Dean Hill's Blog

Two Marks

2011-11-21T11:55:00.000-05:00

A Tale of Two Marks
Mark 12: 38-44
November 8, 2009
Marsh Chapel
Robert Allan Hill
1. Preface
Before you work high you build a scaffold to get yourself up there.
Steeple Jacks do not use a scaffold. They use rope and pulleys, and they rightly earn many hundreds of dollars an hour. As one said to me, quoting Scripture, and speaking of the dangers of height, “Jesus said, ‘Lo(w) I am with you”. Meaning, he continued, ‘up high you are on your own’.
Our first and smaller churches, some five of them, hired Steeple Jacks for the minor tiling, shingling, painting and other repairs required of small church steeples on small steeple churches. One was squat enough (the church I mean not the Jack) that he could go up by ladder. Our sixth church (and the seventh, too) was a ‘tall steeple church’ The trustees tried to get by with a Steeple Jack, every time repairs were needed, but most times, no, they needed to spend more. Once a two hundred pound section of copper plate fell off that steeple onto a University neighborhood street. Exposure, liability, act of God, randomness—these words appeared in sermons later that month. No one was hurt. Scaffolding went up the next week, and stayed up for several expensive days.
The interior space of churches also requires endless attention. As with care of the human body after the age of forty, the motto for sanctuary care must be ‘maintenance, maintenance, maintenance’. Interior scaffolding also comes at a price. Sure you prefer to change light bulbs and paint ceilings with a huge step ladder and a fearless Trustee or hired painter. Sure. But the higher the nave, the, well, I refer you to adage above. “Lo I am with you”. Not high.
Even before any paint is spilled, and even before any long lasting bulbs are replaced, there is work, there is cost, there is meaningful preparation.
So it is, as you know, in preaching. The interpreter either swings in the breeze like a Steeple Jack, if the matters of historical interpretation are low fences (Paul’s letters come to mind), or, if the height is greater, scaffolding is needed (the Hebrew Scripture, all the Gospels, and especially the Gospel of John come to mind). What you see when the work is done, is the steeple repaired, the roof replaced, the paint (both coats) applied, the bulbs changed. But before that there has been scaffolding up, so that the work could be done.
2. Markan Scaffolds
We come this morning to the interpretation of a passage from Mark. Mark requires scaffolding. We cannot begin to paint until we have someplace to stand. No light bulbs will be changed until we can reach the fixtures. Help me with the scaffolding this morning.
We know not who wrote Mark, only his name. He wrote for a particular community, whose location and name are also unknown. He even mentions by name members of his church, Alexander and Rufus (15:21). The book is meant to help a community of Christians. It is written to support and encourage people who already have been embraced by faith. While it purports to report on events long ago, in the ministry of Jesus, its main thrust is toward its own hearers and readers forty years later. So it is not an evangelistic tract and it is not a diary and it is emphatically not a history.
You will want to know what we can say, then, about Mark’s community. If the community gave birth to the gospel, and if the community is the primary focus of the gospel, and if the community is the gospel’s intended audience, you would like to know something about them. For one thing, the community is persecuted, or is dreading persecution, or both. Jesus suffered and so do or so will you. This is what Mark says. This gospel prepares its hearers for persecution. For another thing, the church may have been in or around Rome, or more probably somewhere in Syria. It is likely that Mark was written between 69 and 73 ce. For yet another thing, Mark’s fellow congregants, fellow Christians, are Gentiles, in the main, not Jews. He is writing to this largely Gentile group. He writes for them neither a timeless philosophical tract nor an ethereal piece of poetry. His is rather a ‘message on target’. For one final thing, on the academic side, Mark’s composition, editing, comparisons, saying combinations, style and Christology all point to Mark as the earliest gospel (J Marcus).
I have used the word gospel. You have heard the word many times, and know that it means ‘good news’. It is an old term. You could compare it to ‘ghost’. Gospel is to good news and ghost is to spirit, you might say. Yet Mark calls his writing a ‘gospel’. He creates something new. Mark is a writing unlike any other to precede it. It is not popular today any longer, no longer fashionable, to say this. It is however true. Mark is not a history, not a biography, not a novel, not an apocalypse, not an essay, not a treatise, not an epistle. Examples of all these were to hand for him. Mark might have written one of any one of them. He did not. He wrote something else and so in form, in genre, gave us something new. A gospel. His is the first, but not the last.
Mark is not great literature. It is not Plato, not Cicero, not Homer. Nor is the Greek of the gospel a finely tuned instrument. It is harsh, coarse and common. The gospel was formed, formed in the life of a community, as described earlier. Its passages and messages were announced as memories meant to offer hope. Its account of Jesus, in healing and preaching and teaching, all the way to the cross and beyond, is offered to a very human group of humans who are trying to make their way along His way. The Gospel is a record of the preaching of the gospel. To miss this, or to mistake this, is to miss the main point of the Gospel, and of the gospel. It is in preaching that the gospel arrives, enters, feasts, embraces, loves, and leaves. It is in preaching that you hear something that makes life meaningful, makes life loving, makes life real. It is in preaching that the Gospel of Mark came to be, as a community, over time, heard and reheard, remembered and rehearsed the story of Jesus crucified (his past) and risen (his presence). We should not expect narrative linearity, historical accuracy, or re-collective precision here. And in fact, we find none. Let me put it another way around. Most of the NT documents are, in one way or another, attempts to remember, accurately, the nature and meaning of baptism. Well, Mark fits that description. What does it mean, hear and now, to be a Christian?
3. Mini Anti-Fundamentalist Jeremiad
You may preach, you may interpret the Gospel flat, in a synchronic not a diachronic way. You may simply read it, and make comments on it, as you please. In the same way, you may fix a roof by hurling shingles to the heavens, hoping some, with appropriate missile guided nails, will land on the roof. You may paint the walls of your church by opening the can, stirring the pain, and letting fly. It is a primitive procedure, but you are free to use it. You may aim your arm at various fixtures, and pitch light bulbs upward in the hope that some may land in place and, perhaps with a little breeze, turn themselves in. Across the land we have examples of this kind of preaching without scaffolding. I do not recommend it, neither for hearer nor for speaker. You know anyway when somebody doses you with a bucket of paint. You know what it feels like and how to judge it.
So far, there is with a few exceptions, broad consensus on the needed Markan scaffolding, in its general shape, heft and contours. But we have one more tier to place before we have reached our necessary height. Here the height and the weight of the matter make the scaffold lean and swing a little. Just which planks need to go where, here, is uncertain. In our reading and hearing of the Gospel of Mark we need to step carefully here, just at the very top.
4. Last Plank: A Tale of Two Marks
I put it this way. Ours is a tale of two Marks. Is Mark a moderate critic or is Mark a critical moderate? How you answer will both depend on and indicate where you stand on the scaffold. Moderate critic, critical moderate? That is, across the length of his Gospel, is Mark actively criticizing others or is he carefully moderating, coaching if you will, the approach of others? Is the tone of the gospel polemic or irenic?
Mark is clearly an apocalyptic writing, although clarity about this has only fully emerged in the last generation or so. Mark expects the end of all things in his own time, and so the Markan Jesus so instructs his followers. In fact, Mark expects the culmination of all things, soon and very soon. In this regard, and in regard to his understanding of the cross, Mark has some congruence with the letters of Paul. Given this apocalyptic perspective, is Mark a critic or a coach?
Critic
The first option, Mark the moderate critic, was most piercingly presented almost forty years ago. First let me give you the outline of the planking in this part of the scaffold, and then let me tell you about the carpenter.
On this view, Mark combats a view of Jesus that will not accept his suffering, his crucifixion. Long after the events of Calvary and Golgotha, spirited and strong people, singing a happy song, have caused the earliest church to forget their baptism, or its meaning. They expect ease, spirit, joy, and, soon, a conquering victory over all that plagues and persecutes them. Mark says no. To say know Mark remembers in delicate detail the story of Jesus’ passion, relying on a source, a document he has inherited. To say know, Mark pointedly shows the ignorance and cowardice of Peter, at Caesarea Philippi and in Jerusalem. To say know, Mark criticizes, diminishes the miracles of Jesus, letting them wind away to nothing as the Gospel progresses. To say know, Mark describes the disciples as diabolical dunces. They didn’t understand it and neither do you, he says. Mark stays within the fold of the inherited story of Jesus, the gospel of teaching and passion, of Galilee and Jerusalem. But he does so as a moderate critic of those who are unrealistic of the suffering that continues, from which the gospel does not deliver, any more than Jesus had been delivered from the cross. Saved, yes, delivered, no. On this view, at the heart of Mark there is a bitter dispute in earliest Christianity about what constitutes discipleship, baptism, and Mark is out to prove his opponents wrong. As with the alternative, there is plenty of evidence to support this sort of scaffold.
I am pleased, and honored, to tell you that the person who most powerfully presented this view is a dear friend of mine. In fact, he was my immediate predecessor in our Rochester church. My eleven years in that pulpit immediately followed his seventeen. He is a Methodist minister who did his doctoral work at Claremont. It has taken some decades for the force and power of his argument to stand up and stand out in comparison to the work of others. Ted Weeden is his name: ‘Jesus serves as a surrogate for Mark, and the disciples serve as surrogates for Mark’s opponents…The disciples are reprobates’. (op cit, 163).
Coach
The second option, Mark the critical moderate, has in a way been present for a longer time, and, one could say, is still the more dominant, the majoritarian position. I read through the summer the culminating presentation of this position in a two volume Anchor Bible Commentary. Imagine my surprise, opening the books, to read that the author was (once) on the faculty of Boston University School of Theology. His name is Joel Marcus, now at Duke. On this view, things in Mark’s community are not so much at daggers drawn. There are differences to be sure, but the disagreements are differences among friends. The Markan coaching does not face strong spirit people, committed to an idea of the ‘divine man’. Mark is not so negative about miracles. The disciples are mistaken but not malevolent. The titles for Jesus are not so telling or convincing. The real trouble is not so much in the community itself (perish the thought), but outside, among the potential deceivers of the church. Hence, on this scaffold, Mark has the job of more gently reminding his hearers of the cross, of suffering, of discipline, of the cruciform character of Christianity, as a moderate, a critical moderate, but a moderate more than a critic.
We have a hard time imaging that our faith tradition was born out of serious conflict. It is like family stories. We really don’t like to imagine that our family tree is littered with broken branches, dead limbs, crooked roots, and Dutch elm disease. We like the picture of the Palm Tree, majestic and free. The second option appeals to our sense of pride in our Christian heritage. It is a more pleasing view. But the former, Weeden’s Mark, is over time the stronger scaffold, and what we need from a scaffold is not presentation but reliability, not beauty but strength.
Here is where my feet come down. Marcus appeals to my heart, what I wish were true or truer. But my mind trusts Weeden. Our passage today, Mark 12: 38-44, is a case in point.
5. Today’s Markan Gospel
Our passage today teems with criticism. There is venom here. There is hurt, too. There is an outsider looking in. There is a widow, righteous, but overshadowed. You too were outsiders, the passage recalls. You follow one who sat outside, who had his on the sparrow, who resented the robes, the prayers, the stoles, the seats, the feasts, the forgetful unsympathy which occludes human vision and corrupts human life. Be careful. In God’s time, the first become last. When it comes to giving, the question is not how much but from how much…
“The fact that it follows Jesus’ summons of the disciples, moreover, could hint that the lesson is particularly important for the members of the Markan community. Are there perhaps rich people there as well as poor ones, and are the ostentatiousness of the former and their callousness toward the latter among the spiritual dangers besetting Mark’s church home” (Marcus, II, 861).? For Mark, the disciples are the church, his church. Just how hard on them is he?
Mark: moderate or critic? This passage begins with an attack upon the scribes of old, and so upon the leaders of Mark’s church. This passage concludes with a wry portrait of a poor widow, a picaresque portrait of unjust distance between rich and poor in the Temple, and so in the community of Mark’s church. Today’s passage, concluding the gospel’s narrative before the passion, shows us Mark the critic, Mark the prophet. He might have Jesus add: ‘I saw many in the temple that day….and it seems like I saw some of you there, too.’
Two tones are possible for this sentence: she has given all she has, her whole life. One moderate, a good stewardship lesson. One critical, a call to change. The latter is the truer, the latter is the gospel.
6. Climbing Down: Applying Today’s Gospel
Three suggestions follow, regarding awareness, regarding assessment, and regarding saving change, when it comes to scaffolds, to the frames from which we see and hear, build and repair.
We see what we expect, or want, to see. We hear what we are accustomed to hear. We have our scaffolds.
Are they the right ones?
Granted that the scaffolds on which you stand to build or repair the steeples of your lives are fundamental, necessary, and crucial, are these, yours the right ones for your life today? Are you aware of your presentiments, your prejudices, your perspectives? Are you? Can you give an account, for example, of your religious perspective? We are more regularly challenged to account for our political perspective, conservative or liberal, or our economic perspective, libertarian or egalitarian, or our cultural perspective, bohemian or bourgois. Today the Markan Jesus sits, sits, outside the temple, and turns a moderate or critical eye upon the horizon, upon the whole, upon what purports to represent the good, true, beautiful, and holy. What is your scaffold made of, when you lean toward the realities of dawn and twilight?
Are you aware of the scaffolds you have ascended?
Then let me ask you, since this Sunday, and now we have awareness, to assess your religious scaffolding. Does it hold? Here are a couple of tests, ways to jump a bit up and down on the board, without yet falling. What about death and taxes?
Does your religious scaffold hold, when you are reaching out to fix up the steeple in the hour of death? Last Sunday, Tom Long, our colleague in Atlanta, preached an op-ed sermon about our cultural, spiritual inability gracefully to approach and accept death. He recommends some better scaffolding: ‘show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead, and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people (Gladstone’…People who have learned how to care tenderly for the bodies of the dead are almost surely people who also know how to show mercy to the bodies of the living’. (NYT, 11/1/09)
Does your scaffold hold, when you are facing financial extremity? Has the scaffold the strength to hold you up, while you look out for that next job, while you look down at the prospect of debt, while you look up at your hope for measured frugality, while you look in toward the same potential greed Jesus saw in the temple of old? If the scaffold wobbles here, you have some work to do.
Have you assessed your scaffold?
Then, to conclude, let me ask you something. Is it time to change? Is it time to find a better scaffold, I mean perspective, I mean scaffold, I mean worldview, I mean scaffold, I mean faith? One of our friends sent in this comment on a sermon last month: ‘I'd further suggest it is time to unleash a more aggressive message: that only stupid people think they are so smart that they can figure out everything for themselves and that if they (and everyone else) just maximize their self-interest we will end up with the best of all possible worlds. Rather, really smart people know that they are both limited but responsible and that their best hope is to join in the company of other faithful people in a life of prayer and study and worship to help illumine the path.’
Have you come to a moment of change?
A long time ago, a preacher and Greek scholar summed up his own way of thinking: ‘If thine heart be as mine, give me thine hand’. Can you hear the trust held, affirmed, offered there? ‘If thine heart be as mine, give me thine hand’. Can you hear the openness, there, the maturely naïve confidence there, the fresh breeze there? ‘If thine heart be as mine, give me thine hand’. Can you hear the freedom and grace there? It begs to be heard. In its hearing is your health, safety, healing, salvation.

The Embodied Theory-Practice Relationship: Two Voices on Vocation as Practical Theologian and Pastor

2010-05-10T16:13:00.001-05:00

The Embodied Theory-Practice Relationship: Two Voices on Vocation as Practical Theologian and Pastor

By Stephen Cady and Robert Allan Hill

April 10, 2010

Biennial Meeting
Association for Practical Theology
Boston, MA

The Embodied Theory-Practice Relationship: Two Voices on Vocation as Practical Theologian and Pastor

Over the last three years, we have had many conversations together about the benefits of a bi-vocational commitment as a pastor and academic. Because we are related (Stephen is Bob’s son-in-law), these have mostly occurred informally amid Christmas dinners, summer vacations, and other family visits. However, as we have both found our way more deeply into our commitments in both arenas, we found that the conversation we have shared informally, if more formally offered might be of some service both to the church and to the academy. As such, we offer this paper, written in two voices, sometimes distinguished, but often not, which moves our conversation about the benefits of a bi-vocational commitment as a practical theologian and pastor from the dinner table to the lecture hall.
Introduction
When I was applying for doctoral work I was given quite a bit of advice. I was offered counsel as to which programs had the most to offer, whose graduates received tenured faculty positions, and how to navigate the rolling waters of the academy. One word of caution, however, sticks out in my mind. On multiple occasions I was told not to mention, under any circumstance, that I had an interest in serving a church either during my doctoral work or after. The fear was that I wouldn’t be taken seriously as an academic. Thankfully, however, I ignored that advice and upon accepting my position as a doctoral candidate in Practical Theology, and with the hesitant approval of my department, I sought an appointment in a local congregation. Admittedly, my decision was motivated more by finances than by principle, but now two years into both my program and my pastorate, I would not have it any other way.
The dichotomy that sometimes is supposed to exist between the faith community and the academy can be unhelpful to both. Like theory and practice, the academy and faith community are not two distinct entities existing in a vacuum. Rather, the academy exists, in part, in service to the faith community, by preparing clergy for leadership in communities of faith. When the distance between the two is overly exaggerated, both the church and the academy lose a valuable partner in ministry and in education.
This paper claims that the relationship of the academy to the faith community is not unlike the relationship of theory to practice: a practical theologian is ideally suited to bridge both divides. The paper argues that far from being an impediment, or a detriment, pastoral experience and leadership concomitant with academic work can actually benefit the research and teaching of the academic as well as the congregation being served. As such, we identify the theologian herself as the locus of this mutuality and claim that the ongoing interaction with the current praxis of the church influences the direction of theoretical studies (and vice versa) in a way that is not fully present without that relationship. To that end, we will first look at the connection of the theory/practice relationship to the academy/faith community relationship before exploring the benefits of this embodiment in the second part of the paper. The final section will suggest a few implications for both sides of the supposed dichotomy.
Part 1
A. Theory/Practice Relationship
At the heart of this conversation is an attempt to rescue practical theology from its perception as merely “applied” theology and to maintain the constructive element of its task. Practical theologians have had carefully to construct their understanding of the relationship between these two crucial components of academic work. In general, contemporary practical theologians seek to allow current practice to inform theories generated in the academy and then to allow those theories to inform the ongoing praxis of the church. Don Browning, for example, says, that “theory arises out of practice and leads back to practice,” in what we might call a theory/practice circle. Richard Osmer, in the appendix to his book The Teaching Ministry of Congregations, highlights several of the ways that practical theologians construct this relationship, ranging from a neo-Marxist to a neo-pragmatist perspective, and recognizes that “decisions about the theory-praxis relationship influence in fundamental ways the phenomena investigated in empirical work, the interpretive framework used to understand what is found, the norms offered to assess both church and society, and the models used to guide and reform present praxis.” However the relationship between these two is worked out, it is worked out within the practical theologian himself. Thus, the role of the practical theologian is to embody this relationship. The commitments she makes to certain sources of justification or forms of cross-disciplinary conversation will affect the relationship between theory and practice as it occurs in specific moments of practical theological inquiry.
The argument of this essay is that just as the relationship between theory and practice is embodied within the person of the practical theologian, so too is the relationship between the academy and faith communities. The job of the practical theologian is to observe the practices of the church (understood broadly) and, through thoughtful interpretation in dialogue with conversation partners from social science and the humanities, to construct a theological response that aims to improve faith practices. In other words, theory is formulated in the academy in dialogue with the practices of the faith community. This conversation happens within the practical theologian himself. Charles Foster investigates this relationship by exploring the pastoral imagination. He affirms “a form of paideia—embodied in the person of pastor, priest, or rabbi—that inspires and equips an imaginative habitus, or way of being in the world, for a religious community.”
The danger for practical theology of becoming applied theology carries over to this relationship as well. That is, one does not want to understand the academy to be the place that creates the rules and the communities of faith to be the places that implement them. At the same time, however, if one focuses too heavily on practice and does not reflect critically on those practices based upon our theological understandings, then one risks allowing thoughtless or harmful practices of faith to be perpetuated. Again, these dangers may be lessened when there is a person who is serving as the embodied bridge between these two important institutions of faith.
The challenge, then, is to find the appropriate balance of construction and interpretation in the mode of practical theological reflection within communities of faith. This, we are claiming, is forged in the person of the practical theologian who is able to be connected both to the academy and to the community of faith, in order to embody the theory/practice relationship.
B. The Swinging Pendulum
Shifts in emphasis within broad ranges of theological study are not uncommon. For many years, for example, within Homiletics, the inductive narrative approach to preaching held the center ground across much of the discipline in the United States (1975—2005, or so). Over time, questions arose and various arguments with them about the narrative emphasis. A chastened inductivity currently still commands much support, but the emphasis has changed. Thomas Long’s recent Lyman Beecher Lectures provide both a clear history of the tidal changes, and a careful defense of a modified narrative approach. Likewise, within New Testament research, in Johannine studies, the stereoptic, two level drama approach to the Fourth Gospel held center ground across much of the discipline, in the United States (1975—2005, or so). However, over time, questions arose and various arguments with them, about the historical and theological claims within the Martyn\Brown\Ashton understanding of John. A current (2007) review of the state of Johannine studies identifies this once pervasive (and still compelling) position as one of five. A chastened ‘aposynagogos’ approach still commands much support, but the emphasis has changed. Shifts in emphasis within broad ranges of theological study are not uncommon. Over time they are to be expected.
This sort of shift in emphasis may now be gradually emerging within practical theology. Bonnie Miller-McLemore has argued that for many years, largely in response to Edward Farley’s critique of the theological encyclopedia, an “academic paradigm” has held the high center ground in the United States. Edward Farley’s Theologia, both built on earlier and presaged later significant approaches which accused the ‘clerical paradigm’ with the ironic elimination of theology from theological education and called for a return to theology as habitus. Miller-McLemore shows how in an attempt to respond to Farley’s critique of theology for the sake of clergy alone, we have created an “academic” paradigm which often views any use of the words “clerical” or “application” as pejorative. Shifts in emphasis within broad ranges of theological study are not uncommon, and are to be expected. This paper’s argument is situated within the possible emergence of one such shift, from a non-clerical, academic paradigm, to or toward a clerically chastened habitus paradigm.
These works and others tend and intend to build on the work of Farley, Browning and others. However, as with the Long (Homiletics) and Ashton (New Testament) reformulations, they also tend and intend to caution against throwing out the baby with the bathwater. They wonder, and wander in various ranges of thought in their wondering, whether the pendulum may have swung too far. Various shared features of these writings deserve note. As a group, they recognize that participation precedes competence. As Miller-McLemore writes in the collection of essays on this theme, For Life Abundant, “[Students] need more than just the capacity to ‘think theologically,’ but also the capacity to “practice theology” by putting theology into action through one’s body on the ground.” Therefore they tend to honor and to highlight situated learning. In fact, for some, the pedagogical perspective employed assumes that such situated learning works best. They draw on varieties within pedagogies of contextualization, in order to engage and expand our understandings of embodied theory and practice, and they attempt to legitimate peripheral participation, or limited participation, as a part of embodied theory practice. To some degree they benefit from the insights provided by Osmer’s ‘second level’ analysis of theological inquiry. Osmer emphasizes that the four practical theological tasks (descriptive\empirical, interpretive, normative, pragmatic) are “distinguishable but not separable,” and hence the hermeneutical circle may be entered at any point. He argues that “reflective practice is epistemic.” Osmer’s definition of rational judgment includes professional values and acquired expertise. He affirms the importance of interdisciplinary partnerships as well, like partnerships with homiletics, biblical studies, and pastoral care.
The argument of this paper is that the personal location of people simultaneously engaged in both pastoral ministry and theological education can be a fruitful embodiment of theory and practice within practical theology. We will now shift our attention to review how this relationship benefits the practical theologian and the church.
Part 2
Embodied Theory-Practice Relationship: A Tale of Two Desks
Every doctoral student is asked to do two things well: read and write. This is partially because most of the student’s life for the foreseeable future will be spent doing those two things. After the student finishes her dissertation and is (hopefully) in a faculty position, the student is asked to add to those two proficiencies the ability to teach. A student in practical theology adds yet another level to this mix inasmuch as a practical theologian is expected to listen well. This is not solely for the purpose of recording class lectures or understanding assignments, but rather refers to the task of practical theological inquiry itself. As Don Browning has stated, practical theological inquiry begins when one is brought up short. Said another way, practical theological inquiry should have magnitude; it should engage an authentic and resonant challenge of the church. In other words, the “practical” side of our field matters. As such, a student of practical theology must develop the ability to listen attentively in order to distinguish the exigent needs of the faith community so that she might describe them fully, interpret them faithfully, assess them normatively, and respond to them strategically. While it is possible for one to develop this careful ear for the on-the-ground dilemmas of the church in the academy solely, it is best developed in consistent and thoughtful participation with living congregations.
Imagine a student who is engaging in doctoral level practical theological inquiry and is searching for a research topic for his dissertation. Chances are high that he had some idea of his interest, and perhaps even narrowed it down significantly, prior to entering his program. As he begins the long and winding road through coursework and exams, however, he will be continually forced to refine and revise that interest so that it may address an exigent need of the church. If the student is currently engaged in pastoral ministry, his ears will already be tuned to the needs of at least one congregation.
Each week someone serving in pastoral ministry is asked to read, write, preach, teach, and listen in order to assess the needs of his or her congregation. This is an ongoing process that continually forces the pastor to engage one’s ministerial imagination in order to discern the salient issues in any given experience of being brought up short, and then to address them swiftly and thoughtfully. In short, the fully engaged pastoral imagination is an ecclesial partner for academic practical theological inquiry. A student of practical theology desires to develop the muscles of the pastoral imagination, and then to benefit from their steady toning throughout her academic work. If this student were to be engaged in the ongoing practice of ministry in a local congregation, he would have the benefit of consistently being reminded that the often theoretical conversations of the academy do matter in congregations and would then learn to hold at bay those possible areas of inquiry which fail the “magnitude” test. Indeed, a student in practical theology who was currently serving in pastoral ministry might not be able to avoid constantly assessing their work based upon the real lives of people in her congregation. This paper argues that such a bi-vocational commitment would not only improve the work of the practical theologian, but would also have a greater impact on the church.
Embodied Theory-Practice Relationship: Chapel and Classroom
In the course of preparing students to preach, one addresses the issue of exegesis. Within that major undertaking, the teacher may want to highlight the movement from text to sermon that occurs in preaching on passages from the gospels. One particular approach here involves a choral image. The students are asked to imagine the passages of the Gospels, not as solos, but as hymns sung in four-part harmony. Thus, every passage will potentially include soprano, alto, tenor and bass lines: the soprano melody of the voice of the historical Jesus to the limited extent one may yet hear it; the profoundly significant alto voice of the early church which developed the notes sung well before their appearance in the canonical score; the tenor of the author, Matthew, Mark, Luke or John; and the ongoing basso profundo, the baritone line of interpretation of the passage, starting right in the Bible itself (for Mark, beginning with Matthew and Luke, for example; for John, beginning with 1 John, for example), and continuing on in some ways to yesterday and today and next Sunday when the sermon is finally preached. The gospels are sung in four-part harmony, as many congregations once regularly did sing hymns. The preacher will watch carefully to hear and overhear the various ‘parts’ within the fully harmonic beauty. To this point, standard instruction in homiletics can proceed without any interaction with the argument of this paper.
Suppose, however, that the teacher is also a preacher, who is responsible every Sunday for a sermon within the context (a highly particularized context) of a University Chapel, located not more than 100 yards east of the offices of practical theologians, the library stalls of graduate students, and the very classroom setting for learning and teaching about exegesis. On one hand, now, the stakes have been radically raised. Sunday arrives, and the text, Luke 4. Is there an exegetical chorus heard in the sermon? For those students who are seized by the confession of the church, and who have become a part of the addressable community in the University Chapel, an interpretive moment has arrived. And for the teacher, a moment of truth has come. Do the pods of church and school, ecclesia and academy stick to each other, in Osmer’s image, in ways that allow for transversal reason to engage both student and teacher? The worship service in question is a real, live service, with real living and dying humans. Real ammunition is in use. On any given Sunday the possibility stands that one student or one retiree may hear his or her last earthly benediction, that morning. The setting is not a contrived ‘preaching club’ quasi-service, nor even a seminary only mid-week devotion. The church has gathered and the hope still lives for something to hear and something to eat, through preaching meant to teach, to delight, and to persuade. Moreover, and quite visible to the eye of the worshipping homiletics student, there stands a person, now robed, who looks quite like the disheveled teacher she remembers from Tuesday’s homiletics lecture, which dealt with exegesis and the gospels.
We have here ‘a theory-practice relationship embodied within the vocation of a practical theologian who is working concurrently in the academy and in the pastorate.’ Furthermore, for teacher and student and congregation, the experience in worship of the sermon may therefore take on either a greater sense of risk or a greater possibility of benefit. If the sermon bears faithfulness to the teaching earlier in the week about the sermon, the student may benefit. Having offered some preliminary description and empirical observation of a weekly pattern actually found in at least one setting, we pause to provide some reflection upon and interpretation of the experience, the pattern. The preacher may on occasion refer, in passing, to the SATB critique of Luke 4 by saying, ‘as we teach our students across the plaza, passages like this in the gospels are like our own favorite Methodist hymns…’ In fact, the preacher may not be able to avoid saying something like this, given the inter-textuality, the inter-psychic connection in his own life between pulpit and lectern.
Conclusion and Appropriation
Throughout this essay, we have made a claim that pastoral experience and ministerial leadership, engaged alongside academic work, can benefit the research and teaching of the academic as well as the congregation being served. We began by describing the dichotomy between the academy and the faith community and have shown that, like the theory-practice relationship, the bridge between these two areas is personified in a practical theologian. We demonstrated that paradigm shifts, such as the one we are suggesting may be emerging, are both common and necessary in growing fields of inquiry. We have further suggested ways in which this is embodied, both from the point of view of a student of practical theology, and from that of a professor.
Let us now reflect on a few ways that this argument might be helpful.
First, the paper proposes a certain kind of academic reflection. Those teaching on the faculty of a school that prepares people for ministry may benefit from participating in a local congregation in some capacity. While it might not be feasible or fruitful to have an entire faculty serving as the minister of a congregation, it might be feasible to encourage participation in some capacity within congregational life, even if only as a participant in worship. As we have described above, this is as beneficial to the practical theologian as it is to the church.
Second, seminaries or schools of theology may choose to commit to maintaining a certain percentage of faculty who are serving in primary leadership roles in local congregations. This would be a clear means by which to break down the false dichotomy between the academy and faith communities. Additionally, it might also serve as an important bridge from the local congregation to the seminary for those who might be discerning a call to ministry.
Third, faith communities might consider supporting a “practical theologian in residence” who would serve the congregation in a unique way and be allowed to “test-drive” new constructive practices of education, spiritual formation, worship, or pastoral care. This might be done on a limited-time/rotating basis or with someone on a more permanent schedule. Either way, this would offer congregants opportunities to converse with those who find their homes in the academy while at the same time creating a lab for constructing better practices of faith. It may also have the unintended consequence of offsetting the budget of the seminaries in that part of the funding for these particular faculty members would be coming directly from a local congregation.

Bibliography
Ashton, John. Understanding the Fourth Gospel. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007.
Bass, Diana Butler. Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith. New York: HarperOne, 2007.
Bass, Dorothy C., and Craig Dykstra, eds. For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education, and Christian Ministry. Grand Rapids Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2008.
Bernstein, Richard J. Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity. New ed. Philadelphia Pa.: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Browning, Don S., ed. Religious Ethics and Pastoral Care. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983.
Carson, D.A. “The Challenge of Balkanization of Johannine Studies.” In John, Jesus, and History, Volume 1: Critical Appraisals of Critical Views, edited by Paul N. Anderson, Felix Just, and Tom Thatcher. First Edition. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007.
Craddock, Fred B. As One Without Authority. Revised. St. Louis Mo.: Chalice Press, 2001.
Farley, Edward. Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983.
———. “Theology and Practice Outside the Clerical Paradigm.” In Practical Theology, edited by Don Browning. 1st ed. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983.
Foster, Charles, Lisa Dahill, Larry Goleman, and Barbara Wang Tolentino. Educating Clergy: Teaching Practices and Pastoral Imagination. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005.
Hill, Robert Allan. Renewal: Thought, Word, and Deed. Lanham MD: Hamilton Books, 2009.
Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Long, Thomas G. Preaching from Memory to Hope. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009.
Miller-McLemore, B J. “The "Clerical Paradigm": A Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness?.” International Journal of Practical Theology 11, no. 1 (2006): 19-36.
Miller-McLemore, Bonnie J. “Practical Theology and Pedagogy: Embodying Theological Know-How.” In For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education, and Christian Ministry, edited by Dorothy C. Bass and Craig Dykstra. Grand Rapids Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2008.
Osmer, Richard. Practical Theology: An Introduction. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2008.
———. The Teaching Ministry of Congregations. 1st ed. Louisville Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005.
Stone, Bryan. “The University Based Divinity School in Relationship to Theological Education,” 2008. (Paper delivered to the Boston University School of Theology Faculty, autumn retreat, 9/08).

Late Term Additions to Introduction to Preaching: Pastoral Imagination in Preaching, BUSTH Spring 2010, Robert Allan Hill

2010-05-01T12:45:00.001-05:00

Late Term Additions to Introduction to Preaching: Pastoral Imagination in Preaching, BUSTH Spring 2010, Robert Allan Hill

TC 715: Introduction to Preaching (“Pastoral Imagination in Preaching”)
BEECHER LECTURE # 3 – Jean Halligan Vandergrift, TA Presenter

Text: Brueggemann, Walter. Finally Comes The Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation.
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989.

Lecture
I. Who is Walter Brueggemann?
Old Testament scholar and author. Ordained in the United Church of Christ. Professor emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia. He is known for his exploration of Old Testament theology through rhetorical criticism, with an emphasis on the relation between the Old Testament and the Christian canonical works, and the dynamics of Jewish-Christian interactions. He is a prolific author, having written over 58 books.
He is also known for speaking about preaching. Mark Thiessen Nation quotes an unidentified, famous American preacher who said: “I would go so far as to say that if there is any one author every preacher should have in his or her library, it should be Walter Brueggemann. Any preacher who does not use Brueggemann as a companion in preparation of sermons is cheating himself or herself and their respective congregations.” According to R. Albert Mohler Jr., few biblical scholars have been chosen to present the Beecher Lectures. Walter Brueggemann was the lecturer in 1988/89.

II. What was happening in 1988/89? The context of these Beecher lectures.
A. In the world: U.S. support for the Nicaraguan Contras was on the wane. Desmond Tutu was arrested with 100 clergypersons during Anti-Apartheid demonstrations in Cape Town. Other Anti-Apartheid events. Jimmy Swaggert and Jim Baaker scandals. The Iran-Iraq War. Soviet Red Army begins withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Surgeon General announces the addictive qualities of nicotine. NASA resumes space shuttle, grounded after the Challenger disaster. Gorbachev named head of the Supreme Soviet. Chile votes “No” to Pinochet. Sega Megadrive released. George H.W. Bush elected. Benazir Bhutto elected as Prime Minister of Pakistan. Terrorists bombed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Exxon Valdez oil spill. First GPS satellite placed into orbit. Time Warner merger. Tiananmen Square Protests in Beijing. Voyager 2 passes Neptune. Hurricane Hugo. East Germany opens checkpoints in the Berlin Wall for citizens to travel freely to West Germany. El Salvadorean death squad kills 6 Jesuit priests. Velvet Revolution in Prague. Operation Just Cause, U.S. troops into Panama to overthrow Noriega. Dictator Ceausescu of Romania executed.
B. In homiletics: In the early 70s, hermeneutics became open to encountering God in the literary dynamics of the biblical text over the reconstruction of the history behind the text. This led to rhetorical approaches to interpretation. Paul Ricoeur and others emphasized how language was dynamic and relative, not static, that language could perform and intend, which eventually led to valuing how the form of the text has a vital role in shaping the form and function of sermons. One way to sum this up is that there was a shift from a rational to an aesthetic hermeneutic, which affected homiletics. Another way to describe this “revolution” is that by the mid-80’s, it had three main concerns:
1. Rhetoric – particularly narrativity, imagery, embodiment, as well as original oral/aural setting
2) Imagination – juncture of human spirit and Holy Spirit, divine creativity channeled
3) Social analysis – influence of feminist and liberation theology, the social reality of the text and the contemporary world, sermon as a social act.
Brueggemann fits into all three aspects of this new approach to biblical scholarship and homiletics, and this is why he is sometimes referred to as a postmodern biblical scholar. (Wardlaw, Don M. “Homiletics and Preaching in North America.” Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching. Willimon & Lischer, eds. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995.)

III. His general thesis for these lectures
Preaching is experiencing a crisis of interpretation in which the biblical text is either dismissed or controlled. It must interpret, which involves exegesis and the realities of society. Societal ideologies tend to silence us all. (Preface) We argues that we exist in a “prose-flattened world.” “Prose” refers to a world organized in settled formulae. Other characteristics of this world are that believers take the gospel for granted, we are all influenced by technical thinking and utilitarian aims, and embrace managed, social ideologies that leave no room for newness. “Reduced speech leads to reduced lives.” (Introduction)
Therefore, preaching needs to be daring and poetic. This is the kind of counter speech that can shape new life. “Poetry” means language that moves and breaks open old worlds. Indeed, preaching is poetry: “the ready, steady, surprising proposal that the real world in which God invites us to live is not the one made available by the rulers of this age…a poetic construal of an alternative world.” The preacher needs to be a poet in this sense. The title, “Finally comes the poet,” is a line from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:
After the seas are all crossed, (as they seem already cross’d)
After the great captains and engineers have accomplish’d their work,
After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist,
Finally shall come the poet worthy of that name,
The true son of God shall come singing his songs.
(Introduction)
Also in his introduction, Brueggemann describes worship is a “speech meeting,” between four partners:
1. the text – though we have domesticated it, we want to remember it, and hope that there is a word for us today.
2. the baptized – come to be shaped by the text, which requires an artist to render it in fresh ways.
3. the specific occasion – all attention is on this speech/sermon moment.
4. the better world – the alternative way is revealed and by it truth and life are disclosed.
(Introduction)

IV. The four lectures
Brueggemann’s lectures are each shaped by the frame of this thesis. He first describes the characteristics and longings of listeners in this prose-flattened world and then contrasts these characteristics to those that the biblical text projects for listeners, along with the way in which interpretation and preaching poetically leads the listener to that new place. I can’t take time to trace it here, but he does a great deal with scripture itself in these lectures. This is one of the strengths of this book.
A. First lecture
A prose-flattened world of numbness and ache concerns the “powerful reality of guilt,” (13) in which there seems to be only either strict retribution or soft grace. We truly yearn for healing. This only occurs when God enters into every bit of the process. So he offers a taxonomy of guilt from the old and new testaments. (18, 33) He argues that evangelicals must break out of a conservatism that makes God function mechanically and liberals must break out of believing we can do it on our own. (36) Preaching poetically, as with these taxonomies, should move this way: 1) that guilt is a reality, God is serious, reparations required, residue to be dealt with, 2) God’s pathos and gift of Self, and 3) social reparations and blood atonement. “The preaching conversation is the only meeting in town where these realities will be enacted.” (39)
B. Second lecture
A prose-flattened world of alienation and rage concerns the lost and longed for communion with God. (43) This takes two forms: 1) a “subjective consciousness” – that the only reality is us, which leads to anxious alienation, (45) and 2) “uncritical objectivism” – that the only reality is God, which leads to a deep rage. (46) And there is no real conversation between us and God. The hoped-for end is doxological communion. This requires that we see God as both Sovereign, though one that yields, and Suffering love, though one that demands much. (44) Preaching poetically, then, as with laments, leads listeners to this by: 1) speaking for the worshipper, breaking the silence by expressing his/her lament, protest, and pain, 2) speaking for God, by not remaining silent, but responding with “God’s intervention, rescue, and transformation.” (66), and 3) speaking for Israel/listener his/her praise, celebration, and doxology. This is a poetic conversation that lets life begin again. Indeed, the biblical text itself is “a long-standing conversation.” (76)
C. Third lecture
A prose-flattened world of restlessness and greed concerns having more than we need and yet being uneasy and wanting more. This state makes it hard for us to obey the commandments of Sabbath-keeping (participating in God’s rest) and not coveting (land tenure systems without economic exploitation). In fact, in this condition, we view obedience as only a personal virtue or a dreaded burden. (80) Listening to God becomes very difficult. (83) The aim, however, is a kind of obedience that provokes missional imagination, that is, an urgency to share, to yield, to die to self, to relinquish and embrace God’s will. Preaching poetically to this end is speaking the command by sparking an alternative imagination, which will motivate obedience (85), for “we are not changed by new rules,” (109) but to imagine our lives and our world differently (97), as God does, for “God does not practice greed toward us nor toward the world.” (106)
D. Fourth lecture
A prose-flattened world of conformity and autonomy concerns a reduction of our identity and a depersonalization, in which we are seduced into the false notions of self that we can succeed through conformity (exiles) or, if we are in power (Nebuchanezzar), that it is really ours. We seek true freedom. To experience this, preaching poetically will interpret texts like Daniel, who resolved to practice his faith and dare resistance to the Empire. In his nonconformity to the system, he became truly free. Nebuchanezzar also experienced transformation when he acknowledged the surprising dream, asked Daniel’s interpretation, yielded to God’s sovereignty, and practiced doxology. Both characters opted for an alternative way in the world. (139) This is a “story designed to break the system.” (140) Such preaching will speak new possibilities to both Daniels and Nebuchanezzars who listen, resist and relinquish, producing faithful, free selves. (112)

V. His conclusion
There are many pressures to quiet the text, to silence it, but the way that people begin again is by being “speeched” (not “scripted”). “We have only the word, but the word will do.” (142)

VI. Is there a question of clarification?

VII. Two questions for group reflection
A. Do you think that we are still in a prose-flattened world? If so, how? If not, why not?
B. What difference does thinking of yourself as a preacher/poet make in your goals and aspirations for your preaching?

Potential critiques of Brueggemann’s text:

1. How does one write a prose sermon manuscript poetically? These lectures are more about hermeneutics than they are about crafting poetic sermons. He gives no sermon examples.

2. This text locates preaching in congregations and assumes that the listeners are the baptized. Why don’t we and where do we speak to the unbaptized?

3. This text seems to view the listeners of sermons as discreet individual selves over communities or a body. What of collective consciousness (Buttrick)?

4. When Brueggemann is speaking of a prose-flattened world in which there is an organized, settled formula, believers who take the gospel for granted, etc., isn’t he speaking to the white western world? Does his approach adequately address or incorporate African American culture and experience?

When God Is Silent by Barbara Brown Taylor
Barbara Brown Taylor
- Born in 1951. Teaching religion at Piedmont College, GA and an adjunct professor of spirituality at Columbia Theological Seminary, GA. Episcopal priest. When God Is Silent was her Lyman Beecher Lecture delivered in 1997, originally titled, “Famine in the Land: Homiletical Restraint and the Silence of God.”
Content
Chapter #1: Famine
- Taylor believes that there have been three kinds of assault on our word that lead to discrepancy between the word and the world: Consumerism, Journalism, and Proliferation of words/Democratization of Words.
- Church is not exception from such separation. i.e) The sign at the lawn of chruch that says, “Our doors and hearts are open to everyone.” Do they really mean it or should it be changed to “We do the best we can.”
- We are currently living in a land of famine, famine of word. Did Amos predict such famine in his time? (Amos 8:11-12)
- The words that preachers speak at the pulpit may be compared with an overchewed gum that has lost livelenss in it.
Chapter #2: Silence
- What would silence mean? Tranquility, awe, manfunction, or death.
- In The Disappearance of God, Richard Elliot Friedman argues that God gradually retreated from God’s people. The last person to whom God revealed Godself was Samuel in the temple at Shiloh.
- Silene of God is present everywhere in the Bible: Abraham’ sacrificing of Isaac (Genesis 22:2), Job, and Jesus.
- What do discern about God’s silence to God’s peoplpe? Taylors argues, “Only an idol always answers. But the God who keeps silence, even when God’s own flesh and blood is begging for a word is the God beyond anyone’s control.” (80)
Chapter #3: Restraint
- “So, how does one preach without profaning God’s silence, without getting between that silence and those for whom it is intended?” (99)
- Taylor suggests three tips as follows;
- 1. Economy: choosing the fewest, best words that will allow them to find one another and then to get out of the way. Saying only what we know to be true, to say it from the heart, and to sit down.
- 2. Courtesy: respecting the autonomy of the hearer, his/her ability to make meaning without too much supervision. Jesus used stories and images to leave room for his listeners to take part in the makingof their meanings.
- 3. Reverance: rather than compensating by talking more, we do our best but acknolwedging our limits in doing it. Divine silence is not a vacuum to be filled but a mystery to be entered into, unarmed with words and undistracted by noise.

Introduction to Preaching: Final Exam
Please Choose Three Essays From This List
The Exam is Meant to Last about 90 minutes (30 minutes per question)
You May Stay Though Until 4:30pm
Boston University School of Theology
Robert Allan Hill
April 26, 2010

1. Describe and explain your own current understanding of the authority of Scripture, as it impacts and influences your own preaching.
2. Reflect on the preparatory practice of exegesis. What have you learned and appropriated in this course? What are your own areas of strength and weakness?
3. Write your own creed, your own brief affirmation of faith.
4. Analyze and criticize the work on ‘moves and structures’ in our Buttrick text.
5. How would you define your call to preach or to pulpit ministry?
6. Identify and reflect upon two sermons you have heard this year (class, subgroup, chapel, tape, other) that you remember fairly clearly. What made them stand out for you?
7. We have emphasized excellence in preaching with attention to pastoral imagination. How do you understand pastoral imagination in preaching?
8. One major point of annual reflection on preaching is found in Yale’s Lyman Beecher lectures. What aspects of these lectures, as summarized in class, have stayed with you, challenged you, or found influences in your preaching?
9. Another aspect of preaching we have explored has been through our guests (Miles, Schol, Weaver, Fisher). Can you identify three or four highlights from these which have provided important insights for you?
10. The arts of listening and receiving feedback deserve and require lifelong attention. How have your practices grown this term in these areas?
11. Describe your preaching ministry as it will (by the mind’s eye and imagination) be in April 2030.
What in the work of crafting a sermon did you find most difficult and most rewarding

Lecture Notes: Introduction to Preaching. Second Post.

2010-03-27T10:34:00.001-05:00

Lecture Notes: Introduction to Preaching

1/25/10 Robert Allan Hill

Pastoral Imagination: “I’m Feeling Some Mixed Up Feelings Today”

Basic Recipe for a Sermon
Research
1. What do the Greek\Hebrew text, commentaries, translations, parallels offer?
2. How did ‘the Fathers’ read the text or handle the theme?
3. What do Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Barth, and Tillich do with the text or theme?
4. What does your favorite journal offer (Christian Century, NTS, Interpretation)?
5. What recent pastoral conversations come easily to mind?
Writing
1. What is the whole gospel for this sermon (‘daimond point’) in a sentence?
2. What three part division will be used (abc, a1b1c1, e/e/e, s.s.s., verses, moments)?
3. What practical suggestions has the sermon for personal life?
4. What references has the sermon to social life?
5. At what points does the sermon use appropriate humor?
6. What can children understand in the sermon?
7. Is the mortality of the preacher and congregation clear?
8. Is the gospel preached, clearly and forcefully?
9. Do you believe what you are about to say?
Delivery
1. Is the sermon written, rewritten, memorized and practiced?
2. Are silence, dynamics, singing, emotion, body language considered?
3. Is it under twenty minutes?

2/1/10

Pastoral Imagination: Exegetical Primer (RAH)

Exegetical Primer
(An expansion of Research, #1: Basic Recipe for a Sermon)
RAH: 2010

1. Read slowly and carefully through the passage(s), in translation(s) or original.

2. Think about what exegesis is: explanation, interpretation, clarification, exposition.

3. Consider the ongoing development of your own view of Scriptural authority.

4. Caution: this task calls for a disciplined inquiry into the meaning of the text; a casual, haphazard, or perfunctory method inadequate.

5. Listen with your whole mind, your whole person.

6. Employ some literary criticism (text, source, unit, structure).

7. Accentuate form criticism (original setting and function).

8. Give space for tradition, canon, and redaction.

9. Keep RAH ‘chorus’ (SATB) in mind.

10. Develop the Pastoral Imagination (journal, group, other).

11. Ask the deeper theological question(s). What is at stake here?

12. Make friends with analogy. ‘There are frequently analogous relationships between the situation depicted in the Bible and our own’ (G Landes). But, ‘all analogies limp’ (P Berger).

13. Can you enter into the mind, heart, center out of which the ancient author wrote?

14. Develop your libraries, virtual and actual.

15. Pray, throughout, pray, throughout. Pray without ceasing.

2/8/10 Robert Allan Hill

Pastoral Imagination: ‘Kyrie Eleison’

Tools in the Preacher’s Workshop: Buttrick Summary Lecture

Intro: Design. Lost art. G Davis. Design for Preaching. F Craddock. Induction/Narration. BTW: theological reflection\journal. How do you use ‘God’? A
Macleod never does. Presence in absence (Easter). Key: 320, 321. Note ambivalence about three part thought. Importance of brief summary.

1. Structural Modes: (Picasso. I understand Picasso. Picasso makes me paint).
A. Immediacy. Text. Parable. Experiential analogies. For example: ‘Jesus meets us today…’ Suited to narrative passages (eg gospels). Easter and Christmas. 323. Ex: WSCoffin, Jonah.
B. Reflection. Thought. Meaning today. 325. Hold up the mirror. Teaching passages (Paul, SOTM, wisdom). Apocalyptic? (RAH says no) 482).
C. Praxis. Application\Crisis. Ex. Brown Sail. A situation in the congregation. May not be resolved\resolvable. Multiple Lectionaries (liturgy, nation, denomination, congregation). 443. After this 333-445 are all outworkings of these.
2. Hermeneutical Proposals:
A. Community. Developing a communal consciousness. (RAH, NYState; RAH, Commonwealth Avenue). Form criticism, the situation in life of the original hearers. 277. To the Thessalonians…264, meant and means and language. 276. Situation, author. The faith community.
B. Duality: simul Justus et peccator. 278.
C. Interpretation of symbols: in the wilderness, prepare…41: ‘preachers do not explicate teachings, they explore symbols’
3. Moves or Points or Parts: pages 30-33 MOST HELPFUL AND IMPORTANT PART OF THE BOOK
A. Theological Understanding
B. Opposition (how can some of you say…?)
C. Real Experience
(RM Brown; Father\Parent; Love\Justice\Mercy; Ordinary Grace)
4. Images (ways of speaking)
A. Analogy: … like… structures of human consciousness; arise rationally out of self-awareness…117
B. Denial: …not like …via negative…Dionysius…silence…10 commandments…
C. Metaphor\simile\image: Tiger, like a tiger, has the ferocity of a tiger. Or nurse, gentle as a nurse, Ottawa…two keys: bath and meal
5. Some Warnings and Cautions:
A. Be aware of your own point of view
B. Be aware of transitions (RAH critique)
C. Starting and stopping (Bernanos, love, 2/7/10)
D. Not teachings but symbols 41
E. No personal illustrations 142 (Have you ever? I am told…)
F. No to sarcasm 146
G. No to sexist illustrations 168
H. No to easy translation 181
I. No to theological technical language 187 (teleological suspension of the ethical)…’getting over seminary’ (5 years and 10 years)… prize the ‘sophisticated simple’
J. No to lack of structure 305 (lecture on design)
6. Advisements about Style: use Strunk and White, ELEMENTS, EB White and R Angell in Boston University
A. Be concrete: Our Town
B. Limit adjectives: omit needless words 218
C. Use pronouns
D. Present tense, active voice, short sentences: I have a dream (not a really good idea…) So: poetry: TAKE A POEM HERE. 220.
E. Hill adds: make it your own voice (journal)
7. Rhetorical Forms
A. Bringing out: depiction, analogy, metaphor, explanation, analysis, creed
B. Associating: imagery, illustration, example, testimony
C. Disassociating: dialectic, antithesis, opposition, mockery
8. Rhetorical Orientations: One example, page 392. 4/19/10, 10:30am Hills’
A. Spatial
B. Temporal
C. Personal (stream…), again, 2/7/10
D. Social (logical, argument, question)

Guest Lecture Notes, Introduction to Preaching, Spring 2010, BUSTH

2/1/10 Dr Veronice Miles

1. Preachers are faithful people called to Christian Faith.

Tom Long, Gardner Taylor, Barbara B Taylor. Those who preach need to hear the message themselves, ourselves. (Her story as a woman in the National Baptist church). We are inviting people to consider a possibility, to sense the transformation of the spirit, to engage in self-evaluation. The preacher is both a center and a periphery prophet, and a prophet in the community. We preach so that people can lead their best lives. We affirm goodness, not just what feels good. “Sometimes the good news is in the transition we need to make”. Moses, Esther, Samuel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Mary, Women at Tomb, Paul, Amos, Jonah. ‘Can you talk about a character with whom you can identify’?

2. Preachers live within the tension of our unique expression of faith and our common vocational call.

We need to claim our lives for the soundscape of our existence. Voice is our mode of expression. We need to claim our voice. We need to avoid a fear that we might be great (Maryann Williamson). We need freedom: of expression, experience, perspective, to hear persons who struggle. Voice: distinctive, authentic, authoritative, resistant. We are always in it. Voice saves us from silence. Distinctiveness is recognized and valued. Preaching calls for courage, for attention to hearers, for voice in context. In manyh cases we overthink who we need to be for others. One who claims one’s own voice then has a capacity to dialogue with others. We need a balance of humility and boldness. By the grace of God we stand, speak, listen. The job of preaching is not to give simple answers, but to call people to a way of being in the world. The job of preaching is not merely to solve problems, but to transform ways of being. We embody practices.

3. Preachers are persons who are committed to the ongoing ministry of forming and sustaining persons in the Christian faith.

Barbara Lundblad. Water dripping on the stone. Consistent, persistent calling. What role do we play as spirit born preachers? We help people to imagine. Sowing seeds, dripping water, taking responsibility for others, praying for them, being aware of others. We are called to form, transform, sustain, confront, and encourage to inspire and propel others toward good works, to live worship-full lives. Read Marjorie Suckochi. Preaching is sacramental. It can become our mode of worship. What are you grappling with? Is there some word of the Lord? Begin where people are. There are many forms of ministry. Is there an illegitimate call? Preach an authentic word.

2/22/10 Two Lyman Beecher Lectures: Jackie Blue and Elizabeth Jones

3/15/10

Pastoral Imagination: Forms of Ministerial Imagination

Jackie Blue: Gardner Taylor

Sermon Assessment

Preacher: ________________________________________ Date: ____________

Keep in mind, sermons are very personal as they are a part of the preacher. Therefore, all comments and critiques are to be given with the utmost care and compassion.

Questions Yes No N/A
Sermon Content
Exegesis – was research evident?
Was there a cultural perspective?
Was the text used appropriately?
Was the purpose of the sermon clear?
Were illustrations and images used appropriately used?

Sermon Organization
Was the introduction clear and focused?
Did the introduction introduce the sermon?
Did the introduction facilitate the first move?
Body of sermon – were moves clear and sequential?
Is the text woven into the body of the sermon?
Was the conclusion clear?
Did it conclude the sermon?
Was the conclusion connected to the sermon?
Was the conclusion predictable?
Was the conclusion tagged on?

Sermon Delivery
Was the preacher authentic?
Was s/he believable?
Does s/he own the pulpit space?

Communication
Was there good use of varied volumes?
Did s/he articulate clearly?
Was breathing controlled?
Was there a good use of gestures?
Was eye contact consistent?

Please complete the following:

The main point of the sermon was: ______________________________________________________________________________

The part of the sermon I appreciated most was:
______________________________________________________________________________

I wish the preacher had said more about:
______________________________________________________________________________

The Lyman Beecher Lectureship on Preaching
Yale Divinity School
New Haven, Connecticut
INTRODUCTION
The Lyman Beecher Lectureship on Preaching at Yale Divinity School was established April 12, 1871 by a gift of ten thousand dollars from Henry W. Sage, esq. in memory of Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), a member of the Yale College class of 1797. Beecher was a Presbyterian and Congregationalist minister who held pastorates in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, Litchfield, Connecticut, and Boston, Massachusetts. He was also the first President of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Henry W. Sage, the donor of funds for the establishment of the lectureship, was a member of Plymouth Congregational Church of Brooklyn, N.Y., where Henry Ward Beecher, son of Lyman Beecher, was pastor for forty years. Sage was a prosperous businessman and one of the chief benefactors of Cornell University, where he served on the Board of Trustees.
In accordance with the wishes of Mr. Sage, his gift to Yale was devoted by the Yale Corporation to the establishment of a foundation to be designated as, "The Lyman Beecher Lectureship on Preaching" to be filled from time to time, upon appointment of the Corporation, by a minister of the Gospel, of any evangelical denomination who has been markedly successful in the special work of the Christian ministry. With the authorization of the donor, the Corporation voted in May, 1882, "that henceforth the Lyman Beecher lecturer shall be invited to lecture on a branch of pastoral theology or in any other topic appropriate to the work of the Christian ministry." In December 1893, the donor authorized the Corporation, "if at any time they should deem it desirable to do so, to appoint a layman instead of a minister to deliver the course of lectures on the Lyman Beecher Foundation."

Facilitator Notes
“How Shall They Preach”
Gardner C. Taylor

• What I have set down in the following pages is largely a transcript from these nearly forty years I have known of going in and out of pulpits in almost every nook and cranny of the world, but most particularly that of The Concord Baptist Church of Christ (13)

• Lecture 1 - Recognizing and removing the presumptuousness of preaching
o As much as men are able to appropriate the divine mind, the humblest lay person has the same access as the man or woman whose vocation is the preacher (24)
• The preacher does not enjoy right to any esoteric knowledge of God denied to those to whom one preaches (25)
o There have, of course, been pretensions aplenty on the part of the clergy that they are of a higher moral breed, but these claims do not pass muster (25)
o There will be people in almost any congregation who by the purity of their lives and quality of their discipleship will put those who preach to them to shame (25)
o Honest confession will force most of us who preach to join Paul and Barnabas when they spoke at Lystra, say “We also are men of like passions with you” (25)
o The magnificent anomaly of preaching is to be found in the fact that the person who preaches in the need himself of herself of the message which the preacher believes he or she is ordained to utter (27)
• It ain’t my brother and it ain’t my sister, but it’s me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer (27)
o The principal presumptuous, or as my old Colgate-Rochester colleague, Gene Bartlett, put it, the “audacity of preaching,” is found in the awareness that the person who preaches is, himself, part of the guilt and need to which he speaks (28)
• What a word we have to carry, but how compromised is the messenger?
• The person who preachers is as guilty of the wrongs against God against which he inveighs as are those to whom he or she addresses his or her words (29)
• God help the preacher who is so self-hypnotized that the full brunt of this shame does not fall like an awful weight upon him, loading what he says with becoming humility and hush of the soul that he, of all people, should be sent to say such things about what is wrong with people before God (29)
o For what is wrong with the hearers is the same that is wrong with the preacher (29)
o All of us are tempted to vanity, particularly if some success has attended our ministry of if we have in fact, something more than modest gifts as a preacher (32)
• We who preach are sinners as repulsive and course and faulted as those before whom we stand and to whom we bear the gracious, but tough ultimatum of a sovereign whose judgment is His mercy and whose mercy is His judgment. (32)
o We who preach are part of the whole human undertaking (34)
o A person’s preaching is infinitely sweetened as he enters, actually or vicariously, into the plight and circumstances of human hope and heartbreak (34)
• It was not empty rhetoric but a part of the basic formula for his enduring immortality as a preacher which made Paul cry, “To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. And this I do for the gospel’s sake, that I might be partaker thereof with you.” (35)

• Lecture 2 – The Foolishness of Preaching
o What am I doing? What is this all about? (42)
• There may be a gnawing uncertainty about the value and worth of preaching which will doubtless affect all of us from time to time.
• At its lowest elevations, it seems many times to be a dull and unexciting rehashing of old matters. At its impassioned heights, it seems to approach a vulgarity of intensity and a making public of sentiments and experiences which if they have happened at all seem altogether too private, and precious, to be paraded before a crowd of strangers. (42)
• I confess that preaching has often seemed to me such a clumsy and unclear form of communication. (42)
• How strange of God to make the uttered word, so fragile and so tenuous, the principal carrier of so precious a cargo as the incalculable love which he has intemporated and incarnated in Jesus Christ our Lord. (44)
• God might have found so many other ways to spread the Gospel of the love of God. He might have written His love on the leaves of the trees and blowing winds would have sent news of the deliverance and redemption far and wide. God might have written His love in the skies and in the rising sun so that men looking upward could have read the message, ‘God so loved the world.’ He might have made the ocean sing His love and nightingales to chant it. Neither of these, not even angels, could ever preach and say, however, “I’ve been redeemed.’ (45)
o So this is a Gospel for sinners saved by Grace and only saved sinners can preach. (45)
• Those who preach deal with a word, which seems weak in comparison with other words. (46)
o He or she is heard by comparatively few people, many of whom seem to give scant attention to what is being said. The preacher deals in “spiritual” words, which have no power and force, so we think. (46)
o We may discover, and the preacher ought never forget, that the words he uses and the ideas and emotions they represent are the most powerful forces on earth. (46)
• Dare anyone who feels the pressure to preach conclude that he or she has a puny, inadequate Gospel? (50)
o Standing in the grand lineage of our holy faith, the preacher ought not dare to utter the things of Christ too hesitantly or casually or tentatively. (50)
o The power and pathos of the preacher are to be found not in volume of voice nor those patently contrived tremors of tone preachers sometimes affect, but in passionate avowals which are passionate because they have gotten out of the written word into the preacher’s own heart, have been filtered and colored by the preacher’s own experiences of joy and sorrow, and then are present to and pressed upon the hearts and minds of those who hear. (51)

• Lecture 3 – Building a Sermon
o From where do sermons come? There are perhaps few preachers who have not pondered this question, sometimes in quiet reflection and sometimes in desperate anguish when the vision tarries and Sunday morning does not. (57)
o The heart of the preacher’s dilemma is how to trust God wholly and at the same time to prepare diligently. (57)
o Most of us discover that sermons are born of a mysterious romance between preparation and inspiration (58)
• Dr. Paul Scherer used to say that inspiration is 10 percent genius and 90 percent firm application of the seat of the pants to the chair. (58)
• Let every person who would preach be well aware that whatever even approaches acceptable pulpit work on any sustained basis will never come without effort and even anguish. (58)
• The faithful preacher, willing to pay the price in study, prayer and that meditation which is a “sitting silent before God,” will find rich reward for his pulpit work. (59)
o Sermons come in many ways (59)
• They come by study of the bible (59)
• Sermons are everywhere, for the critical encounter between God and his creation, human kind, is forever occurring world without end. (61)
• So, one who preaches may confidently look everywhere for sermons, not snooping, mind you, nor in panic casting about desperately on Saturday for something to preach about the next morning. (62)
• Ponder the mystery and majesty of the seasons in order to give color and contrast to our sermons, but even more so that your own spirit might appropriate the brown wistfulness of autumn, the leaping green joy of spring, the heat and stillness of summer, and the white death of winter. (63)
• Any preacher greatly deprives himself or herself who does not study the recognized masters of the pulpit discourse, not to copy them but rather to see what has been the way in which they approached the Scriptures, their feel for men’s hearts. (64)
o Harry Emerson Fosdick, Frederick Robertson, Arthur Gossip, Joseph Fort Newton, John Jasper, C.T. Walker, L.K. Williams, William Holmes Borders, J.H. Jackson, Sandy F. Ray, J.C. Austin, John Jowett, Alexander McClaren, George Buttrick, F.W. Boreham, and Paul Scherer. (64)
o One who preaches must come to know the doubts and hopes, the longings and fears, the strengths and weaknesses of the human heart. He arrives at this awareness, first, I think by seeking, not morbidly, to plumb the depths of his own being. (65)
• So the preacher must be willing to look deeply and honestly into himself, for in those depths, touched by the light and flame of the Gospel, will much of one’s preaching find birth and life. (67)

• Lecture 4 – Preaching the Whole Counsel of God
o How we approach the preaching responsibility depends upon whether we consider proclamation of the Gospel to be a matter of life or death. (77)
o The whole sweep of Biblical revelation asserts that the spokesperson for God stand in a grandly perilous post of responsibility. (78)
• The Word of the Lord is presented as addressing Ezekiel about the cruciality of the prophet’s calling as an interpreter of God to men. (78)
• The prophet’s (watchman) job is to:
o Scan the hills and to peer toward the valleys
o Agree to till the fields to draw water and all of that
o Be faithful in what he or she does
o Is freed from regular occupational responsibilities
o Has no right to claim indifference or indolence or sleepiness, for he or she is spared many of the irksome annoyances of the work-a-day world.
o Sounds an alarm in the event of danger
• The person called of God to preach is summoned to look at humanity under the light of God (81)
o The preacher, coming at the fearful, destructive sins of our society, surely must speak to them with a diving pity which weeps, so to speak, at the same time in which it challenges the community’s delinquencies and derelictions. (83)
o Thus, every preacher ought never to forget in his preaching that one preaches to people who are initially and finally solitary animals with their own fears and courage, guilt and grief, joy and sorrow, anxiety and anger and with that deep age-old hunger which the bread of this world cannot satisfy and a thirst which the waters of this life cannot quench. (89)
• How shall the preacher know how to deal with these matters? (91)
o One of the great, sustaining strengths of the preacher is to be found in the fact that he or she is part of the human condition, seeing and experiencing ecstatic joys and knowing the cold chill of the follows of sorrow. (91)
o The preacher who hears the sound of angels’ wings and who sits where the people sit is gifted to preach to men in the heights and depths of their being. (92)
• We are surrogates of a Gospel which has explored the secret places of the human heart, which has sounded the depths of the human predicament. (92)
We are bearers of an incredibly rich Gospel which imparts unspeakable treasures of the spirit to those who

3/1/10 Bishop Peter Weaver:

Preaching is one beggar telling another where they can both find bread.

In 95% of the churches, the NUMBER ONE, first listed requirement for ministry is: PREACHING. ‘If it doesn’t happen in worship, it doesn’t happen’. So, preaching deserves and requires preparation excellence. This is the highest impact moment of anything you do. Do not press the button a computer and expect it to deliver. J Wesley: “Give me 100 preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God and they will shake the gates of hell.” Ordained to word, sacrament, order ‘so long as his spirit and his practice are such that become the gospel’.

Preaching is both BEING AND DOING.

BEING: 1. The preacher is called to be an authentic human being. Be who you are. You are a creature before you are a preacher. One 3 year old called the pastor ‘creature’ because he could not pronounce preacher. This is the mystery of the incarnation. Read F Beuchner, Telling the Truth: The gospel as tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale. The preacher deals out his note cards like a river boat gambler…We are not magicians. We are called to be human, and to be human is task enough for anyone. 2. We are called to be passionate followers of Jesus Christ. Preach what you know and live. 3. You are called to bring a compassionate listening heart into the community and world. I cannot preach until or unless I have been to the hospital, the home, the hurting in visitation.

DOING: 1. Do the theology. Read Charles Rice, Interpretation and Imagination. Take seriously what he calls the historico-ontological method. 2. Do the sociology. Read Fred Craddock, Preaching. Focus on the language of the first 7 years of life, wherein we receive our fundamental self-understanding. The mind is like an art gallery. Explore the deep places, kerygma, poetry. Avoid using theological terms. Know the powerful images for your community (Pittsburgh: the river). You’ve got to listen to the stories of those around you. 3. Do the missiology. Preaching is a part of the mission of God into the world (story of street people in Pittsburgh church).

Phillips Brooks: preaching is communication of truth through personality. Jesus did not just minister to the people in the synagogue. The art of preaching is an oral event, not an exercise in literature. See Amos Wilder, Early Christian Rhetoric. Preaching connects to hearts. Proclamation, teaching, experience, both inductive and deductive. The primitive church moved from experience, to oral tradition to the written word; the preacher moves from the written word, to the oral tradition, to experience.

Distributed: Folded 8 ½ x 11 sheet, four fold, as weekly pocket worksheet: Top: Lessons, and ‘What’s the Point?”; then: biblical/theological; personal/pastoral; literature/media; outline.

3/15/10 Bishop John Schol:

Faith without works is dead. Preaching comes out of who we are. Preaching keeps me awake at night, which shows how important it is. Good preachers are always a little on the edge. When was the last time you experienced God in church? (75% say not in the last year). What is the best sermon you have heard? Who is the best preacher you have heard? Good sermons give a sense of intimacy. Joe Williamson (BUSTH) used to liken the preacher to the court jester, who reminds the court and king of who they are.

You should be open to the moment, but also prepared to communicate well. The earlier questions (above) are out of an older paradigm. People who did not grow up in church don’t have history with sermons, so they comment on the ‘talk’ or ‘message’ or ‘experience’.

There are three types of people: thinkers, feelers, doers; head, hands, heart; information, inspiration, application. Application today is less emphasized than it should be. Part of preaching is knowing, exegeting, your audience. Do good exegetical work on the congregation! A sermon is really part of a long collection of sermons over the years. Begin your ministry by honoring what has come before. In the itinerancy you have no time to waste. Like sex, it is not about a moment but about a relationship. In BWAC, they appoint for a minimum of 7 years. Things take time.

Also, you need to exegete your community.

What people in the UMC want in the preaching is authenticity (sermon matches life of preacher) and transparency (that’s my story too). The medium becomes the message. Some images will work in one setting but not in another: the contexts are different.

Preaching changes depending on the type of congregation. There are four main types. The Family church (50 in worship, conversational preaching, informal organization, chaplaincy). The Pastor Centered church (140 in worship, stressful for pastor, much clergy burn out. The Program church (150+ in worship, members attached to ministries not clergy, staffing issues are the central problems. The Corporate church (400+ in worship, multiples of multiples, diversity of worship styles, varieties of offerings, the minister casts the congregational vision, sermon by sermon). The first two can achieve ‘congruent’ growth. The second two can achieve ‘transformative’ growth.

3/22/10 Pastoral Imagination: A Call At Midnight

Buttrick Summaries By Teaching Assistants:

TBA: #1, E Jones

TC 715: Introduction to Preaching (“Pastoral Imagination in Preaching”)
SUMMARY # 2 – Jean Halligan Vandergrift, TA Presenter

Text: Buttrick, David. Homiletic: Moves and Structures. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987.
Goal of Text: to understand what may actually take place in consciousness during the production and hearing of sermons (Preface)
He claims that public address forms “faith consciousness.” (26)

Note: The outline below is intended to support the facilitation of class review. By no means does it substitute for your own reading, careful study, and interpretation of the text.

PART I: Moves
III. Framework (83-112)
A. Introductions
1. The introduction’s purpose is to introduce a particular sermon and it can be
designed only after one has almost completed the full sermon scenario. (83)
2. It a) gives focus to consciousness and b) provides hermeneutical orientation to
the listeners – readies them to listen in a certain way. It sets up a congregation
so that the first sermon move can start. (83)

DOs DON’Ts
Move into sermon without abrupt discontinuity (85) yet clearly distinguished from move one. (87) Give away the structure of the sermon ahead of time. (85)
Make the intro only 7-12 sentences in length. (86) Be too short. (86)
Establish “a shared consciousness” without undo labor or length. Intro is different than friendly banter. (86) Use dialogue unless it is one, brief conversational exchange. (89)
Make the first 2 or 3 sentences short, simple, without too much content. (86-87) Build into the intro movement of thought or argument. (89)
Construct the last sentence so that it stops action, a firm period. (87) Put in too much introduction to literary references. (92)
Use visual material. (89) Use step-down intros. (92)
Refer to the scripture passage of the sermon. (90) Use tangential intrusions. (93)
Feature material familiar to the congregation, realizing that the gospel means that they aren’t only interested in themselves and that they can imagine. (91-92) Use oblique suspense. (94)
Be disciplined and focused in language. (93) Use personal narrative. (94)
Write out the intro and memorize it. (95) Try to make trivial “funnies.” (95)

B. Conclusions
1. What do they do?
a) They fulfill the intention of the sermon (The sermon is “performative
language (98);” it intends to do something, but what? Is this sermon for
conversion, amendment of life, summary of the lesson, emotion, bridge to the
sacrament or ? (97) The intention of the scripture might be the intention of the
sermon. (100) It is good to vary the intention of the sermon. (100).
b) They conclude the sermon and fix consciousness (97) so that the effects of
the gospel will continue (101).

DOs DON’Ts
Make it brief, no less than 5, no more than 8 sentences. (97) Introduce new ideas, content, and material. (97)
Sketch the conclusion with care. (98) Be too brief or too long. (98)
Gather up images and/or phrases. (102) Use phrases like “finally” or “in conclusion.” (101)
Use a logical-outcome conclusion. (102) Start the conclusion the same way every week. (101)
Make the last sentence short and clear. (102) Use didactic “ordered repetition”/redundancy. (101)
Repeat or echo the key message. (103) End the sermon with a question. (103)
Be concrete over abstract, but not too particular. (106) “Gospel does not grown in a climate of fear.” (107) Speak in love. (107) End with quotation, illustration, or poetry. (104)
Use simple, direct language. (107) Return to an introduction, though sometimes useful. (105)
Sketch the conclusion ahead of time. (109) End for emotional impact with rhythmic intensification. (105)
End with personal testimony. (106)

Summary #3: Jackie Blue
Central focus of the reading: Because sermons “bring into view” unseen reality, they will of necessity, dabble in metaphor, image, illustration, and all kinds of depiction. After all, preaching is preoccupied with Christ who comes to us as story, and as a living symbol; thus preaching is bound to tell stories and explore images. Inescapably, preaching is a work of metaphor. (113)
1. Language of Analogy
a. Preaching reaches for metaphorical language because God is a mysterious Presence-in-Absence. God is not an object in view. (116)
b. God-talk is related to structures of human consciousness. Consciousness is remarkably agile (if predictable). In consciousness, we are free to leap about in time and space, to view ourselves and overview our deep-pool souls, to perform magic tricks of imagination. (116)
c. God analogies also arise relationally out of our self-awareness (117)
d. In addition to relational imagery, there are models that seem to emerge in connection with our narrative consciousness. (118)
e. The use of analogical language – metaphor, simile, image, and the like – is inevitable, and obviously, desirable in preaching. God is a mysterious Presence-in-Absence, and may not be spoken of in matter-of-fact “table-and chairs” language. (119)
f. Preaching is much too important to be top-of-the-mind, spilled-out verbiage, shaped by immediate associations of a minister’s consciousness. We must consider our analogical language. (119)
g. Throughout the Christian centuries, there have been other languages used along with the language of analogy – the language of amplification and the dialectical language of denial. (119)
2. Examples and illustrations serve to increase understanding or bolster credence; they explain the obscure or convince the dubious. Such a view is too simple. (127)
a. Examples highlight the common consciousness of a congregation while illustrations are imports brought to the sermon by the preacher. (128)
i. Examples used in sermons will tend to be either “moments of consciousness” or very simple narratives. To clarify: By “moments of consciousness”, we mean examples of how things may strike us, of our attitudes, of our self-awareness, of our world, and so on. By narratives, we mean brief plots of how we act or what may happen to us in our daily lives. Either type of example will require discipline. (131)
b. Illustrations can be varied – brief quotes, described scenes, episodes involving action, pictures, stories, bits of dialogues, and the like. (133)

Summary #4: Bob Jon

Buttrick’s Homiletic: Language (p.173-221)

11. Language
We are Homo loquens
1) We do within language; 2)We relate within language; 3) We think within language.

The Communication Model
Basic Communication Model: Sender - Code - Receiver
- Problem: Words are more than arbitrary code. Words can express what is more than rational thoughts.

The Expressive Model
Two Primary Ways that language is presented: 1) joined to some depth of self; 2) linked with subjective intuition. (177)
- Problem: “It places too much burden on self and on religious affectations. Our Christian faith is both social and historical.” (179)

What is language for preaching?
“Ultimately, the language of preaching is language related to consciousness, concerned with bringing out and forming in.” (184)
The language of preaching - “a connotative language used with theological precision” (184, 193)

12. The Language of Preaching
The language of preaching is basically the common shared vocabulary of a congregation. (188) The act of preaching is to use the common words from our daily life in “the extraordinary service of the gospel, dancing the edge of mystery, reaching into depth.” (189)
Metaphor is not inauthentic. What is artificial is attempting to preach without metaphorical language. (192) - Visual Imagination

Choosing the language of preaching
1) Is the language theologically apt?
2) Does the language form in congregational consciousness?
3) Does the language serve the statement of a particular move?

Language and Public Dominations
- Sexism
- Anti-Semitism
- Racism
- And more?

13. Style and Preaching
Style as Doing
- In preaching, language is functional; it is trying to do certain things. (199)

Style and Point-of-View
- The question is not “Does it have good style?” but “How well does the language represent?” (201)

Style and the Objects of Consciousness
- When we speak of an “object” in consciousness, we are bound, at the same time, to express the effect of the object on us. (202)

Style and Content
- Again and again, in preaching, we will be called upon to match style and content expressively. (203)

Style and Move Development
The move must hold together in a unity of style, but, at the same time, may demand stylistic variety as different ideas are expressed. (204)

The Means of Style
1) The Sounds of Words
2) Cadenced Language and Rhythms of Speech - repetition, doublets, and triadic clauses.
3) Conversational Forms - exclamations, questions, and direct address, repetition and inversion, synecdoche, personification, and apostrophe.

Common Problems
Some Word Problems - avoid the followings,
1) “this, these, those, that, and it”
2) “very, really, indeed, actually”
3) delaying words or phrases usually used in academic paper
4) numbering
5) “thus, therefore.”

Some Syntactical Problems
Although doublets, triple words or clauses could create rhythmic cadences, they could easily disrupt consciousness in hearing.

Problem Expressions
Avoid slang phrases, religious clichés, or vogue words.

Some General Guidelines
1) Work on verbs with color and precision - be imaginative.
2) Be careful in using an adjective; it could “obscure structures of meaning and produce a language that is quite unnatural. (219)
3) Use pronouns instead saying, “People have”
4) Use present tense and active voice and simple, short sentences.
5) But consider using long sentences when necessary.

TBA: #5, E Jones

TC 715: Introduction to Preaching (“Pastoral Imagination in Preaching”)
SUMMARY # 6 – Jean Halligan Vandergrift, TA Presenter

Text: Buttrick, David. Homiletic: Moves and Structures. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987.
Goal of Text: to understand what may actually take place in consciousness during the production and hearing of sermons. (Preface) He claims that public address forms “faith consciousness.” (26)

PART II: Structures
VII. Hermeneutics (239-284)
A. Chapter 15 (239-250) “Preaching and Authority”
1. The question of this chapter is “How ought we to think about the authority of the scripture and the preacher?” He says that usually we think of authority as the power to command and/or the wisdom to consult. (239) Historically, we have attributed this kind of authority to the scriptures, but when we say that the bible is the Word of God, we are usually referring to its message – the good news, and we are assuming that the Holy Spirit has a role in its interpretation. (239) So the problem of authority is one of hermeneutics, that is, how to interpret the meaning of the text for now. (241) The bible is not a fixed truth. It is not the historical critical method that undercut its authority. All preachers demythologize scripture as a historical document. (241) It is a gift and it is normative because it is the remembering of the gospel. (248) The Hebrew scriptures are normative for Christians because Jesus was a Jew and this was his tradition and because the church may be viewed as a continuation of Israel. (248) Tradition of the being-saved community – liturgical and interpretative – is the hermeneutical context of the gospel message. (249)
2. Buttrick proposes that, instead of authority as power and wisdom, we ought to develop a new model of authority. (243-5) He uses the apostle Paul to get to this, that the authority, power, and wisdom of God is revealed in the foolishness of the cross. (1 Cor 1:10-30) So the locus of authority is not in the bible itself alone. Rather, we, as Christians and as the church, are located by God’s authority in the presence of Christ crucified as our salvation. (246) He argues that the better model of authority for us is to remember the gospel in relation to our awareness of being saved, that is, our faith consciousness (247), which is mediated by preaching.
3. Given this new understanding of authority, Buttrick defines preaching as mediation. (249-50) One could summarize that preaching is mediation of/articulation of faith consciousness through Christ crucified.

B. Chapter 16 (251-262) “The Place of Preaching”
1. The question that begins this chapter is “Where do preacher’s preach?” With preaching as mediation, Buttrick locates the preacher in between God and the people. (251)To preach about God is to speak of “Presence-in-Absence Mystery” or “a mysterious consciousness that is conscious of us.” (252) Buttrick argues that to preach to people acknowledges that they also are mysterious and living at the edge of mystery. (252-3) He reminds us that we ought not forget how to tremble. (253) Yet, this mystery, this God, wants to be known, so this is the origin of revelation. For Christians this revelation of God is through Jesus Christ, so preachers preach through Jesus Christ. (254) “We don’t just hand out Jesus.” (255) Preachers also address people through “a being-saved-community in the world” – the church. (255)
2. Asks: “What qualifies preachers to speak?” (255-7) They are not qualified to speak due to perfection; rather are worldly, finite, sinners. They must learn to objectify the worldly “isms. They should ponder the story of the church, look into mystery and symbols of revelation, be acquainted with Christ through scripture, practice “brooding thoughtfulness” and “special study,” and demonstrate “a disposition toward God and neighbor in faith”
3. Since preaching is mediation, it is an act of twofold interpretation, and must use “a double hermeneutic.” (258-62) This means that: a) preachers must study texts from the past – Jesus Christ in story and symbol – be concerned with the knowledge of God, and being saved, AND b) preachers must study situations in the present, be concerned with understanding ourselves, and being saved in the world. The place of preaching is in this kind of “homiletic consciousness.” (262) One could summarize that preaching intends toward Jesus Christ, story and symbol, and toward a being saved community in the world.

C. Chapter 17 (263-281) “Preaching as Hermeneutics”
1. This double hermeneutic poses certain problems:
a) the problem of how to ascertain the meaning of words from the past for today. (264) After presenting and then critiquing several responses to this problem: “Perennial Truth,” “Perennial Human Experience,” and “Perennial Faith or Church” (263-68), Buttrick argues that a better method is to locate a “theological field” delineated by the text, which allows for deeper reflection and different cases than just that in the original text. (268) Another perennial to explore may be human consciousness, which allows for change but is still a constant. This approach responds to the problem through a structure of consciousness rather than in the content of consciousness. (269)
b) the problem of a “new” meaning/scope of the text. It might have polyvalent meaning or mean more than what the original author intended. Intendings may be an aiming of and an aiming toward. (262, 274) But are they all valid?
c) the problem of “what” is interpreted. What are we seeking after in interpreting texts? He proposes that we are looking for a “hermeneutical consciousness intending.” The trick is to search for what is given. (276)
2. General guidelines for the interpretation of biblical texts:
a) biblical texts are addressed to communal consciousness, written to a faith community. Scripture doesn’t speak to individual consciousness. “What is the text saying to our faith-consciousness?” Not “to me.” (277)
b) The text addresses the “double consciousness of being saved in the world.” It is inappropriate to interpret the bible through a secular hermeneutic. Our own double mindedness of being in the world and being saved in the world can help us sort texts. (278)
c) The bible needs to be interpreted within the interaction of symbol and story, which both reveals and signals mystery. (279)
3. To avoid misinterpetation (279-281) we should be wary of our own baggage and predispositions, differentiate between world and being saved in the world, use critical methods, allow texts freedom to speak on their own terms, take delight in being saved, and as forgiven people, interpret bravely, and realize that audience feedback is less than helpful as a test of interpretation.
4. The test of interpretation: (281) a) Does it align the mysteries of being-in-the-world and those disclosed through revelation? b) Does it serve to define being saved in relationship to being in the world and vice versa? c) Does it invoke the Presence in Mystery through Jesus Christ in story and symbol, that is, lead to mediation?

Pastoral Imagination in Preaching Course Outline

2010-01-25T10:51:00.000-05:00

Pastoral Imagination in Preaching
Spring 2010
BUSTH TC 715
Robert Allan Hill
Monday 2-5pm, STH B 19
rahill@bu.edu
6173583394

Purpose of the Course

The purpose of this course is to inspire students with a desire to preach well over the course of their ministries. In order to begin or to continue the full development of the preacher’s “voice”, attention is given to the theology of preaching, the place of preaching in the context of pastoral ministry and the pastoral imagination (with special attention given to various forms and features of ministry around the globe), the design of the sermon, sermon content, preparation and delivery of sermons, and, in addition, the capacity to evaluate, critically, the effectiveness of the sermon. In this 2010 Introduction to Preaching, the professor will coordinate the presentation of materials in lecture, guest speaking, video, TA presentation and other forms. Preaching is particularly crucial for the future health of our Northeastern churches, over the next two generations.

Course Requirements

1.Class attendance and active participation. 2. Chapel attendance. 3. Quizzes on reading content and one final exam. 4. Two sermons submitted in finished written form and preached in tutorial groups (22 minutes each). One, a three point\part sermon; the second, students’ choice. 5. Selection, presentation and description of a favorite poem (starting randomly on 2/1/10) 6. A willingness to learn how to acknowledge genuinely and nourish personally the preaching of others, in order homiletically to watch over one another in love. 7. Completion of all assigned reading.

Grade components: Final 15%; Sermons 70%; Other (attendance, participation, quizzes, poem, etc) 15%.

Text: Required

1. David Buttrick, Homiletic: Moves and Structures, (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988).

Other Suggested Resources:
(Bookstore, Marsh Chapel, Amazon, and Library Reserve)
1. Robert A Hill, Snow Day: Reflections on the Practice of Ministry in the Northeast (Lanham: University Press, 2000).
2. Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life, (Boston: Cowley, 1993).
3. Robert A Hill, Renewal: Thought, Word, Deed. (Lanham: University Press, 2009).
4. Robert A Hill, Prophetic Protestant Preaching on America’s War in Iraq: Marsh Chapel (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2010).
5. Robert A Hill, Seeing with the Heart: Meditations from Marsh Chapel, (San Diego: UR\Cognella, 2010).

Class Schedule and Reading Schedule

January 25: Course Introduction and Overview, ‘Voices for a New Day’,
Basic Outline

February 1: Veronice Miles Lecture; Buttrick (B)‘Words and Moves’, 5-82

February 8: The Two Point Sermon, Buttrick Card, ‘Two Kinds of Confidence’; B: ‘Framework’, 83-112

February 22: TA Lectures (2) (Lyman Beecher) B: Images,‘113-172’;

March 1: Peter Weaver Lecture; B: ‘Language’, 173-224;

March 3: Violet Fisher (Chapel, Lecture, Panel)

March 15: John Schol Lecture B: ‘Words in Church, Theology’, 225-238, 449-462

March 22: B: ‘Hermeneutics’, 239-284.

March 29: B: ‘Homiletics’ 285-332.

April 5: B: ‘Structures’, 333-390. Weddings and Funerals (TBA)

April 10*: TBD, optional workshop on Youth Culture and Preaching, S Cady

April 12: B: ‘Structures’, 391-448 TA Lectures (2) (Lyman Beecher)

April 26: FINAL EXAM

Weekly Class Basic Outline: First 90 Minutes
(second 90 minutes for tutorials)

1. Pastoral Imagination: A Setting in Ministry RAH
2. Lecture RAH, TA’s, Guests
3. Questions? (2) Class
4. TA Buttrick Summary TA’s
5. ‘Tools’ RAH
6. Exemplum Docet RAH, Other
7. Coda\Written Exercise Class

Course Information

Outline: The BUSTH basic preaching course, spring 2010, will follow the above outline, in the first 90 minutes, with the second 90 minutes led in groups by TA’s. Each TA will offer one 45 minute lecture, summarizing one of the annual Lyman Beecher Lectures (2/22, 4/12). Each TA will also provide one 5-7 minute Buttrick summary, with one page written hand out: 1. ES, 2. JV, 3. JB, 4. SBJ, 5. ES, 6. JV, 7. JB, 8. SBJ, 9. RAH.

Guest Dates: February 1: Dr. Veronice Miles; February 22: RAH away; March 1: Peter Weaver; March 3: Violet Fisher; March 15: John Schol; April 22* (optional): Steven Cady (Preaching and Youth Culture)
TA Lecture dates: 2/22, 4/12

No Class Dates: 1/17/10 (M. L. King); 2/15/10 (Presidents’ Day); 3/8/10 (Spring Break); April 19 (Patriots’ Day); 2/16/10, 2/22/10 ‘BU Mondays’

Special (Extra) Days: Wednesday, 3/3/10, 11am Chapel, 2pm Lecture; *Saturday, 4/10/10, Cady/Hill Paper on Pastoral Imagination; *Sunday, April 18, 11am, Peter Gomes, Marsh Chapel;

First Day of class: 1/25/10; Last Day of class: 4/26/10.

Fellowship: Patriot’s Day, April 19, Hill’s 96 Bay State Road #10 (6178593750) 10:30am, Marathon to follow.

Special Breakout Tasks and Days: 1/24: Introductions, descriptions of names, dates for preaching; 2/1: basics and practice in public speaking; 2/8: 5 Internet resources for sermons, and review of exegetical procedure; 2/22: Sermons begin.

Breakout Locations: Marsh Room, Thurman Room, Robinson Chapel, other.

Hill Possible Lecture Topics and Example Sermons (deanhill.blogspot.com)

1: Two Point Sermons. “Two Kinds of Confidence”
2: Language and Imagery. “Snow Day”
3: Spiritual Geography. “Once More to the Lake”
4: Story and History. “Empire Spirit”
5: Preaching John. “Twilight Gospel”
6: Concept and Content. “A Village Green”
7: Preaching the Synoptics. “The Day’s Own Trouble”
8: War and Peace. “Preemption or Redemption?”
9: The Fourth of July. “The Color Purple”
10: Monologue and Dialogue. “Invisible Slides\CRH”
11: Approaching the Grave. “In Memoriam: Mason Hartmann”
12: Meaning and Memoir. “Kyrie Eleison”
13: Preaching and Apocalypse. “Resistance”
14: A Personal Word. “Remembering Chalmers”.
15: Dominical Sayings. “No Place To Lay His Head”

A Selected Homiletical Bibliography

Sacraments

Willimon, William H. Remember Who You Are: Baptism, a Model for Christian Life. Upper Room, 1980.

Ministry (General-leadership)

Dudley, Carl S. Basic Steps Toward Christian Ministry: Guidelines and Models in Ministry. Alban Institute, 1991.

Lebacqz, Karen. Professional Ethics: Power and Paradox. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989.

Mead, Loren B. The Once and Future Church: Reinventing the
Congregation for a New Mission Frontier, Alban Institute, 1991.

Poling, James N. The Abuses of Power: A Theological Problem. Abingdon, 1991.

Raiser, Konrad. To Be The Church: Challenges and Hopes for a New Millennium. World Council of Churches, 1997.

Schreiter, Robert J. Constructing Local Theologies. Orbis Books, 1985.

Steinke, Peter L. How Your Church Family Works: Understanding Congregations as Emotional Systems. Alaban Institute, 1993.

Weems, Lovett H., Jr. Church Leadership: Vision, Team, Culture, and Integrity. Abingdon, 1993.

Wiest, Walter E. and Elwyn A. Smith. Ethics in Ministry. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990.

Black Church Tradition

Stewart, Carlyle. African-American Leadership. Abingdon, 1994.

Women and Gender

Becker, Carol E. Leading Women: How Church Women Can Avoid Leadership Traps and Negotiate the Gender Maze. Abingdon, 1996.

Gillespie, Joanne Bowen. Women Speak:Of God, Congregations and Change. Trinity Press. 1995.

Nesbitt, Paula D., Feminization of the Clergy in America: Occupational and Organizational Perspectives. Oxford, 1997.

Wessinger, Catherine, ed., Women in Leadership within Religious Communities.

Winter, Miriam T. et al. Defecting in Place: Women Claiming Responsibility For Their Own Spiritual Lives. Crossroads, 1995.

Church & Society

Bass, Dorothy, ed. Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People. Jossey-Bass, 1997.

Niebuhr, H. Richard. Christ and Culture. Harper, 1951.

Sample, Tex. White Soul.

Practice of Ministry books for Spring 1999:

Ballard, Paul, and John Pritchard Practical Theology in Action:
Christian Thinking in the Service of Church and Society (London: SPCK, 1996) ISBN 0-281-05012-0.

Gunderson, Gary. Deeply Woven Roots: Improving the Quality of Life in Your Community (Minn: Fortress Press, 1997) ISBN 0-8006-3095-5.

Neuger, Christie Cozad, ed. The Arts of Ministry: Feminist-Womanist Approaches (Louisville: Westminister John Knox Press, 1996) ISBN 0-664-25593-0.

Preaching & Worship

Best, Ernest. From Text to Sermon: Responsible Use of the New Testament in Preaching. Atlanta: John Knox, 1978.

Buttrick, David. Homiletic: Moves and Structures. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988.

Craddock, Fred B. Overhearing the Gospel: Preaching and Teaching the Faith to Persons Who Have Already Heard. Nashville: Abingdon, 1978.

Craddock, Fred. Preaching. Abingdon, 1985.

Davis, Grady. Design for Preaching. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1958.

Faber, H. Vanderschoot, E. The Art of Pastoral Conversation. (New York: Abingdon, 1965).

Fuller, Reginald. The Use of the Bible in Preaching. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981.

Keck, Leander. The Bible in the Pulpit. Nashville: Abingdon, 1978.

Koller, Charles W. Expository Preaching Without Notes. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1962.

Long, Thomas. The Senses of Preaching. Atlanta: Knox, 1988.
Long, Thomas. “The Use of Scripture in Contemporary Preaching”. Interpretation 44 (4, 90). 341-352.

Malherbe, A. J. “Pastoral Care in the Thessalonian Church”, New Testament Studies, 36 (3, 90), 375-391.

Marty, Martin E. The Word: People Participating in Preaching. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984.

Miller, R. M. How Shall They Hear Without a Preacher? The Life of Ernest Fremont Tittle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971.

Van Seters, Arthur, ed. Preaching as a Social Act. Nashville: Abingdon, 1988.

Willimon, William H. On a Wild and Windy Mountain. Nashville: Abingdon, 1984.

Willimon, William H. Preaching and Leading Worship. Westminster, 1984.

Audiotape Material

Circuit Rider Sermon Series. Nashville: Abingdon.

Reigner Recording Library. Union Theological Seminary, Virginia.

RAHill Personal Collection. AFUMC. Rochester, New York

A New Birth of Freedom

2010-01-04T13:31:00.001-05:00

A New Birth of Freedom
John 1: 51
January 18, 2008
Marsh Chapel
Robert Allan Hill

Our gospel today can best be heard from the last sentence, wherein the clearly clairvoyant Johannine Jesus belittles Nathaniel’s marvel at him by acclaiming divine freedom, historic change, and a horizon of hope. Divine freedom: you will see the heavens opened. Change in history: you will see the angels of God ascending and descending. A horizon of hope: you will see the Son of Man.

Freedom

First, freedom.

God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom.

The nature and dimensions of freedom are very much on our minds this week. Others from other spaces will want to continue to explore more fully the political, social, and economic features of this freedom. We have though, first, another job to do. It is the job of preaching. It is our task to name freedom. In that sense it is a theological job, though preaching is more than theological reflection. It is our confession that Jesus means freedom.

The other morning I took my daughter and grandchildren to the Aquarium. With you I celebrate this cultural gift, and make common cause with their fine work in opening the world to wonder. Surely there are many fine places to spend an hour or two in our fair city. Is there a single one, though, that will pierce your soul and spirit with a sense of the creative power, natural wonder, and physical freedom of the world in which we live? I challenge to stand in front of the Pacific Rim tank, with fish of a hundred colors and shapes, and not be overtaken, in wonder, by the power of freedom set loose in the universe.

It is our conviction that the God who makes allowance for being, who calls us and all into being, is the God of freedom. Freedom on Sinai. Freedom on the Mount of Olives. Freedom on the way to Emmaus. Freedom itself set free. Freedom evolves.

Does your God, your apperception of God, make space for evolution?

Your patent or latent view of God makes every sort of difference.

If as the Scripture says, “God is love”, then human freedom is real...Freedom is the absolutely necessary precondition of love. (W S Coffin, Credo, 27).

Our incoming President made a fine speech last year about race. He did so to clarify his own thinking, and our thinking about his thinking, with regard race. This was widely known and acclaimed. But to do so he had to clarify his own thinking and our thinking about thinking, with regard to a form of religious thinking. To date, to my knowledge, no one has fully appreciated the theological depths and dimensions of his March 18, 2008 address. As we come to the inaugural, perhaps we could pause to appreciate his theological insight, all the more choice since it is offered by a lay person.

Obama that day said ‘No’ to Jeremiah Wright, in terms like these: unlike others, unlike another generation, we do not believe that our fate and our future are irrevocable chained to our tragic past. He offered his view, that change can happen, real change, which is real hard, over time, in real time, can really happen. He explicitly rejected a harsh, providential, divine determinism or damnation for a country that certainly has known its share of sin. He stepped aside from the litany of sin and atonement, and stepped toward the liturgy of confession and pardon. That is a layman’s theological statement about divine and human freedom. Life is not purpose driven, for ill or good. Life is not divinely ordered and directed, in the small or in the large. Life is not found in the rigid orthodoxies neither of fundamentalism nor of radicalism, neither in the Biblicist fundamentalism of a Rick Warren nor in the Liberationist radicalism of a Jeremiah Wright (produced by his teacher and mine, James Cone.)

I have yet to see a single serious writer, preacher or journalist identify the ironic similarity, the congruent similarity, the family resemblance of Warren and Wright. One is from the far right and one is from the far left. Nonetheless, they offer the same religious perspective. (In what I say I do not criticize them. They are good people. They do good work. Though I profoundly disagree with them and adamantly oppose them, I acknowledge their desire to know and do the right and the true and the good. I too fell in love early on with Karl Barth, so I know from inside the powerful pull of their perspective). Yet here is the irony. While they differ completely in politics, Warren and Wright offer the same religious perspective: The Bible is the sole Word of God, either in personal purpose (Warren) or in cultural judgment (Wright); God is known in providence, whether from the Law (Warren) or from the Prophets (Wright); it is God, not we ourselves, who makes all change, whether from the right (Warren) or from the left (Wright); the human being is left to submit (Warren) or rebel (Wright), finally doubly predestined as Augustine finally had to admit before Pelagius; history is tragedy, fore (Warren) and aft (Wright); freedom is an illusion (Warren) or a presumption (Wright). (You will note that this is not a very cheery world view ).

Both Wright and Warren are indebted, theologically, to Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr and the Neo-Orthodoxy against which Howard Thurman and others have unsuccessfully, but rightly, preached for fifty years. Thurman was 100 years ahead of his time 50 years ago. Warren is Barth from the front, and Wright is Barth from the back. But from front or back, it is still Barth. They both have taken seriously the first of Niebuhr’s grave points, about the tragic sense of life, and they both have neglected utterly Niebuhr’s second, his concluding sermon, that there is in the human being a divine freedom, a capacity for a spiritual discipline against resentment, and so an open future, a divine\human heteronomy. Both radically and fundamentally minimize the capacity of the human being to change, and the potential for human society to improve. They both radically and fundamentally mute freedom, whether for a new post-Biblical freedom for gays to find their place in society or for a new post-radical shared leadership of many hues in the cause of racial justice. They both (and quite successfully to this date) define American Christianity over against the liberal tradition. And, so far, they have won the day.

What astounds me, still, is that the theological insight of Obama’s race speech has had no attention. Against a purposey providentialism (Warren), against a denunciatory determinism (Wright), Obama affirmed freedom on March 18, 2008:
But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.
Embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation.
The problem with radicalism and the problem with fundamentalism is the same problem: they see the future only from the past. “The sun also rises and the sun also sets. What has been is what will be. What has been done is what will be done. There is nothing new under the sun.” They see what they expect to see. And so they chain us, with all due sense of purpose, from right or left, to what has been. And so they chain us, with all due citation, from right or left, of the Bible, to what has been. Here is the key line: The profound mistake is that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.
In thrilling mystery this morning the Gospel denies that we are irrevocably bound to a tragic past! In the same way, this week’s inaugural denies that we are irrevocably bound to a tragic past!

Change

Second, change.

John’s gospel exudes freedom. For John Jesus means freedom. With freedom, scary thought, things can change, either for the better, or for the worse.

At a wedding this weekend, guests from New York chose to spend Saturday at the Kennedy museum. I said a silent thanks that they had chosen that spot this weekend. It is a place that says, ‘I believe America should set sail, and not lie still in the harbor’ (JFK).

You remember, I expect, a time when the utter misery of others at last permeated your spirit, and you seethed with an angry hunger for change. You drove by the South Bronx, safe on the highway, riding in a new car, and looked down on the city and saw PS 131, with 6 year olds coming out, and you thought, “How do we do this? How do we let this happen?” Or you had to stop at the emergency room in a small town hospital—a toothache, a broken limb—and you looked around and for the first time the hidden poor of the land were real. You served in the dining center or suited in the storehouse or read books in the daycare. You heard Marion Wright Edelman, really heard her, when she said that 20% of our American children are raised in poverty. You saw something, of all places, on television, and it made you weep. You read an article about children hurt, wounded, killed, in the fog of war, as they took shelter in a school house. You crossed the border into Tijuana and all those brown little faces and browner little hands reaching for coins sent a chill through you on a sunny, hot day. Your club offered a day of service and you ended up, not on the sunny side, but on the slummy side of the street.

God loves: especially those left out. With the divine gift of freedom there comes the chance for change.

In two fine novels, Gilead and Home, over the past several years, Marilynn Robinson has given you a sympathetic reading of determinism (fundamental or radical), which, ultimately, though cautiously, she rejects. Here is the climax of Home:

Her second book places the apparently damned Jack in earshot of a young woman who has married an old preacher:

“Just stay for a minute”, she said, and Jack sat back in his chair and watched her, as they all did, because she seemed to be mustering herself. Then she looked up at him and said, ‘A person can change. Everything can change’…Jack said, very gently, ‘Why thank you, Mrs. Ames. That’s all I wanted to know’. (p 228)

Hope

Third, hope.

Given the darkness, confusion and corruption of our time, it is more than tempting to turn a cynical eye and ear upon the earth.

The thrilling mystery of our gospel today, though, argues otherwise. The community that composed the Gospel of John knew a rare kind of freedom. Theirs was not only a freedom of religion, but also a freedom from religion. So, in this mysterious verse, the writer acclaims openness, even to the heavens; he pronounces motion, even among and between angels and men; he pulls forth what strangely for him is the highest title of Jesus, the Son of Man. An open heaven is a symbol of divine freedom given as human freedom. The Jacob’s ladder of ascent and descent is a symbol of power to move, to change. The heightened title, Jesus a divine figure, is a symbol of hope that will not let go.

On Christmas Day we stood outside Trinity church after a fine morning service. Hope was in the air. What the Aquarium is to freedom, what the Kennedy museum is to change, the churches of our community are to hope. They are living, speaking symbols of hope.

When you are tempted to lose hope that their might be liberty and justice for all, I hope you will think of the family just now about to set up housekeeping at the White House.

When you are tempted to lose hope that our education or medical provisions can be fair or just, I hope you will remember that one teacher who touched you, that one doctor who helped you.

When you are tempted to lose hope that peace might ever come between Arab and Israeli, Muslim and Jew, I hope you will remember that other peace, hard wrought, has come, in other places. I give you Ireland. I give you South Africa.

When you are tempted to lose hope that a durable economy might evolve wherein those who have much do not have too much and those who have little do not have too little, I hope you will remember the Hudson River voice of a crippled President, ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’.

When you are tempted to lose hope that the voice and place of women, world-wide, might ever be sustained, I hope you will remember Susan B Anthony, ‘failure is impossible’.

When you are tempted to lose hope that the world can work, I hope you will remember Jesus’ thrilling mystery, ‘Truly, truly, I tell you, you will see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’ For just as freedom leads to change and change leads to hope, so also hope brings change and change brings freedom.

Coda

We enter a time in which there is the possibility of a new birth of freedom.

It was not a pretty June morning on which Abraham Lincoln spoke the words of this morning’s sermon title. It was not on a beach, in Hawaii or Florida that he spoke. It was not in the peaceful backwaters of a decade of progress and plenty. It was not after a long and easy life. It was not out of quiet reflection is a monk’s peaceful cell.

Lincoln spoke over the graves of thousands. He spoke in the roaring November wind. He spoke on the corn stubble of a Pennsylvania field. He spoke as a leader who might be losing a war. He spoke as a man more acquainted with sorrow and defeat than perhaps any other person of his time, or any time. He was our greatest leader, and a pretty fair lay theologian himself. In a couple of years he would himself be dead.

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . . and that government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . . shall not perish from the earth.

Annual Report 2009

2010-01-04T13:27:00.001-05:00

Annual Report
Robert Allan Hill
Boston University
Dean of Marsh Chapel, Professor of New Testament and Pastoral Theology, and Chaplain to the University
January 1, 2009—December 31, 2009
A. Dean of Marsh Chapel: Preacher
1. Sunday Sermons and Services: 47 (see bu.edu/chapel; see deanhill.blogspot.com)
Summer Series: ‘Darwin and Faith’ (10); Autumn Series (16): ‘Two Marks’
2. Special Services 9
(ML King Observance, BU Baccalaureate, BU Matriculation, BU Alumni Weekend, This I Believe, Marsh Matriculation Service, ‘Fall of the Wall 20 Year Remembrance’, Lessons & Carols (2x))
3. Guest Speaking 23
(1/09 Four Seasons, 2/09 Inter Varsity Fellowship BU, 2/09 BU Christian Unity Evening, 3/09 K Darr Bible and Violence, 3/09 BU Service Recognition, 3/09 New Haven Theological Discussion Group (participant), 4/09 BU Academy, 4/09 Harvard Memorial Church Board of Overseers, 5/09 Commencement Address Northwestern University Garrett Evangelical Theological School, 5/09 Lake Winnipesaki, 6/09 Conference Sermon Baltimore Washington Annual Conference UMC Baltimore, 6/09 Wyoming Annual Conference UMC BU Alumni, 6/09 Western NY Annual Conference UMC Prayer, 7/09 Union Chapel, North Hampton NH, 9/09 BUSTH Worship Celebrant, 10/09 Navigators BU, 10/09 ME Moore Installation BUSTH (2x), 11/09 Howard Thurman Center BU Thurman Birthday Event, 11/09 Fall of the Wall Service, 11/09 BU Senior Student Life Staff Luncheon, 12/09 Kingston NJ First UMC.
4. Meetings 441
(Regular 12: Marsh Staff, Marsh Advisory Board, Faculty BUSTH, Faculty Area A BUSTH, Worship BUSTH, Dean’s Council, University Council, University Leadership Group, University Council Student Life Committee, Religious Life Council, BU Chaplains, New England Annual Conference Foundation Board)
5. Visits 571
6. New Chapter Members Received 16
7. New Initiatives: a. Autumn program expansion (see term book); b. Sunday Under Graduate Fellowship, Marsh Forum (4: Bacevich, Koskinen, Brown, Fomby), Student Ministry expansion; c. Completion of Marsh Staff Renewal; d. Ministry\L Whitney Initiatives (goal 200 students in weekly worship in process); e. Music\S Jarrett Initiatives (10 ensembles goal met: Chapel Choir, Chapel Collegium, Inner Strength, Summer Choir, Westerhaus CFA Choir, Seminary Singers, Schola Cantorum, Mustard Seed, Anne Howard Jones Choir, L’Academie); f. R Bouchard\Hospitality Initiatives (goal 300 worship attendance September to May in process; Valentine’s Day and other development work ongoing) g. Revision of Strategic Plan; h. Motives Magazine Volume Two (Marsh Annual Theological Journal); i. 9 Hill Receptions and Open Houses at ‘Deanery’ (96 Bay State Road #10); j. New England Foundation (new 2009); Religious Life Council Overhaul Begins.
8. Baptisms 7
9. Weddings 12
10. Memorials 11
B. Professor of New Testament and Pastoral Theology: Professor
1. Areas A and D Monthly Faculty Meetings
2. Full Monthly Faculty Meeting
3. Worship Committee
4. Annual Faculty Retreat NA
5. 2009 Publications (8) : 1. Sunday Sermons, BU website (Theme: Mark; New England Interlocutor: Boston University History); 2/3. Two Books: Renewal (University Press); Prophetic Preaching on Iraq (Mellen); 4. Autumn Sermons Series : ‘Two Marks’ ; 5. Summer Sermon Series: Darwin and Faith 6. DeanHill’sBlog (blogspot.com); 7. Motives Article: Darwin and the Personalists; 8. BU Today (8/24, Marsh as Icon); 8. ‘Remembering Chalmers’ BUSTH Focus Magazine;
6. BUSTH courses (3): Pastoral Leadership; Pastoral and Spiritual Formation; and The Gospel of John; Lemoyne College (1): The Letters of Paul;
7. World Council of Churches Commission on The Nature and Mission of the Church.
8. Receptions and Open House for BUSTH faculty at Hill Residence
9. SUPE consultant\ Asian Ministry Consultation
10. Member, ex officio, BUSTH Board of Overseers
C. University Chaplain: Pastor
1. Daily conversations, noon time walks, informal discussions—not countable
2. BU Today Articles and Interviews 2
3. BU Matriculation, Alumni Awards, Senior Bkfst, Retiree Luncheon, Commencement, Multifaith Dinner, and Baccalaureate prayers 7
4. Splash, and Religious Life Fair
5. Marsh Board of Advisors (29 persons), May, and October (see folder)
6. Pastoral Counseling 61
7. Committees: Deans’ Council, University Leadership Council and Group, Student Life Task Force,
8. Open Houses\Receptions in 96 Bay State Residence 9
(Staff, Parent’s Weekend, Theological School, October BSR 96, Christmas Party, Oscars, Patriot’s Day Brunch, other)
9. Student Deaths 2009: 2
(Victoria Rubino, Alvaro Roccaro Giamporcaro)
10. 2\month Chaplains’ meetings; 2\month Religious Life Council (significant additional time investment)
11. Books read (a selection): HOME, Robinson; CHICKEN SOUP COLLEGE, E. Hill; CHRISTIANITY FOR THE REST OF US, Bass; OUTLIERS, Gladwell; MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND EARTH, Blake; SANE INVESTING, Cramer; F SCHLEIERMACHER, Sykes; TWO LETTERS, Schleiermacher; A N WHITEHEAD, Pittinger; L WITTGENSTEIN, Hudson; SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY INTRODUCTION, Neville; AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO, P Brown; DARWIN, Hur; THE EVOLUTION OF GOD, Wright; TRANSFORMATIONS, Kilgore; MARK, Marcus; WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES LIFE MEANING, Hedges; A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT, Maclean; REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, Proust; THE EMBERS AND THE STARS, Kohak; PINE RIVER AND LONE CREEK, Lee
21 General Comments
1. The year has gone smoothly, with many thanks to many people. The residence, 96 BSR 10, works well for us, for entertaining, and as a setting for fellowship and ministry in the heart of the University. The three part role seems to be just right (PPP). 2. Current challenges: Re-development of Boston University Religious Life Administration. 3. Fall worship: 2006 Frostiana series, 2007 Kennedy series of sermons (available on web); 2008 Common Hope (Philippians and Commonwealth Avenue); 2009: ‘Two Marks’ 4. Reorganization of staff and staff meetings (part 1) begun in 2007. Part 2 completed with one vacancy 2007. 5. Two publications in addition to sermons; numerical assessment of chapel web site (52nd of 400 BU web sites in number of ‘hits’). 6. Increasing pastoral counseling (sexuality issues, deployments to Iraq, vocation, relationship); Strategic Plan Conference, Provost and President. Articulation of Chapel mission: ‘our envisioned mission is to be a loving heart for BU, in the heart of the city, and to provide a vibrant worship service for BU, in the service of the city’. 7. Completion of Staff 8. Hence new fall program: Sunday Breakfast (40), Sunday Lunch (60), Monday dinner (50), Tuesday lunch (40), Dean’s Sunday Study (12), good growth in voice, vocation and volume. New National Summer Series 2007 and 2008, with Darwin Series for 2009. 9. Special Preaching 2009: 10. All Fall Sundays except 3 over 200 in worship: 11. BU hosts Monthly Boston Ministers’ Club 12/09; 12. Summer Choir; 13. Significant first level communications improvements (newsletter, web, newspaper, pew rosters, BU calendar, PR menu, Arts Boston, stewardship campaign). 14. From 75 to 99 Marsh donors of record; 15. 2009 Darwin Summer Preaching Series; Staff retreat; Young Adult Clergy Weekend. 16. 25 Christmas Events 2009; 17. Regular presence at BU basketball games; 18. Four Friday Fall Musical Events 2009: Haydn, ISGC, Messiah, Lessons and Carols; 19. Joy: 11/09 NYC ‘Red Hot’ Hockey Game, BU vs. Cornell; 20. Main 2010 Foci: Preacher: a. Expand video/radio voice; b. Meet with remaining (3) US University Preachers (Harvard, Marsh, Duke); Professor: a. Offer Excellent Introduction to Homiletics Course Spring 2010; b. Publish 1 or 2 Books (Songs of the Heart: Meditations from Marsh Chapel is already coming); Pastor: a. Raise Marsh Annual Income to $100,000; b. Establish Robert Allan Hill Foundation; c. Begin Religious Life Administrative Overhaul. 21; Best moment: Preaching 5/15/09 in Ernest Fremont Tittle’s pulpit, First UMC, Evanston, Ill.

Two Marks

2010-01-04T13:19:00.000-05:00

A Tale of Two Marks

Mark 12: 38-44

November 8, 2009

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

1. Preface

Before you work high you build a scaffold to get yourself up there.

Steeple Jacks do not use a scaffold. They use rope and pulleys, and they rightly earn many hundreds of dollars an hour. As one said to me, quoting Scripture, and speaking of the dangers of height, “Jesus said, ‘Lo(w) I am with you”. Meaning, he continued, ‘up high you are on your own’.

Our first and smaller churches, some five of them, hired Steeple Jacks for the minor tiling, shingling, painting and other repairs required of small church steeples on small steeple churches. One was squat enough (the church I mean not the Jack) that he could go up by ladder. Our sixth church (and the seventh, too) was a ‘tall steeple church’ The trustees tried to get by with a Steeple Jack, every time repairs were needed, but most times, no, they needed to spend more. Once a two hundred pound section of copper plate fell off that steeple onto a University neighborhood street. Exposure, liability, act of God, randomness—these words appeared in sermons later that month. No one was hurt. Scaffolding went up the next week, and stayed up for several expensive days.

The interior space of churches also requires endless attention. As with care of the human body after the age of forty, the motto for sanctuary care must be ‘maintenance, maintenance, maintenance’. Interior scaffolding also comes at a price. Sure you prefer to change light bulbs and paint ceilings with a huge step ladder and a fearless Trustee or hired painter. Sure. But the higher the nave, the, well, I refer you to adage above. “Lo I am with you”. Not high.

Even before any paint is spilled, and even before any long lasting bulbs are replaced, there is work, there is cost, there is meaningful preparation.

So it is, as you know, in preaching. The interpreter either swings in the breeze like a Steeple Jack, if the matters of historical interpretation are low fences (Paul’s letters come to mind), or, if the height is greater, scaffolding is needed (the Hebrew Scripture, all the Gospels, and especially the Gospel of John come to mind). What you see when the work is done, is the steeple repaired, the roof replaced, the paint (both coats) applied, the bulbs changed. But before that there has been scaffolding up, so that the work could be done.

2. Markan Scaffolds

We come this morning to the interpretation of a passage from Mark. Mark requires scaffolding. We cannot begin to paint until we have someplace to stand. No light bulbs will be changed until we can reach the fixtures. Help me with the scaffolding this morning.

We know not who wrote Mark, only his name. He wrote for a particular community, whose location and name are also unknown. He even mentions by name members of his church, Alexander and Rufus (15:21). The book is meant to help a community of Christians. It is written to support and encourage people who already have been embraced by faith. While it purports to report on events long ago, in the ministry of Jesus, its main thrust is toward its own hearers and readers forty years later. So it is not an evangelistic tract and it is not a diary and it is emphatically not a history.

You will want to know what we can say, then, about Mark’s community. If the community gave birth to the gospel, and if the community is the primary focus of the gospel, and if the community is the gospel’s intended audience, you would like to know something about them. For one thing, the community is persecuted, or is dreading persecution, or both. Jesus suffered and so do or so will you. This is what Mark says. This gospel prepares its hearers for persecution. For another thing, the church may have been in or around Rome, or more probably somewhere in Syria. It is likely that Mark was written between 69 and 73 ce. For yet another thing, Mark’s fellow congregants, fellow Christians, are Gentiles, in the main, not Jews. He is writing to this largely Gentile group. He writes for them neither a timeless philosophical tract nor an ethereal piece of poetry. His is rather a ‘message on target’. For one final thing, on the academic side, Mark’s composition, editing, comparisons, saying combinations, style and Christology all point to Mark as the earliest gospel (J Marcus).

I have used the word gospel. You have heard the word many times, and know that it means ‘good news’. It is an old term. You could compare it to ‘ghost’. Gospel is to good news and ghost is to spirit, you might say. Yet Mark calls his writing a ‘gospel’. He creates something new. Mark is a writing unlike any other to precede it. It is not popular today any longer, no longer fashionable, to say this. It is however true. Mark is not a history, not a biography, not a novel, not an apocalypse, not an essay, not a treatise, not an epistle. Examples of all these were to hand for him. Mark might have written one of any one of them. He did not. He wrote something else and so in form, in genre, gave us something new. A gospel. His is the first, but not the last.

Mark is not great literature. It is not Plato, not Cicero, not Homer. Nor is the Greek of the gospel a finely tuned instrument. It is harsh, coarse and common. The gospel was formed, formed in the life of a community, as described earlier. Its passages and messages were announced as memories meant to offer hope. Its account of Jesus, in healing and preaching and teaching, all the way to the cross and beyond, is offered to a very human group of humans who are trying to make their way along His way. The Gospel is a record of the preaching of the gospel. To miss this, or to mistake this, is to miss the main point of the Gospel, and of the gospel. It is in preaching that the gospel arrives, enters, feasts, embraces, loves, and leaves. It is in preaching that you hear something that makes life meaningful, makes life loving, makes life real. It is in preaching that the Gospel of Mark came to be, as a community, over time, heard and reheard, remembered and rehearsed the story of Jesus crucified (his past) and risen (his presence). We should not expect narrative linearity, historical accuracy, or re-collective precision here. And in fact, we find none. Let me put it another way around. Most of the NT documents are, in one way or another, attempts to remember, accurately, the nature and meaning of baptism. Well, Mark fits that description. What does it mean, hear and now, to be a Christian?

3. Mini Anti-Fundamentalist Jeremiad

You may preach, you may interpret the Gospel flat, in a synchronic not a diachronic way. You may simply read it, and make comments on it, as you please. In the same way, you may fix a roof by hurling shingles to the heavens, hoping some, with appropriate missile guided nails, will land on the roof. You may paint the walls of your church by opening the can, stirring the pain, and letting fly. It is a primitive procedure, but you are free to use it. You may aim your arm at various fixtures, and pitch light bulbs upward in the hope that some may land in place and, perhaps with a little breeze, turn themselves in. Across the land we have examples of this kind of preaching without scaffolding. I do not recommend it, neither for hearer nor for speaker. You know anyway when somebody doses you with a bucket of paint. You know what it feels like and how to judge it.

So far, there is with a few exceptions, broad consensus on the needed Markan scaffolding, in its general shape, heft and contours. But we have one more tier to place before we have reached our necessary height. Here the height and the weight of the matter make the scaffold lean and swing a little. Just which planks need to go where, here, is uncertain. In our reading and hearing of the Gospel of Mark we need to step carefully here, just at the very top.

4. Last Plank: A Tale of Two Marks

I put it this way. Ours is a tale of two Marks. Is Mark a moderate critic or is Mark a critical moderate? How you answer will both depend on and indicate where you stand on the scaffold. Moderate critic, critical moderate? That is, across the length of his Gospel, is Mark actively criticizing others or is he carefully moderating, coaching if you will, the approach of others? Is the tone of the gospel polemic or irenic?

Mark is clearly an apocalyptic writing, although clarity about this has only fully emerged in the last generation or so. Mark expects the end of all things in his own time, and so the Markan Jesus so instructs his followers. In fact, Mark expects the culmination of all things, soon and very soon. In this regard, and in regard to his understanding of the cross, Mark has some congruence with the letters of Paul. Given this apocalyptic perspective, is Mark a critic or a coach?

Critic

The first option, Mark the moderate critic, was most piercingly presented almost forty years ago. First let me give you the outline of the planking in this part of the scaffold, and then let me tell you about the carpenter.

On this view, Mark combats a view of Jesus that will not accept his suffering, his crucifixion. Long after the events of Calvary and Golgotha, spirited and strong people, singing a happy song, have caused the earliest church to forget their baptism, or its meaning. They expect ease, spirit, joy, and, soon, a conquering victory over all that plagues and persecutes them. Mark says no. To say know Mark remembers in delicate detail the story of Jesus’ passion, relying on a source, a document he has inherited. To say know, Mark pointedly shows the ignorance and cowardice of Peter, at Caesarea Philippi and in Jerusalem. To say know, Mark criticizes, diminishes the miracles of Jesus, letting them wind away to nothing as the Gospel progresses. To say know, Mark describes the disciples as diabolical dunces. They didn’t understand it and neither do you, he says. Mark stays within the fold of the inherited story of Jesus, the gospel of teaching and passion, of Galilee and Jerusalem. But he does so as a moderate critic of those who are unrealistic of the suffering that continues, from which the gospel does not deliver, any more than Jesus had been delivered from the cross. Saved, yes, delivered, no. On this view, at the heart of Mark there is a bitter dispute in earliest Christianity about what constitutes discipleship, baptism, and Mark is out to prove his opponents wrong. As with the alternative, there is plenty of evidence to support this sort of scaffold.

I am pleased, and honored, to tell you that the person who most powerfully presented this view is a dear friend of mine. In fact, he was my immediate predecessor in our Rochester church. My eleven years in that pulpit immediately followed his seventeen. He is a Methodist minister who did his doctoral work at Claremont. It has taken some decades for the force and power of his argument to stand up and stand out in comparison to the work of others. Ted Weeden is his name: ‘Jesus serves as a surrogate for Mark, and the disciples serve as surrogates for Mark’s opponents…The disciples are reprobates’. (op cit, 163).

Coach

The second option, Mark the critical moderate, has in a way been present for a longer time, and, one could say, is still the more dominant, the majoritarian position. I read through the summer the culminating presentation of this position in a two volume Anchor Bible Commentary. Imagine my surprise, opening the books, to read that the author was (once) on the faculty of Boston University School of Theology. His name is Joel Marcus, now at Duke. On this view, things in Mark’s community are not so much at daggers drawn. There are differences to be sure, but the disagreements are differences among friends. The Markan coaching does not face strong spirit people, committed to an idea of the ‘divine man’. Mark is not so negative about miracles. The disciples are mistaken but not malevolent. The titles for Jesus are not so telling or convincing. The real trouble is not so much in the community itself (perish the thought), but outside, among the potential deceivers of the church. Hence, on this scaffold, Mark has the job of more gently reminding his hearers of the cross, of suffering, of discipline, of the cruciform character of Christianity, as a moderate, a critical moderate, but a moderate more than a critic.

We have a hard time imaging that our faith tradition was born out of serious conflict. It is like family stories. We really don’t like to imagine that our family tree is littered with broken branches, dead limbs, crooked roots, and Dutch elm disease. We like the picture of the Palm Tree, majestic and free. The second option appeals to our sense of pride in our Christian heritage. It is a more pleasing view. But the former, Weeden’s Mark, is over time the stronger scaffold, and what we need from a scaffold is not presentation but reliability, not beauty but strength.

Here is where my feet come down. Marcus appeals to my heart, what I wish were true or truer. But my mind trusts Weeden. Our passage today, Mark 12: 38-44, is a case in point.

5. Today’s Markan Gospel

Our passage today teems with criticism. There is venom here. There is hurt, too. There is an outsider looking in. There is a widow, righteous, but overshadowed. You too were outsiders, the passage recalls. You follow one who sat outside, who had his on the sparrow, who resented the robes, the prayers, the stoles, the seats, the feasts, the forgetful unsympathy which occludes human vision and corrupts human life. Be careful. In God’s time, the first become last. When it comes to giving, the question is not how much but from how much…

“The fact that it follows Jesus’ summons of the disciples, moreover, could hint that the lesson is particularly important for the members of the Markan community. Are there perhaps rich people there as well as poor ones, and are the ostentatiousness of the former and their callousness toward the latter among the spiritual dangers besetting Mark’s church home” (Marcus, II, 861).? For Mark, the disciples are the church, his church. Just how hard on them is he?

Mark: moderate or critic? This passage begins with an attack upon the scribes of old, and so upon the leaders of Mark’s church. This passage concludes with a wry portrait of a poor widow, a picaresque portrait of unjust distance between rich and poor in the Temple, and so in the community of Mark’s church. Today’s passage, concluding the gospel’s narrative before the passion, shows us Mark the critic, Mark the prophet. He might have Jesus add: ‘I saw many in the temple that day….and it seems like I saw some of you there, too.’

Two tones are possible for this sentence: she has given all she has, her whole life. One moderate, a good stewardship lesson. One critical, a call to change. The latter is the truer, the latter is the gospel.

6. Climbing Down: Applying Today’s Gospel

Three suggestions follow, regarding awareness, regarding assessment, and regarding saving change, when it comes to scaffolds, to the frames from which we see and hear, build and repair.

We see what we expect, or want, to see. We hear what we are accustomed to hear. We have our scaffolds.

Are they the right ones?

Granted that the scaffolds on which you stand to build or repair the steeples of your lives are fundamental, necessary, and crucial, are these, yours the right ones for your life today? Are you aware of your presentiments, your prejudices, your perspectives? Are you? Can you give an account, for example, of your religious perspective? We are more regularly challenged to account for our political perspective, conservative or liberal, or our economic perspective, libertarian or egalitarian, or our cultural perspective, bohemian or bourgois. Today the Markan Jesus sits, sits, outside the temple, and turns a moderate or critical eye upon the horizon, upon the whole, upon what purports to represent the good, true, beautiful, and holy. What is your scaffold made of, when you lean toward the realities of dawn and twilight?

Are you aware of the scaffolds you have ascended?

Then let me ask you, since this Sunday, and now we have awareness, to assess your religious scaffolding. Does it hold? Here are a couple of tests, ways to jump a bit up and down on the board, without yet falling. What about death and taxes?

Does your religious scaffold hold, when you are reaching out to fix up the steeple in the hour of death? Last Sunday, Tom Long, our colleague in Atlanta, preached an op-ed sermon about our cultural, spiritual inability gracefully to approach and accept death. He recommends some better scaffolding: ‘show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead, and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people (Gladstone’…People who have learned how to care tenderly for the bodies of the dead are almost surely people who also know how to show mercy to the bodies of the living’. (NYT, 11/1/09)

Does your scaffold hold, when you are facing financial extremity? Has the scaffold the strength to hold you up, while you look out for that next job, while you look down at the prospect of debt, while you look up at your hope for measured frugality, while you look in toward the same potential greed Jesus saw in the temple of old? If the scaffold wobbles here, you have some work to do.

Have you assessed your scaffold?

Then, to conclude, let me ask you something. Is it time to change? Is it time to find a better scaffold, I mean perspective, I mean scaffold, I mean worldview, I mean scaffold, I mean faith? One of our friends sent in this comment on a sermon last month: ‘I'd further suggest it is time to unleash a more aggressive message: that only stupid people think they are so smart that they can figure out everything for themselves and that if they (and everyone else) just maximize their self-interest we will end up with the best of all possible worlds. Rather, really smart people know that they are both limited but responsible and that their best hope is to join in the company of other faithful people in a life of prayer and study and worship to help illumine the path.’

Have you come to a moment of change?

A long time ago, a preacher and Greek scholar summed up his own way of thinking: ‘If thine heart be as mine, give me thine hand’. Can you hear the trust held, affirmed, offered there? ‘If thine heart be as mine, give me thine hand’. Can you hear the openness, there, the maturely naïve confidence there, the fresh breeze there? ‘If thine heart be as mine, give me thine hand’. Can you hear the freedom and grace there? It begs to be heard. In its hearing is your health, safety, healing, salvation.

Robert Allan Hill Annual Report 2008 (Charge Conference, Asbury First UMC; and, Offices of the President and Provost, Boston University)

2009-12-10T12:29:00.002-05:00

Charge Conference (Statistical) Report

Robert Allan Hill

Boston University

Dean of Marsh Chapel, Professor of New Testament and Pastoral Theology, and Chaplain to the University

January 1, 2008—December 31, 2008

Dean of Marsh Chapel

(Preacher)

1. Sunday Sermons and services: 47

Autumn Series (14): A Common Hope (Philippians)

2. Special Services 8

(ML King Observance, BU Baccalaureate, BU Matriculation, BU Alumni Weekend, This I Believe, Marsh Matriculation Service, Lesson & Carols (2x))

3. Guest Speaking 18

(White Fish Bay UMC, Park Ridge Ill UMC, Mass Council Churches, Hampshire House Boston, Hendrix College Arkansas, Conway Forum Arkansas, Londonderry UMC NH, BUSTH Worship, Lansing Michigan State Peoples Church, Boston Ministers’ Club, BU MultiFaith Dinner, Fort Worth Cattleman’s Club BUSTH General Conference, BU Academy School Mtg, Union Chapel Hampton NH, Echo Lake Inn Vermont, BU Islamic Society Rhamadan Dinner, South Asian 16 BU Student Groups Mumbai Memorial)

4. Meetings 482

(Regular 12: Marsh Staff, Marsh Advisory Board, Faculty BUSTH, Faculty Area A BUSTH, Worship BUSTH, Dean’s Council, University Council, University Leadership Group, University Council Student Life Committee, Religious Life Council, BU Chaplains, Bishop’s Boston Urban Initiative)

5. Visits 578

6. New Chapter Members Received 3

(Quigley, Hessler, Buchanan)

7. New Initiatives: a. Autumn program, term book, full packet provided for Advisory Council; b. Sunday Under Graduate Fellowship, Marsh Forum, Student Ministry; c. Completion of Marsh Staff Renewal; d. Ministry\L Whitney Initiatives (see his report); e. Music\S Jarrett Initiatives (see his report); f. R Bouchard\Hospitality Initiatives (esp E Fomby addition); g. Summer Choir (major addition\Palestrina Song of Solomon Motets); h. Motives Magazine (Marsh Annual Theological Journal); i. 9 Hill Receptions and Open Houses at ‘Deanery’ (96 Bay State Road #10)

8. Baptisms 4

(Henry Becker, Ben Owusu-Amo, Cameron Paul Mara, Kendall Bowen)

9. Weddings 18

(Brides: Karas, Skola, Williams, Ho, Rim, Wong, Ng, Simon, Hamel, Clinch, Ugarte, Lee, Phidej, Gruber, Hall, Czaporski, Paz, Lee)

10. Memorials 5

(Alan Stern, Albert Price, Michael Harrison, Nurell Jackson, James Nash)

Professor of New Testament and Pastoral Theology

(Professor)

Area A Monthly Faculty Meeting
Full Monthly Faculty Meeting
Worship Committee
Annual Faculty Retreat NA
2008 Publications: 1. Sunday Sermons, BU website (Theme: Hope; New England Interlocutor: Commonwealth Avenue); 2/3. Two Books: Renewal (University Press); Preemption or Redemption? (Mellen); 4. Autumn Sermons Booklet: A Common Hope; 5. Sermon: Two Christmases, Lectionary Homiletics; 6. DeanHill’sBlog (blogspot.com); 7. Motives Article: Last Great Hope?
General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, UMC
GBHEM Study of Ministry Commission
2007-2009 Worship support & counsel for Karen Westerfield Tucker
Fall BUSTH courses (2): Integration of Theology and Practice and The Gospel of John; Lemoyne (1): The Letters of Paul;
World Council of Churches Commission on The Nature and Mission of the Church (monthly\Holy Cross).
Receptions and Open House for BUSTH faculty at Hill Residence
Elected to serve on search committee for new Academic Dean, BUSTH
SUPE consultant\ Asian Ministry Consultation
Member, ex officio, BUSTH Board of Overseers

University Chaplain

(Pastor)

1. Participant, BU Resolutions, BU Today 1

2. BU Today interviews, articles 2

3. BU Matriculation, Alumni Awards, Senior Bkfst, Retiree Luncheon, Commencement, Multifaith Dinner, and Baccalaureate prayers 7

4. Splash, and Religious Life Fair

5. Marsh Board of Advisors (29 persons), May, and October (see folder) 2

6. Pastoral Counseling 54

7. Committees: Deans’ Council, University Leadership Council and Group, Student Life Task Force,

8. Open Houses\Receptions in 96 Bay State Residence 9

(Staff, Parent’s Weekend, Theological School, Christmas Party, Oscars, other)

9. Student Deaths 2007/8 2

(Haley Morrill, Alan Stern)

9. Student Deaths 2008/9 1

(Alvaro Roccaro Giamporcaro)

10. 2\month Chaplains’ meetings; 2\month Religious Life Council (significant additional time investment)

15 General Comments

1. The year has gone smoothly, with many thanks to many people. The residence, 96 BSR 10, works well for us and for entertaining. The three part role seems to be just right (PPP). Entering interests named: national voice, Methodist ethos, excellent hospitality. 2. Current challenges: Re-development of Marsh programmatic ministries, with hopes for graduate, undergraduate and theological fellowship. 3. Completion of fall worship: 2006 Frostiana series, 2007 Kennedy series of sermons (available on web); 2008 Common Hope (Philippians and Commonwealth Avenue); 4. COMPLETION of Reorganization of staff and staff meetings (part 1) completed in 2006. Part 2 completed with one vacancy 2007. 5. Two publications in addition to sermons; numerical assessment of chapel web site (52^nd of 400 BU web sites in number of ‘hits’). 6. Increasing pastoral counseling (sexuality issues, deployments to Iraq, vocation, relationship); Strategic Plan Conference, Provost and President. Articulation of Chapel mission: ‘our envisioned mission is to be a loving heart for BU, in the heart of the city, and to provide a vibrant worship service for BU, in the service of the city’. 7. Completion of Staff 8. Hence new fall program: Sunday Breakfast (40), Sunday Lunch (60), Monday dinner (50), Tuesday lunch (40), Dean’s Sunday Study (12), good growth in voice, vocation and volume. New National Summer Series 2007 and 2008, with Darwin Series for 2009. 9. Special Preaching 2008: BOUND FOR BOSTON? Worship at Marsh Chapel, Boston University, 735 Commonwealth Avenue, 617-353-3560. Special preachers for 2008 include: Dr. James Forbes (1/19/08--w\ Mass. Council of Churches); Dr Robert Cummings Neville (3/2/08 and 3/22/08); Rev. Floyd Flake (4/3/08--w\BU MLKing Commemorative Event); Rev. Stephen Cady (4/6/08); Rev. Mike McKee (7/6/08 and 7/13/ 08); Rev. Dr. Randy Day (7/20/08 and 7/27/08): Dr. Mark and Ms. Lynn Baker (8/3/08 and 8/10/08). Regular weekly services are at 11am Sunday, with Dean Robert Allan Hill, preaching, and the Marsh Chapel Choir, under the direction of Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett. 10. 50% of Sundays over 200 in worship: 11. BU Program on Clinch book, FINN. Monthly Boston Ministers’ Club 5/12. New Summer Choir; 13. Significant first level communications improvements (newsletter, web, newspaper, pew rosters, BU calendar, PR menu, Arts Boston, stewardship campaign). 12. 2008 Goals (see 2007 report) DONE: 2 books; 10 guest speaking; fall sermon series; Staff completion (the main accomplishment of 2008); 75 Marsh donors; 2009 Darwin Summer Preaching Series; Staff retreat; Young Adult Clergy Weekend. 13. 2008 Goals PARTLY DONE: John memorization; 2 University events; Marsh Chapter growth; 200 attendance; expansion of radio broadcast; increase to $100,000\yr chapter\chapel donor\other income (at $80,000 now, $46,000 in 2006). 14. 2009 (primary)Goals (fuller list available): a. $100,000 donor level; b. expansion of radio broadcast.

No Place To Lay His head

2009-12-09T15:10:00.000-05:00

No Place to Lay His Head

Matthew 8: 20

Asbury First United Methodist Church

March 2, 2003

Dr Robert A Hill

A Word of the Lord

In the exuberance of youth, a scribe comes to Jesus and throws in his lot with the disciples: “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus’ response is startling. No encouragement, no congratulations, no thanksgiving. Jesus rebukes the scribe by telling him how homeless the Christ is, in this world: “the Son of Man has no place to lay his head”.

These words, dripping with nature imagery, cast in Aramaic grammar (“birds of the air”), proverbially arranged, and centering as they do on Jesus’ favorite self-reference, “the Son of Man”, surely come from the lips of Jesus of Nazareth. What a marvel, a miracle really, to hear his voice some 2000 years later! Yet, we know that we today need not only to hear what Jesus said, but also to know what this means for our life together. The verse “simply” reminds us that Christ is not at home in this world.

Loyalty Displaces Honesty

Christ is not at home in the lives of institutions, when people must forsake honesty for loyalty. The displacement of honesty by loyalty is inevitable in institutions. It goes with the territory. Of course, we must do our part to support meaningful, healthy institutions. It takes skill to run an institution: a family, a school, a church, a corporation, a government. But Christ is not always at home in institutions. Even—how painful this is—the church, for which Christ gave his life, sometimes places loyalty over honesty. I remember the old saw about and grandfather with his grandson at an ordination. They sat in the back of the large sanctuary; the boy slept for much of the service, but perked up when the Bishop began to lay hands on the candidates. As a hush fell, the boy whispered, “what are they doing with their hands on his head?” Grandpa crustily replied, “they’re taking out his spine”. Christ is not at home where loyalty displaces honesty.

Dreams Domesticated

Christ is not at home in a society that domesticates dreams. The relentless push for order in our society inevitably crushes dreams. When a dream dies, so does Christ. What happens to a dream deferred? Consider the case of Walter Lee Younger, who is building his life and dreaming his dreams on Chicago’s south side. He words as a chauffeur, but dreams of owing his own store. One morning, in the hectic breakfast hour, he tries to share his dream with his wife. She frowns on the plan, and they argue. In exasperation she says, “ Oh Walter, eat your eggs, they’re gonna be cold”. Walter says: “That’s it. A man says to his woman, ‘I’ve got a dream’. His woman says, ‘Eat your eggs’. A man says, ‘I’ve got to take hold of this world’. But his woman says, ‘Eat your eggs and go to work’. A man says, ‘I’ve got to change my life, I’m choking to death’. And his woman says, ‘Your eggs are getting cold’.” Says Walter, “Well damn my eggs…damn all the eggs that ever was!” That as you know is part of A Raisin in the Sun, a story of a dream deferred.

A Culture of Comfort

Nor is Christ at home in a culture focused on comfort. A towering Rochester hero, Christopher Lasch, wrote: “American youth culture is not a medium that initiates young people into adult life, nor even prepares them for it, but is a quasi-autonomous culture organized around the pursuit of fun and thrills.” Christ is not at home in that kind of mellow world. How could one who knew the cross conform to a world of comfort? Rather, we hear in his life the rhythms of Auden’s poem:

He is the Way

Follow him through the land of unlikeness;

You will see rare beasts and have unique adventures

He is the Truth

Seek him in the kingdom of anxiety

You will come to a great city that has expected

Your return for years.

He is the Life

Love him in the world of the flesh

And at your marriage all its occasions shall

Dance for joy.

Christ is not at home in the darkness of this world: to the extent that we are Christians we are homeless too. It is our job to remember this and to remind others. The Christian community’s joy is to point to…God…to confront a secular world with…God. We may not point well. In fact, we may be close to inept. But the pointing is what counts.

Forgotten Children

Christ is not at home in a time that forgets the littlest. Our Bishops wrote a wonderful paper a few years ago, “Children and Poverty”. At Asbury First we say “yes” to children in so many ways: Sunday School, Nursery School, Day Care, Scouting, Caring Center, Youth Group, Student Fellowship, and more. But children in our urban centers, children in the third world, children in pockets of hurt and poverty in many places—these littlest keep the Christ Sleepless, Roving, Wandering, Homeless. As Winston Churchill said, a culture is judged by how well it cares for the oldest and the littlest. How do we measure up?

Diplomacy Denigrated

Christ is not at home in a world that denigrates diplomacy. No wonder we serve such a sleepless Savior, nowhere to lay his head has he, when the great world around makes such little space for the wisdom of the serpent and the innocence of the dove.

In the 1990’s everything was negotiable. Today nothing is negotiable. Both denigrate diplomacy. Diplomacy is the art of balancing the one with the other.

In the 1990’s, as was regularly decried from this pulpit, everything was provisional, up for sale or rent. The long shadow of the White House of Never Ending Negotiation both reflected and shaped our culture. A night in the Lincoln Bedroom—negotiable. Daily routines and deadlines—negotiable. Land in Arkansas—negotiable. Fate of the welfare poor—negotiable. Use of the Oval Office—negotiable. Personal morality—negotiable. The definition of “is”, “good”, “sex” and other timely terms—negotiable.

Today the opposite is true. Nothing is for sale, but nothing is flexible either. The long shadow of the White House of Never Employed Negotiation, itself a creation of our revulsion at its predecessor, both reflects and shapes our culture. The goodness of lowering taxes—non-negotiable. The subservience of the environment—non-negotiable. The invasion of Iraq—non-negotiable. The daily time-table—non-negotiable. The death penalty—non-negotiable.

In Christ, as Paul says, all is Yes. In Adam, as Paul says, all is No. For us, upon this earth, in the ongoing invasion of Adam by Christ, Yes and No are bedfellows. This is what makes life so real and hard. It takes great balance to run a marriage, a family, a business, a church, a government, a world. It takes diplomacy. As John Kennedy said, in the presence of Robert Frost, on the happy day of Kennedy’s inaugural: “Let us never negotiate out of fear; but let us never fear to negotiate.” That is the kind of innocent wisdom and wise innocence that makes for a saving diplomacy.

Collateral Damage

Christ is not at home in a world collateral damage. I never will take for granted the regard of this congregation for the freedom of the pulpit. Most of you disagree, I know, with what I have said about the impending conflict with Iraq. Yet, you have graciously accepted what you cannot recommend, and you have graciously heard what you would not have said, and you have graciously protected what you would not have preferred. In my own ways, I will strive to measure up to your spiritual maturity in the years to come.

Once more: the opposition here voiced, over many months, to preemptory, unilateral, imperialistic, unpredictable military action continues. I have tried to show that such is outside the bounds of inherited Christian just war ethics. I have tried to argue that such is unreasonable when compared to the alternative of ongoing containment and potential retaliation. I have tried to calculate the consequences of first strike, non-multilateral, imperial invasion by one country of another. I have quoted Robert Kennedy, from another setting, that such would be “Pearl Harbor in reverse”.

What then do I say to the day that one of these terrorists further harms our people. They will. “We shall meet violence with patient justice”, and where we can bring justice, in response to attack, justice, in concert with the united nations, justice that is a republic in defense not an empire in expanse, justice that makes for peace, even when this justice, to be temporarily achieved, may tragically involve the utter horror of war, then, let us say, we may have to act. That is 1991 and that is Afghanistan. But this new war is somehthing else. Terror will continue. Our neighbor students died in Lockerbie, and that did not end it. The towers came down on 9/11 and that did not end it. Until a global tide of liberty and justice reaches the poorest moslem hamlet in the most hateful islamic nation, there will still be terror: to be met with patient justice.

Innocent Guilt

Christ is not at home in a world where the innocent are judged guilty, when the powerless innocent are judged by the powerful, to be guilty though they be innocent.

At the very end of my friend T L Butts funeral sermon for our former pastor Dr. Andrew Turnipseed, we are graced with these lines:

“Near the end of Nelle Harper Lee’s wonderful novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, there is a touching and unforgettable scene. Jean Louise (Scout), young daughter of the courageous Atticus Finch, has persuaded her father to let her come to the courtroom to hear the verdict in the controversial case in which he is defending a black man. She chose to sit in the balcony with the black people. The inevitable “guilty” verdict is rendered. It is over. Atticus Finch gathers his papers, places them in his briefcase, and begins a sad and lonely walk down the center aisle to the back door. Scout hears someone call her name, “Miss Jean Louise?” She looks behind her and sees that all of the black people are standing ups as her father walks down the aisle. Then she heard the voice of the black minister, Rev. Sykes: “Miss Jean Louise, stand up, stand up, your father’s passin’.” Can you hear that? It begs to be heard.

Hope is the capacity to work for something not because it will succeed, but because it is good. Said Vaclev Havel 30 years before he had any success.

Good News: The Best of Company

The Sleepless Savior, the Roving Redeemer, the the Homeless Christ of this single sentence in our Holy Scripture—the Son of Man who has no place to lay his head—it is His presence and wandering on which you can rely when you also are sleepless, roving and homeless.

When you are crushed in institution life between honesty and loyalty—just there, not later when things get better, but right there—you have the best of company, the Son of Man who has no place to lay his head.

When you see your dream of a lifetime domesticated in the world’s blessed rage for order—just there, not later when things get easier, but right there—you have the best of company, the Son of Man who has no place to lay his head.

When you watch your teenagers swamped in a sea of material excess and you wonder just how well they will swim—just there, not later when they and you are more settled, but right there in the necessary anxiety of faithful parenting—you have the best of company, the Son of Man who has no place to lay his head.

When you see children, far or near, marginalized and underattended—just there, not when the kingdom comes in full, but right there in the mud—you have the best of company, the Roving Redeemer who also sits up at night with children.

When you worry about a world that turns a deaf ear to the poetry of diplomacy, as we do today—just here, not when all is well later, but right here in our concern we have the best of company, the Son of Man who has no place to lay his head.

When you lift your voice in sober concern about the collateral damage of war, as I do today, just here—not after the armistice, but right here, we have the best of company, Jesus Christ, who has no place to lay his head.

When you weep at the sight of the innocent judged guilty, so often the voiceless innocent judged by the powerful to be guilty—just there, not in the heavenly courtroom but right smack in earthly defeat—you have the best of company, Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, who has no place to lay his head.

Stand up, stand up, He is passing by…

Postscript

My daughter, who will be married this summer, is one of the greatest joys of my life. When she was little and the weather was nice, we walked in the Cornell wild flower gardens. She was a calm sort, except when she happened to see a bird in flight. Then she would tug my hand, and stamp her feet, and point to the sky and call out…”booties, daddy, booties”. She got the word wrong, but the spirit she got just right. The gospel is the freedom of a bird in flight! (Barth). It is the pointing to God, whether we do it well or poorly, with the right words or not, it is the pointing that counts. Following afar off, we point to a Homeless Christ, faith pointing to God’s future: the reign of Jesus in the heart, the reign of justice in the world. Until that day, the Son of Man has no pl

An English Spring

2009-06-07T14:24:00.000-05:00

An English Spring
John 3: 1-17
May 24, 2009
Marsh Chapel
Dean Robert Allan Hill

Grace can appear, out of the mist, out of a London fog. Grace can overtake you in the mist, in the midst of an English Spring. Faith is that kind of walk in the dark. You only appreciate your faith when you get to a point that you truly need it. I wonder whether you are at a point, ready to set out on the trail of faith? Faith overtakes us in the mist, in the dark, in the fog like that interminable London fog.

We have last week passed through the ritual of Commencement, here at Boston University. Many thousands cheered at Nickerson Field, in the main gatherings. Many hundreds, school and college by school and college, heard words with which to be hooded and to begin again. Two smaller gatherings impressed me this year.

Another kind of fog, spring in England, greeted us at Faneuil Hall.

Jan and I have gone, every year, to Faneuil Hall for the commissioning ceremony for our new ROTC leaders. It is at 3:30pm in the afternoon. Each young woman or man ascends the historic stage of the Hall. They each take an oath to defend the constitution of the country. Then their parents come forward to pin the amulets for their new rank upon each shoulder. There is a little quiet at the pinning, as mom and dad find the right way to attach the rank badges. The hall is fairly full. Veterans are honored. There is a prayer and a speech. There are awards. This year’s winner was remembered for his playful temperament, his team spirit, and the fact that he still used a Chuck-E-Cheese wallet. These are young people. As mom and dad pin on the rank, it becomes shockingly clear just what sacrifice and just what cost arises when peaceful means, diplomatic strategies, fail. Then we turn to young people, some of whom are carrying wallets from childhood, and depend on their courage. There is a thick fog of unforeseeable future and a mist in the eyes as well. Every year there have been soldiers who have been regulars in worship here at the Chapel. Some of you will remember Morgan Jordan from last year. We prayed that day:

All things blessed come from Thee.

In this hour of consecrated commitment, we ask to sense Thy blessing.

Bless our country with a hunger for liberty and justice.

Bless our leaders with courage and patience.

Bless our people with a new rebirth of wonder.

Bless the parents here today with a feeling of your embrace.

Bless those to be commissioned here today with a confidence born of obedience.

Bless, O Lord, these young women and men with the graces of safety and courage.

And bless us who rely on their sacrificial service, with a deeper, truer admiration for them and for that service.

Grant us thy peace.

Another fog still greeted us on Monday.

On Monday, the day after commencement, some of us gathered for a very dignified graduation ceremony to honor the senior class of the BU Academy, our resident Preparatory High School. These students were at least four years younger than the soldiers. They came forward in robes not uniforms. A stately quiet piano rendition of Pomp and Circumstance guided their entry. Their senior orations were in Greek and Latin. The speaker of the day playfully quoted a certain mid-20century English philosopher and sociologist, one ‘J Lennon’ and his colleague, Dr ‘P McCartney’ to the effect that money cannot buy love and love is all you need. The students were admonished, with straightforward frankness, to learn to delay gratification. There were awards. And while the list of schools, fine colleges, to which the graduates have been admitted was printed, it was clear that the future was not clear. One honoree gave thanks for finishing, and remembered studying her Latin vocabulary in the shower. Again, the fog and mist of the unforeseeable future did not escape the prep school ceremony, any more than it had the ROTC commissioning. Young people, young people, such young people.

If we could see everything, we would not need trust. If we knew every little thing ahead of time, we would not need faith. If we were certain, already, about how the future would unfold, we would not need the courage to be or the confidence born of obedience. Faith is fond in the fog. Faith is fond in the London Fog. Whatever version of an English Spring you are living through right now may just the weather system and psychic mist that will evoke your faith. It has happened before.

Nicodemus presents himself to Jesus, appearing out of the misty fog and London like shadows at night, to ask the location of real authority, he who is a figure of much authority, and to seek an authoritative word of faith. Where is faith? Almost any religious text is a neighbor to this question, and here in the fourth Gospel, Nicodemus brings the question home. What is the shape of real faith?

Is it found in law, the ten commandments, the fierce fundamentalism on the rise in our time? Surely these commandments are the basis of good life, but are they the heart of life? Is faith found in order or structure, as in that of a church with laity and deacons and priests and bishops, the depositum fidei? Surely the river of life needs some banks, otherwise all would be flood, but is order at the heart of faith? Are we left, for salvation, to choose between fundamentalism and ecclesiasticism? In this monsoon, this rainy English spring, let us listen again for the Word of God.

The freedom and love in today’s Scripture lesson provide an alternative. Authentic faith, finally, is found in freedom and love.

Speaking of London fog…

We once remembered that. It is the experience of freeing love, that ignited the Methodist church.

Every Sunday has four liturgical dimensions, four calendars. One is the lectionary and liturgy of the church—we use this each week, here, so our lesson and Psalm and musical recognition of Ascension. A second is the cultural calendar, Memorial Day this weekend, the traditional beginning of summer and remembrance of service. A third is the calendar of every local community, like ours here, at BU, in our case feeling the effects of the tide going out, faculty, students and staff on summer break. And a fourth is the variety of denominational dates and events, the birthdays of obscure Scottish saints, the feast days of more venerable holy ones, the needs of the larger church for funding of very sorts, and today, 5/24, Aldersgate Sunday, the 271st anniversary of Mr. Wesley’s own English Spring, his discovery of faith in fog (more on this in a moment).

Winston Churchill knew the fog of an English Spring.

At the right moment, one momentous English Spring of 1940, Winston Churchill faced down the more polished, better heeled, more popular and more experienced old Britons of his newly formed war cabinet, and steadily led his country away from their desire to compromise with Adolf Hitler. With Belgium defeated, Churchill clung to a love of freedom. With France cut in two, Churchill clung to a love of freedom. With 400,000 men stranded at Dunkirk and escape virtually impossible, Churchill clung to a love of freedom. With the whole German airforce poised to incinerate England’s green and pleasant land, Churchill clung to a love of freedom. With Lord Halifax ready to seek terms and Lord Chamberlain ready to let him Churchill clung to a love of freedom. Re-read this summer John Lukacs’ Five Days in London, May 1940. He concludes: “Churchill and Britain could not have won the Second World War. In the end, America and Russian did. But in May 1940 Churchill (alone) was the one who did not lose it.” Faith is about love of freedom.

John Wesley knew something about the fog of an English Spring.

At midlife, one enchanting night in the English Spring of 1738, John Wesley heard something said in church that warmed his heart for good. He had been on Aldersgate street that Sunday evening, going to chapel service more from duty than from passion, when he heard a preacher read Romans 8 and also Martin Luther’s commentary on that passage. There is something so fragrant and so full about damp London in the springtime. As he left church, Wesley felt something new, a freeing love in the heart, which is the creation and work of the Holy Spirit, which blows where it wills and you hear the sound of it. Faith is about freeing love.

The sermon today is an altar call for you. I propose that you come to prayer, ready to accept Jesus in your life. So come, to experience freeing love. So come, to receive a love of freedom. So come, to give thanks for the freedom to love. For the wind blows where it wills and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes. So it is with every one who is born of the spirit.

Last week’s Commencement reminded us of freedom and love. After our main event speaker had filled the imaginations of a very responsive class with a challenge to service of others, I leaned over to Father Paul and said, ‘I am calling an audible’. I put aside the written benediction (I reserve the right to use it next year!), and remembered a New England poet and a New England poem. It seemed to fit the moment, as it does as well today:

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

A Recession Theology

2009-06-07T14:23:00.000-05:00

A Recession Theology
John 16: 4-14
Pentecost Sunday
May 31, 2009
Marsh Chapel
Robert Allan Hill

Preface

With most of our students now away on summer break, we may hazard a reference to Donna Reed as the sermon begins.

The Marsh pulpit, historic and delightful as a setting for preaching, demands weekly illustrations or combinations of illustrations accessible to four generations, 20, 40, 60 and 80 years of age, or thereabouts. This quadrilateral in illustration is true in other, in many other places, but heavily true here, where our youth group mailing list has 25,000 names on it. On a Sunday during the school year, I would think twice about dear Donna, and whether or not 20 year olds would know her, and whether 40 year olds would connect with her.

‘I has been a long time since any of us boys have seen a woman, so we are writing to you in hopes you’ll help us out off our situation…We would appreciate it very much if you would send us a photo of yourself’ (NYT, 5/25/09). So wrote one solder in 1944 from the Aleutian Islands. From New Guinea, a month later: ‘The boys in our outfit think you are a typical American girl, someone who we would like to come home to’. A year earlier my wife’s uncle had died on the next island over, New Britain, a hockey star and recent graduate of Mount Hermon, age 20. In 1943, someone asked her to dance because ‘I really felt like she was a girl from back home. She was from a smaller community, and we were more or less the same age, so I felt she was the kind of person I could talk to’. ‘We think you’re swell’ wrote six marine sergeants.

Other generations will know her, not by photograph, but by cinema and television. They will remember her as the bright light of George’s ‘Wonderful Life’, the woman whose stairway banister can never permanently hold its top. Or they will remember her as the woman ever standing in televised living room or kitchen, always perfectly dressed, from 7am to 7pm.
Donna Reed, it turns out, kept her WWII letters, 341 letters stored up in an old shoebox. Remembered, by so many, it turns out, she remembered many. The letters sat undiscovered for 65 years, kept in a shoebox kept in a garage. Donna Reed’s daughter, Mary Owen, discovered the letters early this recession. They made her feel ‘really proud’. Many of the letters she saved from GI’s overseas came from fellow Iowans, some from friends near her family farm in Denison, Iowa. Her daughter discovered the shoebox and letters earlier this recession. It happens that the Mary Owen was employed, pre-recession, by Bear Stearns, a company, as we know see, neither bearish enough nor stern enough, its name notwithstanding. In 1942, Reed wrote to a friend, ‘my effort to win the war has not amounted to much…I wish I could find more to do’.

In preparing this sermon, I did not fish out this newspaper story from earlier in the week only to continue my ongoing personal support for the beauty and power of the daily newspaper at its finest. Although, now that the subject has come up, the power of the daily paper to open the world, to expand the horizon, to challenge the mind and to warm the heart, it might be noticed, is a great and gracious good. When Karl Barth said, in days of Donna Reed, that the preacher speaks with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, he had little sense that one of his two hands might fall empty, or that the endangered document would be the paper. No, the sermon about the press and freedom is for another day. Nor is the point her to recall the power of a hand written letter to form memory and meaning and to call up the very presence and person of the writer to our minds and hearts. Again, another sermon for another day. I mention the story because Donna Reed’s shoebox opens up today’s gospel, a recession theology well fit for Pentecost, in two ways. The 341 letters, saved by the generous mother, and their discovery, made by the newly unemployed daughter, recall for us a recession theology that honors those in need and out of work, and a recession theology that drives us back to the glory hole of spirit, the shoebox of longing, the recessive, recessive depth of saving faith. A recession theology: we are our brothers’ keeper. A recession theology: return to the forgotten love you had at first.

One: The Spirit Helps Us In Our Weakness

Romans 8, a jewel and a beauty, reminds us on Pentecost that our voice in need is our voice in deed. When we are weak, then we are strong enough to see more clearly. The spirit helps us in our weakness. On my prayer list in these months are nearly two dozen people without work, mostly men. I look forward to their re-employment, and I look forward to a day when as a people we may more effectively mitigate the effects of recession. Then we shall rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. Then we shall see what we avoid, that the person on the corner, wearing the sign, ‘jobless, homeless’, another time may be us, or our relative. Then we shall work for the common good with a shining zeal and ferocity like that you see in the photographs of servicemen in 1942. Then in the common good we shall find the moral equivalent of war.

For Romans 8, as the choice verse on hope reminds us, is yet another point in Paul’s apocalyptic desire for heaven, a heaven of earth and and earth of heaven, that which ‘we wait for with patience’. It is not, this hope, what now we see. We have miles to go before we sleep.

Maybe you do to: I keep a little statistical list in my journal. Here are some of the latest entries. They are only numbers: 47, 58, 50, 87, 10, 266, 28, 40.

40% of babies born in the USA in 2008 were born out of wedlock.

58% of male Harvard graduates who entered the work force in 2007 went into finance.

50% of recent Afghani applicants for police positions tested positive for drug use.

87,000 Iraqis have died violently since 2005.

10,000,000 species live on earth right now.

266 uses of waterboarding, a kind of torture were inflicted on 2, just 2, detainees.

28% of all US adults change their religion.

40% change their denomination.

You see? Every now and then arithmetic can be ever so interesting. Today I mention the number 84. 84% of the jobs lost this recession, thus far, have been lost by men. For all the spirit gusts of Pentecost, or perhaps precisely out of that holy wind, today upon the heart we feel the hurt of the unemployed.

Why Dean Hill do you present us this number, amid these numbers, on Pentecost? Is this not the church’s birthday, Dear Dean. Are we not to adore the birth of the early church, in red cloth and sparkling songs? What has the spirited holy catholic and apostolic church to do with a few redundant men?

Well…

A long time ago, Augustine of Hippo started into Bishop work, in North Africa. He had many troubles. He fought fundamentalism, for instance, as we do in our time, shouting, ‘love understanding wholeheartedly’. He also argued and wrestled with the Donatists, an ancient, spirited and disciplined form of Christianity. One side of the spat was the question of the extent of the church.

How much real estate is church and how much is not? How much humanity is church, or potentially so, and how much is not? Should the church focus on quality or quantity? Are only those baptized by good Bishops baptized well, or at all? What makes the hotentot so hot? What puts the ape in apricot? Is the church, as the Donatists argued, a select remnant, a pure priesthood, a leaven in the lump, a company of resident aliens, a band of holy Methodists fleeing from the wrath to come? If so, then church is always and ever separated from, alienated from the culture in which it exists. Christ against culture.

Or is the church, as Augustine argued, and as I do today, itself a mixture of wheat and tares, saints and sinners, holy and not yet holy, yet all and objectively founded upon and protected within spirit, divine grace, a set of networks and invisible relationships in the world to redeem the whole world, to transform culture, and the society from which culture comes, and the language that is the very root of that society? Christ transforming culture.

Is church us in worship or does it include unemployed men, whether in worship or not? Is the church the circled wagons of resident aliens? Or is the church found in all humanity, ‘nothing human foreign to us’? How you answer, on this Pentecost Sunday, the church’s birthday, will determine whether you think Christ and his church have anything in common with men without work.

Not all of our unemployed are people of faith. But very few are socially located very far from a baptized brow or a consecrated marriage or a social hall covered dish dinner. Not all of our unemployed are of great moral strength. But very few are living in towns and cities without good people doing good things. Not all of our employed are people who give to anything, any cause or institution, on a regular basis. But very few have received no help, support, forgiveness or grace from someone, somewhere, somehow, sometime. The parables of Jesus are almost all about men and work and troubles. I do not find Augustine invariably helpful. Yet his view of the church, in argument against the purists, and his respect for its well nigh universal, invisible expanse—this I preach, this I affirm, this I love. Nothing human is foreign to us. The issue of work, of honorable work, is as shot through with Pentecost spirit and sacramental wine as every curiosity about prayer, parament, liturgy, music or pardon. The word liturgy, in fact, means ‘work’.

I left an exit ramp in New York on Tuesday, and passed that man wearing that sign, ‘jobless, homeless’. For many men, the job is the spiritual home. His job is his home and his home is his castle. So I pull out my statistics list when I read that 84% of the job losses befell men. We can do better by our brothers in Christ, and one day, we shall have built a society that better smoothes the inevitable collisions between growth and value, and better smoothes the inevitable tensions between liberty and justice. The hurt of this recession will prod, goad, teach and inspire us to do so. One of two announcements in recession theology is this, that we are our brothers’ keeper, meant to watch over one another in love. Donna Reed symbolizes this shared effort, this common good, this love of neighbor.

Two: The Spirit of Truth Will Bear Witness to Me

Yet there is a second flame flickering in the fire of Pentecost and its, our, recession theology. For heaven and full employment are not the same thing. Heaven and guaranteed employment are not the same thing. Heaven and employment are not the same thing. Your job may be your home but it is not your soul. A friend, savingly, asked me recently, ‘have you been long enough in your new job to have a sense of humor about it?’

John 16 is striking for how strikingly strange it is. Sin is not what we do. Sin is not believing. Righteousness is not what we do. Righteousness is Jesus’ absence and the longing absence creates. Judgement is not hellfire. Judgement is the victory of things invisible over the god of this visible world. The Counselor, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth—perhaps the least historically understood figure and figure of speech in the New Testament to this day, by the way—guides us, guides us still.

There is more to life than work. Very few people, come dusk, say, ‘I just wish I could have spent another Saturday afternoon in the office’. There is more to work than earning. Very few hearses come equipped with a trailer hitch ball, neither a 2 inch or 1 ¾ inch variety. I know these are trite preacherly truisms. Yet why do we live as if all we needed were work? Yet why do we live as if our hearse will pull a trailer?

A Spanish poet: ‘while others strive vainly for impermanent authority, let me lie down in the shade of a tree, singing’.

Donna Reed’s daughter found meaning, power, memory, love, a depth she did not before know, on an unemployed day, rooting around in the garage. She found glory in the glory hole. She remembered, as she learned about her mother’s own memory lane. Maybe we can remember some things hidden in our spiritual shoeboxes, in our personal garages. Do you remember what you were taught?

See ye first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these will be yours as well.

Store ye not up treasure on earth where moth and rust consume and thieves break in and steal, but store up treasure in heaven where neither moth nor rust consume, nor do thieves break in and steal. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Prize your time, now you have it, for God is a consuming fire.

When she died in 1986 at age 64, Donna Reed wanted to remember that at least 341 servicemen, many from Iowa, had found comfort in her photo, counsel in her response, truth in her letters, spirit in her correspondence. Did we not just read that in John 16? I believe we did.

We treasure what we love, and love what we treasure.

I want to ask you flat out: where is your treasure? What is it that you want to keep dry, preserved for the benefit of another generation, tucked in a shoebox literal or figurative, stored in a garage actual or virtual, kept as a badge of honor in the spirit of truth? What do you hope someone, a daughter, a great--great nephew, might come upon, about your life, which might make them, as Mary Owen said of her mother, ‘feel so proud’?

For a recession theology—I am sure you guessed the turn we would make here—is a recessive one. It seeks out the recesses of mind, heart, and soul. Faith plumbs the deepest recesses of your inner being. In a recession, we have more opportunity, and more need to climb down into the recesses of our lives. In this way, recession is a necessary prelude to salvation. The Spirit is given to us in our weakness, not in our dominance, but in our recession. When we need love, we know love, and know how to love. The second announcement of good news in a recession theology is just this. Grace meets us not just when we succeed, but also and more so when we recede. And in place of prowess, to replace prowess, grace gives love.

Coda

“In thee is the fountain of life and in thy light we shall see light. Give me a man in love: he knows what I mean. Give me one who yearns. Give me one who is hungry. Give me one far away in this desert, who is thirsty and sighs for the spring of the eternal country. Give me that sort of man: he knows what I mean. But if I speak to a cold man, he just does not know what I am talking about” (S Augustine, sermons).

"The Day's Own Trouble" Commencement Address, Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary, 2009

2009-06-07T14:21:00.001-05:00

“The Day’s Own Trouble”
Matthew 6: 25--34
Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill
Dean of Marsh Chapel
Commencement Address
Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary
Northwestern University
May 15, 2009

Preface

My mind settles on a farm that rests on the Canadian border. Now my mind settles on the voice of a woman, the matriarch of that farm, who also taught elementary school. And my mind settles on her diamond brilliant mind, sharp as a tack 28 years ago. A mind tough like that of Susan B. Anthony, keen like that of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. We walk toward the barn, and notice the day’s troubles: veterinarian coming, tractor broken, hired help AWOL, and other derisive difficulties not yet visible, far more difficult to mend. She hands me a cool drink, an ice tea. She has listed the day’s hurts. She brightens and recites: ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof’. Let the day’s own trouble, derision, evil, be sufficient for the day. Mazzie Hesseltine, as smart a person as I can recall having known, and as strong a woman, will forever wear that verse as her clothing in memory, not just because she knew it, or could recite it, but because she lived it. She faced the world, free from the world. You can too. Your lay people will teach you how.

1. The Day’s Own Trouble: The Verse

Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day….

How do you face the day’s own trouble, and keep it tied to the day, rather than letting it spill out and over into every day? Especially for those in the ministry, this is a crucial issue. A friend once told me (his initials are Phil Amerson) that in ministry it is not enough to generalize, nor even enough to specialize. Ministry requires you to improvise. True enough.

With regard to trouble, this verse says: expect it, accept it, address it, and forget it. At the end of the day, put out the mental trash on an imaginary front curb, wrapped in a bundle with the careful marking, ‘the day’s own trouble’.

The main trouble a preacher faces, with regularity, is how to understand, and so interpret, a passage from 2,000 years ago. This will be your daily trouble in a life where every day is Saturday night. It is always Saturday night in the ministry. Every passage like this one is like a hymn, or an anthem. There is soprano line (the lead, the voice of Jesus of Nazareth). There is an alto line (the most important voice, that just below the surface of the text, the voice of the early church, in its preaching of the gospel, its remembering, hearing and speaking. For the early church Jesus meant freedom, and his cross and resurrection meant one thing—the preaching of good news, that we may face the world free from the world). There is the tenor line (what we read from the lectern, the gospel writer, in this case Matthew). And there is the baritone, basso profundo (the way the line reverberates throughout the rest of scripture, and down through nineteen hundred years of experience to us today).

Preparing for you, I had hoped this was pure soprano, but it probably is not. ‘Mt 6:34 adds a bit of worldly wisdom which in itself does not seem to be typical of Jesus’ (TDNT 4, 593—R Bultmann!).

I had hoped this was the gospel preached by the primitive church, but, other than the thoughts about anxiety, it probably is not. Merimna (gk: anxiety) is a word that makes significant appearances at some of the very highest points in the New Testament. Have no anxiety about anything, says Paul in Phil. 4:6. Be anxious about nothing. In fact, we are often anxious about nothing. Does your spouse every say: ‘What’s wrong’. And you say, ‘Nothing’. Exactly. Care, fret, anxious expectation: Matthew addresses this in the Sermon on the Mount, Paul in 1 Cor. 7: 32, the second century author of 1 Peter in 1 Pet. 5:7, and again Paul in 2 Cor. 11:28. We associate these passages with climactic sayings. And so they are. Consider the lilies of the field… Let those who have wives live as if they had none, for the form of this world is passing away…. Be sober, be watchful, your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour… Five times I have received from the Jews forty lashes less one…And above all these my anxiety for the churches…

So Paul both admonishes all to have no anxiety and readily admits his anxiety (merimna, the same word in all cases) for the churches. I think Ernest Tittle, my pulpit hero, the great presence of this very room understood this best in his generation. Face the world, free from the world. Have no anxiety. But work out your salvation in fear and trembling. To channel my own inner Tittle for a moment, I believe he would want to remind us of the old Kingswood Wesley hymn, ‘to unite the two so long disjoined, learning and vital piety’. To preach aware that the Bible is errant, that the tradition moves toward equality, that the truth of science in evolution is true for us too, and that the truth of faith of is existential (‘all of us are better when we are loved’). So celebrate Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience, as long as you meant by that error, equality, evolution and existence. Said Tittle!

Matthew 6:34 is Matthew’s gift to us.

I should have expected the tenor tone. Remember Mazzie? A teacher. Remember Matthew? A teacher. A teacher likes a summary at the end of a long chapter. To reiterate: ‘Mt 6:34 adds a bit of worldly wisdom which in itself does not seem to be typical of Jesus’ (TDNT 4, 593).

So teach us to, Holy Scripture, so teach us Gospel Writer, so teach us Tenor Voice, to get a heart of wisdom. So sing to us that our own basso profundo will respond in grace!

2. The Day’s Own Trouble: The Ministry

How do we deal with the anxiety, ‘fear in search of a cause’, that colors every day and mediates our every experience, our trouble, our derision, our evil?

How do we handle trouble?

The Day’s own trouble….

Not the major traumas of life, not the major crises, but the stubborn fact that EVERY DAY IN MINISTRY YOU WILL ENCOUNTER ONE TROUBLE, ONE UNEXPECTED AND UNPLEASANT ISSUE.

With every, this worn verse suggests, there comes the strong possibility of trouble, a trouble congruent with that day, a trouble fluent with the language of a single day, a trouble rightly embedded in that very day.

When the day greets you with derision, how do you respond?

Here are four suggestions: expect it, accept it, address it, forget it.
Deal.

Deal with it.

Expect it. Be ready for it. Do not take it personally. Accept it. Be prepared. Address it. Work it through. Do what you can—that day, TODAY. Recall Ephesians: “Be angry. But let not the sun go down on your anger”. Then let it go. Forget it. Do not let it sit on your desk, or on your mind. Say: shoo! Respond, don’t react. But respond soon. Otherwise you will have collisions and calamities. Put it out with the trash, on the curb, under the street lamp, in a bundle. Expect it. Accept it. Address it. Forget it.

I emphasize the last. Forget it. One morning the green line (the local subway that passes by the porch of Marsh Chapel in Boston) was backed up, packed up, jacked up, because of a stuck, down train in the tunnel. The day’s own trouble will become tomorrow’s backed up, packed up, jacked up mayhem if you do not clear the tracks. Other days are coming and they each have their own troubles. Suffice it to deal with this one today.

Every day carries such portent. Every day in ministry carries its own earmarked trouble. Isn’t that a remarkable insight? There is an organic, natural, historic, existential difficulty owned in every day. The day’s OWN…And when life speaks, from the wilderness, in derision, you will say: ‘Well, it’s about high time. Here you are. At last. What took you? I have been expecting your arrival.’

For example…

Phil could have brought you a young Turk. Instead he brought me. It doesn’t take long to go from being a young Turk to becoming an old turkey. But with the change does come some experience…

As I was saying, for example…

One day in the ministry you are misquoted in the paper. (Any more, to be quoted is to be misquoted). Stew for a while. Compose yourself. Compose your response. Respond, in person, on the phone, with civility. Or, decide it does not merit response, offer a prayer, and move on.org. As Basil of Caesarea once said, “You cannot bring a refutation to bear upon a palpable absurdity.”

One day you yourself (most uncharacteristically) fly off the handle, justly but gracelessly criticizing a colleague. Moan for a while. Flog yourself. Then straighten up. Go to your colleague and apologize.

One day you take the wrong way on a one way street. Those riding with you are terrified. Turn around. Get settled back into traffic. Adjust your seatbelt and rear view mirror. Say a prayer of thanks. Then, turn to your terrified riders and say—‘wasn’t that great!’ Wow! Remind them of the story of the old women pulled over for speeding on route 96. The officer berated them and then asked why they were speeding. They replied that the speed limit said 96. No, he said, that was the route number not the speed limit. ‘Are you frightened?’ Oh no, they said. This road was fine. It was route 222 that was really scary.

One day you get up in your daughter’s business. You didn’t mean to, but you did. You just couldn’t bite your tongue or bide your time. OK. Call her back. Say: ‘forgive me. I was out of line.’ Then stuff it in the paper bag that has this marking: let the day’s own troubles be sufficient for the day. Move on.org. There are other subway trains coming down the track, tomorrow.

One day a colleague wrongly criticizes you. Steam about it. Go for a jog. Then write out a full, fair and frisky response. Carefully put the letter in an envelope. Open your desk drawer and put the envelope in the desk drawer. Simmer for three days, seasoning with bile. Take it out and read it, on a trouble-lite day. Carefully the letter back in the envelope. Repeat procedure every 72 hours…until the urge to mail it abates.

One day you leave a meeting fit to be tied. Pause. Stop. Take ten deep breaths. Then think. Yes, think. What one irenic word can I speak today, before I go home from work, which will somehow slightly improve the situation? What one thoughtful gesture can I make, before I go home from work, which might somehow slightly improve the situation? Do so. Say so. Then move on.org.

One day somebody else lets their fear get the better of them. They lambaste you. Respond, in the moment, with honesty. Then shake the dust from your feet. Brush the lint from your shoulder. Peel the nametag off your lapel. Move on. There are other lambastations coming, tomorrow.

Not every fight is your fight. Not every issue needs to be addressed, at least not by you, at least not right now. Not every troublesome moment is fixable, curable, healable.

One day you encounter e-trouble. My son knows I think the world gets better one conversation at a time, and worse one email at a time. He clerks for a federal judge. One morning my son called me with this story. “I knew you would enjoy it Dad”, he said. “It involves trouble and email”. Well, apparently in the judicial employment system, when one falls ill and runs out of sick days, others can take from their account and give to the need. A worker received days from about twenty others, healed, and went back to work. The colleague who organized the sick day bank support assayed to write a thank you note, which she did. It was a very simple note, graciously thanking the donors, reporting on the healing, and wishing all well. This would have been no problem. Except that in mailing the thank you note, she hit the wrong key, and sent to the wrong list, not a list of twenty donors, but a general list of 200,000 judicial employees. Here is a trouble, a day’s own trouble, organically designed for the tweeter, list serve, email, website 21st century. Oops. Yet even this would also have been no problem. Except that a lawyer in Arizona took umbrage at the e-incursion, and said so in a curtly written note: ‘not my issue, not my problem, you invaded my space, thanks but no thanks, plus I really do not agree with this whole socialist sick day swapping anyway.’ Which would have been alright, too. Except that she hit ‘reply all’, and, in the next hour, said my son, he had 100 emails in his box. Yes, Sick Day Bank! No Arizona! Yes Thank You Note! No To Rude Response! Yes to Liberty, No to Obama (I have no idea how he got in there)…Until one kindly attorney from the St Lawrence River area shouted out: “STOP. This is what makes people suspicious of lawyers in general and federal workers in particular. We have better things to do with our time.” This also would have been no problem. Except. Except that before he signed off he wrote: “PS, while I have your attention, I want you to know that I am an amateur chef, and I would like to take this opportunity to share with you all MY FAVORITE RECIPE FOR COOKING SALMON”. Yes, he hit reply all. And on the day went: Salmon Yes! Salmon No! Amateur Chef Yes! Email recipe, NO!…

How will you face the Day’s Own Trouble…

Here is some good news.

You may face the world, free from the world. This is faith. Faith is a gift, not something you build in your own garage on weekends. It is a gift, like all the great things of being. Life is a gift. Forgiveness is a gift. Friendship is a gift. Love is a gift. Eternal life is a gift. And so is faith. All the miracles, teachings, parables, healings, controversies, passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ mean just one thing for the New Testament writers, like Matthew, and a for communities of faith, like you (pl.): Hear the gospel: You may face the world, free from the world.

3. The Day’s Own Trouble: Yesterday Helps Today

We have our troubles. To face them we shall need the courageous honesty of faith. To struggle on for the full humanity of gay people is our day’s trouble. To resist the blandishments of preventive war (warfare that is preemptive, unilateral, imperial, unforeseeable, immoral, post-Judeo Christian—wrong) is our day’s trouble. To meet violent terror with patient justice is our day’s trouble. To face, truly face, the actual historical condition of the church, our church, in ruins, in ruins, is our day’s trouble. For these troubles we shall need to find access to our own best past. We in the bass section can learn from our Tenor teacher.

We can learn to remember our own best past. Real
tragedy is lacking access to your own best past. Your ministry brings healing by bringing people access to their own best past.

Remember…

These verses have resounded through history. Remember Shakespeare? Remember Kierkegaard? Remember Bonhoeffer?

Pasternak loved Shakespeare’s Sonnett 66. It is said that whenever he read aloud the crowd would not let him leave until he had rehearsed it for them. “Give us the 66th…” Its evocation of daily anxiety bears remembering. The poem is unequaled in its announcement of trouble. When life gives you the 66th remember Shakespeare, but especially his last couplet.

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,And purest faith unhappily forsworn,And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd,And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,And strength by limping sway disabledAnd art made tongue-tied by authority,And folly--doctor-like--controlling skill,And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,And captive good attending captain ill:Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone,Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

‘Captive good attending captain ill…’ Can you hear that? It begs to be heard. Stand with your people in tragedy, honest and kind in word and deed.

Kierkegaard knew trouble. He called it anxiety. He called anxiety the ‘dizziness of freedom’. Anxiety reveals us to ourselves as incomplete beings. “Anxiety is fear in search of a cause” (P Pearson). Anxiety is not sinfulness, but is the state out of which sinfulness arises. The human being is the place where being is. Is anxiety a longing for one’s own most self, own most possibility? Kierkegaard’s successor Heidegger thought superficial social living helps us avoid an uncomfortable encounter with the nothing. “The original anxiety in existence is usually repressed. Anxiety is there. It is only sleeping. Its breath quivers perpetually through Dasein, only slightly in those who are jittery, imperceptibly in the ‘oh, yes’ and the ‘oh, no’ of men of affairs; but most readily in the reserved, and most assuredly in those who are basically daring” (Heidegger, par. 41).

Stand with your people in anxiety, honest and kind in word and deed.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer certainly faced trouble, derision, evil. In some ways his is the iconic response to evil in our time. Bonhoeffer lived and taught a non-religious Christian worldliness. Here is good news. We face the world free from the world. He knew that fundamentalism feeds on deep anxiety. To face the world in a free way, we need to face down our anxieties and face up to our challenges. Hence, Bonhoeffer faced trouble, derision, evil by facing the world freely, facing down anxieties, and facing up to responsibilities. “Only those who are obedient believe, and only those who believe are obedient” (Discipleship, 63). We recognize Christian truth “solely through the free experiment in living” (DBW 11, 415). He taught that there is no reality that is not Christ. “Christ is the center and power of the Bible, of the church, of theology, but also of humanity, reason, justice, and culture” (Ethics, 341). Luther began with Romans, but Bonhoeffer began with Matthew. Luther began with Paul, but Bonhoeffer began with Jesus. While Luther began with the obedience of faith, Bonhoeffer began with the faith of obedience. While Luther began with the faith of Abraham, Bonhoeffer began with the lilies of the field: ‘do not be anxious about tomorrow, tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.’

Have you read Bonhoeffer recently? My seminary roommate and I discovered midway through our first year that we were living in the room Bonhoeffer inhabited at Union Theological Seminary in 1931. If you travel light, you can meet life, and meet it square. You can face the world, free from the world. Months before the hanging, he was able to write (found in your hymnal, 517):

By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered
And confidently waiting come what may
We know that God is with us night and morning
And never fails to greet us each new day

He is not Shakespeare, and I am not Kierkegaard and you are not Bonhoeffer, but we are alive today, to meet the day’s own trouble.

Stand with your people in defeat, honest and kind in word and deed.

Remind them of their own best past.

I hear Howard Thurman!
“The ocean and the night together surrounded my little life with a reassurance that could not be affronted by the behavior of human beings,” wrote Thurman. “The ocean at night gave me a sense of timelessness, of existing beyond the reach of the ebb and flow of circumstances. Death would be a minor thing, I felt, in the sweep of that natural embrace.”
Sursum Corda! Face the world. Free from the world.

And brush away the day’s own trouble…

Coda

Our new president seems to take life as it comes. He travels light. Do not be anxious about tomorrow. Tomorrow will be anxious for itself.

Last fall, there was some trouble, a day’s trouble. He was roundly criticized. Most criticism, by the way, has some truth in it. I think it was around the time of the great ‘lipstick on a pig’ incident, but my memory fades and fails.

The next day he stood before the cameras. He spoke and smiled. Sometimes a smile is better than a word. Then he took his right hand, as I am doing now, and he brushed it, knuckles down, across his left shoulder. Try it…when you get home. I mean, we aren’t going to get all slobbery with you, we wouldn’t presume to enter your personal space and suggest you try it right here (though you can if you want). Brush it away, the day’s own trouble. Sweep it away, the day’s own trouble. Flick it away, the day’s own trouble.

Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof…

A Common Prayer

2009-06-07T14:17:00.000-05:00

A Common Prayer
Trinity Sunday
Psalm 29, Isaiah 6, Luke 15
June 7, 2009
Marsh Chapel
The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean

Preface

The ministry of Marsh Chapel, in this decade, quickens in connection with voice, vocation and volume. The voice of this pulpit, around the globe, is lifted and shared, in the liberality of the gospel, as it has been from the time of our first Dean, Dr. Franklin H. Littell. Our Psalm today celebrates voice. The vocation to service, in ministry and culture, to which we invite young people every day, is our joy and hope, this day, as it was in exuberance over lunch last Sunday. Our lesson today celebrates vocation. The volume, simply put, the increasing worshipping presence of the people of God, grows in ordered worship, as we lift hymns in four part harmony, enjoy choral music both historic and contemporary, and ponder the word, with head and heart, to ‘unite the two so long disjoined, learning and vital piety’, as the lost are found. The gospel today speaks of the lost and the found. We invite you to step alongside the ministry of Marsh Chapel, our shared common prayer, in voice, vocation and volume.

1. Voice

First, voice.

The hallowed predecessors who occupied this pulpit in the cradle of liberty and the cradle of Methodist theology are names, and voices, you mostly know. Robert Cummings Neville. Robert Watts Thornburg. Richard Nesmith. Robert Hammil. Howard Thurman. And Franklin Littell.

Dr. Franklin Littell was the first Dean to occupy this pulpit. President Daniel Marsh brought him here in the early 1950’s. As recently as May of 2006, Littell was able at age 88 to preach here, as he did that spring at commencement (for the School of Theology). A friend, colleague, contemporary and fly fishing partner of our dear friend Dr. Ray Hart, Littell brought a stirring sermon to that moment just three years ago. You may know that Littell died just recently, in late May.

Or maybe both his life and death are unfamiliar territory for you. In fact, I guess that such is the case for many, and so, come October, I am planning to preach a full sermon titled ‘Remembering Littell’ for Alumni Weekend.

We at Marsh Chapel, and we at Boston University may not yet have the largest financial endowment in the country, or along the Charles River. One day, that may change. If you would like to help us to help that to change, please let me know. Be assured that we will do whatever we can for your personal and spiritual welfare, in gratitude. But there is another way in which Marsh Chapel, and Boston University may already have the largest endowment in the country, or along the Charles River. Our riches are vocal. Our largest endowment is not financial but audible, not monetary but epistolary, not in the coin of the realm but in the language of the heart. Boston University, and centrally within the University, Marsh Chapel, is a treasure store of voice. You notice that, probably, every Sunday when you come across the plaza, and pass the sculpture and monument to Martin Luther King, birds in flight. Said Karl Barth, ‘The gospel is the freedom of a bird in flight’. But King’s voice was not only or mainly a solo voice. He sang in a choir, in choro novo. He sang as one bird in the flock. Howard Thurman sang with him, for example. So did Allan Knight Chalmers. Robert Hamill’s voice was known in his regular column in motive magazine. Littell lead the way. Remember today three features of Littell’s voice.

He was the father of holocaust studies. Littell was the first to offer courses, formal study, in the area of the holocaust. Throughout his life, with passion, and as a Methodist preacher, he continuously challenged the Christian community to take emotional responsibility for the horrors of the holocaust. Yesterday, rightly, we honored those who physically, and in some cases ultimately, took responsibility for stopping the Third Reich. Littell, in his time here and later in his long career, never stopped pushing, preaching, even attacking his own Christian church to look hard, deep, and long at Auschwitz. He did so from this pulpit. He did so later as a college President, and he did so in scores of classrooms from Temple, to Emory, to Chicago. Remember his words: “Most gentiles, even church leaders, have not confronted the Holocaust and its lessons for the present day... It is important, especially for Jewish children, to know that in those terrible years not all the gentiles in Christendom were either perpetrators or passive spectators," (NYT obit)
Likewise, Littell gracefully and steadily combined learning and piety. His ministry embraced both head and heart, and actually could not have been conceived or developed without such a real, even radical integration of the mind and the spirit. His passion about the holocaust, for instance, began out of a revulsion he felt as a student in Germany in 1939, attending a Hitler rally. He never forget the feeling of that early experience, and that feeling fueled his work through the years. Feelings are more than emotions, more than sentiment. They are the great steed, the great horse on which we ride. The mind is the bit and bridle, as Wesley somewhere wrote. He pressed the church, our church, to remember the great Kingswood hymn of Charles Wesley: ‘to unite the two so long disjoined, learning and vital piety’. So he was a preacher who also was President of Iowa Wesleyan. He was a pastor, who also taught and wrote. He was a person of faith, who saw the need to combine mind and heart.

In addition, and to my great benefit, Littell was an early supporter and even translator and commentator on the work of Rudolph Bultmann, still an important voice in the study of the New Testament.

Holocaust, head and heart united, the critical study of the New Testament—these are three gifts of Littell to our time. His voice continues to bless us. Voice, the liberality of the gospel, is our central mission.

2. Vocation

Second, vocation.

Our time needs a cultural revolution as much or more than a theological reformation. The peace of God will come to earth as much at the urging and prompting of those committed to cultural transformation as through those engaged in the work of religious or even theological reconstruction. It is striking just how much religious expression is shaped, even determined, by the surrounding culture. Hence, while we hunt every work day for women and men who are called to preach—is that you?—we also here at Marsh Chapel are vigorous in our celebration of those called to service of other saving, healthy forms.

To that end, something powerful happened here last Sunday. And I am not referring to worship, prayer, sermon, or collection, our Sunday service at 11am, though I hope and trust that we in our way offered our best selves to God in that hour of prayer. No, the wind of grace blew through here last Sunday at lunch as well.

Carefully and covertly, our lay leaders hatched a plan for a surprise lunch, to honor three young women of our congregation. One is a becoming a teacher, one a lawyer, and one is working on the hospitality of the church. Our lay leaders emailed and called and cooked up a smorgasbord for lunch. I doubt that any church luncheon was offered that was more savory and more calorific than that provided last Sunday. I think we lived on its effect for two days. Of course a beautiful cake concluded the repast. Our women and men decorated the room with balloons and crepe paper. They set out the table. The arranged for gifts. These gifts were delicately and carefully wrapped. I emphasize the detail of these gifts because the commitment to excellence in the manner of giving was so pronounced. People notice when things are done well. Excellence, enjoyment of people, and entrepreneurial spirit are three things that grow churches. I mean excellence at anything, from mowing the lawn to preaching to wrapping gifts with style.

After the meal, formal speeches and prayers were made. There was much humor. We sang also some happy birthday greetings. Then a charismatic transfer occurred. I am going to use the term ‘ordination’, only because you get the sense from it of what ‘went down’ last Sunday after lunch. The three women, none preachers, but all heading into ministry, were summoned forward. They were given gifts, practical and beautiful, helpful and playful. Then the community listened as they told the truth about their lives, and their vocations. One is going to work as urban teacher in Missouri. One is going to practice law for the greater good in Boston. One is going to continue to fan the flames of life and hospitable growth in a church not far from here, actually, Marsh Chapel itself. In the speaking, and listening, a transfer of charisma, of gifts, accompanied the transfer of physical gifts. No kneeling occurred, no hands were laid upon heads, no stoles or robes were put on. Yet an ordination of a truly profound sort occurred. Three young women named their callings, and the community cheered.

This is how the world gets better, when young people and once young people connect their deepest passions with the world’s greatest needs. It was a moment that preached out the following question: ‘and how about you?’ Lunch became a charismatic moment last week, a moment of transfer of charismata. Vocation, the liberality of the gospel set to work, is our central calling.

3. Volume

Third, volume.

In a moment we shall celebrate together Holy Communion. If you are listening from afar and would like to have someone bring communion to your home, call the chapel, and we will endeavor to do so. One by one, heart by heart, the good news of love divine changes people for the better. The lost are found. It is a moment of true joy, as our gospel today told us.

Many years ago, Jan and I were serving a little church in Ithaca, New York. We had two little children, and one beagle puppy. The salary was $8,000 a year, the home modest, the work challenging, the learning curve steep. It seemed like it was always Saturday night, and the sermon awaiting its writing.

One Saturday Jan came home in the morning from the grocery store in tears. Somehow she had lost her engagement ring. The ring itself was modest enough, a family heirloom, but nonetheless, a symbol at the heart of things. After a little breakfast, she had been shopping while the children were sleeping, and I was trying to figure out what to say the next day. We spent the later morning and all afternoon hunting for the ring. We went back to the grocery. We walked every aisle. We searched behind cereal boxes, and looked under grapefruit. We enlisted the help of kindly overworked store attendants. Dusk came, no ring. What a sad Saturday night! No ring, no sermon, no joy in Ithaca that night. Finally, the kids went down and Jan went off to bed. Sunday morning loomed, and the wind was just not in the sails.

About ten o’clock I went down into the kitchen. As every writer knows, the only cure for writer’s block is…eating. Even when there is no cure, the eating itself is, like virtue, its own reward. So I poured some juice. Then I waffled between cookies and toast, and settled on a piece of toast, comfort food. There was only one piece of bread left in the loaf, and I struggled to pull it out of the bag. As I did, I felt something. That is something that happens with bread and grape juice, sometimes. You feel something. I felt around in the bottom of that forlorn bread bag. Something small and hard, something round, something smooth, something good—I felt it. And there it was. A simple little ring, with a small diamond, the lost, now found. Is there a more joyful moment than this? Truly I tell you, there is joy in heaven, when the lost are found.

We are coming to the table in a moment. When you eat this bread and drink this cup, there is remembrance, there is presence, and there is thanksgiving, all in one. In feasting on the love of God, you are meant to turn up the volume, here at Marsh Chapel, for that love of God. Heart warmed, you are meant to warm other hearts. You are found, and you have found something, now go and find others for whom such divine discovery has yet to happen. Volume, the liberality of the gospel shared with others, is our central calling.

Coda

Our common prayer: voice, vocation, volume.

Voice like that of Franklin Littell, father of holocaust studies, combiner of head and heart, student of the Bible.

Vocation like that of three young women, a teacher, a lawyer, a minister.

Volume like that of bread and cup, word and table, in remembrance, real presence, and thanksgiving.

A New Birth of Freedom

2009-05-11T15:20:00.001-05:00

A New Birth of Freedom
John 1: 51
January 18, 2008
Marsh Chapel
Robert Allan Hill

Our gospel today can best be heard from the last sentence, wherein the clearly clairvoyant Johannine Jesus belittles Nathaniel’s marvel at him by acclaiming divine freedom, historic change, and a horizon of hope. Divine freedom: you will see the heavens opened. Change in history: you will see the angels of God ascending and descending. A horizon of hope: you will see the Son of Man.

Freedom

First, freedom.

God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom.

The nature and dimensions of freedom are very much on our minds this week. Others from other spaces will want to continue to explore more fully the political, social, and economic features of this freedom. We have though, first, another job to do. It is the job of preaching. It is our task to name freedom. In that sense it is a theological job, though preaching is more than theological reflection. It is our confession that Jesus means freedom.

The other morning I took my daughter and grandchildren to the Aquarium. With you I celebrate this cultural gift, and make common cause with their fine work in opening the world to wonder. Surely there are many fine places to spend an hour or two in our fair city. Is there a single one, though, that will pierce your soul and spirit with a sense of the creative power, natural wonder, and physical freedom of the world in which we live? I challenge to stand in front of the Pacific Rim tank, with fish of a hundred colors and shapes, and not be overtaken, in wonder, by the power of freedom set loose in the universe.

It is our conviction that the God who makes allowance for being, who calls us and all into being, is the God of freedom. Freedom on Sinai. Freedom on the Mount of Olives. Freedom on the way to Emmaus. Freedom itself set free. Freedom evolves.

Does your God, your apperception of God, make space for evolution?

Your patent or latent view of God makes every sort of difference.

If as the Scripture says, “God is love”, then human freedom is real...Freedom is the absolutely necessary precondition of love. (W S Coffin, Credo, 27).

Our incoming President made a fine speech last year about race. He did so to clarify his own thinking, and our thinking about his thinking, with regard race. This was widely known and acclaimed. But to do so he had to clarify his own thinking and our thinking about thinking, with regard to a form of religious thinking. To date, to my knowledge, no one has fully appreciated the theological depths and dimensions of his March 18, 2008 address. As we come to the inaugural, perhaps we could pause to appreciate his theological insight, all the more choice since it is offered by a lay person.

Obama that day said ‘No’ to Jeremiah Wright, in terms like these: unlike others, unlike another generation, we do not believe that our fate and our future are irrevocable chained to our tragic past. He offered his view, that change can happen, real change, which is real hard, over time, in real time, can really happen. He explicitly rejected a harsh, providential, divine determinism or damnation for a country that certainly has known its share of sin. He stepped aside from the litany of sin and atonement, and stepped toward the liturgy of confession and pardon. That is a layman’s theological statement about divine and human freedom. Life is not purpose driven, for ill or good. Life is not divinely ordered and directed, in the small or in the large. Life is not found in the rigid orthodoxies neither of fundamentalism nor of radicalism, neither in the Biblicist fundamentalism of a Rick Warren nor in the Liberationist radicalism of a Jeremiah Wright (produced by his teacher and mine, James Cone.)

I have yet to see a single serious writer, preacher or journalist identify the ironic similarity, the congruent similarity, the family resemblance of Warren and Wright. One is from the far right and one is from the far left. Nonetheless, they offer the same religious perspective. (In what I say I do not criticize them. They are good people. They do good work. Though I profoundly disagree with them and adamantly oppose them, I acknowledge their desire to know and do the right and the true and the good. I too fell in love early on with Karl Barth, so I know from inside the powerful pull of their perspective). Yet here is the irony. While they differ completely in politics, Warren and Wright offer the same religious perspective: The Bible is the sole Word of God, either in personal purpose (Warren) or in cultural judgment (Wright); God is known in providence, whether from the Law (Warren) or from the Prophets (Wright); it is God, not we ourselves, who makes all change, whether from the right (Warren) or from the left (Wright); the human being is left to submit (Warren) or rebel (Wright), finally doubly predestined as Augustine finally had to admit before Pelagius; history is tragedy, fore (Warren) and aft (Wright); freedom is an illusion (Warren) or a presumption (Wright). (You will note that this is not a very cheery world view J).

Both Wright and Warren are indebted, theologically, to Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr and the Neo-Orthodoxy against which Howard Thurman and others have unsuccessfully, but rightly, preached for fifty years. Thurman was 100 years ahead of his time 50 years ago. Warren is Barth from the front, and Wright is Barth from the back. But from front or back, it is still Barth. They both have taken seriously the first of Niebuhr’s grave points, about the tragic sense of life, and they both have neglected utterly Niebuhr’s second, his concluding sermon, that there is in the human being a divine freedom, a capacity for a spiritual discipline against resentment, and so an open future, a divine\human heteronomy. Both radically and fundamentally minimize the capacity of the human being to change, and the potential for human society to improve. They both radically and fundamentally mute freedom, whether for a new post-Biblical freedom for gays to find their place in society or for a new post-radical shared leadership of many hues in the cause of racial justice. They both (and quite successfully to this date) define American Christianity over against the liberal tradition. And, so far, they have won the day.

What astounds me, still, is that the theological insight of Obama’s race speech has had no attention. Against a purposey providentialism (Warren), against a denunciatory determinism (Wright), Obama affirmed freedom on March 18, 2008:
But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.
Embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation.
The problem with radicalism and the problem with fundamentalism is the same problem: they see the future only from the past. “The sun also rises and the sun also sets. What has been is what will be. What has been done is what will be done. There is nothing new under the sun.” They see what they expect to see. And so they chain us, with all due sense of purpose, from right or left, to what has been. And so they chain us, with all due citation, from right or left, of the Bible, to what has been. Here is the key line: The profound mistake is that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.
In thrilling mystery this morning the Gospel denies that we are irrevocably bound to a tragic past! In the same way, this week’s inaugural denies that we are irrevocably bound to a tragic past!

Change

Second, change.

John’s gospel exudes freedom. For John Jesus means freedom. With freedom, scary thought, things can change, either for the better, or for the worse.

At a wedding this weekend, guests from New York chose to spend Saturday at the Kennedy museum. I said a silent thanks that they had chosen that spot this weekend. It is a place that says, ‘I believe America should set sail, and not lie still in the harbor’ (JFK).

You remember, I expect, a time when the utter misery of others at last permeated your spirit, and you seethed with an angry hunger for change. You drove by the South Bronx, safe on the highway, riding in a new car, and looked down on the city and saw PS 131, with 6 year olds coming out, and you thought, “How do we do this? How do we let this happen?” Or you had to stop at the emergency room in a small town hospital—a toothache, a broken limb—and you looked around and for the first time the hidden poor of the land were real. You served in the dining center or suited in the storehouse or read books in the daycare. You heard Marion Wright Edelman, really heard her, when she said that 20% of our American children are raised in poverty. You saw something, of all places, on television, and it made you weep. You read an article about children hurt, wounded, killed, in the fog of war, as they took shelter in a school house. You crossed the border into Tijuana and all those brown little faces and browner little hands reaching for coins sent a chill through you on a sunny, hot day. Your club offered a day of service and you ended up, not on the sunny side, but on the slummy side of the street.

God loves: especially those left out. With the divine gift of freedom there comes the chance for change.

In two fine novels, Gilead and Home, over the past several years, Marilynn Robinson has given you a sympathetic reading of determinism (fundamental or radical), which, ultimately, though cautiously, she rejects. Here is the climax of Home:

Her second book places the apparently damned Jack in earshot of a young woman who has married an old preacher:

“Just stay for a minute”, she said, and Jack sat back in his chair and watched her, as they all did, because she seemed to be mustering herself. Then she looked up at him and said, ‘A person can change. Everything can change’…Jack said, very gently, ‘Why thank you, Mrs. Ames. That’s all I wanted to know’. (p 228)

Hope

Third, hope.

Given the darkness, confusion and corruption of our time, it is more than tempting to turn a cynical eye and ear upon the earth.

The thrilling mystery of our gospel today, though, argues otherwise. The community that composed the Gospel of John knew a rare kind of freedom. Theirs was not only a freedom of religion, but also a freedom from religion. So, in this mysterious verse, the writer acclaims openness, even to the heavens; he pronounces motion, even among and between angels and men; he pulls forth what strangely for him is the highest title of Jesus, the Son of Man. An open heaven is a symbol of divine freedom given as human freedom. The Jacob’s ladder of ascent and descent is a symbol of power to move, to change. The heightened title, Jesus a divine figure, is a symbol of hope that will not let go.

On Christmas Day we stood outside Trinity church after a fine morning service. Hope was in the air. What the Aquarium is to freedom, what the Kennedy museum is to change, the churches of our community are to hope. They are living, speaking symbols of hope.

When you are tempted to lose hope that their might be liberty and justice for all, I hope you will think of the family just now about to set up housekeeping at the White House.

When you are tempted to lose hope that our education or medical provisions can be fair or just, I hope you will remember that one teacher who touched you, that one doctor who helped you.

When you are tempted to lose hope that peace might ever come between Arab and Israeli, Muslim and Jew, I hope you will remember that other peace, hard wrought, has come, in other places. I give you Ireland. I give you South Africa.

When you are tempted to lose hope that a durable economy might evolve wherein those who have much do not have too much and those who have little do not have too little, I hope you will remember the Hudson River voice of a crippled President, ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’.

When you are tempted to lose hope that the voice and place of women, world-wide, might ever be sustained, I hope you will remember Susan B Anthony, ‘failure is impossible’.

When you are tempted to lose hope that the world can work, I hope you will remember Jesus’ thrilling mystery, ‘Truly, truly, I tell you, you will see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’ For just as freedom leads to change and change leads to hope, so also hope brings change and change brings freedom.

Coda

We enter a time in which there is the possibility of a new birth of freedom.

It was not a pretty June morning on which Abraham Lincoln spoke the words of this morning’s sermon title. It was not on a beach, in Hawaii or Florida that he spoke. It was not in the peaceful backwaters of a decade of progress and plenty. It was not after a long and easy life. It was not out of quiet reflection is a monk’s peaceful cell.

Lincoln spoke over the graves of thousands. He spoke in the roaring November wind. He spoke on the corn stubble of a Pennsylvania field. He spoke as a leader who might be losing a war. He spoke as a man more acquainted with sorrow and defeat than perhaps any other person of his time, or any time. He was our greatest leader, and a pretty fair lay theologian himself. In a couple of years he would himself be dead.

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . . and that government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . . shall not perish from the earth.

Robert Allan Hill 2009 Spring and Summer Guest Speaking Schedule

2009-05-11T15:14:00.000-05:00

Robert Allan Hill
2009 Spring and Summer Guest Speaking Schedule

1/17/09 Four Seasons Boston (wedding)

2/04/09 Christian Unity Event, Boston University

2/10/09 Chi Alpha Boston University

3/18/09 Lecture Respondent, Dr K Darr, Marsh Chapel

3/15 New Haven Theological Discussion Group, Yale University Divinity School (participant only)

4/2/09 Boston University Academy

4/18/09 Harvard Memorial Church Overseers’ Committee

5/15/09 Commencement Address Northwestern University, Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary

5/22/09 Coyne Family Lake Winnipesauke, NH

5/26/09 Visit: North Central New York Conference Retirement Dinner, Syracuse

6/4/09 Conference Speaker Baltimore Washington Annual Conference, UMC

6/5/09 Luncheon Speaker Wyoming Annual Conference, UMC, Scranton

6/12/09 Troy Annual Conference, UMC, Saratoga Springs, Breakfast

6/16—6/19 Western New York Annual Conference, Buffalo (conference member)

7/18/09 Ithaca NY (family wedding)

7/26/09 Union Chapel, Hampton NH

8/2/09 Summer Marsh Friends Gathering, Hamilton NY

For Fall: 10/09 Weekly Tuesday School of Education Sponsored Presentation and Dialogue with Dean of Students Kenn Elmore and SED Dean Hardin Coleman

(Plus usual annual Boston University Invocations and Other: 3/26/09 Service Recognition Dinner, 5/1/09 Senior Breakfast, 5/13/09 Retired Faculty and Staff Luncheon, 5/17/09 BU Baccalaureate, 5/09 BU Commencement)

Theological Temptations

2009-05-11T15:07:00.000-05:00

Theological Temptations
A Sermon from Marsh Chapel
Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean

Preface

Your love of Christ shapes your love of Scripture and tradition and reason and experience. You are lovers and knowers too. We are ever in peril of loving what we should use and using what we should love, to paraphrase Augustine. In particular we sometimes come perilously close to the kind of idolatry that uses what we love. We are tempted, for our love Christ, to force a kind of certainty upon what we love, to use what is meant to give confidence as a force and form of certainty. It is tempting to substitute the security and protection of certainty for the freedom and grace of confidence. But faith is about confidence not certainty. If we had certainty we would not need faith.

1. Errancy

Your love for Christ shapes your love of Scripture. You love the Bible. You love its psalmic depths. #130 comes to mind. You love its stories and their strange names. Obededom comes to mind. You love proverbial wisdom. One sharpens another comes to mind. You love its freedom, its account of the career of freedom. The exodus comes to mind. You love its memory of Jesus. His holding children comes to mind. You love its honesty about religious life. Galatians comes to mind. You love its strangeness. John comes to mind. You love the Bible like Rudolph Bultmann loved it, enough to know it through and through.

You rely on the Holy Scripture to learn to speak of faith, and as a medium of truth for the practice of faith. Around our common table today in worship, we share this reliance and this love. The fascinating multiplicity of hearings, here, and the interplay of congregations present, absent, near, far, known, unknown, religious and unreligious, have a common ground in regard for the Scripture. A preacher descending into her automobile in Boston, after an earlier service, listens to this service to hear the interpretation of the gospel. A homebound woman in Newton listens for the musical offerings and for the reading of scripture. On the other side of the globe, way down in Sydney, Australia, a student listens in, come Sunday, out of a love of Christ that embraces a love of Scripture. Here in the Chapel nave, on the Lord’s Day, scholars and teachers and students have in common, by their love for Christ, a love for the Scripture, too. In this way, we may all affirm Mr. Wesley’s motto: homo unius libri, to be a person of one book.

But the Bible is errant. It is theologically tempting for us to go on preaching as if the last 250 years of study just did not happen. They did. That does not mean that we should deconstruct the Bible to avoid allowing the Bible to deconstruct us, or that we should study the Bible in order to avoid allowing the Bible to study us. In fact, after demythologizing the Bible we may need to remythologize the Bible too. It is the confidence born of obedience, not some certainty born of fear that will open the Bible to us. We need not fear truth, however it may be known. So Luke may not have had all his geographical details straight. John (chapter 8) includes the woman caught in adultery, but not in its earliest manuscripts. Actually she, poor woman, is found at the end of Luke in some texts. Paul did not write the document from the earlier third century, 3 Corinthians. The references to slavery in the New Testament are as errant and time bound as are the references to women not speaking in church. The references to women not speaking in church are as errant and time bound as are the references to homosexuality. The references to homosexuality are as errant and time bound as are the multiple lists of the twelve disciples. The various twelve listings are as errant and time bound as the variations between John and the other Gospels.

The Marsh pulpit, and others like it, are not within traditions which affirm the Scripture as the sole source of religious authority. We do not live within a Sola Scriptura tradition. The Bible is primary, foundational, fundamental, basic, prototypical—but not exclusively authoritative. Do you hear that? It begs to be heard. Today’s passage from Matthew 4 is an idealized memory of something that may or may not have happened in the way accounted, somewhere along the Tiberian shore. It looks back sixty years. What do you remember from January of 1948? Nor was it written for that kind of certainty. It is formed in the faith of the church to form the faith of the church.

If I were teaching a Sunday School class in Nebraska this winter I would buy the class copies of Throckmorton’s Gospel parallels and read it with them.

We grasp for certainty, but confidence grasps us.

2. Equality

You love the tradition of the church as well. Though with a scornful wonder we see her sore oppressed…John Wesley loved the church’s tradition too, enough to study it and to know it, and to seek its truth. The central ecclesiastical tradition of his time, the tradition of apostolic succession, he termed a ‘fable’. It would be like political debaters today using charged language like ‘fairy tale’. Likewise, we lovers of the church tradition will not be able to grasp for certainty in it, if that grasping dehumanizes others. The Sabbath was made for the human being, not the other way around, in our tradition.

Baptism is as traditional and central a variously understand practice as Christianity possesses. It is in some ways the very doorway to our traditions. Yet listen to Paul today. In his context, he rejects baptism. For him gospel trumps tradition.

Our linkage of the gifts of heterosexuality and ministry, however traditional, fall before grace and freedom. Further, on a purely practical level, another generation will not be impressed by church growth strategies rooted in the exclusion of 10% of the population. There is a serious upside limit to the use of gay bashing to grow churches. My three children in their twenties are not going to stay around for it.

It is theologically tempting to shore up by keeping out. But it has no future. Equality will triumph over exclusion. It is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave…

If I were convening a Lenten study in suburban Washington DC I would have the group read G. Wills’ Head and Heart: American Christianities, for some perspective on the way traditions change.

3. Evolution

You love the mind, the reason. You love the prospect of learning. You love the life of the mind. You love the Lord with heart and soul and mind. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. You love the reason in the same that Charles Darwin, a good Anglican, loved the reason. You love its capacity to see things differently. (Marsh Chapel will host a series of ten sermons on the theme ‘Darwin and Faith’, offered by preachers from around the country, during the summer of 2009)

Of course reason unfettered can produce hatred and holocaust. Learning for its own sake needs virtue and piety. More than anything else, learning to last must finally be rooted in loving. Did you hear the one thing requested in our vibrant Psalm? To inquire in the temple. Inquiry!

The universe is 14 billion years old. The earth is 4.5 billion years old. 500 million years ago multi-celled organisms appeared in the Cambrian explosion. 400 million years ago plants sprouted. 370 million years ago land animals emerged. 230 million years ago dinosaurs appeared (and disappeared 65 million years ago). 200,000 years ago hominids arose. Every human being carries 60 new mutations out of 6 billion cells. Yes, evolution through natural selection by random mutation is a reasonable hypothesis, says F Collins, father of the human genome project, and, strikingly, a person of faith.

If I were the chaplain of a small private school in New England I might have my fellowship group read this winter F Collins, the Language of God. He can teach us to reason together.

It is tempting to disjoin learning and vital piety, but it is not loving to disjoin learning and vital piety. They go together. The God of Creation is the very God of Redemption. Their disjunction may help us cling for a while to a kind of faux certainty. But their conjunction is the confidence born of obedience. Falsehood has no defense and truth needs none.

4. Existence

You love experience. The gift of experience in faith is the heart of your love of Christ. You love Christ. Like Howard Thurman loved the mystical ranges of experience, you do too. Isaiah, in looking forward, can sing of the joy of harvest. We know joy. Joy seizes us. Joy grasps us when we are busy grasping at other things. You love what we are given morning and evening.

You love experience more than enough to examine your experience, to think about and think through what you have seen and done.

But beloved, a simple or general appeal to the love of experience, in our time, in 2008, is not appealing or loving. It is not experience, but our very existence which lies under the shadow of global violence. To have any future worthy of the name we shall need to foreswear preemptive violence. How the stealthy entry of such a manner of behavior could enter our civil discourse without voluminous debate and vehement challenge is a measure of our longing for false certainties. Our existence itself is on the line in discussions or lack of discussions about violent action that is preemptive, unilateral, imperial, and reckless. One thinks of Lincoln saying of slavery, ‘those who support it might want to try it for themselves’. Not one of us wants to be the victim of preemptive violence. We may argue about the need for response, and even for the need of some kinds of anticipatory defense. But preemption? It will occlude existence itself.

If I were gathering a book club in downtown Boston to read this winter I would select the articles and books of Andrew Bacevich. Our future lies on the narrower path of responsive, communal, sacrificial, prudent behavior and requires of us, in Bacevich’s hero Neibuhr’s phrase, ‘a spiritual discipline against resentment’.

There are indeed theological temptations in the unbalanced love of Scripture, tradition, reason or experience. As we come soon to Lent let us face them down. Let us face them down together. Let us do so by lifting our voices to admit errancy, affirm equality, explore evolution, and admire existence. The measure of preaching today in the tradition of a responsible Christian liberalism is found in our willingness to address errancy, equality, evolution and existence.

Coda

Perhaps we could set to music a hymn with these verses, in some combination:

God is love.
Love is both mercy and justice, both compassion and holiness.
Compassion is more important than holiness.
God loves the world (not just the church).
The church lives in the culture. The church lives in the culture to transform it. (Not above it to disdain it, not below it to obey it, not behind it to mimic it, not before it hector it).
The church is the Body of Christ.
Christ is alive. Wherever there is way, truth, life…
Life is sacred.
Life is a sacred journey to freedom.
The Bible is freedom’s book.
The Bible is a source, not the source, of truth
The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
War is hell.
Peace is heaven. Jesus is the prince of Peace.
Gay people are people.
Women’s bodies are women’s bodies.
Women and men need each other.
There is a self correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe.
The founder of Methodism is John Wesley (not John Calvin).
The ministers of the conference are the conference. Period.
Ministry is preaching.
The fun of faith is in tithing and inviting. ‘Remember the poor.’
Tithing is required. It is core, not elective.
Death is the last enemy. As Forest Gump said, atop his beloved’s
grave, ‘My momma told me that ‘death is a part of life’. But wish it
weren’t’.
God’s love outlasts death.

The Future of Theological Education

2009-05-11T14:57:00.002-05:00

Thoughts on the Future of Theological Education
Boston Ministers’ Club
March 2008

With William Blake, I take as my text Numbers 11: 29. “Would to God that all the Lord’s people were Prophets”.

1. Exemplum Docet

A man in early retirement has decided to bicycle across the continent, starting with his rear tire in the Pacific, down in San Diego next to Coronado Island, and finishing with his front tire in the Atlantic by Provincetown. The trip he makes is in memory of his son who died two years earlier. Father and son did much cycling together, and after two years haunted by demons, Dad cycles with a hope of exorcism. He stops on a Sunday morning in the little town of Onega, Kansas. He is, in no particular order, tired, lonely, bereft, empty, needy, hopeful, utterly clear about his own mortality and his existential location, east of Eden. A Methodist, he goes for worship to the Methodist Church. A smallish congregation embraces him. The ordered service enchants him. The minister’s prayer restores him. An hour of worship:
To Quicken the Conscience by the Holiness of God
To Illumine the Imagination by the Beauty of God
To Open the Heart to the Love of God
To Devote the Will to the Purposes of God
In the heart of continent, his heart has been warmed. In form and content, the sermon is one of the finest he can recall. A brief note in the bulletin tells about the minister. The cyclist calls his wife from the road that evening. With a gratitude that sometimes replaces our more native human sense of entitlement, he describes the wonderful service, the preacher’s heart and mind and wisdom and concludes, as the cell phone fades: “Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised at that, I mean the true excellence of her healthy, vocal leadership. I remember the Bishop saying at conference that seminaries, particularly those connected to the Boston Theological Institute, are developing healthy voices for a new age.” The future of theological education will bring renewal to the church by developing healthy, vocal, excellent spiritual leadership.

2. Divine Delight

I met for the winter semester with my Greek class a few years ago in March. I asked them about “the future of theological education and the renewal of the church”. This dozen students, resembling Galatians 3: 26-28, had much and much good to say. Black and white, female and male, Presbyterian and Baptist, liberal and conservative, gay and straight, right brain and left, intuitive and deductive, greek geeks and struggling c’s, the class is a hologram of the future. This is what Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite meant, recently, by describing theological schools as “places that preserve the important open space in which to integrate great issues”. As they mulled our question, I reminisced about the fall term, and the beginning grammar, and three points of discovery we enjoyed together.

Their issues I listed in the key of d: “diversity, debt, distance, degree, disciplines, debility, dialogue”. But my mind retraced their eager study of the autumn.

We read together Matthew 9:9ff. “Go and learn what this means: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”. I cautioned my colleagues not to assume they already knew the meaning of the verse. After all Matthew did say, go and learn. Perhaps, just perhaps, more than Hosea is here. In this crucial passage Matthew describes what caused him to have been forgiven and what effect that had. The nature of the event itself he hides from us. The cause of his forgiveness is inclusion in a new movement, a new community, a new society. This brought Matthew—aha!—to the experience of mercy which delights God. We hear ‘I desire mercy’ as an imperative, a command to do. But Matthew meant something else. Go and learn he says. Θελω: I …desire, want, enjoy, take pleasure in---mercy. This is not first about what we do, but first about what God loves. Mercy. Do you know God to be a pardoning God?. If there is enough space and generative probity in our teaching, we will allow ourselves to discover and to be discovered by Another Reality. The Divine, who delights, who delights in mercy. I listen for voices that translate the tradition into insights for effective living. The future of theological education will bring renewal to the church through healthy voices that announce the divine delight in mercy.

3. Christ at the Center

My students went around the table making their lists regarding theological education and the renewal of the church. They said things like this: “I looked up praxis in my dictionary and did not find it…integration is always a personal, though not individual project… who will address spiritual formation? The seminary, the church, the denomination, who?… there is too much separation between the church and the school…no, there is not enough: seminaries need churches like fish need bicycles, and vice-versa…who will attend to the nature of call?…Seminary is lonely. “

I admit my mind wandered a little, back to November when we came upon Galatians 2, and its remarkable announcement of the πιστιs χπριστου Ιησου.

I cautioned us not to assume that we already knew the meaning of the phrase. Such a phrase carries power and danger, particularly in a time like ours that slides, in some places, toward a unitarianism of the Second Person of the Trinity. How are we to translate? An objective genitive, «faith in Jesus Christ»? Or a subjective, authorial genitive, «the faith of Jesus Christ»? What is the basis for salvation? Human faith in Christ or the faith of Jesus Christ, that is his faithful death? We divided about equally, no bad thing. But all left a little less certain, and, oddly, a little more confident.

I listen for voices that resound in the affirmation before the question, “Are we lovers anymore?” The future of theological education could bring renewal to the church through healthy voices that announce the faith(fulness) of Jesus Christ, who loved us and gave himself for us.

4. Spiritual Sensibility

We had gone over the 90 minutes, but the discussion rolled on. I noted that a friend of mine had listed 8 issues for leaders of Schools of Theology: the burden of taking initiative, the weight of accumulated grievances and inappropriate expectations, telling the story and knowing the mission, competing constituencies and contradictory expectations, building a board that cares (but not too much) and caring for a board (but not too much), MONEY, cooperating with others, finding the time for self-care.

My mind, though, careened back toward December, when we translated Matthew 25. The students were by that time reciting their own warning not to assume but to learn and grow. They paused before the word for “least”. As you have done it to the least of these my brethren…ελαχιστοs. It means the littlest, the most diminutive, the smallest of the brothers and sisters. Could this be a baptismal moment? Is the reference, at least in part, to children? As you have done it to the littlest of these in my family, you have done it to me? These infants—hungry, thirsty, powerless, imprisoned in infancy. We wondered. The world does not lack for wonders, as Chesterton said, but only for a sense of wonder. Delores Williams had been with us the week before, bringing a wondrous womanist reflection on the least, and on need, and on the wildnerness. I listen for voices that remember the least, last, lost.

The future of theological education may bring renewal to the church through healthy voices that announce a spiritual, preferential option for the poor means renewal for the church.

The divine delight in mercy. The faithfulness of Jesus Christ. A spiritual, preferential option for the poor. Three theological thoughts about the future of theological education.

5. Three Practical Footnotes

Education is about people, and 90% of what happens in any school is related to the people present. Let us say something, briefly, about the people involved in theological education.

1.A healthy, vocal leadership, clergy and lay, depends on a regard for faculty. Faculty provide height. I remember visiting Lou Martyn, 10 years out of seminary. He offered me a noon libation, and said, among other things: “We have tried here to keep heaven a little higher”. Frost’s poem on the Star comes to mind:
It asks of us a certain height
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far
We may take something like a s tar
To stay our minds on and be staid
All Frost’s star says, you remember, is “I burn”. So, faculty need the freedom to burn, to produce the spiritual blaze Solzhenitsyn said the world expects, to generate, to be creative, to take the full responsibility for creative freedom and to “burn”. (Douglas John Hall’s 12/02 article in Theology Today winsomely underscores this point.) Party of rigor, party of responsibility, all. Burn. In my view, such lofty freedom to burn serves one central lordly goal: to live as examples for vocal leaders, healthy preachers, who themselves, Sunday by Sunday, will become common as sagebrush, and then be set on fire by the Holy Spirit: 1. To earn a Ph.D. in Theology is very difficult. 2. To struggle to publish, through all the disappointments, necessary early on, is more than hard. 3. To endure the burden of community, the inevitable clash of views in a “small town”, takes courage. (Isaiah Berlin’s motto is mine, to live in a liberal openness of spirit, but in a way that “softens the collisions”.) In short, for faculty I hope for more “space”.

2.A future, healthy, vocal leadership in the church needs students who are debt free. One of the saddest patterns to have developed in our Canadian and American churches in the last 20 years is the pattern of joking reference to the Wesley question at ordination, “are you in debt so as to embarrass yourself?” This is hardly a laughing matter anymore. We need to produce debt free graduates who are then free in ministry to boldly go where no one has gone before. Some responsibility for this lies with our students, but more lies with our systems. Out of debt such graduates are free to provide the depth that the soul seeks in the ground of being.

Who are the students today. My longtime friend, and my clergy and teaching colleague Chris Evans has a new article out about today’s students. Here is its paragraph abstract:

Discussions on teaching and learning within theological seminaries often center on the question of student diversity, focused primarily upon issues of race, gender, and ethnicity. At the same time that seminaries are challenged to deal with a multitude of pedagogical suppositions emerging from increasingly diverse learning goals, seminaries must also pay attention to the ways their students challenge an institution’s core mission to train ministers for service in churches/denominations. Based upon the author’s experience teaching in a mainline Protestant seminary, the essay discusses three student cultures that often overlap among today’s seminarians. These three student cultures, what I call the “church seminarian,” “new paradigm seminarian,” and “vocational seminarian,” carry very different understandings of the seminary’s role to prepare students for ministry. A critical discernment of these cultures might challenge seminary faculty to reevaluate their educational and missional suppositions, amidst divergent student career objectives.

3.A future, healthy, vocal leadership in the church needs administrators in the schools of theology who by nature build community. The Bible is freedom’s book, the pulpit is freedom’s voice, the church is freedom’s defense. Faculty freedom and student freedom deserve and require the disciplined and responsible liberty of a village green, an open space for communal life that breathes with the spirit of liberty. We choose to work in a school of theology because we affirm its mission. Administration is a ministry all its own, and it has to do with the crucial work of building spaces for freedom. What faculty bring to height, and students to depth, an administration provides in breadth. The administration is not the enemy! As McCullough reports while writing about Truman, that great President, “While General Macarthur was fighting the Pentagon, General Ridgeway was fighting the enemy.” ( Truman,p. 834)

Faculty provide height. Students provide depth. Adminstrators provide breadth.

6. Voices for a New Age

In early September of 2001, Jan and I drove across New York State, on a Saturday afternoon, following the Army Navy game at West Point. To the right somewhere in the Catskills emerged this sign, black letters and white background: JOIN THE CLERGY. Who are we inviting into ministry?

Some of the work of invitation and recruitment (primarily the province of the church) does fall to the schools of theology. Some of the work of invitation and recruitment (primarily the province of the laity) does fall to you, the veteran clergy. To whom have you spoken of late?

Who will come forward, out of another generation? Who will step up to preach the Gospel, to administer the sacraments, to lead the church, to care for the hurt, to speak for the poor, to provide the “unity and continuity of the church through the ages”? Where are the best and the brightest, the wisest and most sensitive, women and men of imagination and who will stand sentinel and herald the dawn of a New Creation of love and light? The pulpits of our church are not safe, easy places, not happy refuges for weak, unbalanced or needy folks. Jesus came not to be served but to serve. We need the finest top 5% of another generation earnestly to listen, to consider whether God is calling you into the ministry. Where are those men who could do anything, from engineering to medicine to law to business, who will gladly consider all things loss that we may Jesus gain? Where are those women who could command excellent compensation, roles in more lucrative cultural leadership, and high places in public and private realms, who will gladly take up the cross that we the crown obtain?

The 21st century is spread out before us, full of potential for grace and also for disgrace. Where are those young voices that will submit to the maturation of two decades - minimum time to train for real preaching - in order to prepare to quicken the conscience of a new era? Where are those young hearts, still freshly covered with the morning dew of idealism and hope, who will turn away from competitive gain and turn toward the promise of community? Where are the lovers, the dreamers, the seekers, the pioneers who could take the old world of the church and make it young again? And what are we doing to imagine and construct an ethos in which the expectation is that, sooner or later, our best and brightest will fill our pulpits?

What kind of person do you want to see coming up the path, in the rain, while you sit waiting inside on the hour of your husband’s death? What kind of man do you hope to hear speaking from the chancel, on the Sunday after your bombshell diagnosis is given? What kind of woman do you truly desire to perform your daughter’s wedding, counsel your son after a moral failure, help your community assess a call to arms from Washington, listen as you change careers, or offer prayer at the last breath?

We may want to answer that set of questions a full generation before we need an embodied response.

Do we want a healthy pastor? Then perhaps the churches could consider a decent health plan, one with teeth in it. Speaking of teeth, one with dental care.

Do we want an educated pastor, one for whom education is a value along with love? Yes, we remember that Wesley said, “learning without vital piety is like a jewel in a swine’s snout.” But Wesley, an Oxford Don, was the greatest champion of education. An educated pastor, who values a real and good education, will want the same for her children and family. Are we ready as a denomination to compensate our clergy so that their children can attend college?

Speaking of children, do we want to make any space for children in our ministerial families? Children are costly and difficult. Are we willing to provide the housing, salary, pension, benefits that will make space for a young couple that loves their children?

Do we want an emotionally balanced pastor? Then perhaps we can see the value of support systems, denominational and therapeutic, to address this desire.

Do we want a pastor with a global outlook, an ecumenical perspective, for whom the whole world is a parish? Then, perhaps, allowance should be made for travel, for study, for sabbatical, for writing, for growth.

Would to God that all the Lord’s leaders were preachers! I listen for the voices for a new age!

David Mamet had some interesting things to say, a while back, to actors, dreamworkers in the theater:

“Write for yourself…be an artist…Teach yourself some perspective so that you are not at the mercy of the current fad…study voice and movement…learn the difference between the beautiful and the attractive…Make yourself the expert…love the theater and learn about it and strive to improve it and create a new profession for yourselves…Train yourself for a profession that does not exist… That is the mark of an artist—to create something which formerly existed only in his or her heart”. (Writing in Restaurants, 141). Some of this could help budding preachers too.

The future of theological education will bring renewal to the church by developing healthy voices for a new age, excellent spiritual leaders who announce the divine delight in love, the faith of Jesus Christ who loved us and gave himself for us, the spiritual preference for the poor. The future of theological education will include height, depth and breadth—faculty, students and administrators. The future of theological education will depend upon the active invitation, church and academy, laity and clergy, to JOIN THE CLERGY.

7. Thoughts on Pastoral Excellence

In addition, let me also add a few thoughts about the pastoral excellence, a phrase currently in vogue.

The matter of pastoral excellence and personal health is crucial to present and future study and service. It matters for the church and for the school in equal measure. Particularly it matters for the laity of the church, who engage and are engaged by the ministry of the clergy. Unhealthy ministerial leadership hurts most the laity. The gospel of grace and freedom requires preachers who can exhibit grace and freedom, who can model dimensions of ‘spirituality’ (like excellence, undefined in much of our talking) that are freely gracious and gracefully liberating. How can we preach a gospel of grace and freedom without ministers who embody grace and freedom?

Let me next set out some complementary assumptions or perspectives with which I think I participate in this kind of conversation. These are angles of vision or points of view that are perhaps different from, though not contradictory to, the largely unspoken assumptions and perspectives we have used together. It is hard to change the carburetor while the vehicle is cruising down the turnpike, so we often leave systemic or perspectival discussions to rest stops like this one. That is as it should be.

First, the mission of the school of theology is to educate clergy. Two words is a good number for a mission statement, and ‘educate clergy’ are the two words I would choose. By educate I mean twenty things, among them the intention to form life-long learners who are self taught on the basis of a robust exposure to classical materials. By clergy I mean twenty one professionals, among them teachers, preachers, leaders, executives, and those who teach all these, who will bring dimensions of meaning, belonging and empowerment to the new creation, during their day in the Day of God. In saying this I do not deny or contradict the lengthy mission paragraph we have affirmed as a faculty. It is good, but not easily remembered. In saying this I do not deny the important ongoing discussion of theology as the core of theological study, largely because pastoral excellence absolutely requires, utterly depends on every shred of decent theological study available. (In the long run.) In any case, of the 5 funding streams I can dimly perceive which currently pay our rent and grocery bills, ALL 5 assume that our mission is to educate clergy. For this reason I think Foster’s book, Educating Clergy, has something to offer us.

Second, the faculty is the curriculum. 90% of curriculum choices and teaching enhancements are made at the point of permanent hire. Who teaches largely answers the questions about what is taught and how it is taught and when it is taught and so on. In the church, we talk in terms of ‘conference program’ or ‘denominational ministry’, but the dynamic is the same. The ministers of the conference are the conference program. Period. The faculty is the curriculum. Forgive a New Testament digression, but this is what the irascible Apostle to the Gentiles meant, I think, in 2 Corinthians 3: 1ff, a most difficult chapter to translate well. He contrasts print documents with the human being. “Do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you, or from you? You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on your (our?) hearts to be known and read by all (men)…written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts”. Again, I do not here deny the importance of collegial conversation, learning with and perhaps teaching with each other, sharing best practices, and growing steadily ourselves. We, though, come, each one, with decades of commitments made, investments undertaken. We are the curriculum. But I seldom hear us acknowledge this.

Third, as just one person around the table, and speaking from 30 years of preaching twice each week, many visits each week, etc., I cannot think of one paragraph, sentence, phrase, word or syllable that I heard, read or learned in seminary that was not helpful in ministry. The issue is not that some of it is good and the rest is hooey. The issue is that we have 3 years (actually more like 18 months) in which to provide a sound basis for sound ministry. It is all essential, and all helpful, particularly what may seem most unhelpful at the time. The challenge is to provide enough excitement about the documentary hypothesis and the synoptic problem, enough intrigue about Chalcedon and the reformations, enough tensive enjoyment of Aquinas and Guttierez, enough admiration for Steimle and Chalmers, that a whole of life of learning in ministry ensues. Not one shred of Bible, History, Theology, and Rhetoric is superfluous to real ministry, let alone to ‘pastoral excellence’. In other words, I assume that the dichotomy, learning vs. piety, is a false one.

I enjoyed reflecting recently on short papers my colleagues wrote last year about pastoral excellence. Here are some seven of the high points, from my perspective, cited in italics without attribution, and then followed with brief remarks of my own. All of these contributions (and others as well) were meaningful to me, made me think, caused me to pause, so I cite them with affirmation and gratitude.

1. I also think that students who elect to attend a university-based school of theology must expect intellectual rigor and challenges in the classroom. Post-undergraduate, professional theological education is task-oriented to a significant degree, and it requires productivity. It cannot be purely a “pastoral” enterprise if, by “pastoral,” one means “comfortable” and “challenge free.” Of course, I don’t think that’s what “pastoral” means at all. Teaching, preaching, care giving, etc., are courageous enterprises; and those who prepare to undertake them require courage, insight, discipline, and knowledge. Not all of these attributes can be acquired in classrooms, of course, but all of them can at least be nurtured in classrooms and in various activities that comprise our life together.

Yes. Pastoral excellence assumes intellectual rigor, if it assumes anything. That doesn’t mean dull as beans bookish sermons, or ‘more educated than thou’ clerics. It does mean insight, imagination, curiosity, accuracy, truthfulness.

2. Finally, I think we should consciously set in place a program to mentor our international students. Faculty can play an important role in mentoring, but students can as well. Such outreach could go a long way not only in helping our international students succeed in their studies, but also help all of us further to develop an aspect of our communal life that lies at the heart of what is happening in churches and other religious institutions around the country and the globe.

Yes. Each one teach one.

3. Thinking of this in relationship to my students, I do think the free-standing seminaries are able to train ministers more fully and effectively to minister within the particular traditions and church communities as they are. Students in these settings are more prepared to, so to speak, hit the ground running. Students who graduate from STH have, I think, a steeper learning curve.

Yes. Richard Norris said to me, near graduation: ‘five years from now, your education here will seem unhelpful, or worse, but ten years from now it will be precious, invaluable’.

4. A case in point is chapel worship at STH, for which there are already two opportunities for “spiritual” Sabbath in the curriculum. Student attendance is poor and faculty attendance (or even faculty encouragement of student attendance) is sometimes non-existent.

Yes. Exemplum docet.

5. However, by the end of the two hours I began to ask “What conversation are we in?” Is this about the overall curriculum revision that is taking place at the School of Theology or more specifically about the formation of second year Master of Divinity students and the integration of spiritual practices and Sabbath habits into the Field Education program?

Yes. I guess it has been both. I believe that finally integration is a personal, though not individual, task.

6. Contextual assignments like case studies, verbatims, heuristic research, interviewing, team presentations, etc., might help us to create a “mentoring” milieu in our classrooms, thus creating training opportunities for critical reflection and strategizing. This kind of approach might help us overcome the impossible task of trying to mentor individually 40 students in each year’s class.

Yes. Learning skills inventories show that many learn better with these means and media.
7. I don’t think teaching students to nurture themselves (mind, spirit and body) is a matter of just being good stewards of our lives. I believe the integrity and effectiveness of our ministry depends on our example.

Yes. Our example.

8. Thoughts on Pastoral Imagination

To conclude, I would like to lift up the possibility of some sustained, communal conversation about Foster’s book, perhaps with Foster present. His overview of current theological education, has several distinctive advantages, only one of which I will lift up here. In this largely positive, even happy travel through various theological schools and seminaries, Foster regularly returns to the issue of pastoral imagination, as he terms it: How does a seminary education cultivate a pastoral, rabbinic or priestly imagination that integrates knowledge and skill with religious commitment and moral integrity for professional practice? (p.327) The exploration of his work is directed at those educators who have found ways to answer that question: Clergy educators innovate or adapt by drawing on resources of inherited religious and academic traditions to convey or model for students’ pastoral, priestly, or rabbinic imaginations. In our study, students often spoke of moments in their learning as awakening or discovering new meanings in sacred texts, alternative strategies for the conduct of some clergy practice, or new dimensions to their calling and vocation (23).

I hope that the next several years will allow us to consider the integration of theology and practice with regard to the pastoral imagination, as it is discussed by Foster, and sung by Blake:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning Gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O Clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire.

I will not cease from Mental Fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

The Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand

2008-06-15T11:00:00.001-05:00

Matthew 9:35—10:23

The authority of Jesus’ ministry is today transferred to disciples, ancient and modern.

We meet Jesus on the hinges of the first Gospel, as the flow of the Gospel swings from Lord to apostles. In the announcement of this good news is included a measure of empowerment for each one of us. This is the kind of day on which, for once, for the first time, or for once in a long time, we may be seized by a sense of divine nearness. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. The kingdom of heaven has come near to you. When that sentence makes a home in a heart, or in the heart of a community, a different kind of life ensues.

Capture in the mind’s eye for a moment the sweep of the gospel read earlier. First. Jesus has been about, teaching and preaching and healing. His compassion abounds. The endless range of needs about him he unblinkingly faces. Second. Jesus calls and sends the disciples, and empowers them, and by extension he empowers us. The gospel will have been read thus, as it is thus read by us. He instructs and directs them in their work, where to go, what to do, how to be. Learning, virtue, and piety together. Start at home, heal the sick, travel light. Third. Jesus expects and forecasts for them a less than utter victory in their work. They are to know how to shake dust from their feet. Fourth. Jesus warns that there will be a price to pay. The discipline that is the hallmark of the disciple here is named. Shall we not remember Jesus ministry? Shall we ignore the call and power offered here? Shall we forget the directions given? Shall we expect turn a deaf ear to the caution about consequences? We pray not. The main sweep of the gospel today is clear as a bell. Jesus gives power to his disciples. Hold that thought for a moment.

The devil is in the details. The material in our reading sends us into foreign territory. We have other words, whether only modern or both modern and more accurate, to describe unclean spirits. We recognize that the list of apostles or disciples differs from other lists. We are uncomfortably aware that Jesus himself, in other Bible pages, goes both to the Gentiles and to the Samaritans, and infamously so. We do not regularly meet leprosy. We carry no gold in our belts, nor silver, nor even copper. We are not pilgrim peregrinators who arrive in town and camp on a doorstep. We sense that the hard distinctions we make between disciples and apostles were not made by Matthew. We do not readily conjure up the vision of Sodom and Gomorrah. We sense that the time of Matthew and its persecutions under Domitian, 90ce, may have colored all or a part of this passage. Most glaringly, we know that the Son of Man did not arrive on a schedule coordinated with visits across the 50 by 150 mile area of Israel. The devil is in the details.

Nor are we to think that we should by tunics or money belts or sandals or travel through towns in Israel or prefer judgment fall on Gomorrah. This is impossible. Moreover, a confusion here will allow us to avoid the clear call of Christ upon our consciences in the main flow of the gospel. For the main point is crystal clear. To follow Jesus means to take up where he and his earliest companions left off.

Do you love Jesus? Then you must do something for him.

Jesus has taught, preached and healed. This ministry he has bequeathed to his disciples, his apostles. We have been seized by the confession of the Church; we are Christians. Now his ministry, this ministry, is ours. Which part of this ministry draws you?

We have come back from Buffalo this week, where flags are at half-mast to honor Tim Russert. Because his city, family, story and background are not unlike our own, I have listened with keen ear to the eulogies offered. Maybe you have too. ‘Mine is a face made for radio’, he quipped. Mine too. The details of life and illness will take some time to understand, but as with our reading today, the main point is very clear. Tim was a man for others. Tim Russert lived the life of a man for others. He brought baseball hats to kids on chemo. He came to weddings and partied, as, you know, ‘that guy’, the one guy everyone remembers from a party. He found ways to make a difference in the lives of poorer kids. He taught his son. He wrote a book about his dad. We do not know what a day will bring, but only that the hour for doing something with our life is always present.

Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. I could argue with you that healing the sick has a medical degree of meaning, that raising the dead is about pastoral ministry in the Northeast where the church awaits resurrection, that cleansing lepers is about including those on the outside of the social fence, that casting out demons is reminding people not to fear, not to fear, after 9/11, not to fear. You could, rightly, challenge the interpretation.

Where does your passion meet the world’s need?

What are you ready to risk doing, to plan for the worst, hope for the best, then do your most, and leave all the rest?

What are you going to give yourself to, to offer your ability, affability, and availability?

Who calls you, who called you, to your own real life, your vocation? We began this spring to gather people here at the University to ask them this. Who gave you your sense of direction, vocation in life? Robert Pinsky revitalized poetry by asking communities to gather and read their favorites. We are trying to revitalize vocation by asking communities to gather and remember their mentors. Tim Russert had Big Russ. What about you? The world opens a bit when a teacher and disciple connect. Here are three examples.

Schweitzer

Maybe we need to remember Albert Schweitzer.

A child organ prodigy, a youthful New Testament scholar, a young principal in his Alsatian theological seminary, a man whose books and articles I used with profit in my own dissertation a few years ago, Schweitzer’s life changed on the reading of a Paris Mission Society Magazine.

As a scholar, he wrote: 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. He speaks to us the same word, ‘Follow me!’ and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. 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.’ (QHJ, 389).

What he wrote of Jesus became his life. He left organ and desk, studied medicine, and practiced in Africa for 35 years, calling his philosophy, ‘a reverence for life’.

Vocation leads to God. A decision about vocation leads to nearness to the divine.

Addams

Maybe we need to remember the young woman from Rockford Illinois, Jane Addams. She grew up 130 years ago, in a time and place unfriendly, even hostile, to the leadership that women might provide. But somehow she discovered her mission in life. And with determination she traveled to the windy city and set up Hull House, the most far reaching experiment in social reform that American cities had ever seen. Hull House was born out of a social vision, and nurtured through the generosity of one determined woman. Addams believed fervently that we are responsible for what happens in the world. So Hull House, a place of feminine community and exciting spiritual energy, was born. Addams organized female labor unions. She lobbied for a state office to inspect factories for safety. She built public playgrounds and staged concerts and cared for immigrants. She became politically active and gained a national following on the lecture circuit. She is perhaps the most passionate and most effective advocate for the poor that our country has ever seen.

Addams wrote: “The blessings which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation must be made universal if they are to be permanent…The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in midair, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”

Yet it was a Rochesterian who, for me, explained once the puzzle of Jane Addams’ fruitful generosity. This was the historian Christopher Lasch. Several times in the 1980’s I thought of driving over here to visit him. But I never took the time, and as you know, he died seven years ago. Lasch said of Addams, “Like so many reformers before her, she had discovered some part of herself which, released, freed the rest.”

Is there a part of your soul ready today to be released, that then will free the rest of you?

Vocation leads to God.

Thurman

Maybe we need to remember Howard Thurman. The first page of his autobiography announces today’s gospel, that Jesus empowers his disciples, whose vocations lead to God:

At the end of my first year at the Rochester Theological Seminary, I became assistant to the minister of the First Baptist Church of Roanoke, Virginia. I was to assume the duties as pastor during the month that the minister and his family were away on vacation. I would be on my own. On my first night alone in the parsonage I was awakened by the telephone. The head nurse of the local Negro hospital asked, ‘May I speak with Dr. James?’. I told her he was away. ‘Dr. James is the hospital chaplain’, she explained. ‘There is a patient here who is dying. He is asking for a minister. Are you a minister?’

In one kaleidoscopic moment I was back again at an old crossroad. A decision of vocation was to be made here, and I felt again the ambivalence of my life and my calling. Finally, I answered. ‘Yes, I am a minister’.

‘Please hurry’, she said, ‘or you’ll be too late’.

In a few minutes I was on my way, but in my excitement and confusion I forgot to take my Bible. At the hospital, the nurse took me immediately into a large ward. The dread curtain was around the bed. She pulled it aside and directed me to stand opposite her. The sick man’s eyes were half closed, his mouth open, his breathing labored. The nurse leaned over and, calling him by name, said, ‘The minister is here’.

Slowly he sought to focus his eyes first on her, and then on me. In a barely audible voice he said, ‘Do you have something to say to a man who is dying? If you have, please say it, and say it in a hurry.’

I bowed my head, closed my eyes. There were no words. I poured out the anguish of my desperation in one vast effort. I felt physically I was straining to reach God. At last, I whispered my Amen.

We opened our eyes simultaneously as he breathed, ‘Thank you. I understand.’ He died with his hand in mine.

Vocation leads to God.

The kingdom of heaven is at hand when your passion meets another’s need. Jesus empowers his disciples. Vocation leads to God.

A Day in June

2008-06-08T11:00:00.000-05:00

Lectionary Readings

Preface: Light and Growth

And what is so rare as a day in June?

You are children of the light, children of the day. In the daytime of our active living, the daylight of our active yearning, we are present this morning. This is the season of growth. The liturgical seasons, laden with substantial significance they are, need not eclipse the real presence of the natural seasons. It is the natural seasons which provoke some of the questions to and toward which the liturgical seasons provide responses. June is the season of promise, of planting, of budding, of growth, including growth in faith.

And what is so rare, asked J R Lowell, as a day in June?

On this Day in June we trace four daytime stories and find three lessons for spiritual growth. Four stories and three lessons…

Four Stories: Abram, David, Paul, Jesus

One

Abram is given the courage to leave. Under the genus and genius of the courage to be one may find, or be found by, the species and specific courage to leave. When you most need the courage to leave, you will most appreciate its gift to you, by grace. People do not always find the timely courage to leave. For all the right and all the good reasons you can think of, sad to say, people do not shake the dust from their feet as frequently as you think…because to do so is difficult. Yet there come times when you ought to leave. Fortunately, Abram had Sarah along with him to put steel in his spine.

One of our public figures has recently taken a very public leave of his church. Separation has its time, a time there is for everything. Oh, I do not dispute the thundercloud of the gathering retort that it does no good to pull up the carrot every ten minutes to see if it is growing. But, you know, life is short, and when things are really wrong, harmfully wrong, dangerously wrong, it is time to pack. That is a form of the principle of reform, as messy as it makes life, and religious life. Messy is preferable to hellish.

Go. Go! From country…From kindred…From parent’s house…Go. Do so with grace, with tenderness, with humility, with suffering, but do what you need to do to breathe. Your suffocation profits no one.

Our passage from Genesis is the true genesis of Genesis. Genesis 12 opens the Bible. Brueggemann catches a part of the truth: “This cluster of promises becomes the originary principle for all that follows” (OTCCI, 41). He misses the heteronomy lurking behind both theonomy and autonomy. The word, that is, is a word both spoken and heard, and without the hearing the speaking does not carry. The first divine word heard in the human community of faith is…Go! New England struggles with the history of immigration which is our heritage. On the one hand we honor pilgrims, puritans, and various waves of arrivals here in the newer world. On the other hand, their own sense of journey, courage to leave, capacity to change, willingness to risk with responsibility is sometimes lost on us.

A settled minister, a settled Christian, a settled person of faith is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron--like ‘jumbo shrimp’ or ‘United Methodist’.

Go. Shoo! Go. In these verses which originate the story of Israel, all the rest is based on a decision to pull up stakes, sell the farm, list the house, put the furniture on e-bay, buy a storage unit, and say goodbye. A wandering, wondering Aramean was our father. Trace backwards the account of today’s Holy Scripture: The cumulative blessing of all the families of the earth depends on itinerancy. The blessing and protection of the faith family and community depends on itinerancy. The growth of faith in community depends on itinerancy. The honor of one’s name depends on itinerancy. The making of a great nation depends on itinerancy. The inheritance of land, space, promise, future—all these too depend on itinerancy. So, Abram went. Incidentally, the rest of the Biblical narrative becomes possible only on the heels of Abram’s departure, his courage to leave.

Do you need to summon a form of the courage to leave this week?

Two

David did not write all of the Psalms, but he wrote some of them, and his name is legendarily connected to them all. I love the place David holds in our Bible, David the hymn writer. David may have started singing with Bathsheba, but he concluded his songs with songs of praise to the Living God. In New England we have amnesia about hymns. Jonathan Winthrop may have sung in the rolling surf of the Massachusetts Bay. The Puritans may have chanted their quiet hymns of faith. The tunes of Irish folk songs and Italian love poems may have made their way into our worship. But friends, across these six states united by a common love of the Red Sox, otherwise known as New England, we have forgotten a bit what it sounds like and feels like to sing hymns with six or seven hundred people in the same room. We have not taught our children to sing the four lines of harmony. We have not practiced the presence of God in the power of singing. I grant exceptions. But when people come out of Easter worship saying, ‘Wow. That was great. So many people. Such hymns.’, it is a measure of what we have forgotten. We could have that experience every week, if we all got out of bed on Sunday. We live in earshot, by the way, of Fenway park, and I do hear the festive tones of ‘Sweet Caroline’, win or lose, rain or shine, at the seventh inning. It sounds good. So I know you can sing. If you know the words. If you like the music. If you have others around you to guide and support. If you feel the moment.

Notice the specific amendments in Psalm 33 (a highly memorizable passage by the way). A new song… Played skillfully…On the strings… with loud shouts …rejoice…praise…make melody… with a ten string harp…

Notice the specific glories in Psalm 33 ( a highly memorizable passage by the way). Our soul waits for the lord. He is our help and shield. Our heart is glad in him. We trust his holy name.

“God looks down upon humanity, searching their inmost being. What is in men’s hearts?’ (E Leslie, 86).

The heart of the Bible is hymnody. It is the Psalter, the hymnbook of the Bible that is its core and heart. Paul, Augustine, Luther, Wesley---all based their calls to faith on the book of Psalms. And David is remembered for many things, but he is revered as the legendary giver of the Psalms.

Three

Abram had Sarah, and David had Bathsheba and who knows who else. But I cannot quite find a woman to set alongside Paul. Yes, I know about Priscilla and Aquila… Still…Perhaps Paul’s evocation, early and late, of the Holy Spirit herself might round out his story for us on this Day in June. It is the Spirit that frees Paul to leave his own religious heritage. It is the Spirit that opens Paul to another way of reading about Abram. It is the Spirit that settles into Paul’s mind the crucial centrality of promise. It is the Spirit that empowers Paul to lay down the law and pick up the Gospel, to lay down Torah and pick up grace, to lay down the experience of others, and to pick up his own. The law—any and all—is finally the experience of others. Faith is your experience not that of others. That is why faith is so utterly and incomparably personal.

Our reading again captures Paul’s sermon in Galatians, though most of the rest of Romans serves to reinterpret Galatians. We see the unvarnished Paul here—law or faith, there is no middle ground. Have you begun with the Spirit to end with the flesh? Paul calls us out. Your faith will not be yours lived in the shadow of another’s observance. To thine own self be true (that is not in the Bible by the way). Faith that is not utterly personal is not faith. Faith is personal and love is responsible.

How do we understand faith working through love? If we are not careful a kind of fatalism can creep over us, whether sacramental or biblical. For to read out only three verses from Romans 4, and leave them hanging in mid-air, out of context, out of grounding, out of place in the larger sweep—and a large sweep it truly is—of the Epistle to the Romans is not to understand but to misunderstand. Paul affirms faith, and justification by faith. But Paul also affirms faith, and the obedience of faith. Romans 3-8 has to be read within earshot Romans 12-16. Faith is faith working through love. Faith is personal, love is responsible. Faith means work.

Bill Muehl spoke once about Romans 4. (His is a name I have heard from mutual friends, but this one sermon is my only personal contact with him.) Muehl brings a tough, Pauline argument to our Pauline passage. He is trying to find his way through law and grace in a way that is real. He remembers a TV show in which a character says, of a woman of ill repute, ‘Prostitute is what she does not who she is’. Over several pages or minutes Muehl tears apart this false dichotomy and this false interpretation of Romans 4. He tears at and tears apart the false separation of being and doing, of who we say we are and what we do says we are, what we say says we are, how we act says we are. You become what you do. His point: personal faith is about what we do and who we are. I love his concluding illustration:

Some years ago a group of parents stood in the lobby of a nursery school waiting to pick up their children after the last class before Christmas recess. As the kids ran from the classrooms, each one held in his or her hands the brightly wrapped package that was the surprise, the gift on which the kids had been working for some weeks leading up to Christmas. One little boy tried to put on his coat, carry the surprise, wave to his parents all at the same time, and the inevitable happened. He slipped and fell, and the surprise broke with an obvious ceramic crash on the tile floor. For a moment, he was too stunned to speak or cry, but then he sat up in inconsolable lament. Well, his father, in an effort to comfort his son, but also to try to mitigate the embarrassment of those present, went over to him and patted him on the head and said, ‘Now son, it really doesn’t matter. It’s not important son. It really doesn’t matter’. But the child’s mother, somewhat wiser in such affairs, went to the child’s side, knelt on the floor, took her son in her arms and said, ‘Oh, but it does matter. It matters a great deal’. And she wept with the child.

Our God is not the careless parent, who casually pats us on the head and says…You are justified by your faith. What happens to you and what you do, these things are not important at all. Our God is the parent who falls to the ground beside us, takes up our torn and bleeding spirits, and says, ‘Oh, but it does matter. It matters eternally.’ (Muehl, “It Matters Greatly”, 262 Sermons from Duke Chapel).

Four

Now we come to Jesus. Across the gospels, Jesus’ attention to women is manifest, and theirs to him. Across the gospels, Jesus’ attention to those needing healing is manifest, and theirs to him. Jesus healed. Those who touch Him are healed. Those whom He touches are healed. Matthew affirms a code of holiness, but even in Matthew, where holiness and compassion collide, it is compassion that survives. ‘I enjoy mercy’, says the Lord. Jesus heals on the way, and at the end of the road. Two healings are wrapped together in our passage, a resounding report of the power in Divine Love to heal earthly hurt. Do all the good you can!

You may not be able to say, with such amazing grace, ‘Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well’, as did Jesus. But then, you are not Jesus. Yet one good, healing good, you can do this week is to let someone else know of a time in your own life when disappointment gave way to grace, when dislocation became the doorway to freedom, when what seemed like bad news turned out to be pretty good news after all.

Proust: So manifold are our interests in life that it is not uncommon that, on a single occasion, the foundations of a happiness which does not yet exist are laid down simultaneously with aggravations of a grief from which we are still suffering (RDTP, 292).

Perhaps our familiarity with this signature passage in the Gospel of Matthew occludes our view of its powerful call to healing. The Risen Christ, who suffered Golgotha and outwitted the tomb of meaningless death, passes by. Your Christ is passing, your Christ is passing, your passing by shouts the Gospel! One earnestly seeking healing reaches up and touches the garment of Pardon Personified. Do we notice—a generation of political theology to the contrary notwithstanding—Jesus’ attention to a ruler, to authority, to power, to leadership? Do we reckon that this leader—a generation of biblical theology to the contrary notwithstanding—may not have been of synagogue, in the redactor’s imagination, but of empire? (The word for ruler is archon, as valent a Greco-Roman term as one could imagine.

Where do ordinary hands reach out, desperate for pardon? I listen on the esplanade, as young mothers swing their toddlers. I listen at the ballpark, for conversations over hotdogs. I listen with guests at the dinner table. I listen at the coffee shop. I listen to talk radio. I ‘listen’ to common letters to the editor.

The paper yesterday brought this paragraph, a hand from the heart of a sickened people and broken land reaching up to touch the passing Christ:

Democracy can commit not just blunders but horrendous wrongful acts with disastrous consequences for another nation…(Our) chosen leaders abused the power of their offices to conquer and devastate another country that was not a threat to us. How can we redeem ourselves? What do we owe the Iraqi people? What can we say to the families of our dead and wounded soldiers? Can we continue to promote the virtues of democracy to the rest of the world? And we still have the daunting problem of extricating ourselves from the scene of the crime…(Benjamin Solomon, NYT, 6/7/08).

How..to redeem ourselves? We cannot.

How to be redeemed?

By reaching to the Person of Pardon, and allowing our prayers to be conformed to prayers of pardon, and presenting our lives to be shaped as examples of pardon. Do you know God to be a pardoning God? No promise without peace, no peace without pardon. Pardon us our sin as we pardon those who sin against us…

Itinerancy. Hymnody. Personal Faith. Compassionate Pardon. A church that could methodically convince its leadership to itinerate, its people to sing lustily, its preaching to emphasize personal faith, and its laity to heal every earthly hurt—imagine such a church! A church that could methodically energize a global network of clergy to move wherever need and talent meet, that could gather on every hill and molehill a thronging chorus of gracious singing, a church that could preach like the wind about the places in the heart, a church that could assign every baptized soul a healing ministry—imagine such a church! A church that could methodically spend itself in sudden moves and dislocations, in hymns of joyous beauty sung with gusto, in words read from the Bible and spoken from the heart, in service to the poor, the maimed, the blind and the lame—imagine such a church! A church methodically built on these four stories of Abram, David, Paul and Jesus—imagine such a church! Itinerant ministers. Thunderous hymns. Personal preaching. Healing compassion. Hm…I wonder what we would call such a denomination? It would certainly be ‘Christianity in earnest’…

Coda: Three Lessons

Earnest souls, for our spiritual journey this week, what lessons do we learn, people of the day, in the season of growth in faith—what lessons do we learn on this Day in June?

1. First, there are many ways to keep faith. All four of these stories are utterly distinct, variegated, different, multifarious. Your manner of faithful living may not approximate any single other. Abram moved. David sang. Paul trusted. Jesus healed. And you? There are many ways of keeping faith.

2. Second, the expression of faith changes with the context of its time and space. There is serious discontinuity, from book to book and age to age, in the private and public practice of faith. J R Lowell’s other poem also is worth remembering. New occasions do teach new duties.

3. Third, over time there are lasting features of faithful living. One is the courage to leave. Another is the desire to sing. Another is the personal acceptance of responsibility. Another is the attention to suffering. Real religion is mobile, choral, real, and caring. With tender courage, in loving responsibility, let us sing:

(Oldest extant church hymn, Oxyrynchus Papyri 1786)

Together all the eminent of God

Let them be silent

Let the luminous stars not…

Let them hold back, rushing of winds, founts of all the roaring rivers.

And as we hymn Father, Son and Holy Spirit, let all the powers answer

‘Amen, Amen, strength, praise, and glory forever to God

The Sole giver of all good things

Amen, Amen

The Remembrance of Things Past: Communion Meditation

2008-06-01T11:00:00.000-05:00

Matthew 7: 21-29

Today’s Gospel is the Earliest Memory of a verse of Scripture I have. I am four, playing in the desert sand outside a military base housing unit in Las Vegas. It is hot and hotter. The wind blows through the yard and sand, stinging the face and eyes. I am displeased that something built has been blown down. I hear my mother’s voice: ‘A wise man…’

You should Memorize. Memorize: the 10 Commandments, the Books of Bible, the Beatitudes, the Apostles Creed, Psalms (2), Romans 12: 9-13, Hymns (2), Lord’s Prayer.

Both imperatives like this and personal memories like these are verboten for some good reason in preaching text books. The indicative of God’s grace should precede and eclipse any imperative to human behavior, like the command to memorize. The personal illustration threatens to split the consciousness of the hearer, as the Gospel is announced. Mea culpa. It is good that we have the Eucharist today, for the sins of the preacher, in imperative and memory, to be cleansed.

Memories of breakfast are rare in the Holy Scripture. Famously the Gospel of John is concluded by breakfast with Jesus. The Psalmist exclaims that joy will come with the morning, which tarries through the night, but there is no morning meal mentioned in Psalm 33. Jesus shares meals, but they tend to be evening meals, as in a borrowed upper room, or luncheon meals, as with Zaccheus, or midday feasts, as in the 5000 feedings. It would be unfair to declare that the Bible dislikes breakfast, and yet breakfast does not appear to be a major biblical theme.

William Sloane Coffin once described the breakfast this way: ‘the worst hour of the day, the worst time of the day, the worst meal of the day, and everybody at their worst’. (Riverside Sermons, pamphlet) He presumably wrote this sour accolade early in the day. Maybe at the breakfast table.

I happen to like the breakfast hour. Coffee and a real paper newspaper and a time to think about the day. Yet I must admit to and accept the reigning judgment, biblical and experiential, that breakfast is a wholly unholy hour for many.

At age 13, on June 5, 1968, I can dimly remember breakfast. Siblings scraping at the elbow sharpen any memory, like iron sharpens iron. June and its examinations sharpen the memory, for of the writing of books and exams there is no end. A swirl of energy, cacophony, juice and cereal settles the memory of that morning. It was Proust, in THE REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, who best taught us to measure and mingle memory with taste….

And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. (RDTP, 113)

So much recollection from a little cookie! So maybe breakfast has something memorable to offer.

That June 5 1968 breakfast, though, carries another valence. The phone rang amid pancakes and juice, sometime close to 7am. My dad was traveling that week, attending a conference in Chicago. He would call sometimes from the road, usually to talk to my mother. It was then a surprise to have the phone passed down to me.

“I know how much Bobby Kennedy has meant to you. So I wanted to make sure you heard, and heard from me so that we could talk, that he was shot last night. This is a terrible tragedy, a tragedy set among others. It will take many years for us to absorb its significance, and more to still to understand it, if we ever do understand it. Life will go on, under the aspect of a changed world. We can talk more when I get home.”

There is remembrance of things past which illumines and magnifies our current experience. We live out of the unforeseen, and we understand out of the unknown.

Thursday we played a recording, for the high school students of the Boston University Academy, RFK’s impromptu speech on the evening of MLKing’s death, a brief speech torn out of Kennedy’s personal reading and experience. You can ‘google’ it so I need not repeat it, except its key lines:

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

We come to the table of empowerment, belonging and meaning, the table of remembrance of things past. Take and eat. An imperative to be sure. Do this in remembrance. Personal experience to be sure.

Kyrie Eleison

2008-05-23T11:00:00.000-05:00

Matthew 6: 24-34

Memorial Sunday

Dear Rebecca,

You may not remember Al, but he loved you. Even in his eighties he had an unerring capacity to relate to kids. You and your brother grew up while he finished his ministry. Al died one week after he stopped work as the assistant pastor of our church.

Al stood about five feet tall. He was bald, hairless as a billiard ball. He wore thick glasses. One friend, who never says a critical word about anyone, once said that Al was the homeliest person she had ever met, but no one ever noticed because he was so loving.

I met Al when I was myself a teenager. Actually, I had known him during my childhood, as an infrequent clergy visitor to our home, a large and foggy category of preachers, ministers, chaplains, priests, itinerants and other vaguely odd spiritual leaders who were vaguely connected to our parents.

In high school I went to Owasco lake for a week of summer camp. Al I think led the camp, or at least he was around. A few years later I was working there as the lifeguard and every summer, without fail, Al would take his volunteer week to work with high schoolers. I remember drinking beer with Al past midnight around a fire down on the shore. One young cleric was busy criticizing the nascent fundamentalists (a group for which Al also had some disdain). After the hot air faded, Al sipped and leaned forward to say to the young turk: ‘I suppose you are right, but those folks have had a religious experience—something you might want to have yourself sometime.’ He added later that clergy who were hyper active in liturgy or politics usually had never had a real religious experience. Those two categories pretty much included, one way or the other, all the fire lit faces around that midnight hearth.

Al knew you, and your brother, during the years I hired him at our church as my assistant. We paid him hardly anything. He and Ruth bought their first home, on at tree line street, at age 70, after he finally retired. He took out a thirty year mortgage, a daily source mirth for him, a mirth he contrived to share with all comers. In fact, though, he personally lived to pay twenty of those years, if I remember right. It is hard to convey how simply happy Ruth and Al were to have their own home. After five decades of life under the leaky roofs of various parsonages, and after five decades of life under the stingy thumbs of various parsonage committees, their thousand foot house and postage stamp lawn was their prize and paradise, their pride and joy. To think of it makes me ashamed of the times in life I have thought I should have more, or would like more, or deserved more. In the winter he died, Al hornswaggled a friend into redoing the kitchen for Ruth. He saw that the parsonage kitchen was redone and decided Ruth should have something just as nice. It was. She used it for a decade more, to good hospitable avail you can be sure.

Al loved you and your older brother, and your Mom and Dad, who loved him too. Sometimes Al would hold court in his front room, his big black dog between his legs, Al rubbing behind the years. You may remember that the dog’s name. Satan. Al smoked pretty heavily, well into his late eighties. I say that not as recommendation but as recognition, recognition of humanity. He also drank some beer. One neighbor on Scott Ave called the Bishop to complain that he saw the retired pastor drinking beer in the evening. ‘It’s nice to have people so concerned about your well being, isn’t it?’ This was Al’s wry comment.

I noted such Alphorisms. He called one of our great hearted lay leaders, Iva Gorman, ‘stormin’ Gorman’, and is the only person she would have allowed to do so. Sometimes he called Iva, ‘Iva the Terrible’, but not directly to her face. Another person, a female type woman as he would say, who shall remain nameless, Al identified vocationally as, to quote him precisely, ‘a test pilot in a broom factory’. Of those who seemed, to him, wrong spirited, he offered this proverb: ‘I don’t mind people being Christian as long as they are nice about it.’

In his parish, a good village church along one of the deep, great Finger lakes, one of the saintliest women in town, a recently retired single school teacher, was struck by lightning while she trimmed her roses. I am told that at the funeral, Al got up, tried to speak, cried, and cried, and wept, and, at last, said, ‘we have no idea why these things happen, we have no way to explain why these things happen’. Then he sat down.

I knew, during my own college years, that if I ever got into a pickle that I could not get out of alone, and could not discuss with my parents, I could go to Al. I never did, though I almost did once. But I had him in the back of my mind all those stormy years. While I gaze at that in memory I realize that that is just about the best definition of a pastor I could give. Someone you could go to, even if you never do, when the chips are down.

I had a good friend whom he counseled well, a young man who had been away from home, and came home to learn that his girlfriend had been dating other boys. The young man did not come to Al for counsel, but one evening Al found him on the street and told him a joke. ‘A man and woman die and go to heaven. St Peter gives the man a tricycle for transportation and explains that heavenly vehicles are based on the amount of dating activity you had on earth. The next day the man sees his wife driving a Cadillac.’ They laughed, and Al caught the young man’s eye, with a tear filled eye of his own. They laughed so hard they cried, Al crying the harder. While I gaze at that in memory, I realize that that is just about the best definition of a pastor I could give. Someone who accompanies you, overhears your pain, pierces your pain with wit and skill, drains your hurt, and walks away with you as you walk away well. The tricycle and the Cadillac lived happily ever after by the way.

Rebecca, you know the chapel at that old Campground on Owasco lake. You remember it is a rustic all wood Adirondack style Chapel, with a fifteen food window behind the cross, looking out at five miles of Finger Lake beauty. You grew up in the gaze of that chapel. You learned to swim two miles down from that window and cross. You got your boating license in order to run the motorboat back and forth past that campground, that chapel, that window, and that cross. You know the people who built it, or at least their names. (G Y Benton, Vivian’s uncle. L Schaff, who convinced the Case people to give the land for Methodist youth. C Skeele—he built the building, ‘Skeele-built’ he would say, add 10% to the price. Irving Hill, President of the Conference Youth Council at the time.) People like Al, and Ruth, who gave whatever meager shekels they may have had, with typical, generous, careless, abandon, and who gave their time to kids, sitting on the hard benches of that rustic church. I bet you can hear the bell ring, in your mind’s ear, the big old church bell that sits at the doorstep.

Gong. Gong. Gong. Gong. Gong.

In my last month as a lifeguard there, I came sauntering down the road. My friend asks me to be attentive to the etymology of the word saunter. I am. I came sauntering down the road at age twenty. From there, because of the incline, you can see right into the full chapel, and up to the cross, and on through the window, and on a clear morning, right down the lake, right down to the end of the lake, right there where Charon has his boat. It was a clear morning that morning. Sometimes when I have had too much religion, I travel myself by memory back to age twenty, your age Rebecca, back to that downhill road, back to that campground, back to that chapel, back to that window, and back to that cross. I have not decided what to do in life as I come down that road. I am not married. I have no children. I have no parchment, no degree. I have no military experience, no romantic experience, no financial experience, no tragic sense of life. Not quite yet. I am lollygagging, breakfast served and done, swimming lessons to teach, sunshine on my shoulder. Sunshine on my shoulder.

In the chapel I see, though he cannot see me, a short, bald, bespectacled, homely fellow, swinging a broom in the air. At first I find it a source of hilarity—old Al has finally lost it. But as I approach, as I peer into the darkened church, I see that Al is deadly serious. He is utterly absorbed in his flayling about. A sparrow is trapped in the chapel, and, Al must have seen, is set on flying straight toward false deliverance, straight at the clear glass, straight at the brightly scrubbed religious glass cleaned up with so much Methodist cleanliness is next to godliness piety that the poor thing is deceived into mistaking piety for salvation, glass for air. Kyrie Eleison! Al swings, shouts, jumps, doing as he can everything he can to drive the bird out of the church, to drive the bird out the open door, past the steps, out the path, over the bell, beyond the little steeple, and into the grace and freedom of the open air.

His parishioner however is an orthodox bird, religious and pious, and set on a disciplined course. What bird anyway ever understands until it is too late the difference between air and glass, freedom and religion?

I watch, and I suddenly have the dread feeling that I am an uninvited observer in a personal drama, trauma, amid flora and fauna. Al swings, the bird loops, dives, lifts, flies—thud.

Gong. Gong. Gong. Gong. Gong.

Unseen, I watch Al as Al groans and cries. He moves to the window, and shamelessly I watch from my hiding place. Under the cross he finds the bird, another victim of religion and piety, deader than a doornail. He takes a large white handkerchief from his pocket. Later in life, his and mine, I learn the constant contents of his pocket—handkerchief, cigarettes, billfold, pocket knife. He bows to the bird. He gathers the sparrow in his hands, weeping, covers the bird in his handkerchief, weeping, holds the bird at the glass, weeping.

I saw this with my own eyes.

There he stood, before the beautiful blue expanse, the home and heart loveliness of Owasco Lake, in the heart of the Finger Lakes, the single most beautiful place in the world, heaven for those of us who did swim there. I stood as long as his back was toward me, a good long while. Then, when he began to move, to find a way toward some natural burial, I jogged out down to the waterfront, and to my safety duties, and to the teaching of the prone float. I never mentioned it to Al, and he never spoke of it in my hearing.

In the next several years I became better acquainted with, better related to tragedy, of various sorts. Into each life a little rain must fall. I ended up a preacher, too, not least because of Al. I preached at funerals. I preached at memorials. I preached on Memorial Sundays. I preached at commemorations. Once a year I preached on Good Friday. Thirty and more years later I look back through the open chapel door, past the pews, over the cross, out through the window and over the lake. There still is Al, still before the silence of lake and cross. I felt that day that I had been given a front row seat at something, somewhere, (Mercy? Calvary?), at the origins of loving and giving. We live out of the future and understand out of the past. While I gaze at this in memory, or recollection, I realize that this is just about the best definition I can give of a pastor. One who knows the difference between religion and salvation, between glass and air, between cross and freedom, and chases those hiding from life out of church into life, with all his might, and when he fails, knows and shows cruciform love.

Rebecca, my Memorial Sunday prayer for you is that you will take a sense of cradling care with you, for every hour, on every day, enough to sustain you and your family, and enough more to share with your neighbor.

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these…The Gentiles seek all these things; and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will. Even the hairs of your head are numbered. Fear not therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.

Kryie Eleison…

Kyrie Eleison…

Kryie Eleison…

A Great Thanksgiving

2008-05-04T11:00:00.000-05:00

Luke 24: 44-53

Ascension Sunday

In a moment we shall again stand together to proclaim the mystery of faith. We shall offer a great thanksgiving. Responsively, we shall offer the Lord’s presence to one another. Responsively, we shall encourage one another to lift our hearts to the Lord. Responsively, we shall recall the right goodness, the good rightness of great thanksgiving. Friends, we are rooted and grounded in a history of joyful blessing, of great and loving thanksgiving. Eucharist means thanksgiving.

Our gospel is rooted and grounded in a history of thanksgiving, even as it is read and spoken in order to root us and ground us in love. Luke, the author of both readings for today, has every intention of bonding us to the long parade of women and men who lived with happy hearts, in joyful blessing and great thanksgiving. Our Sunday service of ordered worship has its own roots deep in the past, carrying us in memory all the way back into the first century. You come from people who were thankful people, joyfully praising God. They give us a clear example, these earlier witnesses, of a balanced faith, a faith honest to God about sin, death and meaninglessness, but a faith yet confident, joyful and thankful in life. Luke ends his first book, the gospel, and starts his second, the Acts, with thanksgiving.

Now we may pause a moment to be grateful for the form of Luke’s message. He does believe in doing things decently and in order. Luke provides, by his own assessment, dear Theophilus, an orderly account. It is his view that the words of the Old Testament in law and prophets and psalms, when written of the Christ, are fulfilled in an orderly account of the life of Christ. It is Luke’s further view that Christ opens minds to understand Scripture. Luke makes plain the prediction, embedded in a right reading of inherited Scripture, of cross and resurrection and repentance and forgiveness and the preaching of all the above. It is his understanding that disciples are thus witnesses of all these things. They will be blessed as they bear witness. We will be blessed as we bear witness. You will be blessed as you bear witness. His gospel ends with our reading today, an orderly ending to a well ordered gospel. Jesus blesses and leaves. The disciples give thanks and stay.

Some of the ancient manuscripts which we have of this passage say simply, ‘he blessed them and parted from them’. Others read, ‘he blessed them and parted from them and was carried up into heaven’. It is not clear, at least to this interpreter, which reading is stronger, which more probably original. Yet it is significant, at least to this interpreter, to see and know that more than one version of this passage exists. The addition, if it was a later addition, of ‘was carried up into heaven’, makes this passage a suitable and qualified Ascension passage, unmistakably congruent to the account in Acts 1. Luke’s penchant for the orderly may have inspired a follower of his to do likewise, and clean up one aspect of the conclusion to the gospel. To Luke it mattered to put things in order, to get things right. His spiritual descendents may have had the same passion. The true desire to get things right reveals, makes naked, a joyful thanksgiving. A passion for true goodness, good beauty, beautiful truth, in life, work, politics, music, art, architecture, religion, hospitality and friendship reveals, unclothes, a spirit of thanksgiving.

We are thankful for Luke’s orderly account. We may be a bit mystified by the mythic account of Ascension. We may be less than certain of the meaning of such symbolic imagery in our own time. But we can be utterly confident about the effect of Ascension, on our forebears, and so on us. The religious consequence of the Luke’s conclusion to the Gospel is thanksgiving. The religious consequence of Luke’s introduction to Acts is thanksgiving. Our Sunday praise of God is thanksgiving.

For all the dimness of creation, of the created order and the history within it, for all the trouble in life, in the gift of life and the history that comes with it, for all the fracture in body, in the body of Christ and the history that comes with it, still, at Ascension, there is thanksgiving. Sometimes the gospel and its very human interpreters need to shore up our sense of the way things have gone wrong. I suppose Lent and perhaps Advent too are markedly important seasons for emphasis upon the Fall—the way creation has somehow been loosened from the divine grasp. Sometimes the gospel and its very human interpreters need to short up our sense of creation as God’s creative act, in thanksgiving for what is right. Eastertide and Ascension may be such times. Today, in gospel and Eucharist, is such a day.

With you, I try to read the news and listen to the events of the day. As you do, I try to overhear behind the immediate din of sounds and bites, something of the heart of people and of our people. This spring, sometimes, I overhear a pained and painful sense of doubt about the possibilities in life. A doubt that things can change very much. A doubt that anything new could ever emerge. A doubt that people can repent and turn around. A doubt that systems, so entrenched and contentious, can ever be made orderly. A doubt that any of the older differences among us can ever be bridged. A doubt that any common expression of faith can be trusted. A doubt that any common faith or common ground or common hope can ever, with authenticity, emerge and survive. A doubt that minimizing one’s own visibility or audibility, for the sake of something bigger and someone else, could ever be faithful or reasonable. A doubt that the general public could be trusted to shoulder significant sacrifice. A doubt that anything I do or you do would ever make a difference.

When this cloud of doubt gets so thick that it eclipses both the sun and the moon, it is time to hear again the Ascension gospel. Such a thick cloud comes from a theological weather system

in which the cold front of wrong has chased out the warm front of right,

in which the low pressure of the fall has displaced the high pressure of creation,

in which the radical postmodern apotheosis of difference has silenced the liberal late modern openness to shared experience, to promise and future, to common faith, common ground, common hope,

in which the cream of liberalism has curdled into the sour milk of radicalism,

in which the creation is seen from the cavern of the fall, not the fall from the prairie of creation.

This is not a “pastor problem”, but a pastoral problem. It is not a political conflict, it is a theological contrast. It is not a matter of church coloration or religious style, it is a matter of creation, of God’s creation and the truth about creative goodness. Just how balanced is your balance between creation and fall?

There are for sure a lot of things wrong. But there are also, and more surely still, a lot of things right. Hear the good news. The gospel ends in joy. You are witnesses of the goodness of God, witnesses who come from a long line of people who joyfully bless, and routinely give great thanks. “Faith is an event expressing the conviction that the things not yet seen are more real than those that can be seen” (L Keck). As you, as I, as we together walk toward our last adventure, our own look over Jordan, it is this thanksgiving, a great thanksgiving, which carries us.

Marilyn Robinson’s novel, Gilead, is about a man who rightly balances creation and fall. We end this sermon, a call to thanksgiving, as she ended her novel, another call to great thanksgiving:

“I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word ‘good’ so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing. There may have been a more wonderful first moment ‘when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy’, but for all I know to the contrary, they still do sing and shout, and they certainly might well. Here on the prairie there is nothing to distract attention from the evening and the morning, nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or to delay. Mountains would seem an impertinence from that point of view.”