Preaching in the New Millennium: Celebrating the Tercentennial of Yale University 9780300128178

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Preaching in the New Millennium

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Preaching in the New Millennium Celebrating the Tercentennial of Yale University Edited by Frederick J. Streets

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Yale University Press

New Haven and London

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Copyright © 2005 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Preaching in the new millennium : celebrating the tercentennial of Yale University / edited by Frederick J. Streets. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 0-300-10081-7 (alk. paper) 1. Universities and colleges—Sermons. 2. Sermons, American— 20th century. I. Streets, Frederick J. bv4310.p67 2005 252—dc22 2004016520 Printed in the United States of America. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction 1 Frederick J. Streets They Left Everything and Followed Him Frederick J. Streets Blessed Are the Poor Harry B. Adams

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Death in the Academy Robert L. Johnson

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Truth Is Told: This Is Our Story 42 Jewelnel Davis Be As Christ in the World Victoria Matthews

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Cliff ’s Notes for the Journey Eileen W. Lindner

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The Power of a Changed Mind 68 Cynthia A. Terry Friends of the Disciples 76 Barbara Brown Taylor Who Tells You Who You Are? William Sloane Coffin Jr.

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Walk by Faith and Wait upon the Lord David L. Bartlett A Benediction for Us All Gardner C. Taylor

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The Years That the Locusts Have Eaten John Vannorsdall

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Lux et Veritas 113 Peter J. Gomes Preaching in the New Millennium Laura Geller More God Than We Want William H. Willimon Closing Prayer 140 Frederick J. Streets Contributors

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Acknowledgments

One writes alone, but always with the assistance of others. No one finishes a project like this one without the help of others. I wish to thank Richard C. Levin, president of Yale University, and Linda K. Lorimer, vice president and secretary of Yale University, for their support of this project. I am grateful to my colleagues the Reverend Cynthia Terry, associate university chaplain; Martha Highsmith, associate secretary of Yale University; and Samuel Slie, associate pastor, and Pamela Bro, former associate pastor of the Church of Christ at Yale, for their assistance in planning and support of the Tercentennial preaching event. The staff of the Yale University Chaplain’s Office, Administrative Assistants Elaine Cooper and Gale Iannone, attended to the details that helped make this event a success; and Julie Ann Stokely, now an alumna of Yale, provided valuable coordination and clerical support of this project. Our musicians Mark Swicegood, Kola Olowabi, Joan Lee, Garmon Ashby, and Eleanor Fulton and the undergraduate University Chapel Choir inspired us during worship with their musical gifts. Thanks to Yale University Press for publishing this book. John Ryden, former director of Yale University Press, now retired, welcomed the idea of publishing these sermons. His interest helped to make this book a reality. Erin Carter, associate editor, provided invaluable guidance that made this project possible to complete. My conversation partners about this book gave me the sup-

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port and inspiration along the way to its completion: Rabbi James Ponet, the Howard M. Holtzmann Jewish Chaplain at Yale and Lamin Sanneh, the D. Willis James Professor of World Christianity; Howard Lamar, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History and former president of Yale University; Henry Broude, Philip G. Bartlett Professor Emeritus of Economics and Economic History and advisor to the president of Yale University; Gaddis Smith, Learned Professor Emeritus of History; Edwin R. Edmonds, Pastor Emeritus of the Dixwell Congregational Church in New Haven, Conn.; and Richard F. Mollica, MD. I deeply appreciate having constructive input from Robert Allen, Alvin Johnson, William Lytle, Marcus McCraven, James Thomas, Earl Yancy, and Eugene Andrews. We meet regularly as a group to discuss our projects and offer one another support. Jonathan Rose of the Garrison Institute in Garrison, New York, and its staff welcomed me there as the first Garrison Institute ‘‘Scholar in Residence.’’ The time spent there engaging in meditation, quiet reflection and conversation aided my work on this project. A grant for Pastoral Leaders from The Louisville Institute added inspiration and support while I was completing this project. I am thankful for those preachers who came and offered their inspiring witness to God as Yale celebrated its three-hundredth anniversary. Their contribution to Yale goes far beyond their sermons, without which this book would not have been possible. Words cannot adequately express my appreciation to my family for their support of this project. A special thank you to my wife, Annette, and our children, Tina, Carolyn, and Bennett. I wish to dedicate this book to the Church of Christ in Yale and my predecessors: the Revs. Elmore McKee, Sidney Lovett, William Sloane Coffin Jr., John Vannorsdall, and Harry B. Adams in recognition of their stewardship as university chap-

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lains and senior pastors of the Church of Christ in Yale. I appreciate the history and unfolding ways that God’s spirit is present at Yale.

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Introduction Frederick J. Streets

Preaching in the New Millennium is a collection of sermons preached in the historic and beautiful Battell Chapel at Yale University during the spring and fall of 2001 in recognition of the university’s three-hundredth anniversary and beginning of its fourth century. Battell Chapel was built in 1878 and is also the home of the Church of Christ in Yale, which was founded by the university in 1757. The church is a member of the United Church of Christ, a Protestant denomination. There is no one history of Yale but many histories of the various ways it has evolved since its founding. The development of the undergraduate curriculum in religion, the creation of the Church of Christ in Yale, the abolishment in 1926 of undergraduate mandatory chapel attendance, the creation of a department of religion twenty years later, the emergence of the Divinity School as a university-based professional school, and the establishment of a graduate department of religious studies as a part of the graduate school of arts and sciences are some examples of how the drama of theological convictions, religious sentiments, and values has been played out as Yale has experienced the tensions of its growth from a small college into an international research university. A synthesis of these histories and their relationships to one another and the wider university is beyond the scope of this project; the contents of this book can present only a snapshot of the complex and varied nature of religious life at Yale today and do not intend to constitute a religious

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history of the university. The issues that the sermons of this book address reflect some of the religious and spiritual concerns of the antecedent and contemporary university community at Yale and those of the general public. The contributors to this volume are leading preachers who came to campus to preach throughout the year during University Public Worship through the Church of Christ in Yale. Several of them are graduates of Yale College or Yale Divinity School or both, and some have delivered the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale Divinity School, which is the oldest lectureship on preaching in the country, established in 1871. This Tercentennial preaching program was an example of the many ways that the Office of the University Chaplain fosters an understanding of and appreciation for the diverse religious and spiritual life of the university community. The Yale Tercentennial provided an opportunity for the community to reflect upon aspects of Yale’s religious history as a part of celebrating the founding of Yale College in 1701. A study sponsored by the Chaplain’s Office in 1999, conducted by Yale Associate Professor of Sociology Michele Dillon, demonstrated both the depth and breadth of religious life among Yale students, faculty, and administrators.1 Of the students surveyed, 39 percent reported that they attended religious services regularly; more than half characterized themselves as ‘‘very’’ or ‘‘somewhat’’ religious. Professor Dillon’s work helped shed light on the nature of the issues with which students today are wrestling as they seek meaningful expressions of faith in an environment made complex by the gifts and tensions of religious pluralism and a busy, secular world. The Yale students who participated in the study, however, indicated their satisfaction with the variety of offerings and opportunities available to them and saw religious life as an important part of their Yale experience. The form of religious life on campus has changed dramati-

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cally over the past three hundred years, but as the students indicated, it continues to be an important part of the university, as it has been from the founding of Yale. Established with a charter to educate youth for ‘‘Publick employment both in Church and Civil State,’’ the university continues to offer opportunities for religious expression, even as such opportunities have evolved significantly through the university’s three centuries. Religious life at Yale is rich, diverse, robust, and complex. In this setting, religious expression and spirituality have flourished for many. The following sermons, while reflecting upon the nature of faith and preaching in this university setting, address religious issues and spiritual concerns of people everywhere. They represent the variety of theological and liturgical sensibilities found among those who comprise the Yale community today. History For Yale’s first two centuries, Christianity was deeply embedded in the life of the institution. Yale’s faculty members were expected, even required, to be men of strong Christian faith, and the spiritual and religious leadership of the campus was lodged in the Office of the President. Yale’s presidents preached regularly to the campus community, and chapel attendance (daily!) was mandatory for all students. Yale’s church, the oldest college church in the country and known now as the Church of Christ in Yale, was created out of concerns that preaching in the local church was straying from sound doctrine. As Ralph Henry Gabriel described in his history of religious life at Yale: President Thomas Clap of Yale had grown dissatisfied with the preaching of Mr. Noyes [the pastor at First Church]. The minister had directed his ser-

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mons—simple, moralistic, and dull—primarily to the instruction of his flock in man’s duties to his brothers. Almost never did the pastor of the First Church expound those robust doctrines of original sin and of the majesty and justice of God that had so long given power to Calvinism. The congregation seldom got a glimpse into the fiery pit. The President, listening in his pew, had come to consider the spiritual sustenance provide by Mr. Noyes to be a watery porridge, inadequate for the needs of the spirited young men whom parents had put in the charge of the College.2 When a group of the college’s tutors and students petitioned the Yale Corporation for permission to create a college-based ‘‘Christian communion,’’ the Corporation granted the request. President Clap presided, along with Naphtali Daggett, the college’s first Livingstonian Professor of Divinity and later president of Yale, at the first worship service on July 3, 1757, of what would become the Church of Christ in Yale University. The church was the center of religious life at Yale for 150 years, in part because it was mandated to be so. As times and student interests changed, however, there was increasing pressure to change the form of participation in religious activities. In 1926, the Corporation, with some reluctance, concurred with recommendations from students and faculty, including the college pastor, to abolish compulsory chapel attendance. The Corporation’s public statement of its action noted the following: The Corporation recalls that according to the charter of Yale a primary aim for which the University was founded is ‘‘to uphold and propagate the Christian Protestant religion’’ and that it is incumbent upon the University to see that this purpose is

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loyally fulfilled. Compulsory chapel will be discontinued at the end of the present year. In its place the University has taken measures to establish a strong undergraduate department of religion; to develop in every way the Church of Christ in Yale University, the official name of the College Church; to maintain and strengthen the various student religious organizations; and to call to the attention of the friends of the University the desirability of a suitable chapel building where voluntary services may be held.3 These actions of the Corporation were instrumental in shaping the current form of religious life on campus. The Corporation followed up its initial decision by creating the Office of the University Chaplain in the following year, and many of the new measures in support of religious life devolved to that office. The first chaplain was Elmore McKee, an Episcopalian and former secretary of Dwight Hall, Yale’s service organization. Sidney Lovett, a Congregational minister known as ‘‘Uncle Sid’’ to generations of Yale ‘‘boys,’’ served in the role from 1931 to 1957. Presbyterian minister William Sloane Coffin Jr. was chaplain until 1975, followed by Lutheran John Vannorsdall, who served until 1986. Harry Adams, minister in the Christian Churches Disciples of Christ, was chaplain from 1986 until 1992, when I, a Baptist, was appointed. A university chaplaincy is responsible for the pastoral care of and reaching out to the entire university community—its parish, in effect—and helping the university to interpret and carry out its mission. Denominational campus ministers have as their primary responsibility the care and nurture of their community of faith. The university chaplain at Yale historically has the dual role of chaplain to the university and senior pastor of the Church

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of Christ in Yale. Embedded in these roles is the expectation that the chaplain help the university to interpret its mission today in light of the values found in its historical religious roots and provide pastoral leadership to the university church while engaging both the university and the church in the issues that shape and challenge their common life. Like other academic institutions founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Yale was established by people who were motivated by their religious values and ideals to create a school that would train people to serve God and the public good. Many of these institutions are no longer sectarian in nature; however, some of them continue to support the office and active presence of a university chaplain. The role of the university chaplain at Yale goes beyond offering prayers at university public events and ceremonies, though these practices are a part of a set of long-standing practices. Each chaplain at Yale, representing a variety of Protestant denominations and approaches to the office, has been responsible for establishing the focus of ministry at Yale based on his vision of the role religion plays in the university. The ministries of McKee, Lovett, Vannorsdall, and Adams were primarily pastoral in style and purpose. These men focused internally upon the spiritual nurture and care of the congregation and wider university community. The tenor of the time during which Coffin served as university chaplain drew his attention significantly to address the civil rights and antiwar movements. This is an exciting time for the chaplaincy at Yale. It has as its focus the promotion of religious tolerance, understanding, and pluralism within the life of the university. It seeks to foster an atmosphere in which religious perspectives are appreciated, explored, debated, and affirmed in constructive ways. The chaplain supports and participates in the ecumenical and interfaith community beyond the campus and promotes social justice.

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The Present Diversity of Religious Life on Campus It is quite likely that the Yale Corporation in 1926 had no idea of how its desire ‘‘to maintain and strengthen the various student religious organizations’’ would be realized seventy-five years later. Religious life on campus today is voluntary, vibrant, and varied, and the Chaplain’s Office has an essential role in promoting this diversity. There are at least a dozen Christian and non-Christian religious traditions on campus, such as the Muslin Student Association and Campus Crusade for Christ, that offer worship services and the study of texts sacred to their traditions. Such groups represent a richness of on-campus worship opportunities. Yale Religious Ministry, in collaboration with the Chaplain’s Office, is the on-campus association of clergy and nonordained representatives who provide pastoral support to these various religious communities. In addition to worship, students express their religiosity and spirituality in a number of ways and contexts. Many student religious groups engage in several activities in addition to worship, such as Bible study, praise services, and fellowship meals. Some groups, such as the Interfaith Alliance for Justice, an organization with a membership that represents different religious faiths, seek to relate their faith to social activism and are a part of Dwight Hall, the organization through which students provide volunteer services to New Haven and its wider community. These organizations reflect the growing interests that many students have in religion and spirituality. Their presence makes Yale a challenging place at which to minister—an environment that the founders of Yale could not have envisioned when they created a learning community that would serve God and society. Students sometimes say that college life is not the ‘‘real world.’’ They soon realize, however, that the university com-

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munity reflects the pluralistic nature of the larger society’s religious and secular beliefs. This diversity is often a source of creative tension. Students look for opportunities to understand and address their own religious and spiritual quests while learning how to live among such diversity. Their values influence their thinking about a number of social, political, economic, and global issues. Their thoughts about these matters influence their interactions with one another. The questions that students have about their own identity and the way the politics of identity is played out around a number of issues on campus affect their common life and some of the decisions they make regarding whom to consider as friends and what organizations to join. Debates constantly occur, for example, about the relationship between church and state and attitudes concerning race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, region, class, culture, and religion—issues that are always in flux. At the core of higher education today is the need for us as educators and ministers to address the religious, spiritual, and cultural particularity and diversity of students and their relationship to the larger world; to enable them to stand in their traditions of culture, race, and religion while also learning how to engage modernity. It is important for students to have a sense of self-determination and belonging and ownership of their college experience. This helps them to contribute to building a democratic and multicultural society once they graduate. These tasks are even more formidable for those whose historical experience and self-understanding have been profoundly affected by being excluded and marginalized in their relationship to the larger society. Those who come to our university as students, faculty, and staff do so as whole people. Our common life should encourage and value the exploration of the spiritual, ethical, and moral as

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well as the intellectual and physical dimensions of our human experience. Often, this means being in a place where creative tensions exist because of competing and conflicting values and beliefs of members of the community. Helping members of the university sort through those values and beliefs in ways that allow growth is not only a challenge but also makes this an exciting and rewarding place to practice ministry. Distinctively Christian in its origin, the chaplaincy at Yale celebrates this heritage and affirms its legacy in a variety of ways while attempting to build a sense of community among those who represent so much of its diversity. Religious communities on college campuses can help students form their identities and experience a sense of belonging to a community, culture, and nation while also helping them find ways to create a common ground upon which they can address their particular interests and meet common needs in a way that builds healthy communities and relationships. This is the changing and multiple nature of ministry and religion at Yale. The dual and complex roles of university chaplain and senior pastor of the Church of Christ in Yale in this context were acknowledged by the two-part service of installation held in October of 1992 initiating my tenure as chaplain. The morning service focused on my becoming pastor of the Church of Christ in Yale University; the afternoon’s interfaith program installed me as chaplain. Concerning these two events, Wayne Meeks, Woolsey Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, observed: This service of installation differs in significant ways from the installation of the five chaplains who have preceded Jerry Streets in this office. Yale is an institution in which tradition is rightly held in honor . . . [but] two changes stand out. This is the first time that the installation of the Chaplain to Yale Univer-

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sity has been distinguished and separated from the installation of the same person to be Pastor of the Church of Christ in Yale University. After careful deliberation, we have decided to separate these two acts in order to acknowledge publicly a fundamental change in the religious life of Yale and of the nation in the time since the chapel in which we gather was dedicated more than a half century ago. It is no longer the case, under Yale’s by-laws pertaining to the Chaplaincy, that the same person must hold both offices. But that legal change merely reflects a deeper change in sensibilities, in our recognition of who we, the Yale community, are. To emphasize this underlying set of changes, the other departure from tradition we have planned for this service is the attempt to embody in our words and actions some representation of the great variety of traditions, practices, beliefs, and backgrounds of those who meet in and around this University. And through that variety we have tried at the same time to emphasize the growing sense of many at Yale that our life as an institution and as individuals within it is intimately linked with the life of the larger community around us. Images of what those services were about continue to play themselves out in the life of this university. The Tercentennial preaching event nine years later draws upon Yale’s historical and changing Christian institutional identity, which no longer reflects a theological and denominational orthodoxy. And although a significant number of people from the greater New Haven community regularly attend University Public Worship, the majority of those who do are not formal members of the con-

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gregation and have some affiliation with Yale as students, faculty, or staff. In her interviews with Yale undergraduates, faculty members, and administrators to explore their views of the culture of Yale today, Michele Dillon found that there are ‘‘continuities between the values at Yale today and those enshrined in its founding moment. . . . Although the accent on the expression of specific values may be different today than in the Yale of heretofore, . . . the values of responsible individualism and achievement, the founding ethic of the American nation, were very much in evidence. . . . [The interviews] also illuminate the dilemmas confronted in forging community in contexts in which cultural diversity is affirmed, and individual achievement is prized.’’ She continues: ‘‘It is also the case that while many people at Yale are not religious and eschew the language of spirituality, there is still a substantial proportion for whom religious beliefs and spiritual essences matter. Religious expression is assuredly more pluralistic than in the past, and indeed some commentators might see this as evidence of secularization. On the other hand, at Yale today religious expression is voluntary and yet still vibrant.’’ 4 This is the context in which preaching is done at Yale. Continuity and Change Yale maintains an Office of the University Chaplain and the Church of Christ in Yale as important parts of its historical identity, tradition, and educational mission. All other Ivy League schools have a university chaplain, but Yale is the only one that also has a resident congregation, which it established during the university’s first century. The chaplaincy and church at Yale honor the historical origins of the university while addressing the pastoral needs and spiritual interests of a religiously diverse

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community. The larger role of the chaplain within the university signals the university’s acknowledgment that religion and spirituality are important aspects of its corporate life and the lives of many students and other members of the Yale community. Those students, faculty, staff, and non–Yale-related parishioners of greater New Haven who attend University Public Worship find these services to be an important part of their religious and spiritual discernment and Yale experience. This worship service seeks to balance the tradition of the Church of Christ in Yale, the memory and symbolism of the institution, and the expectations of progressive Protestant Christianity placed upon a university church while genuinely acknowledging the religious pluralism and Christian diversity of the campus environment. Yale’s Tercentennial was a time of celebrating Yale’s history and seriously reflecting upon its role, strengths, and future goals as an institution. To invite a number of distinguished preachers to preach during University Public Worship as part of this historical occasion is another indication of the university’s mindfulness about its religious heritage and legacy. The messages of the sermons preached in Battell Chapel may reflect historical values and universal themes one could hear in sermons preached in other places. But the context of a university in which there are a number of religious communities also makes the messages distinctive. They signal the university’s intention to and interest in providing an opportunity for those who wish to nurture their faith and ways of living it out in the world. This reflects the sentiment to educate students to serve society and God found in Yale’s charter and marks the way the university acknowledges the traditions, continuities, and changes in its religious institutional character. Continuity and change are major dynamics of institutions of higher education and of the religious and spiritual life at Yale. Preaching and worship at Yale have been seen through three

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centuries as part of Yale life and one of the ways in which the spiritual lives of people in this community are enhanced as they cope with and experience change in the university, the wider society, and the world. The spiritual needs and religious interests of this community have grown more diverse and complex during the past one hundred years. It is a long-standing expectation that Yale will provide members of the Yale community, students, and others with opportunities for religious involvement and will embrace the traditions of the increasing variety of faith communities represented in its student body, faculty, and staff. It is hoped that preaching at Yale will in some way contribute to the spiritual growth of those attending its Public Worship and their service to the common good. The Sermons Each guest preacher received materials about Yale’s history and religious life and the Tercentennial preaching event. The following sermons, although revised, reflect what he or she preached and thought important for the Yale community to think about as it celebrated Yale’s birthday. A sermon read in a book is different from a sermon heard in its historical context with all of its trappings of the audience, the music, and the participation of others in the event. I had the pleasure and blessing of hearing each of our contributors preach the sermons published here, which are also available on audio and videotape. I have known most of them for many years. Their ministries are an inspiration to many in the United States and abroad. Many years ago I heard Howard Thurman, a Christian theologian and mystic, say that a sermon is great when it ‘‘wrestles’’ with a great idea. I initially asked my colleague at Yale, Cynthia

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Terry, to contribute an essay to this collection of sermons addressing the important and sometimes controversial issue here on campus, in religious communities, and in the wider society regarding people who are gay, lesbian, transgendered, or bisexual and upon which one might reflect when preparing to preach on this topic. I asked her upon further consideration to develop the essay into a sermon, which is in keeping with the contents of the book. I am grateful for her willingness to do so and for preaching this sermon during University Public Worship held in Battell Chapel. The sermons by Harry Adams, Jewelnel Davis, Robert Johnson, Victoria Matthews, Eileen Lindner, Barbara Taylor, and me were preached before September 11, 2001. No one preaching after that day could do so without dealing with those events or having them as a reference point for his or her sermon. Each preacher who was scheduled to preach after September 11—William Sloane Coffin Jr., Peter Gomes, John Vannorsdall, David Bartlett, William Willimon, Gardner Taylor, and Laura Geller —indicated to me that he or she revised the sermon in light of that event, addressing the larger themes of the occasion and the meaning of religious faith. These sermons therefore give some indication of how the attacks of September 11 affected the way those who preached after this horrific day thought about their Tercentennial messages. These sermons express a theological reaction to this historic tragedy. On the evening of September 11, hundreds of campus community members gathered on campus for an outdoor candlelight vigil. I offered a prayer, saying, in part: Our words cannot express our deep anguish. We are stunned, scared, anxious, angry, and bewildered as we attempt to steady ourselves in the midst of such an evil wind. We pray for those whose lives have

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been taken, those unaccounted for, and those who have suffered injuries . . . Life for all of us has been changed forever by the events of this day. Help us to be slow in drawing conclusions, avoid stereotyping and vengeful reactions. . . . Help us to support one another in our efforts to cope with this tragedy. May we channel our outrage into concrete acts of caring for and reaching out to one another. I shared the following statement at one of the many gatherings we held as a university community over the weeks that followed September 11, 2001: The meaning of the events of September 11 eludes us. We do not know how we as individuals and a nation may change as a result of the terror that has been visited upon us. Today our grief and mourning, unimaginable three weeks ago, are profound. A space, a hole, a void, an emptiness has been created in us by the attack and murder of people in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania twenty days ago. They were people who represented our global human community. The openness in our soul created by their loss will represent for many of us an aching void that will last our lifetime and beyond. It can also become simultaneously a sacred holding place where our personal grief, memory of our national tragedy and fear of global terrorism are held. Some of us as a result of September 11 will become over time different from how we are today in ways that are now unclear to us. All of us are chal-

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lenged to use our pain to transform evil into good and wrestle from destruction new life. Now, together we remember and mourn those whom we have lost and pray for those who loved them. We are thankful for all those who escaped and for those assisting in their recovery and healing. We seek through our use of familiar rituals and newly created ways of mourning, our hearts’ capacity to affirm the beauty of life, the goodness of people and to once again feel hope for the future they inspire in each of us. The biblical themes of these sermons vary as the preachers share their perspectives on the meaning of living a life of faith today. Theologically, these sermons cover a variety of matters, such as religious pluralism, secular verses religious values, sexual identity, and gender and racial equality. These issues are at the heart of the self-understanding of a research university rooted historically in a religious college. Jewelnel Davis, for example, discusses the status of women from the perspective of the Old Testament story of Hagar. Rabbi Laura Geller brings to this collection an important perspective on Judaism and women. (Women have been earning Yale graduate and professional degrees since the 1800s, although they were not admitted to Yale College until 1969). These are significant concerns confronting Yale, other colleges and universities, and societies around the world. Soon after I arrived at Yale as university chaplain, a distinguished faculty emeritus of biblical studies said to me: ‘‘Don’t forget now, preach the gospel. When I come to Battell, I want to hear the gospel and not a lecture!’’ His words were encouraging to me, as I hope these sermons will be to you.

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Notes 1. Michele Dillon, ‘‘The Learned and the Orthodox Revisited: Individualism, Religiosity, and Community at Yale,’’ 1999. 2. Ralph Henry Gabriel, Religion and Learning at Yale: The Church of Christ in the College and University, 1757–1957 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958), 2. 3. Ibid., 228. 4. Dillon, 43.

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They Left Everything and Followed Him Frederick J. Streets

february 4, 2001 Luke 5:1–11 Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore on the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to pull a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, ‘‘Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.’’ Simon answered, ‘‘Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.’’ When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘‘Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!’’ For he and all who were with them were amazed at the catch of fish that they

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had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.’’ When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him. Since Yale’s beginning, graduates of Yale College, many of whom were motivated by their religious convictions, and later in Yale’s history alumni of the Divinity School, have given remarkable service in various areas of public and private life here in the United States and around the world. Yale has nurtured distinguished religious leaders of the church, community, and academy throughout its history. There have been preachers among each generation of Yale graduates, some of whose voices have been heard here on this campus since the mid-1700s and in Battell Chapel after it was built in 1878. The religious history of Yale, and its contributions to the establishment and growth of our nation, is indeed rich. My remarks today will focus upon the idea of following Christ as implied in our text from Luke 5:1–11. First, I want to comment on my own journey of faith and describe generally some aspects of Yale’s religious history and religious life at Yale today and then talk about their relationship to some of the meanings of following Jesus as implied by the Scripture passage of Jesus inviting Simon Peter, James, and John to follow him. I intend my reflections to serve as a general introduction to some of the themes we may hear explored by the other Tercentennial preachers who will come to worship with us throughout this year. I attended a Lutheran church, which was next door to our home when I was a child. There, I committed to memory this ancient creed of the Christian church:

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I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit And born of the virgin Mary, He suffered under Pontius Pilate, Was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead, On the third day he rose again. He ascended into Heaven, And is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, The holy catholic Church, The communion of saints, The forgiveness of sins, The resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. My family and I later attended an African American Baptist church across town, and some months later I responded to the minister’s sermonic invitation to become a member of that church. A sense of family and community at that church where I spent my youth on the South Side of Chicago wrapped around me like a warm coat worn in the wintertime. The music, praying, and preaching combined to create a symphony of worship sounds that ushered me before God and God’s grace and left me feeling grateful, hopeful, and capable of making, in the words of my parents’ generation, ‘‘another day’s journey.’’ I have deep and abiding memories of growing up listening to evangelistic preaching and the ‘‘call and response style’’ of many African American church services. The Christian nurture I re-

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ceived in my youth helped to shape my identity and provided me with a view of the world and an ethical and moral compass that guided me through high school and college in the Midwest before attending Yale Divinity School. Those early experiences encouraged me to have faith in God and serve humankind. Those who founded this university and later the university church were motivated to do so partly by their vision of how to best serve God. They wanted to educate and train men to serve the church and state, teaching them their understanding of citizenship and vision of society. They were profoundly influenced by their Christian beliefs and expected their students to see themselves as servants of God and to later, after graduating, assume leadership roles in society and government. Yale’s faculty members taught their students Christian values and ethics along with history, science, philosophy, languages, and math in their effort to nurture their Christian character. The Reverend Thomas Clap was elected rector, what we now call president, of Yale College in 1740. This is what he said was the aim of a Yale education: ‘‘Above all, have an eye to the great end of all your studies, which is to obtain the clearest conception of Divine things and to lead you to a saving knowledge of God in his Son Jesus Christ.’’ 1 Legacies of Yale’s religious heritage include this historic church—the Church of Christ in Yale—founded by President Clap in 1757; Yale Divinity School, established in 1824; and the Office of the University Chaplain, established in 1927. The religious and spiritual activities of students here today are voluntary, vibrant, and represent the religious pluralism we would expect to find on many college campuses. Yale’s strong history as an institution where religion thrives is reflected in the diversity within and among the numerous student religious communities and the multifaith student organizations on campus. The founders of Yale could not have envisioned the variety and

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complexity of the secular society now and the global community of which Yale is a part and reflects. My presence here as university chaplain represents what some people in former generations could either only hope for or not at all imagined. I think about this when I reflect upon how my vocational path, religious and cultural background, and the nature of the ministry here at Yale resonate. God acts in ways we do not expect, and we are not always initially alert to God’s spirit being a part of the changes we experience and see happening around us. Many students, as well as faculty and staff members, at Yale today seek to further understand, balance, and integrate their academic interests with their religious or spiritual concerns. The years they spend here as students help to shape their identity and embrace values that will influence their behavior. This is a challenge for them as Yale is a community composed of people from diverse religious, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. Students have to adjust to and accommodate Yale’s culture while negotiating the variety of ways life is lived and how God is thought about and worshipped here. They decide for themselves what to believe and what kind of life they want to live. We as the Church of Christ in Yale, like those members of this church who came before us, are stewards of an ever compelling and revealing gospel of Jesus Christ. Is it a coincidence or by divine providence that as a university church community we have a text about following Jesus as we begin our celebration of the Tercentennial of Yale? You never know when something might happen that changes your life. Our gospel text for today is a story about fishing and people who fish. Jesus approached Simon Peter, who was in his boat in shallow water, and asked him if he could sit in his boat to teach the crowd who had come to hear him speak. Jesus, perhaps noticing that Simon had no fish in his boat, urged him to launch farther out to fish where the water was deep. Simon Peter seems

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to be familiar with Jesus because he refers to him as ‘‘Master’’ when he responds rather pessimistically to Jesus’ request. Peter, from the very beginning of his relationship with Jesus, displays fear and doubt about what Jesus has to offer. Simon Peter was smart or intuitive enough, or both, to follow Jesus’ urging. To his surprise and the surprise of his brothers and those around them, they caught more fish than their nets and Simon Peter’s boat could hold without causing it to sink. We are told that when they returned to shore with Jesus, ‘‘they left everything and followed him.’’ In a similar account found in Matthew 4 and Mark 1, Jesus invites Simon Peter, James, and John to follow him and become advocates of his mission. I suspect that it is easier to follow Jesus than it is to become one of his disciples. We are told by this text that of all the people who may have witnessed the event, only Simon Peter and his brother followed Jesus. Simon Peter, while attending to the tasks of mending his nets after an unproductive day of fishing, is encountered by Jesus. Little did he know that he would soon be invited to discontinue what he was doing and pursue another life course. I am struck by Simon Peter’s two responses to Jesus in this story about fishing. The first is his contrition as he tells Jesus that he is a sinner. He realizes who Jesus is by the miraculous catch of fish and expresses his awareness of his own limitations. This I think compelled his second response to Jesus, which was to follow him after they return to shore. What does his ‘‘following’’ Jesus mean? Some writers suggest that such a response was not so uncommon for the time. Young men would not hesitate to discontinue what they were doing in order to be tutored by a rabbi. This could account for Simon Peter having a frame of reference for Jesus before he saw him at the shore. His attraction to Jesus seems to have something to do with his desire to change himself rather than to change his world around

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him. I think he remained a fisherman throughout his life, but being a follower of Jesus became a primary reference point for how he lived his life. Simon Peter saw his sin in the face of a miracle, but Jesus saw Simon Peter’s potential. This dynamic of Simon Peter’s shortcomings and Jesus’ love for him would characterize their relationship. Perhaps the time that he and the others later spent with Jesus during the early stages of their relationship was a period when they became more aware of their fears, discomforts, desires, and attractions. In those tutoring moments, maybe Jesus awoke in them a new and different desire and attraction that became a light shining on a new pathway of life for them. Peter went through many changes in an effort to control his anger and anxiety and to manage his fear and have some of his initial hungers fed. They often got in his way of meeting some of the expectations Jesus had of him and he had of himself. Jesus told him when they first met, ‘‘do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.’’ Simon Peter’s life reminds us how complex we are and how, in spite of our best intentions, we can be inconsistent with showing our fidelity to Jesus. Peter had conflicts with some of the other disciples and denied Christ at crucial moments, yet he emerges as a leader of the early church who is believed to have died as a martyr of the faith. His life reminds us that we can change for the better and experience the grace and love of God. I know at times this is hard for us to imagine or experience. Simon Peter’s life gives us hope for our own path as followers of Christ. Change of this kind transforms our core identity or enables us to discover and act out of a greater sense of self. It is like polishing a precious piece of metal in order to remove the layers of dirt and tarnish that hide its true identity, brilliance, and worth. So much can hide our beauty and calling from others and ourselves. The relationship and sense of community that developed be-

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tween Jesus and Simon Peter and the others who followed Jesus nurtured their capacity to become disciples—to cast and mend nets of invitation and be sustained on the journey by a new sense of themselves and community created in Jesus Christ. To discern what it means to be God’s servant, to seek God’s light, is a great and grand invitation offered to us by Christ. Sometimes it takes courage to change, but it always requires faith and trust in God and in life and in ourselves—and a vision of what could be. Some of the disciples came to understand the meaning of this new life over time, as does anyone who follows Christ. Their commitment to a life as disciples of Jesus grew from their occasional doubts and failure as followers of Jesus as well as from their trust in him. It is astonishing what can be done to and through us when we trust God. Men and women through the centuries have asserted that because they encountered Christ they experienced God’s love and it changed their lives and gave it meaning. This is not an argument to be won, or a proposition to be proved. It is their witness and description of how they experienced life. This testimony is not new. It is found in the lives of those whose stories leap from the New Testament like James and John, sons of Zebedee; Simon Peter and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; Mary and Elizabeth; Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, and Paul. A great cloud of witnesses surrounds us, and their names form a list that extends to the present. The first song I sang in public had the lyrics ‘‘Lord I want to be a Christian, in my heart.’’ We find God in our hearts, and it is from the heart that we follow God and serve one another. Maybe this is what James, John, and Simon Peter were fishing for that day when they caught nothing, when Jesus asked them if he could sit in their boat and then helped them to catch a new meaning of their lives. Their decision to follow Jesus set in motion for them a life of discovering what it meant for them

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to become his disciples. We have a record of their failures and successes as his followers. So it will be with each of us. People over the centuries who heard the gospel preached have embraced and wrestled with God. This often led to changes in their intrinsic beliefs, values, emotions, and behavior and living a life of ongoing personal transformation. Some of them—like Isabella, who became Sojourner Truth, and Araminta Ross, who is known as Harriet Tubman—were deeply motivated and sustained by their religious faith in their fight against slavery. John Wesley’s religious experience and leadership led to the founding of the Methodist Church, and the Christian commitments of Dr. Martin Luther King found their expression in his leadership of the modern-day civil and human rights movements. Very few of us are led to live out our faith in such a public way, as did these women and men. Many people who experience God’s claim upon their lives may not change their jobs, but they become changed people with a set of values and way of living that is often counter to the message the culture gives about what constitutes a meaningful and successful life. Our responses to the call of God affect our values, the choices we make, and how we live our lives. Even if nothing changes about our external circumstances, how we see other people, life, and ourselves is filtered by our belief and trust in God. We not only discover throughout our journey an understanding of what it means to follow Christ and some of its implications, but also the strength to live faithfully. We are to trust God along the way. Jesus spoke two thousand years ago to our ancestors in faith. I believe God has not stopped revealing to the world God’s ways. He speaks to us now and will also speak to future generations. Those in the future who respond to God’s call will make new expressions of the Christian faith. Their spiritual hunger to connect to God and one another will be fed. This is an essence and reach of the human soul.

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Christian preaching is always about how God in Christ can satisfy this longing. This university, with its noble and invaluable mission in the world, stands in the shadow of this glorious witness that God has made to the world through Jesus Christ. In the tale A Father’s Story, by Andre Dubus, the character Father Paul says: ‘‘Belief is believing in God; faith is believing that God believes in you.’’ The cross reminds us that God has taken our sin and us seriously. In Jesus Christ, God died and rose from death to restore our hope, to reconcile our brokenness from God and one another. The sacrifices and discoveries we make on our journey of faith help us to become new even in the midst of what also makes life for us a burden and blessing. We experience this more richly when we are willing to move into the deep waters of living our faith and there discover a new depth of its meaning and of our lives. I think this is what characterizes the faith of the disciples and many of those whom we may admire as spiritual models. The suffering and redemptive acts of God in Jesus Christ offer those who believe in Christ a peaceful spirit, a meaningful life, and promise of eternal joy. Our faith in this sustains, moves, and guides us toward an unknown future. This is the heart of faith and the message of preaching in any age. It speaks of the joy and hope of faith that enables people to leave everything that is familiar and unproductive and follow Christ. This is the good news for all of God’s people. Those who seek here to enlarge their experience of the life of the spirit may also discover the Christian faith as a way of life. This has always been at the heart of worship and preaching at Yale. This university stands in the historical shadows and promise of this witness. Amen. Note

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1. Ralph Henry Gabriel, Religion and Learning at Yale: The Church of Christ in the College and University, 1757–1957 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958), 12.

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Blessed Are the Poor Harry B. Adams

february 11, 2001 Luke 6:17–26 He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them. Then he looked up at his disciples and said: ‘‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be fulfilled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe

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to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to false prophets.’’ An article in the New York Times recently described the desperate efforts that some parents make in order to get their children into the ‘‘right’’ nursery school. There seems to be widespread conviction that if the children don’t get into a particular nursery school, they will never make it into a ‘‘right’’ elite college. There also seems to be the conviction that if children don’t get into a ‘‘right’’ college, their lives will be blighted at best, and not worth living at worst. Obviously, at least to some, this university would be included on any self-respecting list of ‘‘right’’ colleges. After all, we’re in the midst of celebrating three hundred years of history for this venerable institution. And so we find ourselves in a community to which many people come because they believe that a Yale education will equip them for great careers, will enable them to make a lot of money, will give them the confidence to function in a complex world, and will assure that they will create successful lives. Of course, that is all true. Most of us are convinced that a Yale education provides a rich resource for a person, opens up wonderful new worlds, provides a network of useful contacts, and develops the talents and abilities that a person can use to great advantage. The cartoon is not totally out of touch that shows a parent on commencement day saying, ‘‘I’ve got a big investment in this boy and I expect a good return on it.’’ In this Yale context, the words of Jesus we read a moment ago sound a discordant note: ‘‘Blessed are you poor, blessed are you that hunger now, blessed are you that weep now, blessed are you when others hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil.’’ Luke records these words of Jesus in what is known as the

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Sermon on the Plain, for Luke writes that Jesus ‘‘came down and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples.’’ The preaching of Jesus recorded by Luke here clearly relates to the sermon recorded by Matthew in what we know as the Sermon on the Mount, for Matthew writes that Jesus ‘‘went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him’’ (Matthew 5:1). But there are more differences between Luke and Matthew than just locating Jesus on a plain or on a mountain. The words of Jesus as reported by Luke have a hard edge, which Matthew has softened: Luke: ‘‘Blessed are you poor.’’ Matthew: ‘‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’’ Luke: ‘‘Blessed are you that hunger now.’’ Matthew: ‘‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.’’ Before we resort to what may seem the easier readings in Matthew, let’s at least face the challenge of trying to discern what the words of Jesus as recorded by Luke might mean for us, especially for us in this affluent, competitive, able, talented, bright, gifted, success-oriented community. ‘‘Blessed are you poor.’’ I suspect we don’t really believe that. I suspect that in all honesty we wonder how Jesus could have said that. Blessed are the poor? No! No! The poor can’t get enough to eat for their families. The poor can’t provide an education for their children. The poor wander the streets without a home. The poor are sorely deprived. Many poor are understandably bitter that they live in the midst of a community where other people have so much more than they do. ‘‘Blessed are you poor.’’ We don’t think so. In trying to discern what such a word of Jesus might mean for us, we can begin by reflecting on some things it doesn’t mean. It certainly doesn’t mean that the rest of us can happily abandon

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the poor to their plight because they are in such a blessed condition. It certainly doesn’t mean that we can create a healthy social order by widening the gap between the poor and the wealthy. It certainly doesn’t mean that we the affluent can decide there are no justice issues at stake in how the poor are treated in our society. Earlier in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus had read from the prophet Isaiah that he had been anointed ‘‘to preach good news to the poor.’’ Jesus said that with him the Scripture had been fulfilled, and he certainly didn’t mean that the poor should just be happy with their blighted condition. If we have fairly identified something of what Jesus didn’t mean when he declared ‘‘Blessed are you poor,’’ just what did he mean when he said that? As we seek understanding of the word of Jesus, perhaps it would be helpful to note something that Jesus never said. In the Gospels, there are a number of sayings where Jesus talks about people who are blessed. ‘‘Blessed is the one who takes no offense at me. Blessed are the eyes, which see what you see. Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.’’ But Jesus never said, ‘‘Blessed are the rich.’’ Let’s be clear. Of course riches and material possessions bring good things: comfort, opportunity, pleasure, position, power. Of course the father in the cartoon has made a reasonable investment in the expectation that his son’s education will pay off. Jesus never said, ‘‘Blessed are the rich.’’ It is absolutely clear in the Gospels that being wealthy and having possessions are no guarantee of what Jesus would call the blessed life. In fact, the Gospels are quite clear that while riches are not absolute impediments to such a life, they raise the risk that the blessed life will be missed. You remember that Jesus warned that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom of God. When his hearers wanted to know who then could be saved, Jesus told them that it was only by the grace of

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God that the rich would make it. ‘‘Blessed are the poor,’’ for in significant ways they are spared the awful risks of the rich that they will miss the blessings of God. Poverty in itself is not to be equated with the blessings that Good can bestow, but ‘‘Blessed are the poor,’’ for they may have truer discernment of the ways in which God sustains and blesses God’s people. In this Tercentennial year, we celebrate the achievements of this university in the pursuit of knowledge, in the quest for excellence, in the educating of men and women. It is a place where people come to be equipped for successful living. And surely at this moment it is the task of this community of the faithful within the university, this worshipping community, to speak the word of challenge of the blessing of God—just how does that blessing get manifest in human experience? What is the blessed life? As we noted a moment ago, Jesus talked about it in various ways: blessed are those who are not offended by him, blessed are those who can really see him, blessed are those who can hear and respond to what God is saying, blessed are those who have enough compassion to weep for others, blessed are those who have the courage to risk the wrath of others by living out the love and truth of God made known in Jesus Christ. These words of Jesus are one way to think about the blessed life. But let’s see if we can define and illustrate the blessed life in actual human experience. When I was an undergraduate in Pierson College, a man named Andrew Morehouse was a fellow of the college and a distinguished professor of French. I believe that Andrew Morehouse lived a blessed life, in part because my relationship with him blessed my life. When he died a few years ago, this tribute to him was published: ‘‘There are many who could attest to the letters written, the jobs found, the money lent, and the burdens carried by Mr. Morehouse. It was the unusual in the rushed and

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busy existence to take time out for the kind little attentions that make a difference in other people’s lives.’’ In her book Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott tells the story ‘‘about a man getting drunk at a bar in Alaska. He tells the bartender how he recently lost whatever faith he’d had after his twin-engine plane crashed in the tundra. ‘Yeah,’ he says bitterly, ‘I lay there in the wreckage, hour after hour, nearly frozen to death, crying out for God to save me, praying for help with every ounce of my being, but He didn’t raise a finger to help. So I’m done with the whole charade.’ ‘But,’ said the bartender squinting an eye at him, ‘you’re here. You were saved.’ ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ says the man, ‘because finally some goddamn Eskimo came along.’ ’’ Blessed are the Eskimos, instrument of the grace of God even for those too obtuse to get it. Hear the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn as he draws for us his picture of the blessed life: Do not pursue what is illusory—property and position: all that is gained at the expense of our nerves, decade after decade, and is confiscated in but one night. Live with a steady superiority over life—don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness: it is all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold, and if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, and if our eyes can see and your ears hear, then whom should you envy. And why? Open your eyes and cleanse your heart—and prize above all else in the world those who love you. One final experience from a man who affirmed the blessed life granted to him, a man who illuminates better than most the

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word of Jesus, ‘‘Blessed are the poor.’’ Hans Lilje, a Lutheran pastor, was a prisoner of the Gestapo for many months. He survived, and wrote of that experience: ‘‘At this extreme limit of human life it becomes clear why God is with those who are despised, outcast, tortured, imprisoned, disinherited, and solitary . . . at this period in my life I began to understand that God can only reveal His mercy to one who is in the depths of suffering and desolation. Hence one who God has led into this school of knowledge can only praise Him for this experience, as the most wonderful spiritual gift that he has ever received.’’ Hear once more the word of the Lord: ‘‘Blessed are the poor.’’

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Death in the Academy Robert L. Johnson

february 25, 2001 1 Corinthians 15:20–26 But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in his own order; Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then come the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. I want to speak this morning about death in the academy: both the death of dying and what Walker Percy termed ‘‘the living death.’’ After some forty years of ministry in a university setting, I have come to the conclusion that the occasion of death is the single most teachable (or should I say ‘‘preachable’’?) moment for a university chaplain. Of course, my seminary education should have taught me that. Paul Tillich forcefully argued that there are three basic threats to human existence: death, guilt, and meaninglessness.

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Death was the primary threat to ancient civilization and was addressed by both Greek philosophy and Egyptian religion. And in the Bible, both testaments speak a word against the power of death and for life. For Jews, the eternal toast is l’chaim—‘‘to life!’’ Death always intrudes on our sense of security and well-being. It is Browning’s ‘‘sunset touch.’’ It especially comes as an unwelcome shock to the young, whose lives are full of promise and seeming invulnerability. The most challenging moments of ministry come when we are faced with grieving parents who have lost a son or daughter on the brink of great possibilities. Death and life are always before us as constants and we are pressed to choose. And yet we have myriad ways of evading and denying death—some of them religious. The accent in our education and our popular therapies usually falls on unlimited progress without acknowledging that fixed outer limit of death. For many months now, Tuesdays with Morrie has been a popular book with students. It recalls the dying days of a philosophy professor at Brandeis as he shares his wisdom with a student alumnus. It is often cited by students in their personal essays for admission to our universities. It has touched a nerve among the young and pointed to the awareness of life’s limits as an opening to question what really matters. And academics have recently read Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, which is a fictional account of Bellow’s friendship with Allan Bloom, who taught at both Cornell and Yale and provoked us with The Closing of the American Mind. The book chronicles Bloom’s slow descent into death by AIDS, the awkwardness of confronting the end. Some years ago, William Barrett, who taught philosophy at Columbia, wrote a book titled The Truants: Adventures among the Intellectuals, in which he noted the disorientation academics experience in the face of death. They are at a loss to find a lan-

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guage or meaning system to voice their loss or affirm some hope. Barrett writes: ‘‘Death is the one part of life where a thoroughly secular attitude seems to hit us as crudely inadequate. Whatever our sophistication, in the death of someone close to us, we are thrown back into the same emotions as primitive man. Death thrusts us into the great darkness, the mystery that envelopes all that is, and we have to reach back for a language with which men could once address themselves to those matters.’’ For Barrett, that language was surely found in Scripture and especially the psalms. But for many in the university, that language is a foreign tongue, and they are reduced to silence, mordant humor, or nihilism. I have always held that death is the one point at which humor fails. Reinhold Niebuhr argued that humor and faith were two ways of dealing with the incongruities of life: humor deals with the immediate incongruities (the fool who thinks he is the king), and faith deals with the ultimate incongruities (the suffering of the innocent and death). Niebuhr held that laughter should be heard in the outer courts of religion, but when you hit the hard spots, laughter turns to prayer and humor to faith. No doubt that humor is an ally of faith and enables many to put their life into some perspective. Think of Abraham Lincoln and the great burdens on him from the turmoil of both his family and a nation divided in war. He puzzled many of his friends by his capacity to tell a joke in the face of such a dark horizon. Carl Sandburg said of him, ‘‘daily is death and despair stood off by those who know how and when to laugh.’’ But mordant humor can prove flippant, and Stoic courage can only go so far. For Christians, something more is a possibility. For Saint Paul, in that earliest statement of resurrection faith in I Corinthians 15, death is more than when the body wears out and that remarkable muscle called the heart that first started flexing in our mother’s womb shuts down. I think of that statement

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of Paul’s that I saw on primitive road signs across the South— ‘‘The wages of sin is death.’’ It doesn’t make sense if ‘‘death’’ is just ‘‘dying’’—for that is the fate of all of us. No, for Paul, you did not have to die to get reborn. Like Luther, he understood sin as ‘‘the heart curved in on itself.’’ A posture that led to a deadening constriction of life, a closure to the new, to possibilities of change and redemption. Sin was death, the death of the soul. In our day, the novelist Walker Percy understood this Pauline truth better than most. In his novel The Second Coming, set in an upscale golfing community in North Carolina, he has a contemporary man on a desperate search for God. He dares God to show Himself, and in the end does not get what he asked for but instead determines that the enemy is death—not the ‘‘death of dying but the living death.’’ Then he lays out for us the many forms of death:

. . . . .

‘‘Death in the guise of christianity is not going to prevail over me. if christ brought life, why do the churches smell of death? ‘‘Death in the form of the new christendom in carolina is not going to prevail over me. if the born-again are the twice born, i am holding out for the third round. ‘‘Death in the guise of belief is not going to prevail over me, for believers now believe anything and everything and do not love the truth, are in fact in despair of truth, and that is death. ‘‘Death in the guise of unbelief is not going to prevail over me, for unbelievers believe nothing, not because truth does not exist but because they have already chosen not to believe, and would not believe, even if the living truth stood before them, and that is death. ‘‘Death in the form of -isms and -asms shall not pre-

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vail over me—orgasm, enthusiasm, liberalism, conservatism, communism, buddhism, americanism—for an -ism is only another way of despairing of the truth.’’ Percy’s litany suggests the possibility of a program for those who find the academic arena an inhospitable place for faithful living. He was a conservative Catholic who did not claim to have the final answers, but he names the enemy in our midst. He knew like Kierkegaard how easy it was for scholars and philosophers to create dream houses of the mind but live in hovels. The modern research university is a wondrous thing. You can find virtually every available option among believers and dogmatists of every stripe. It is a veritable pantheon of the gods of our culture, and the Christian context that informed the founding of Yale and Cornell is now much diminished. As Bill Reading wrote in his book The University in Ruins, the central virtues of the modern university are tolerance and excellence. It is possible to embrace both and dodge the ultimate truth claims. Where does truth-telling come in? What about Lux/Libertas? We are chock-full of options but less certain of a sense of grounding values and enduring truths. Are university chapels capable of nurturing liberation and life in such a setting? That is our problem: not the death of dying but the living death, the force that keeps us playing the academic game on the safe side, embracing the conventional pieties and the creed of social and political correctness but not daring to expose our worldview to a transcendent possibility. To confront and contest the prevailing orthodoxies, to engage in the wrenching moral ambiguities of the new technology is a mission demanding both courage and intellect. There is a daunting mural by the Mexican artist Jose Clemente Orozco that adorns the walls of the Baker Library at Dartmouth. I have often wondered how students could study

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under the gaze of that fierce indictment of academic life. One panel shows a skeletal figure giving birth to baby skeletons while professorial skeletons in full academic regalia attend the birth of dry-bones begetting dry-bones! Death begetting death. (The painting graces the cover of Page Smith’s book, Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America.) There are reasons to rejoice. Faithful voices are being raised in the university and in our culture. There is a growing humility in the face of vexing social, political, and technological challenges, and creative responses are appearing both within and without the university. One of the great virtues of the academy is its belief in human fallibility. The opposite of faith is not doubt—but unbridled certainty! The word of hope for those of us who live and work in the university and who attempt to bring some enlivening faith to the mere naturalism and materialism is to recall what first drew us to these enclaves of learning. There is a marvelous clue in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, when the young King Arthur (Wort) goes to his mentor Merlin to ask what one does when things go wrong and you feel sad and confused. Merlin, after much huffing and puffing, offers this wisdom: The best thing when you are sad . . . is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder in your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewer of baser minds. There is only one thing to do—learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or

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distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing!’’ That is the great gift of three centuries of learning at Yale. Lux/Libertas. Light and freedom to generations who have passed through all this expensive real estate and found in classroom and library—and one hopes, under these steeples—some measure of enduring wisdom. We are here to learn—to open our hearts and minds to God’s grace, which is ubiquitous in this world, to learn to lose a few battles and to keep our best friends, to let go of that heart and mind curved in upon itself, to entertain heresy occasionally, and finally to know with Walker Percy the name of our enemy. Then, we choose life and serve life. L’chaim! To life. Amen. Let it be!

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Truth Is Told This Is Our Story

Jewelnel Davis

march 25, 2001 Genesis 16:6–10 But Abram said to Sarai, ‘‘Your slave-girl is in your power; do to her as you please.’’ Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she ran away from her. The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. And he said, ‘‘Hagar, slave-girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?’’ She said, ‘‘I am running away from my mistress Sarai.’’ The angel of the Lord said to her, ‘‘Return to your mistress, and submit to her.’’ The angel of the Lord also said to her, ‘‘I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude.’’ On this occasion I want to reflect upon the importance of hearing the story of women as part of our common life as a community of faith. When the names are called of the great forebears of the Jewish tradition and the Christian faith, the litany almost invariably begins, ‘‘Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’’ If efforts are being made to be inclusive of forefathers and foremothers, the litany may include matriarchs of significant importance. So the inclu-

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sive litany goes ‘‘Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel’’ . . . Hagar? Hagar, a woman able to discern and name the God of Israel, a stellar witness to a faith that is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen, the one who bore the first son of Abraham is not usually named among the most worthy witnesses of our faith. Hagar, an Egyptian woman, an African woman, a slave, must be a part of the litany—a part of the story if faith is to be understood, if our history is to be complete, if truth is to be told. In Genesis 13, the covenant between God and Abraham is established: ‘‘The Lord said to Abram . . . ‘Lift up your eyes, and look from the place where you are, northward and southward, eastward and westward; for all the land which you see I will give to you and to your descendants forever. I will make your descendants as the dust of the earth. Arise, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I will give it to you.’ ’’ Abraham, encouraged and empowered by the word of God, by the covenant that God made with him, moved his tent to the promised land, built an altar to his protector, and waited for the fulfillment of all that his Lord, Yahweh, had promised. Years passed, during which time war occurred and the dreams and hopes of the people were deferred. They demonstrated moral strength and practiced restraint, and still a portion of the promise remained unfulfilled because Sarah, Abraham’s wife, bore him no children. God promised Abraham posterity, yet he had no child and therefore no heir to be chosen as the promised people of God. Abraham, faithful but puzzled, weary by the passage of time and the limits of sight and imagination, questioned God (Genesis 15) when God came to him in a vision, ‘‘O Lord God, what will Thou give me, for I continue childless.’’ More plainly, he asks God to step up! What is going on? It is time for you, God, to meet your responsibilities! Where are my children?

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What is the problem? What is your plan? Sometimes we like to tell God what God already knows! Responding to him, God brought Abraham outside and said, ‘‘Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them . . . so shall your descendants be.’’ Have you seen the night sky? Have you looked up into darkness and seen light? Look left, look right, look north, and look south; stars illuminate the dark sky with magnificent and abundant light. Away from city lights, Abraham looked up, and he was amazed. He saw God’s tapestry! The sky was dark and bright —every star unique and in its own place. And yet, there was room. There was room for more than Abraham could count. In the light of the darkness, Abraham’s sight was sharp and clear. His vision unobstructed—still childless, Abraham saw his posterity, he saw his children and future generations. Abraham saw a chosen nation in the light of the promise of God and in that moment believed God to be a God also of the future. Ten years passed, and when Abraham was eighty-five years old he and his wife Sarah still had no child. We know about time. Chronos is time we measured by the ticking of a clock, the changing of a calendar, the cycles of the seasons. Time is our concern as more and more is demanded of us from our families and jobs, which for some of us do not pay adequately. We are all challenged to balance work, family, and personal time. We experience time as moving slowly toward full realization of equality between men and women. We wonder how long it will be before black and Latino children, women and men, will be acknowledged for their talents, skills, and achievements and by the content of their character rather than by racial and gender stereotypes. As time passed Abraham and Sarah found their patience wearing thin, and they set aside divine promise. Sarah took action. She had an African woman, an Egyptian handmaiden

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named Hagar, who served her personal needs. Sarah decided that Hagar would be her means to achieve motherhood. Hagar would conceive and bear Abraham’s child. That child would then be claimed according to custom and law as Sarah’s child and Abraham’s heir. Sarah would be a surrogate for God—take God’s place in the fulfillment of divine promise. Hagar would become a vessel, and Abraham would finally have his son. The Genesis account bears no record of Hagar’s agreement to surrogacy for Sarah and Abraham. Her consent was not sought or given because she was a slave. Sarah and Abraham are successful in achieving their goal. Hagar conceives the child that Sarah believed God had denied her. Sarah and Abraham had not anticipated all of the consequences of their decision. According to the laws of the time, Hagar was now a second wife for Abraham. As a second wife Hagar experienced some liberation, some freedom to express feelings, make known her opinions, her personality, and her personhood. Abraham and Sarah had not counted on Hagar’s new insight, her understanding of her new status—she now had the right to express contempt. We must remember that every freedom counts. Hagar now looked upon Sarah with contempt. Confronted with Hagar’s attitude toward Sarah, Abraham reminded Sarah of the power she still had over Hagar. She could not banish her from their land, but she could do almost anything short of it. Hagar was still in large measure at the will and mercy of Sarah and Abraham. Abraham and Sarah considered only their power over Hagar and not the child that she carried in her womb. Abraham said to Sarah, ‘‘Do to her as you please.’’ Sarah dealt with her harshly, violently, abusively. When she could no longer bear the cruelty, in sheer desperation, Hagar fled the land of Yahweh’s promise, the land of Sarah and Abraham. She fled from the oppression of two we name as worthy witnesses of faith, as forefather and fore-

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mother, examples of our faith. She tried to find her way out of bondage, away from the Israelites back to Egypt, back to Africa, back to her kin, back to her home. In Genesis 16:7–8 we are told: ‘‘The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness on the way to Shur. And he said, ‘Hagar, maid of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?’ ’’ Commentators generally agree that the reference to the angel of the Lord is actually an earthly or physical manifestation of God. So it is God who meets Hagar at the spring near Shur. God told Hagar to return to Sarah. I would have said emphatically no to God, but Hagar listens. And God makes a promise to her not unlike the covenant he has made to Abraham: ‘‘The angel of the Lord also said to her, ‘I will so greatly multiply your descendants that they cannot be numbered for multitude. Behold, you are with child, and shall bear a son; you shall call his name Ishmael; because the Lord has given heed to your affliction.’ ’’ Witnessing to what is unseen, intangible, or hoped for, Hagar, with the power and assurance of faith, in Genesis called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, ‘‘Thou art a God of seeing.’’ In the wilderness by the well on the way back to bondage, Hagar gives thanks for the blessings of God’s promise, presence, and protection. She returned to Sarah and Abraham and gave birth to Abraham’s first son Ishmael when Abraham was eighty-six years old. For thirteen years Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar believed that Ishmael was the designated heir to God’s covenant with Abraham. But what about kairos, sacred time, that time that God keeps? In God’s time the ways and mysteries of God often exceed our understanding. Ishmael, according to God’s plan, would not be the one to inherit the covenant that God made with Abraham. Abraham would have a second son, and that son,

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conceived by Sarah and nursed by her, would become the true heir of the covenant. Abraham was one hundred years old when his son Isaac was born. Hagar’s story continues: ‘‘And the child grew and was weaned; and Abraham made a great feast of the day Isaac was weaned. But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, ‘Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not be heir with my son Isaac’ ’’ (Genesis 21:10). Do you have the courage to imagine that the forebears of our faith, Abraham and Sarah, cast out Hagar and Ishmael? Abraham and Sarah cast Hagar and Ishmael out into the wilderness without escort, without refuge, without compassion. Ishmael was about sixteen years old by now, a young boy who had lived his whole life as heir to a promise of posterity and wealth. And one day, early in the morning, the Scripture tells us this boy’s father, Abraham, gives bread and water to Hagar and sends her away. Hagar leaves with a skin of water on her shoulder and her sixteen-year-old son. It is hard to see and painful to imagine this scene in Genesis 21: ‘‘When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down over against him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, ‘Let me not look upon the death of my child.’ As she sat over against him, the child lifted up his voice and wept.’’ Can we imagine her despair, suffering, and pain? As she heard her son’s cries, her desperate hope was that she only be spared the sight of the moment of his death. God hears Hagar’s sighs. And she is lost in wilderness, but she is also listening. Hagar is listening for the moment when her son’s cries cease, for the moment when he is dead. God is also listening: ‘‘And God heard the voice of the lad; and the angel of God called Hagar from heaven and said to her,

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‘What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not; for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is.’ ’’ God heard the audible cries of Ishmael and the inaudible agony of this mother, Hagar. Recall Psalm 46: ‘‘Be still and know that I am God!’’ Hagar is still. She is free from the turbulence and commotion of hopelessness. She is at peace with the reality of an Eternal and Most High God—a God who straddles time and eternity. She is blessed in the assurance that God hears the cries of his children and God heard the cries of Ishmael. God heard the silent cries of Hagar’s soul. She is still and safe in the faith that God hears even the whispered murmurs of a weary soul. Sometimes we have to be still to set in motion the very foundations of our faith. Sometimes we have to become silent in order to speak and to be heard. Hear our prayers, oh Lord, hear our prayers, oh Lord. ‘‘What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not; for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is.’’ Can we envision this moment? What troubles you Hagar? I know your affliction, your agony, your needs; I know your terror. I know the covenant I made with you at the spring near Shur when you still carried the son of Abraham in your womb. I named your son Ishmael, which means God hears! God hears! You called my name! You called my name, ‘‘the God of seeing.’’ Fear not! ‘‘‘Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him fast with your hand; for I will make him a great nation.’ Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. . . . [Ishmael] grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow’’ (Genesis 21:18–20). Hagar’s experiences are a part of the truth that must be told about the lives of many women. Their stories are filled with examples of the abusive use of power, racism, humiliation, victimization, ethnocentrism, violence, and oppression. Their lives are also stories about responsibility, freedom, and moral courage, collective and individual justice. It is a story of faith. Hagar’s story is our history, our story. Those who worship here in this

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university are inspired and challenged to speak of God’s judgment of and love for us all. It is the story of our forebears, Abraham and Sarah. Hagar’s story is a ‘‘test of faith.’’ She named our God ‘‘the God of seeing,’’ and this is the larger truth about our faith in God—God sees, listens, and acts on our behalf in our time and on God’s time. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. When calling the names of the witnesses of our faith, let us call the name of the Egyptian, the African woman, the slave of Sarah and Abraham, the mother of Ishmael, Hagar. May her story enlighten and encourage us all. Thanks be to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel. Thanks be to the God of Hagar and Ishmael. Amen.

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Be As Christ in the World Victoria Matthews

april 22, 2001 John 19:19–31 Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, ‘‘Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.’’ Many of the Jews read this inscription, because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city; and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek. Then the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate. ‘‘Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’ ’’ Pilate answered, ‘‘What I have written I have written.’’ When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his cloths and divided them into four parts, one for each soldier. They also took his tunic; now the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from the top. So they said to one another, ‘‘Let us not tear it, but cast lots for to see who will get it.’’ This was to fulfill what the scripture says, ‘‘They divided my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.’’ And that is what the soldiers did. Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus, was his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother,

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‘‘Woman, here is your son.’’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘‘Here is your mother.’’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home. After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scriptures), ‘‘I am thirsty.’’ A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the wine, he said, ‘‘It is finished.’’ Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. Since it was the day of preparation, the Jews did not want the bodies left on the cross during the Sabbath, especially because that Sabbath was a day of great solemnity. So they asked Pilate to have the legs of the crucified men broken and the bodies removed.

John 20:19–31 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘‘Peace be with you.’’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, ‘‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’’ But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when

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Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, ‘‘We have seen the Lord.’’ But he said to them, ‘‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.’’ A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘‘Peace be with you.’’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’’ Thomas answered him, ‘‘My Lord and my God!’’ Jesus said to him, ‘‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’’ Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name. I speak to you in the name of God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. This preaching series is called ‘‘Preaching in the New Millennium,’’ and indeed the community is poised at a moment in history in which the mission of the church needs to look forward. It is also a time, in Easter time, when we celebrate the resurrection from the dead of our Lord Jesus Christ. Such potential can hardly be imagined if only we knew how to harvest it. We live at a time when we know there is enough food in the world to feed all the people who are starving to death, if only we could overcome greed and share with one another. We know we live in

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a time where there is actually enough money for healthcare and we could solve so many of the problems that cripple our world, if only we learn to share our knowledge and put the funds where they are most needed. Last fall when I was in Rome, I was told that at this time much more money is going into the cure of obesity than into a cure for malaria. This is because people who are overweight in our part of the world have more money to give to research than the people who are dying of malaria in other parts of the globe. We live in a world of untold potential, but we keep that potential to ourselves. We hoard it, we keep it one from another, and because of that people starve and die and go to war. We live in a time when we know enough about reconciliation that we could be at peace with one another. And yet we live at a time when the summit of the Americas has unbelievable violence in Quebec’s city and in which nations in the Middle East are again at each other’s throats. We live in a time when there is increasing knowledge about how to look after the environment and, indeed, today we celebrate Earth Day. Yet the planet speedily dies around us. One of the questions that begs to be asked as Yale celebrates its Tercentennial is, what values and vision have endured over the centuries? We hear a great deal about the self-indulgence and narcissism of the youth of today. We know Yale is vastly more multicultural than was the case in the opening years of the eighteenth century when the Yale population, student and faculty alike, would not have heard the names of the nations that today’s students represent. Finally, I dare to suggest that the Yale student of 2001 has a more complex life than the student of 1701. Oh yes, there are the tremendous benefits of technology and huge advances in communications. But today’s students face many more choices. That means they need to be self-

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disciplined, or else. And self-discipline without self-knowledge leads to death not life. I rejoice in the spectacular commitment to community service that is a Yale trademark, and I know that that community service does nurture both discipline and knowledge of self. Indeed in the words of one dean, Yale has a ‘‘culture of generosity.’’ ‘‘For God, for country, and for Yale’’ may not mean exactly what it did when the cheer was crafted, but those who shout it affirm its enduring message. Which is to say, there is gospel at Yale. There is liberation from the fetters of bondage, there is discipleship formation, and at the level of the heart, there is an understanding that service is perfect freedom. And with that in mind, let’s turn our attention to the gospel for today. The gospel that Harry Adams read so beautifully is John 20: 19–31. It takes place the eve of the first Easter. Now already that day there has been some activity. They know that the tomb is empty; they know the body is gone, but the grave clothes have been left. So the answer that the body was stolen because of the valuable linens is obviously not the case. There is also a story that Mary Magdalene has even seen the Risen Lord, but what does she know? And so we find, in today’s gospel, the disciples in a locked room paralyzed with fear. They are confused; they do not know what to do with themselves. They fear that the religious authorities might turn to them next, and they fear for their lives. Into that situation of paralysis comes no other than the Risen Christ. He is not some sort of Disney character who has been made perfect, for we are told He still carries the wounds of the crucifixion—His hands and His side. We are told that even though the disciples just spent three years with Him, the only reason they recognized Jesus is that the signs of the crucifixion are still on Him. And what does He say to them? He says, ‘‘Shalom,’’ peace be with you. ‘‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’’ The message the Risen Christ is bringing into the atmosphere of

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fear is one of potential and freedom. He, who came as the Incarnate Word and has spent three years teaching and preaching and healing people—going where He was not to go, touching lepers, speaking with women, doing all the things that someone who was self-respecting would not do—is now saying to His disciples, his closest friends, ‘‘As I have carried out the mission from my Father, so must you.’’ ‘‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’’ You are to go out and be me in the world. You are to go out, to be my hands and my feet, my voice, my heart, my ears, my eyes. You are to go out and be me in the places I will not be any longer. And because He knows that their fear is very great, and He has noticed on more than one occasion they are just a bit limited in their ability, He does not leave it there. He breathes on them. Now you remember in Genesis 2, God breathes on Adam and creates humanity. The Risen Lord now breathes on the disciples and makes a new creation. In the same way, as in John 3, Jesus said to Nicodemus, ‘‘You must be born again, of the water and the Holy Spirit.’’ He now breathes on the disciples and He says: ‘‘Receive the Holy Spirit. Whatever sins you forgive, they are forgiven. Whatever sins you retain, they are retained.’’ He is giving them the potential, the ability to go out and make the world a new creation. Because He is so aware of their limitations and so aware of the power of fear that holds people back time and again, that stops them from sharing the very thing that would make all the difference, He does not even leave it there. We are told eight days later, when one of the disciples who was not there the first Easter night has been mumbling and grumbling that he will not believe this story unless he sees it for himself, the Risen Christ comes back to Thomas. He says: ‘‘You see my hands, my side? You see, I was crucified and now I have been raised. Now you must go out and be me in the world.’’ Now the crucifixion and the resurrection in the Gospel of John are not two events, but

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one. We should not be surprised to hear that the marks of the crucifixion are still very much in evidence. We should not think this is just one more happening in the life and death of our Lord—as the healing of the Samaritans and the raising up of Lazarus. No, this is an integral turning point; this is it. This is the new creation, the breaking in of the kingdom. When we look at that, we need to ask ourselves what has happened. Why have we not seen a whole new world order coming out of that gift from our Lord? Why are we still sitting here wondering when we are actually going to get around to doing what we have been commanded to do? In trying to explain that, I would like to share with you a story. About eight years ago, when I was still in parish ministry in the Diocese of Toronto, I had a suburban parish. It had the most awful-looking orange carpet you have ever seen in your life. Much like King Henry, I said, ‘‘Who will relieve me of this troublous carpet?’’ And the roof fell in, so we got a new carpet. But we also did a lot of other things as well. One of the things we did in the resultant renovations was discover a whole wall behind the altar when we took down a dorsal curtain that had been there far too long. We got into a discussion about what we would put on that wall. About that time a young artist came to see me and offered me a sculpture. The gift, eventually, of that sculpture changed the life of the parish. It was, in fact, a crucifix, but the corpus or body of our Lord on the crucifix was made of glass—not ordinary glass, but mirrored glass. So when you looked at the crucifix and you saw the body of our Lord, you saw not only yourself but also every other member of the congregation. On the property was a group home for physically disabled young adults. So on any given Sunday we had five or seven electric wheelchairs. You saw the body of Christ on the cross, you saw His wounds, and you also saw Debbie and David and Ann in the wheelchairs and their wounds. You realized what was being

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asked of you was to take seriously who you were as a member of the body of Christ and to go out into the world and to fulfill the ministry; to be as Christ in the world. Now that is not easy, and it took a long time for us to come to that understanding. But the whole notion of the Risen Christ giving us His commission and empowering us with the Holy Spirit, whether we do it or not, we have to understand that is our calling as a church. Now please, again, understand that what I am describing is not a new way of looking at human community; it is living out the resurrection. The resurrection that happened on Easter was the resurrection that happened because Christ died on the cross for us. John Chrysostom, a fifth-century theologian, said on Easter in the year around 407 that when Christ died, ‘‘death took hold of a body and found itself face to face with God. Death grasped Earth and death found itself confronting heaven. Death seized what it could see and found itself crumbling in the face of what it could not see.’’ Our Lord Jesus Christ, the word made flesh— who came among us and healed and taught and preached, who died for us, and who rose again—has asked us to continue His mission in the world. ‘‘O, death, where is thy sting?’’ It has been defeated. And now, it is for us to live out the mission of Christ in God’s own world. In the name of God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Cliff ’s Notes for the Journey Eileen W. Lindner

may 13, 2001 John 12:31–35 ‘‘Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’’ He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. The crowd answered him, ‘‘We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?’’ Jesus said to them, ‘‘The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going.’’ Beloved, will you pray with me: O God not my words but your Word, not our will but your will; not our needs alone but the needs of all your people be before us this day, in the name of the Christ, we pray. Amen. Now last week we learned the sad news of the passing of the founder of Cliff ’s Notes. You remember Cliff ’s Notes? Now, there is nary a one of us who did not come up short from time to time in our school careers and call upon Cliff ’s Notes. What was Cliff ’s Notes about? Cliff ’s Notes is a remarkable series of books started

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in 1951. It seems that all the world’s works of literature, the great classic works, from Moby-Dick to War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, etc.—each one was summarized in fourteen pages! So Cliff ’s Notes and its various volumes summarized and analyzed a broad collection of titles that taken together are a kind of summary of all Western thinking. It may not have much of a place at Yale University, but Cliff ’s Notes has an important place in the annals of American education. Cliff ’s Notes reminds me of that student who took a speed reading course and remarkably read War and Peace in eight minutes, . . . eight minutes . . . War and Peace! The student was asked, ‘‘What was it about?’’ She responded, ‘‘Russia!’’ Today’s lectionary selections I think were done in honor of the late Cliff of Cliff ’s Notes. The texts specified in the lectionary for this Sunday seem designed to offer a kind of Cliff ’s Notes of the Bible. Today’s selection of texts is a curious combination. These texts seem to me, in the aggregate, to be a kind of Cliff ’s Notes of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian gospel. In the aggregate, the four texts designated for this fifth Sunday of Easter—this Tercentenary Sunday, this Mothers’ Day Sunday, this festival of the Christian Home Sunday and who knows what other Sunday we might be celebrating—these texts, taken together, form a summary of the corpus. Well, let us look at them. Psalm 148 is an exquisite, doxological psalm, in which every element and every inhabitant of the creation is singing God’s praises. The Acts text is a peculiar account of people running to and fro, which concludes with this message: God has given, even to the Gentiles, even to the riffraff, even to the people that you and I would not admit into the inner circle, even to these God has given the repentance that leads to life! This text is a radical statement of inclusiveness. Then, of course, Revelation 21 is probably the only chapter of Revelation familiar to most of us. It is a familiar, poi-

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gnant passage that at once recalls the prophetic vision and the prophetic literature in its testimony to God’s continuous reconciling of the cosmos. It does this through that beautiful image of ‘‘a new heaven and a new earth.’’ It offers a vision beyond all pain and suffering and mourning and hurt. Finally, from the Gospel of John is the section known as ‘‘Jesus’ Farewell Discourse and the New Commandment.’’ Here Jesus bids his followers to accept the new commandment of love. So what of these great summarizing texts? What are we to learn from them? Well, it seems to me that what we learn from a text has to do with what we ask of a text. The question we ask of a text is central to what we ultimately get out of the text. This came to me in an important way a few years ago. It is my vocation, alas, to take that aeronautical cattle drive known as the Washington Shuttle back and forth from National Airport in Washington to LaGuardia Airport in New York. I came to that airport on the Friday before Christmas. Now it is always a bit of a shoving match on a Friday afternoon, but with everyone filled with the Christmas spirit, it was even worse. There had been two inches of snow in Washington, which is an unabridged calamity in that southern clime. I came to National Airport; everybody had the two bags they were allowed, the three they were not allowed, and apparently that year everyone was taking Aunt Het a lamp for Christmas—very large boxes. I stepped up to the ticket counter where a harried woman fixed me with a gaze and said, ‘‘Did anybody you do not know give you anything you do not know about?’’ I said, ‘‘I do not know.’’ I thought I saw her glance toward security personnel. She said to me, ‘‘I said that wrong. Do you have anything you do not know about from anybody you do not know?’’ I said again, ‘‘I do not know.’’ She straightened her paper . . . that’s a bad sign. I knew this was my last chance to see my family at Christmas. She leaned forward and she said, ‘‘Do you know what I am try-

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ing to ask you?’’ I said, ‘‘I think so.’’ She said, ‘‘Did they?’’ I said, ‘‘No.’’ She said, ‘‘Here is your ticket.’’ So, beloved ones, it does matter what we are asking. What do we ask of these texts? It seems to me we ask two questions: What holds these texts together? What makes them have some resonance, some coherence with one another and in our minds and hearts and souls? And second, how, together, do they speak to this moment in which we find ourselves? Today’s lectionary texts, taken together, offer a form of Cliff ’s Notes to Scripture. While on the face of it the linkage of these passages to one another is not apparent, a deeper unity joins them. Taken together, the texts assigned for this day offer the essence of Scriptures’ teaching of three points: 1. God’s faithful pursuit of the purpose of peace and justice for all creation. 2. The radical inclusiveness of God’s love, which transcends class, cast, race, gender, or ethnicity—all are beloved. 3. Faithfulness’ requirement for both a horizontal as well as a vertical dimension of religious thought. To love God we fully must demonstrate that love to neighbors. In preparation for my visit with you I read the remarkable study of Professor Michele Dillon asking the question that was occasioned by William F. Buckley’s assertion that somehow the Christian orthodox ethic, so instrumental to Yale’s founding, had been displaced long since by competing ideologies and the corrosive effect of increasing pluralism. Yale is, of course, an enclave, a privileged and particular enclave to be sure, but an enclave nonetheless in a larger culture. It must be asked how Buckley’s assertion applies to the larger society as well as to Yale. What are we to believe in these early days of this twenty-first century? What holds us all together at Yale or in the larger society? What makes sense to us? What helps us find our way?

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Where and what is the role of faith? Asked another way, what do you bring to a birthday party of one celebrating a Tercentenary? What do you bring for a three-hundredth birthday? A book is always good, and the ‘‘Good Book’’ is always better! I bring you these four assigned texts and suggest to you that in them is the answer to our striving. Not only our striving as a community here at Yale or in New Haven but in a broader sense. There is, in the aggregate of these texts, the witness to God’s steadfast love for the cosmos. The first text, the ancient psalm, extols that doxological reality that suggests to us the increasing interdependence of all things and all beings. ‘‘Be at peace with one another,’’ the psalmist cries out, for your survival. Your wholeness, your wellness depends upon your interdependence, a message as contemporary as today’s headlines. The second text is the account in Acts of Peter’s vision and his dialogue with Jesus about whether the message of salvation is exclusive or inclusive. Here we find Jesus arguing strenuously for the radical inclusion of all people. What does it take to become a part of God’s transforming and transformative powers in this world? What does it take? Only repentance, says the text. Turn again; turn away from the things of death and hate and hurt. Turn to life. Even to the Gentiles, even to those we generally regard as outside of God’s domain. Even to such ones is given the repentance that leads to life. Turn again to God’s persistent design for renewal. All that is required is to turn away from xenophobic exclusion. What is in God’s imagination? A new heaven and a new earth where all crying and striving and pain and mourning have gone away? Where is there a holy mountain, places where children can play along the hole of the asp, where no danger brings peril to God’s children? What, you ask, is God’s will for our lives? God’s will for our lives is to turn again, to be a part of that transforming picture. To offer ourselves for the common good. It is hard for us to accept the

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steadfast centuries’ long witness of God’s love for us. Yet, we hear it in these texts but it is hard for us to internalize, to know the depth of God’s love. As a mother, will you allow me one child’s story? Like you, I have a very expensive education; perhaps like you I learned all the theology I know either from the hymns of the church or from my children. When one of my sons was about three years old, he and a friend were playing in the pool in the backyard. Now lest you think that I am talking about some palatial Westchester County, New York, in-ground pool, I am talking about one of those round plastic pools a few inches deep. When two children are jumping in and out it seems there are many grass blades inside of a moment. It looks like a huge petri dish, to tell you the truth, with lots of grass blades and two little boys . . . jumping in and out and in and out . . . no actual swimming you understand. My son came to me, and like all children on a hot day he did not want to go into the house to get a drink but he was parched, and I was drinking some lemonade. He came along and said, ‘‘Mom, can I have some of your lemonade?’’ ‘‘Yes,’’ I said, and I proffered it to him. He took it, and just as he was to bring it to his lips, you could almost see his nursery school teacher arise in his conscience. He looked at me and said, ‘‘Mom, if I drink from that will I catch your dreams?’’ He meant of course germs; a little three-year-old dyslexia creeping in . . . he meant germs— ‘‘Will I catch your germs?’’ He took a sip, he went back to play, and I sat and pondered a little while longer. I thought, ‘‘Oh my son, my son if it were only that simple. No math workbooks, no parallel parking, no late night curfews. Just a sip and you could catch my dreams for your life! My dream that you should be a happy man and a fulfilled man, a kindly man, perhaps even a man worthy of greatness. Take a sip and catch my dream.’’ And then I thought of one who said, ‘‘Take, drink, this is my blood poured out for you.’’

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Perhaps in its essence that is the lesson. God is steadfast and asks us only to sip, to taste, to grab a glimpse of what God intends for our lives. For you, for me, for boys in swimming pools the world around. Finally, in the gospel lesson Jesus says, in essence, ‘‘These are my last words to you little children, my dearly beloved companions of this life, where I am going you cannot go. You cannot come with me.’’ Yet, in essence he says, ‘‘You can be a part of this grand transformation, for I give you now a new commandment that will allow you to come with me in spirit and that commandment is to love one another!’’ He says, ‘‘Live in such a way that your love is a witness to the ever present, invincible, ongoing, consistent power of God’s renewing love for the cosmos. Love one another, even as I have loved you.’’ Simple words, the Golden Rule we say, but so hard for us to take in. A Cliff ’s Notes kind of summary of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Yale at three hundred is certainly far more complex than its founders could have imagined. It too has played a role in the nation and in the world that could not have been foreseen. The three hundred years ahead will bring new challenges to Yale and the world around it. While the content of much that is taught and learned here will change in the light of new insights and advances in science and technology, the backdrop of geopolitical change will constantly place Yale’s striving in a new context. Yet, if Scripture is to be believed, it is the constancy of Yale’s communal identity continuing to offer dignity to individual expression in the context of pluralism of every sort. A treasured individual in a community seeking truth. While this ethic cannot be associated only with Christianity, it is an abiding truth, which ‘‘sets a standard to which others might repair.’’ Within such a community, both learning can be achieved and justice envisioned. My husband and I are like many of you, I suspect: two working parents, oversubscribed, and what passes for a leisure-time activity is doing the Saturday chores. One day during that chore-

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doing it fell to me to take our car to the Jiffy Lube. Do you know what Jiffy Lubes are? They are places where you take your car and—well I am not sure what they do, but it is very important that you have it done periodically. You give them twenty dollars and they klunk around underneath the car, they change its liquids or something. I am not being too technical for you, am I? Anyway, I went to the Jiffy Lube, and my brothers, you will accept I hope that the Jiffy Lube is something of a male precinct. That is putting it very mildly. As I sat and waited my turn for whatever it is they do, there was a coffee table, and I use that term advisedly; it was kind of a flat surface, that would be a better description, and on it were two books. I picked up the first and it was a magazine called Field and Stream. This is an actual magazine; this actually exists. In it they sell guns and bows and arrows. They sell hip boots that come up to your armpits. Myself, I say, if it is that deep, do not go in there! They sell worms by the gross. Now I am having a reasonably happy life, I have never even purchased one worm! I cannot imagine why you would want a gross of them. But, anyway, if you want them that is the magazine for you. This is not the magazine for me. I am a Calvinist, I am a Presbyterian; you know we cannot just sit and do nothing, we are compulsive readers. I never leave the house without, oh, two or three days’ reading material just in case there is a line. But I was caught short this day, and there was nothing except what was there on the coffee table of the Jiffy Lube. So I picked up the next thing, and it was kind of a pamphlet . . . kind of a thick booklet. Now those of you who are compulsive readers know that when you read such things you start in the back. In case you run out of time you know how it came out, you do not know what it was about, but you know how it came out! I started to turn through it and I realized it was the manual you study when you are getting your boat driver’s license. Now that does not sound like much, I know, but remember what our other choice is? Do I have to

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mention worms again? So I continued looking through it, and as I leafed through it I saw a section that said, ‘‘What to Do When Boats Encounter Each Other at Open Sea.’’ I thought that was interesting. Here on terra firma we have lights and lanes and signs, and it does not work out that entirely well. How do they do it in open sea? I started to leaf through the book, and it said there are two kinds of craft: one has access to great power; it can accelerate and decelerate, power through waves, change direction, and come to a stop just where it wishes. It has engine power and control. The other kind of craft is dependent on natural elements: human muscle power for paddling or rowing, tide and wind in the sails, sea current and human striving. These two crafts are known respectively as ‘‘privileged’’ and ‘‘burdened.’’ The text went on to say, ‘‘When the privileged and the burdened encounter each other in the open sea, the privileged must give way if the burdened is ever to make safe harbor.’’ I thought to myself, ‘‘Who wrote this thing? Mother Teresa? Dietrich Bonhoeffer?’’ I turned to the front and to my surprise the author listed was the New Jersey Department of Transportation. Now I ask you, dear ones, how it is that the New Jersey Department of Transportation knows that when the privileged and the burdened encounter each other, the privileged must give way if the burdened is ever to make safe harbor—and the Church of Jesus is having a little trouble with the concept? So, lemonade and Jiffy Lubes, Acts and Revelation, gospel and prophetic literature all cry out: know on this three-hundredth birthday that your legacy of faith has not deserted you, it is there for the asking, and the price of admission is love. In Yale’s three-hundredth year, or your own fifty-fourth or twentysixth or seventy-second year, the timeless ethic of the Christian faith is at hand. Perhaps not with the attendant arrogance, chauvinism, or certainty that once translated into cultural hegemony in your life or Yale’s. But with a mature and more humble, quiet

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assurance, we can continue to summarize God’s long history of faithfulness. God’s love from creation has been manifest in the call to all created things to live in love and harmony within a peaceful society in which none—no, none—is excluded. William Buckley need not be concerned either for Yale or for the Christian ethic; despite new challenges in faithfulness to the mission of love, both will endure. May you feel God’s presence every step of the way. Amen.

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The Power of a Changed Mind Cynthia A. Terry

may 20, 2001 Acts 10:25–28 On Peter’s arrival Cornelius met him and, falling at his feet, worshiped him. But Peter made him get up, saying, ‘‘Stand up; I am only a mortal.’’ And as he talked with him, he went in and found that many had assembled; and he said to them, ‘‘You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.’’ The tenth chapter of Acts is a marvelous story, leading into a powerful sermon preached by Peter. Unfortunately, the sermon part of the chapter is all that is included in the lectionary, while the story leading to the sermon is left out. Meaning that most of us never get to hear the story, only the resulting theology. The message of the sermon is crucial—it marks when Peter, for the first time, acknowledges that Gentiles are included in the new vision of God’s kingdom created by Jesus. Prior to this point, Peter has been absolutely rigid in believing that the message of the gospel is only for Jews. But now Peter says, ‘‘The truth I have now come to realize is that God shows no partiality’’ (Acts 10:34). This new message, this new understanding of truth, changes everything for Peter, and for the future church.

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The sermon is significant, pivotal, so I’d like to look more closely at the story of how this miraculous turnabout came to be. In this Acts story, the action occurs simultaneously; the stories of Cornelius and Peter are woven together, intertwined and intermingled. But for both Cornelius and Peter, their stories occurred singly, each without the benefit of the other’s story. Each man can live only his own part of the story, each part incomplete and confusing without the other. Cornelius (an Italian centurion) is startled by a vision telling him to send for Simon, called Peter. He isn’t told why; only that this is an answer to his prayers. He doesn’t know this Simon Peter; he doesn’t know how he might react to being summoned by a stranger, and a Gentile stranger at that. But Cornelius sends for him anyway, without fully understanding. His vision is incomplete; it requires action and faith to make sense, eventually. Peter, too, is startled by a vision; he is fasting and praying and falls into a trance. While in this trance, he sees something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, a sheet full of ‘‘fourfooted creatures, reptiles, and birds of the air.’’ Peter is told to get up, to kill the animals, and eat. Clearly these animals represent food Jews are not to eat,1 for Peter’s response is immediate and strong: ‘‘No, Lord. I have never eaten anything unclean or profane.’’ I can hear him thinking, ‘‘I follow the Torah, the Scriptures; of course I’ve never eaten any of these animals.’’ The voice speaks a second time and says to Peter, ‘‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’’ It happens a third time, and then the sheet and the animals disappear. Peter is puzzling over this vision and its possible meaning when three strangers arrive. He is so preoccupied that the Spirit has to tell him: ‘‘Look, three men are searching for you. Now get up, go down, and go with them without hesitation; for I have sent them.’’ Peter understands enough then to go with the men, but he, too, isn’t told why. Neither man is in control of the situa-

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tion; neither one understands all that is happening. It is God drawing them together, weaving their two stories into one. ‘‘Now may I ask why you sent for me?’’ Peter asks Cornelius. Cornelius relates his part of the story, finishing with this: ‘‘So now all of us are here in the presence of God to listen to all that the Lord has commanded you to say.’’ Wait a minute. Did I miss part of the story? What has God commanded Peter to say? There is no clear message given, is there? Yet Peter responds without hesitation. He opens his mouth and says, ‘‘The truth I have now come to realize is that God shows no partiality.’’ The message comes only in the midst of the situation, as a result of Cornelius and Peter each acting upon his incomplete understanding of God’s truth. The visions in themselves are incomplete; they come with no interpreter’s guide. Each vision is only finished when acted upon, when Cornelius sends for Peter and when Peter follows God’s leading (as much as is clear to him) and goes to Caesarea. Neither waits until he understands all the theological and personal implications of the vision. Both must act before fully understanding; they have to act in order to understand. I first encountered this story in the summer of 1987. I was preparing to go to Congo (then Zaire) as a Volunteer-in-Mission. At orientation, we read this story, a story where Peter is vividly shown that the rules he had learned about what to eat and what not to eat no longer applied. For me that translated into being open to new ‘‘delicacies’’ and not hanging on to my own eating patterns. It meant that just because something was different didn’t mean that it was profane. And Peter learns that the rules about with whom he could associate no longer applied; in spite of his upbringing, he goes into the home of a Gentile. For me this meant that my set ideas of who is and is not acceptable no longer applied. The story of Peter and Cornelius challenged me to be open when I went to Zaire, not to hold fast to the cus-

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toms and rules of my childhood, of my culture, insisting that ‘‘my way’’ is the only or best way. In this academic setting, the story resonates in yet more new ways. For many members of the university community, Yale challenges our faith and beliefs. Many of us are challenged by ideas that seem to go against what we have always believed. Most of us are somewhat cautious about assuming these new ideas are the truth, appropriately cautious. After being confronted with them several times, we may begin to sense that they are indeed from God, but we usually aren’t given time to keep puzzling for too long. Books have to be read, papers must be written; children need to be fed and played with—life continues, whether we’re ready or not. Before we fully understand, we may have to act. Like Cornelius and Peter, it is in our acting that our understanding will become clearer. We are not given the luxury of time to reflect and figure everything out; instead, we have to puzzle over visions and questions, and then act as faithfully as we can. Truth is not merely something academic that we can learn in the classroom, or in Bible study or worship; truth becomes truth as we act upon it. The story of Peter and Cornelius seems especially helpful in shedding light on an issue confronting most contemporary churches and denominations, the issue of sexual orientation. Except for the United Church of Christ, all mainline Protestant denominations are deeply conflicted at the denominational level about the variety of issues surrounding sexual orientation: ordination of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered individuals; same-sex marriages or unions; roles of gay and lesbian laypeople. There is fear in some denominations that this will be the issue that causes major schisms; it is likened to slavery in this regard. For years to come, denominations will be dealing at all levels with the ripple of issues regarding sexual orientation. These are real issues, facing real people; they are not merely

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philosophical or theological talking points. Nor are they only societal issues relating to issues of job discrimination, hate crimes, discrimination in schools, and legal recognition for same-sex partners and families, among other cultural implications. Congregations deal with these issues in more personal ways: couples who seek to be joined together in the church; parents who are devastated when a child (of whatever age) comes out to them; individuals who struggle to know if God can possibly love them. Sexual orientation often is included in ‘‘diversity lists,’’ along with race, religion, sex, ability, etc. It is good, necessary, for it to be included. But unlike many other kinds of difference, issues of sexual orientation have particular spiritual dynamics that must be addressed. With sexual orientation, there is almost always some period of alienation from one’s family. All too often, when a person comes out to his or her family, he or she is isolated from or even disowned by her or his family. This can range from the topic not being mentioned again (‘‘I still love you, but I don’t want to talk about it; don’t tell anyone else’’) to partners not being included in family gatherings (‘‘Please come home for Christmas but leave him at home’’) to literal removal from the family (‘‘You are not welcome here anymore’’). Since the reality is that virtually every family has a gay or lesbian member, these questions potentially impact all of us. To be isolated from one’s family of origin because of a basic aspect of one’s identity is a tremendous problem, which we as Christians must address. Perhaps even more profound than familial alienation is the reality of alienation from God. For many people, gay and straight alike, there are questions about whether or not being lesbian or gay (or engaging in ‘‘homosexual acts’’) is sinful. Many people wonder if God loves and accepts those who are gay or lesbian or bisexual, or to put it another way, if God loves those who are not heterosexual. For some who find themselves outside of

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the white, middle-class American norm, God or the church or a personal spirituality are a source of comfort and strength. For many people who are lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgendered, not only is the church not a source of comfort but also the church is in fact a source of pain and fear and harm. But what is the connection to Acts 10, the story of Peter and Cornelius? What light does this ancient story have to shed on this most contemporary of problems? Well, like Cornelius, many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people are praying, seeking to know God, seeking to know if there is a place for them within God’s realm. They may have heard that ‘‘the Bible says it is a sin.’’ Like Peter, many Christians and many churches are confronted with a startling vision of sexual orientation as a gift from God, as part of creation; a vision of faithful folk who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered; a vision of families with two fathers or two mothers. Like Peter, many Christians and many churches think, ‘‘No. I’ve been taught from childhood that the Bible says this is wrong, it is profane.’’ So like Peter, we must puzzle over this vision. Is it a vision from God, even though it seems to go against our early religious and biblical teaching? Is it a vision from God, even though we have always thought homosexuality to be ‘‘profane’’? Like Peter, we must be open to the message that our understanding of Scripture can change; that God can tell us something new. We must be open to the message that those whom God has declared clean, we must not declare profane. Many faithful Christians and Christian churches have puzzled with this and come to the conclusion that indeed it is true, that God does not show partiality. They understand Jesus to teach a message of love and acceptance; they understand that Jesus is not preoccupied with matters of sexual orientation, or any sexual relationships for that matter. They hear from Jesus a message of faithfulness and love, of mutuality and care for

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others. Many faithful Christians and churches believe that God accepts and loves all of us. This congregation, following the guidance of the United Church of Christ, became an Open and Affirming Congregation in 1989. This university, too, has taken active steps to ensure the equal protection of gay and lesbian members of the university community. In 1986, Yale added sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination clause. And in 1993, Yale added benefits for samesex partners. These were not legally required measures; instead, they were measures aimed at addressing injustices. This congregation and university have both been in the forefront of dealing with issues around sexual orientation. It is important that we not rest on our laurels of having been an Open and Affirming Congregation for many years and being part of a university that was an early leader in recognizing samesex couples. As Christians, as a church, we need continually to be clear about this message: what God has made clean, let no one call profane; God shows no partiality. We must work actively to combat the feeling that is so prevalent, that God could not and does not love those who are not heterosexual. We need to work actively to proclaim the good news of God’s love, so that the isolation so many feel may be bridged, and so that the rights accorded to some can be accorded to all. As a lesbian woman and mother with my partner, I am particularly grateful to be part of two institutions, this church and this university, that have been willing to respond to God’s vision by acting in ways requiring some courage and faith. I am grateful to live in a state that allows lesbian and gay people to adopt children. For us as a church, as for Peter, the recognition that God shows no partiality, that those whom God has declared clean cannot be called profane, is a turning point that is life-changing —life-changing for Peter, but also for Cornelius and for the

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entire church at that time and on to today. Life-changing for Yale and other such universities; life-changing for the Church of Christ in Yale and other such churches; life-changing for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people who may find a place and perhaps even a home here. Thanks be to God for the faithfulness and action of this congregation and this university, for being willing to proclaim and act upon God’s message of love. Thanks be to God. Amen. Note 1. These forbidden animals are named as part of the Holiness Code found in Leviticus. It is interesting to note that the most explicit prohibitions regarding sexual relations between two men are also found within the Holiness Code (Leviticus 18:20, 20:13), interesting that the texts Peter learned to let go of to understand the Gentiles as acceptable are part of the Code often used to ‘‘prove’’ gays and lesbians are not acceptable to God.

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Friends of the Disciples Barbara Brown Taylor

september 9, 2001 Luke 14:25–33 Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, ‘‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.’ ’’ If any of you came here this morning believing that you were disciples of Jesus Christ, then I guess that you know better now.

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Of course I may be wrong. Has anyone here cut yourself off from your entire family so that there is no one to hold you back from doing whatever God wants you to do? Has anyone chosen a purpose for your life that is so publicly critical of church and state that there is a very good chance it will get you killed? Has anyone given up all of your possessions—all of them—so that the time you used to spend buying, maintaining, and protecting all of that stuff is now free to give to God? Do I see any hands? I didn’t think so. You don’t see mine either. This morning’s third reading is really a remarkable piece of Scripture, which places such demands on would-be disciples that it is a wonder that Luke included it in a gospel meant to grow the church. ‘‘Large crowds were traveling with Jesus,’’ he says. Large crowds! In a time and place where Roman troops were under orders to watch large crowds the way foxes watch hens. If anyone in those crowds made one revolutionary-sounding peep, if a single one of them flashed a beak that looked remotely like a dagger blade, then they could kiss their tail feathers goodbye. In year 6 of the Common Era, when Jesus was still a boy, the Roman governor Varus crucified two thousand Jewish rebels in the Galilee. The region already had a rich reputation by then for bucking Roman occupation. Ezekias the Galilean and his followers had been put to death decades earlier. That did not stop his son Judah the Galilean from leading a major tax revolt. By the time Jesus the Galilean was grown up, Pontius Pilate was procurator of Judea, which he ruled without concealing his contempt for the religion of the Jews.1 Pilate carried images of Caesar into Jerusalem in open violation of the second commandment. He helped himself to the Temple treasury in order to pay for some new aqueducts he had in mind. When the people protested, he had them beaten so badly that many of them died. His ten-year rule ended in 36

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c.e., when he sent soldiers to stop a Samaritan prophet who was drawing large crowds up on Mount Gerazim. Although the Samaritans insisted that their rally was a religious and not a political one, Pilate’s soldiers could not tell the difference. When word of their slaughter reached Pilate’s superiors, he was finally recalled to Rome. Meanwhile, you know what the Bible says about the two king Herods. King Herod the father had all the baby boys in Bethlehem killed when wise men from the east went there looking for a newborn king. King Herod the son had John the Baptist’s head cut off when John passed judgment on his second marriage. John, as you may recall, had also drawn large crowds, at least one of which had included Jesus. All in all, it was just not a good time for big groups of people to go following after anyone who was saying and doing unusual things. The Romans may have built great roads, but they were not famous for understanding the subtleties of Jewish religion, or for standing by while great crowds of Jews gathered to discuss things among themselves. Jesus was by no means the only one drawing crowds in those days, but he was doubly intriguing (and doubly dangerous) because he had as many critical things to say about what was going on in the Temple as he did about what was going on at Roman headquarters. He had harsh words for some clergy who were acting more like celebrities than servants of God. He challenged some Pharisees on their interpretation of Scripture. He chased some licensed businessmen out of the Temple, and he furthermore seemed to believe that God had given him the authority to do all of these things. Most disturbingly of all, when large crowds persisted in following him in spite of the dangers, he said things that sounded more dangerous still. Love your enemies, he said. Hate your family. Bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. Sell all that you own

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and give it to the poor. Give to everyone who begs from you. If you have not yet embraced the means of your own destruction, then it is time to bend over and pick it up, for whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. Mercy! If that is not a message designed to disperse large crowds then I don’t know what is. Unlike many of his latter-day boosters, Jesus did not put a lot of energy into drumming up enthusiasm for his message. If anything, he worked pretty hard to tamp it down. Last year a woman I know decided to convert to Judaism. Since she wanted to join a Reform synagogue, her rabbi agreed to speak with her the first time she called him, but through her I learned about the traditional Jewish practice of discouraging would-be converts. According to Jewish law, or Halakah, rabbis are supposed to make three vigorous attempts to dissuade anyone who wants to convert. The first time you knock on the door, they are bound to send you away. The second time you knock on the door, they are bound to send you away. The third time you knock on the door, they are bound to try to send you away, but if you will not go away then you may finally get through the door. The reason for this is because as far as the rabbis are concerned, non-Jews do not have to convert to Judaism to be saved. God has made other provisions for them, and meanwhile full observance of Torah is hard. Why would anyone who was not born under the covenant want to adopt it—taking on greater responsibilities and stricter standards of living—especially when salvation does not depend on it? By turning away prospective converts at least three times, rabbis test the resolve of those who want to follow Torah. Enthusiasm is wonderful, but it can also lead people into water that is too deep for them. Before they jump, they need to count the cost of following. They need to make a sober assessment of their strengths and weaknesses— not only for themselves but also for the community they seek to join. Above all, they need to understand that there is no extra

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reward involved, for God’s rain falls on the just and the unjust. If they decide to take the leap, then the following itself will be their reward. It would be a mistake to try to turn Jesus into a traditional rabbi since the views I have just described did not take shape until long after he lived. But it may also be a mistake to try to turn him into a present-day Christian preacher. As far as I can tell, his call to discipleship is worlds away from the one I so often hear proclaimed, in which following him is something everyone can and should do. Come one, come all! According to this popular gospel, discipleship pays off. At first it may be hard for you to get up and go to church on Sunday mornings, but if you will just stick with it then you will find that the rewards are immense. Following Jesus will strengthen your family life, help you sleep better at night, and give you inner peace. There is even some evidence that prayer can lower your blood pressure. What’s not to like? Following Jesus requires no more of you than to be the best person you can be, and if you fail, well, then he has that covered. So will you follow him? Come on and follow him. What do you have to lose? It is a different kind of gospel for growing a different kind of church than the one for whom Luke wrote. Luke’s flock already knew what they had to lose: their families, their homes, their possessions, and their lives. To follow Jesus meant to hit the road to Jerusalem with him, leaving every other source of security behind. It meant shaking off the hands of those who had prior claims on you. It meant having no place to lay your head. It meant planning what you would say when a Roman soldier blocked your way with his spears and said, ‘‘Aren’t you one of those Galilean agitators?’’ What did they have to lose by following Jesus? Everything, absolutely everything, and he did not want anyone lining up behind him without counting the cost. He loved them too much

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for that, and besides, it was not as if their salvation depended on it. He saved all kinds of people without recruiting them to follow him: bleeding women, blind beggars, men possessed by demons, notorious sinners. ‘‘Return to your home,’’ he told them, ‘‘and declare how much God has done for you’’ (Luke 8:39). ‘‘Your faith has saved you; go in peace’’ (Luke 7:50). By my count, Jesus directly called no more than fourteen people to follow him in any of the gospels. While that did not keep large crowds of others from going after him, he was always turning around and warning them in one way or another that following was not for everyone. There were other ways to glorify God, but if people were bound and determined to go with him to Jerusalem then he wanted them to make sure that they knew what they were getting into. Their high spirits might last them as far as Chorazin or Bethsaida, but if enthusiasm was all they had in their gas tanks, then they would be running on fumes by the time they reached Jerusalem. Do the math, he warned them. You would not get a building permit for a new stone tower without first figuring out if you had the cash to finish it, would you? You would not declare war on the king next door and then go count your troops? If your answer to either of those questions is ‘‘Yes,’’ then please go home now, because you cannot afford to follow me. If you lay a foundation and then walk away from it, people are not only going to laugh at you. They are going to laugh at all of us. If you charge into battle without checking to see who is behind you, then you are going to get slaughtered, and there is no telling how many other people you will take with you. Believe me, it would be a whole lot better for you to wave the white flag right now than to end up making a sacrifice you never meant to make. If you do not say good-bye to everything you hold dear, including your own life, then you cannot be my disciple. Of course that was two thousand years ago. Where most of

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us live, things are not like that anymore, and it may not be fair to apply first-century standards to twenty-first-century people. But if the problem in Jesus’ day was that discipleship was so dangerous, then the problem in our own day may be that it is not dangerous enough. To listen to some present-day disciples talk, you would think that following Jesus is something that can be done safely within the parameters of a comfortable American life. Earlier this year I read an article by a faith-based environmentalist named Bill McKibben in which he suggests that Christians who buy gas-guzzling cars now are every bit as incongruous as Christians who joined segregated country clubs in the 1960s. Perfectly nice and decent people have done both things, he points out. Buying the car now is deemed as ‘‘normal’’ as joining the club was then, but what both choices have in common is that they benefit the individual while ignoring the consequences to the whole community. They also spurn God’s covenant with all creation. While the sports utility vehicle, like the country club, may be only a symbol of the crisis of our times, McKibben says that it is time for Christians to take a stand: no more buying SUVs, for the love of God. I think it is a great idea, but I want you to try it first. The next time you see your good Christian neighbors climbing into their Ford Explorer, I want you to go over and say, ‘‘Um, look, when that thing wears out, what would you think about replacing it with something a little smaller? You know, as a kind of faith statement about what you’re willing to give up for the good of all?’’ After that, maybe you could say, ‘‘Oh yeah, and if your hand causes you to stumble, cut if off.’’ For the majority of us, there are really only two ways to live in the same world with such hard sayings. The first way is to turn away from them, deciding that we do not have what it takes to be Christians after all. The second way is to soften them, to keep

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sanding away at their sharp edges until we can bump up against them without getting hurt. In the soft version, Jesus did not mean that you actually have to hate your family. He just meant that you couldn’t let your family run your life, that you have to be ready to let them know that you are your own person where faith is concerned. And that part about carrying a cross—that does not mean that you have to go stand with Christians in the Sudan or even get between a bunch of new immigrants in your town and the angry citizens who want them gone. In the soft version it just means that you should be ready to do something hard for God if God asks you to. Better yet, maybe you could head that off at the pass by volunteering an hour or two of your time each week, doing something that Jesus might do if he lived in New Haven. And finally, that part about giving up all of your possessions— that was more like a test, to see who flinched and who did not. In the soft version possessions are not the problem. The problem is becoming overly attached to your possessions. You can keep your stuff as long as it does not mean too much to you, and you are still willing to give some of it up to the less fortunate, at least when you are through with it. I do not know how the church could have survived all these years without modifying the extremism of Jesus. If everyone in the large crowd who heard him that day had taken him at his word, then I am not sure that we would be here today—because most of them would have turned away, and the few who followed him would have been dead in a few years, as extinct as woolly mammoths. Instead, I think, some of those who heard him that day knew that they could not follow him. They had families they did not hate, lives they still loved, and possessions that meant a great deal to them. They may have admired people who could walk away from all that, but they knew that they were not such people.

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So they went home instead of to Jerusalem, some of them no doubt relieved to have had the choice put so starkly that there really was no choice, while others could not stop thinking about what it would have felt like to step out of the crowd—to step right up to Jesus without checking with anyone else first—and say: ‘‘Okay, I’ll do it. I’ve just done it. Let’s go.’’ That evening around all of their supper tables there was only one topic of any interest: following him, and what it meant, where it might lead, why he made it so hard. They were not his disciples. Call them ‘‘friends of the disciples,’’ but that did not mean they could act as if they had never heard what Jesus said. That night some of them even dreamed about following him, so that a few woke panting from nightmares, while others wept upon waking up. Once the sun was high enough for them to focus on the chores, the children, the sheep, the crops, plenty of them wished they had gone with him, but then they settled back into their regular lives. Except that sometimes, when the children were sick and the brothers-in-law were not speaking to one another and the parents had grown so old that they could not remember anyone’s name anymore, one of those friends of the disciples would take a deep breath, remember what Jesus said, and think: ‘‘This isn’t everything. Life goes deeper than this.’’ Other days, when there was something going on in town that just was not right, but the unspoken consensus seemed to be that it was better to let it keep going on than to borrow trouble by saying anything about it, one of those friends of the disciples would call up a couple of others and ask: ‘‘Do you remember what Jesus said? What do you say we go borrow some trouble?’’ And sometimes, when a few of those friends would hear about a family in need or a neighboring town hit by drought, they would decide to fill a wagon with some of their own stuff— not everything they owned, by any means (they were not dis-

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ciples after all), but still stuff they could have made good use of themselves. It only hurt for a minute, and then they could let it go—because they remembered what Jesus said, and because they knew there were some people following him who were getting by on a lot less. The basic idea seemed to be, ‘‘If the disciples can do that, then we can at least do this.’’ Every now and then, of course, one of them would lose it and do something extreme, like auction off the family estate and send the check to the church in Jerusalem, or find some public occasion on which to remind the Roman procurator that the Emperor was a straw boss. On those days, Jesus gained a new disciple. But most days the circle of friends just said their prayers, broke bread when they could, and above all kept the stories alive, so that even people who did not have what it took to be disciples still remembered what Jesus asked of those who followed him. Given the choice between softening his call so that they could all believe they had answered it and preserving its harsh, uncompromising beauty even if that put it out of their reach, the friends of the disciples chose the latter. They did not go to Jerusalem. They went home instead, to catch fish, have babies, and start churches. They went home to tell other people what Jesus had said and done so that his living word continued to rouse new generations of disciples and friends. Along the way, they found a third way to live with his high call to discipleship—neither turning away from it nor lowering it but allowing it to shimmer high over their heads—where it provoked them, disturbed them, inspired and strangely reassured them. They may not have followed Jesus to Jerusalem, but their hearts did. Even after they had counted the cost of following him and come up short, he changed their lives all the same. It is why we are still here today—because of the disciples, certainly, but even more so because of the friends—who were people more like us, after all, and who discovered, like us, that

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God’s love is as free as rain. There is no extra reward for following. The following itself is its own reward. While the dry world waits in eager anticipation for new disciples to step out of the crowd—Peters and Pauls but also Bonhoeffers, Romeros, Tutus, and Teresas—still the gospel is given freely to all of God’s friends. So return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you. Your faith has saved you. Go in peace. Amen. Note 1. Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 79.

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Who Tells You Who You Are? William Sloane Coffin Jr.

september 23, 2001 Matthew 5:43–48 You have heard that it was said, ‘‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. We heard just a moment ago, the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘‘ ‘I have called you by name. You are mine,’ saith the Lord.’’ But let us start with another quotation, this one from Lev Tolstoy: ‘‘Certain questions are put to us not so much that we should answer them, as that we should spend a lifetime wrestling with them. My question: ‘Who tells you who you are?’’’ And let me illustrate . . . I was eighteen years chaplain here at Yale, and it was natural that seniors going on to graduate school (who had not learned

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that education kills by degrees) should come to the chaplain for letters of recommendation. Modesty aside, I wrote brilliant letters of recommendation, and often I would write to such highfalutin institutions of higher education as the Harvard Medical School or the Columbia Law School: ‘‘Dear Dean of Admission, this candidate will undoubtedly be in the bottom quarter of your class, but surely you will agree with me that the bottom quarter should be as carefully selected as the top quarter. And for what would you be looking in the bottom quarter if not for the sterling extracurricular characteristics so eminently embodied by this candidate?’’ And I would list them—caring, conscientious, will seek not private gain but the common good. Then I would show the letter to the senior. You are not going to believe this but, invariably, their feelings were hurt. ‘‘How do you know that I am going to be in the bottom quarter?’’ Well, all the evidence is in, isn’t it? ‘‘Yeah, but you didn’t have to tell them.’’ You see what is going on? Just to get into Yale, you have to be in the 99.5 percentile, to graduate, 99.6; to get in the Columbia Law School or the Harvard Medical School, you have to be in the 99.7, and to graduate, in the 99.8. But just because I did not say that they were going to be in the 99.9—never mind that I said they were caring, conscientious, would seek the common good, not personal gain—they felt as nothing. Such is the power of institutions of higher education to tell you who you are. Some people need money to tell them who they are. There are of course two ways to be rich: one is to have a lot of money; the other is to have few needs. As the second option is not entertained with breathtaking regularity in American society, it is well to remember the wise words of British philosopher John Ruskin, who said, ‘‘The primary reward of human toil is not what you get for it, but what you become by it.’’ Human development is a matter of being more, not having more.

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Some people need power to tell them who they are. Think of the politicians who seek, gain, and hang on for dear life to the political power they have obtained. It is moving, always, to me, to remember that Abraham Lincoln in Congress raised up to say that the war in Mexico was unnecessary and unconstitutional. For that, he lost his congressional seat. And a year ago, in what is now my home state Vermont, many legislators voted their consciences to legislate civil unions with all the benefits of marriage for gays and lesbians. Many of them lost their seats. But it was good to know that some politicians have ethical instincts greater than their political ones. Ethical is as ethical does. Believe me, as a pastor I can report to you that many people need their sins to tell them who they are. In fact, the way some people treasure their sins, you would think they were the holiest things in their lives. And finally, some people need enemies to tell them who they are. In 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, millions of American anticommunists suddenly lost their identity. ‘‘Who are we without communists?’’ In the 1990s they elevated liberals to the stature of communists and found their identities again. But this works on both sides. In March of 1968, President Johnson in the middle of the war in Vietnam announced that he would not stand for reelection. Half a million people in the American peace movement lost their identity. ‘‘Who are we without LBJ?’’ Well, fortunately Mr. Nixon came along and restored it. Today, this is a pretty important question: Who tells you who you are? On September 11th, a restless, rootless society vaguely groping for a meaning was viciously attacked, and now, it would appear, millions of Americans are purposeful again; they have found their identity. Last Sunday I was ambushed in church by a deep feeling that Jesus never made more sense than when he gave that incredible, provocative commandment, ‘‘Love your

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enemies.’’ At least if you love your enemies, your enemies cannot tell you who you are. Or consider this: Love your enemy in part because you made him so. The president said on Thursday that the enemy attacks us for what we are, not for what we do. We are so steeped in innocence we cannot even recognize our lack of innocence. Saint Augustine said, ‘‘Never fight evil as if it were something that arose totally outside of yourself.’’ He also said, ‘‘Imagine the vanity of thinking that your enemy can do you more damage than your enmity.’’ And of course, ‘‘Love your enemy’’ is a reminder that love is perfected in the love of the imperfect. It is a good question, is it not? Who tells you who you are? Suppose you heard and actually believed Isaiah when he said, ‘‘ ‘I have called you by name. You are mine,’ saith the Lord.’’ What does that mean? It means, for one thing, you never have to prove yourself, for two reasons: God’s love is poured out equally, for everybody from the Pope to the loneliest wino on the planet, and God’s love does not seek value, it creates it. It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because God loves us that we have value. Our value is a gift, not an achievement. But if you do not have to prove yourself, you have to express yourself. And what a world of difference there is between proving and expressing yourself. To express yourself means basically to return God’s love with a devotion of your own. It means you do not have to be successful, you have to be valuable. You do not have to make money, you have to make a difference, primarily in the lives of those Jesus put first and society generally puts last and counts least. One of my favorite stories is of a beggar in sixteenthcentury Paris, desperately ill and brought to the table of a group of doctors who said in Latin—they were sure he would not understand—‘‘Faciamus experimentum in anima vile’’; ‘‘Let us experiment on this vile fellow.’’ The beggar was in fact an im-

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poverished student, later to become a worldly renowned scholar, Marc Antoine Muret. And he asked from the slab on which they had laid him out, ‘‘Animam vilem appellas pro qua Christus non dedignatus mori est?’’; ‘‘Will you call vile one for whom Christ did not disdain to die?’’ If Christ did not disdain to die for anyone, who are we not to live for everyone? In religious faith, it is not doctrine, but love, that is nonnegotiable. And love, among other things, demands the utmost in clear-sightedness. If your heart is full of fear, you will seek not truth, but safety. But if your heart is full of love, it will have a limbering effect on the mind. To quote Tolstoy once again, ‘‘Indifference to evil is violence.’’ I want to stress this because in my old age, it is very clear to me that the primary damage to human life and the planet is not done by the poor and ignorant, for whom education is the answer. It is done by the highly educated, for whom self-interest is the problem. The higher our education, the greater should be our responsibilities for a saner and safer world. But alas, often recognized in institutions of higher education, ‘‘Cogito, ergo sum’’— ‘‘I think, therefore I am’’—is a bit of surpassing nonsense. It is far truer to say ‘‘Amo, ergo sum’’—‘‘I love, therefore I am.’’ For as Saint Paul said, ‘‘Even though I understand all mysteries and all knowledge but have not love, I am nothing.’’ I believe that. I believe it is better not to live, than not to love. So, do not let Yale tell you who you are. Do not let money tell you who you are. Do not let power, and do not let your sins tell you who you are, when there is more mercy in God than sin in us. And let us not let our enemies tell us who we are, lest we become what we abhor. You do not have to prove yourself, but you have to express yourself. It may be hard to love unrelentingly, but you are far more alive in pain than you are in complacency. Finally, it is quite easy. All you have to do is to remember: ‘‘ ‘I have called you by name. You are mine,’ saith the Lord.’’ Amen.

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Walk by Faith and Wait upon the Lord David L. Bartlett

october 7, 2001 Luke 17:5–10 The apostles said to the Lord, ‘‘Increase our faith!’’ The Lord replied, ‘‘If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you. Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, ‘Come here at once and take your place at the table’? Would you not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink’? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’’’ The prophet Habakkuk cried his anguished complaint twentyseven hundred years ago, but it could just as well have been twenty-seven days ago: O Lord, how long shall I cry for help And will you not listen?

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Or cry to you ‘‘violence!’’ and you will not save . . . Destruction and violence are before me; Strife and contention arise. . . . Then after long anguish and short silence, the Lord finally replies: There is a vision for my appointed time . . . If it seems to tarry, wait for it; It will surely come, it will not delay; . . . In the meantime the one who lives right will live by faith. Centuries later, Jesus’ disciples, trying hard to live right themselves, have got the message—the righteous ones will live by faith—but do they have the faith? ‘‘The apostles said to Jesus, ‘Increase our faith!’ The Lord replied ‘If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘‘be uprooted and planted in the sea’’ and it would obey you.’’’ The grammar is a little complicated, but I think what Jesus is saying is not, ‘‘If only you had faith the size of a little seed you could move a big tree’’; I think he’s saying, ‘‘Since you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can move a big tree.’’ And how does he know that the apostles have any faith at all, even a mustard seed’s worth? Because they ask for more faith. Asking for faith is the beginning of faith; the hope for faith is the birth of faith. I drove here to church three weeks ago to a nearly full chapel, past all kinds of churches full to overflowing. At Yom Kippur a few days later, the streets around our local temple had cars parked everywhere. Attendance at mosques all over the nation rose markedly. Of course, fear brought us there but also faith: maybe the hope for faith or the memory of faith, but faith. Look at us here this morning. Of course it is a special celebration for academy and community alike. But there have been

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more than enough other events this weekend to show our civil loyalties. We didn’t need to squeeze this worship in between the fireworks and the football. Loyalty brought us here but also faith: maybe the hope for faith or the memory of faith, but faith. Here’s the surprising word Jesus speaks to his apostles. A little faith is faith enough to make the most astonishing change. Nascent faith and vestigial faith are still faith. If you ask for faith nervously or remember faith faintly, you’re on your way. Therefore, this sermon does not demand faith or even recommend faith; it just assumes faith. Given that we’re all here with at least a mustard seed’s worth of faith, how might we live in this time of celebration for our school and anxiety for our nation? First, faith hopes in a vision. God tells Habakkuk to stand like a watchman in the time of terror and hope steadfastly for the vision of God to do what’s right. Stand with your mustard seed’s worth of faith and hope for the vision to come. Those clergy who founded a little college in a little colony with whatever faith they could muster that day hoped for a vision, and have received I dare say far more than they could have imagined. There is plenty of talk about Yale’s heritage and greatness and influence this weekend. And Habakkuk, before recommending faith, warns against pride. So put it simply: that modest beginning, sown in hope, brought forth this university we love. Rosa Parks, whom we honor with a lectureship at the Divinity School each year, refused to move to the back of that Montgomery bus because she bore an unquenchable hope and because she was tired. Martin Luther King found the words to affirm Rosa Park’s vision in sermons from this pulpit and around the nation: ‘‘The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice,’’ he said. We are far, far from where we need to be in dealing with racism in this nation, but we are also far from where we were.

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There is a vision for the appointed time . . . If it seems to tarry, wait for it; It will surely come, it will not delay . . . In the meantime the one who lives right will live by faith. A mustard seed of faith helps us live in hope in the light of September 11, as well. The cover of Newsweek this week asks in bold letters: ‘‘How Scared Should You Be?’’ I don’t know about you, but I’ve never needed lessons in anxiety. How faithful can we be? That’s the more pertinent question. We can take the mustard seed of hope, and we can live faithfully. We can learn from people who live daily with the embattlement we’ve only experienced this past month. Go to work; go to church or synagogue or mosque; celebrate holidays and Tercentennials. Hold firm the rights and liberties that give us cause to celebrate. I like what William Safire wrote in his column on Yom Kippur: ‘‘On top of a panicky rush to eliminate rights, too many of us are afflicted with a ‘nameless, unreasoning, and unjustified terror.’ . . . We’ll shake off that dread. Americans will return to our future’s normalcy. . . . Our children’s world will be right side up.’’ Safire continued: ‘‘I believe that especially on this somber Day of Atonement as Jews ask God to seal their names in a symbolic book. It is not a book of fear or lamentation. In an ageless affirmation of hope, we call it the Book of Life.’’ The righteous will live by faith. Faith hopes in a vision, and faith seeks reconciliation. The verses from Luke’s Gospel that come just before the passage that was read help us understand why the apostles were worried about the state of their faith. Jesus is talking about forgiveness, ‘‘If your brother or sister sins against you and repents, you must forgive. And if that same person sins against you seven times a day and says, ‘I repent’ you must forgive.’’ Then, just then, the disciples say, ‘‘[Yikes] increase our faith.’’

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Of course increase our faith. It takes faith to forgive another the wrongs done against us. It takes faith to believe that our forgiving will make a difference. It takes enormous moral courage to be willing to risk being wronged again. But I have absolutely no doubt that in the personal world of which Jesus was speaking—of family, neighborhood, and faith community—the faith that risks forgiveness is the faith that increases righteousness. It is so much harder when we move to the larger world of nations and of politics. Surely we believe that King is right that the moral bow of the universe is bent toward justice. At least in domestic politics he knew what that meant: speaking to African Americans who had been wronged in so many ways, he laid his claim to the faithful life: ‘‘In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. . . . Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.’’ Even in the face of international terrorism we seek to live by faith, to live under the claim that faith points toward forgiveness between people and reconciliation among nations. But it is very hard to know just what that means—how we live out the vision. I confess that I stand with Professor Margaret Farley, who recently told a discussion of these recent events that she wishes she could be a pacifist but she can’t. I do know that the witness of radical reconciliation is absolutely essential to the health of this nation and the hope of the nations—and any attempt to silence or shame those who are steadfastly peaceful shames our nation. There are modest things all faithful people can work for as we wait like Habakkuk for the vision of a deeper peace. We can insist that we have the same standards for international justice that we insist on at home: that we base justice on evidence; that we do not unilaterally serve as victim, jury, and judge. As our leaders have largely done, we can resist any attempt at

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scapegoating, at racial or religious profiling. Fear is the breeding ground of prejudice, and faith is the enemy of fear. And we can once again remember that a university, our university, is not merely a spectator in the great movements of history. Issues of justice, proportionality, equity, religious difference, economic growth, conflict resolution are the stuff we talk about day by day. We are allowed, invited, challenged to make sure that we become part of the public discourse, too. There is a table set before us here for world communion Sunday. Talk about mustard seeds. Who would have believed that a sad farewell meal among a small group of friends would begin a table fellowship that has extended through two millennia and spread across the earth? This table is one vision: a vision of reconciliation among all Christian peoples. Even that vision is not yet complete. Not all Christians are yet willing to come to the table. But the table is also a sign of an even larger vision: of a neighborhood larger than the Christian neighborhood and a guest list long enough for all the earth. We are not there yet; we will not see it while we live. But there is a vision for the appointed time. It will come; it will not forever delay. And meanwhile, for now, the righteous live by faith. Most of us have been at Yale’s commencement, either regularly or from time to time. Commencements remind us of our heritage, not only the splendid combination of informality and pomp—little jungles on the mortarboards of students in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies; the president speaking in Latin to award the Ph.D.’s. Commencement is also the odd combination of a pluralistic research university rooted in a religious college. That heritage is evident in the prayers, but perhaps especially in the hymns we always sing—one written at the dedication of the first Yale building in New Haven; the other

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written for the Bicentennial of our city in 1838. I have noticed that when Thomas Duffy and the University Band begin to play the last hymn, the singing, at least in my section of the audience, is a little thin: O God beneath thy guiding hand Our exiled fathers crossed the sea, And when they trod the wintry strand With prayer and psalm they worshipped thee. Perhaps both words and tune have simply faded from memory, or perhaps we remember more clearly in the twenty-first century than they did in the nineteenth that some of our exiled fathers and mothers came to this country on slave ships; and some of our fathers and mothers got exiled only when the Puritans and their friends arrived on these shores. But as the music continues, all of us remember not just the tune but the heritage—recalling the faith with which this city and this university began: faith sometimes as small as a mustard seed, faith that does ransom hope from terror and reconciliation from hate. Faith that stands strong as a watchman against the threatening night. And the singing swells and grows: And here thy name, O God of love, Our children’s children shall adore Till these eternal hills remove And spring adorns the earth no more. Amen.

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A Benediction for Us All Gardner C. Taylor

october 14, 2001 Jude 1:24–25 Now to him who is able to keep you from falling, and to make you stand without blemish in the presence of his glory with rejoicing, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. I had wanted to deal with something, but events have imperiously demanded that something else be looked at. Let me read this passage from the last two verses of that one chapter that comprises the epistle of Jude: ‘‘Now unto Him, that is able to keep you from falling and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our savior be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever.’’ I had wanted to call that a benediction for us all. And I must make a confession to you, with which I feel a great embarrassment. I was hearing and uttering these words of benediction for twenty-five or thirty years before I realized the literal meaning of the word ‘‘benediction.’’ This is an embarrassment. It really is composed of two Latin words: bene, from which our words ‘‘benefit’’ and ‘‘benevolence’’ come, and dictus, from which our word ‘‘dictating,’’ as in dictating machine, comes. It

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is a good word, but it is a good word at the end of something else. There is a bogus, a counterfeit, Christianity that is being (I wanted to use another word but I cannot think of it) peddled on television over and over again. It is centered on the themes of ‘‘health and wealth’’ and ‘‘name-it and claim-it.’’ It is a crossless Christianity. These words here at the end of this brief epistle are filled with calmness and reassurance. But they do not compose the whole part of the epistle. There is an earlier part, and I hope before dinner or whatever, you will read that entire epistle. You can read it in a very few minutes; it has but one chapter. In it earlier, this writer speaks of clouds without water, of trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit twice dead plucked up by the roots. It is really almost vehement language. That is true of the New Testament. We look upon it as a kind of calmness, of pink lemonade, or sort of like crumpets. But it was conceived and begun not only in the song of angels, but also in the shrieks of agony of dying infants and ends with the last loud thunders and trumpets of the Book of Revelation. The New Testament is really a polemical document and one of conflict. We do a grave injustice to the faith when we make it all smooth and calm and nice and placid. It is not. This particular instant may have grown out of, as New Testament scholars tell us, a heresy that had come into the community of faith— maybe Docetism, the idea of trying to explain the human nature of Jesus Christ and how the Son of God could die on a cross and all that this claim entails. Whatever it was, it had caused a grave disaffection and dislocation in the church, and this letter addresses this situation. So a faithful Christianity must confront the realities around it. It does not flee, it does not cringe in corners, it does not seek to escape, and it does not deny the realities that are around us. I suppose no one going into a pulpit today, or even ponder-

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ing privately the events of recent days, could escape some consideration, solemn consideration, of that awful visitation, that almost unspeakable assault that has been made upon our country. Mrs. Taylor and I eat at a restaurant across the East River just across from where those huge scars in the New York skyscraper line occur. We have seen through the days the billowing smoke. I guess no one could seriously ponder anything about life today without thinking of that. But one must also, in the midst of that, ponder its significance. Ponder what it does not mean. It certainly does not mean what two gentlemen in another part of the country sought to make it mean—the judgment of God upon sexual practices in America. I almost hesitate to say it, but I nearly shudder for the good name of the deity if these are his spokesmen. It does not mean that. But something else ought to engage our minds and our hearts. And that is not only our contemporary situation but also the precedents in history. How does one bring together—how does a nation, how does a state—bring together power and humility and proportion? That may be one of the subthemes of those Greek dramas we call now the tragedies—in which heroes and heroines got caught in toils, saw some way out, but in their hubris (as the Greeks put it, in their pride) could not resist attempting to rearrange the purposes of the deities. This is a problem our country faces. This is a religious problem. It is a question with which we all ought to be engaged. How does one bring power together with humility and with proportion? It may well be that only those who have known terrorism are qualified to be the chief spokesmen for healing and alone may have the competence for dealing with this kind of atrocity, which assaults everything within us and defies explanation and stupefies, boggles the mind. It may be that those who have known terror ought to be the chief spokesmen now for the healing of the nation. I come out of a community in which, in my childhood, people,

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some of whom had known the awful indignity of slavery, sought to deal with what the theologians call theodicy, or the question of how a good and omnipotent God can exist given the evil in the world. They sought to try to understand what was the purpose of the long nightmare and torture of slavery. Some of them tried to say that it was to give the freedmen a chance to turn back to Africa for its redemption. There may have also been a domestic purpose, coming out of slavery and the terrorism of racism that followed it. That community and those who are sympathetic with that community, those who have entered vicariously into the experiences of that community, are perhaps alone competent, to some extent at least, to deal with what has happened in our country. That community out of which I come knew domestic terrorism and an anonymous terrorism under white sheets and the visitation of bombing—Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins bombed in a Birmingham church. This is to say that people of all colors who have witnessed in their own country that kind of terrorism ought to be qualified, at least more nearly qualified, to deal with what has come upon our land. In that community also, other things have occurred. My friend Vernon Jordan has written his autobiography entitled Vernon Can Read, in which he, along with Dr. Arnette Reed, who humanized the Declaration of Independence with an account of Ms. Sally Hemmings, refers to people in his book who saved the soul of the nation. That to some extent may be true. It was not just a matter of black people who lost their lives fighting racism. For example, Viola Liuzzo and Reverend James Reeb were white, and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were Jewish. Out of that long history of terror, a people not of just one racial community, who have been sympathetic to that whole undertaking, ought to be qualified, made more competent to deal with what has happened to us now.

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As I said, people were seeking somehow to find out how slavery could have gone on. Some of the textbooks, which I studied in Louisiana in that distant past, said that all of the slaves were happy people. New England scholars—I hope not from this university, but at least from some of the New England schools— wrote some of those books. But out of that long nightmare, those who have been of that community and others who have vicariously entered into the experiences of that community may be eligible to help us in this hour; and some did far back—John Brown, for instance, though his name is not immortalized in one of the colleges of one of our great universities as perhaps it ought to be, while others whose names perhaps ought not to be, because they were partisans of that atrocity, are immortalized. But that community and those who are sympathetic to its purposes may well be qualified to speak a healing word of how a nation can have power and humility and a sense of proportion, which has never happened in the history of the world. We are now confronted with a crisis that gives us the opportunity, and with that crisis, with that responsibility, to do so. If we do, we might be able to solve the real problems that face us. I must confess to you that I am not a pacifist. Martin Luther King was one of my dearest friends. I am perhaps among the last living who called, affectionately, him and his father by their nickname, ‘‘Mike,’’ and his mother by her first name of Alberta. He and I argued in hotel rooms and restaurants around this country, in Jamaica and Puerto Rico and Brazil and other places, about the whole matter of nonviolence, and I have great respect for those who hold to the doctrine. Still, I believe the Civil War should have been fought, and I am proud that my grandfather wore the uniform of the Union Army and engaged in that struggle. But the problem now is what lies beyond retaliation? What reconciliation? What opportunity once again to effect a community of nations in which suspicion is not domi-

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nant? That is the question. Suppose it cannot happen? What then? Well, going from that large canvas to our individual lives, here we are in this historic chapel today at this church—all of us vulnerable not only to national events, but vulnerable by virtue of being human beings to all of the assaults upon our personhood, to all of the outrages, to all of the sadness, the tragedy to which we are heirs. I look at particularly you young people whose families are gathered around you here or somewhere, whose members seem that they will be there forever. I remember my own childhood. Those who were my elders seemed as sturdy as oak trees. One by one I saw them disappear until they are all gone now. How do we deal with the sometimes-grim realities of life? Jude does not flee or seek to escape; he faces the difficulty—but recognizes that all he has faced and confronted may not solve the problem. What then? If no nation can resolve the problem of power and proportion and humility, if no individual can solve the vulnerabilities of our being human—born to live and born to die— what then? And so at the last he says: ‘‘And now, unto him,’’ and assigns to God responsibility, hope, and trust, beyond all human power. ‘‘Now unto Him who is able.’’ Ah, that is a key word. And I put it to you here in this chapel this day. All of us, every one of us has a God, one kind or another, some ultimate trust, ultimate confidence—family, nation, race, denomination, what have you. But one must ask the question, ‘‘Is your God able?’’ Able to pick you up when you fall down, able to turn you around when you are in the wrong direction, able to sustain you, to steady you, to guide you, to keep you? ‘‘Now unto Him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you faultless.’’ One really almost stammers at the word ‘‘faultless.’’ Have you ever thought of yourself as being faultless? Well, of course you have. But have you ever thought of your roommate in this school or

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your colleague on this faculty as being faultless? And yet, this is exactly what the New Testament says. Arthur Gossip in Scotland used to say in his time that one day you, I also perhaps, will stand next to Jesus Christ, and angels who have been looking at Him since the morning of creation will look at Him, and look at you and ask one another ‘‘Which one is Jesus?’’ Such is the startling word of the New Testament: ‘‘it does not yet appear what we shall be, but this we know, that when he shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see him as he is’’ (1 John 3:2). And so our writer of Jude says, ‘‘to the only wise God our Savior, be glory and majesty.’’ To that God, who calls us out of darkness into his marvelous light. To that God, who gives power to the faint and to them that have no might quick strength. To that God who leads us by still waters and into green pastures. To that God, who has ‘‘sounded forth the trumpet that shall never sound retreat, who is ever seeking out the hearts of people before his judgment seat,’’ To that God who turns the fields at Antietam and Shiloh Church and Gettysburg, and in my native state of Louisiana at Port Hudson, red with patriot’s blood that freedom might live, To the only wise God our Savior, be glory, and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.

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The Years That the Locusts Have Eaten John Vannorsdall

october 21, 2001 Joel 2:1–9 Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near—a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness! Like blackness spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army comes; their like has never been from of old, nor will be again after them in ages to come. Fire devours in front of them, and behind them a flame burns. Before them the land is like the Garden of Eden, but after them a desolate wilderness, and nothing escapes them. They have the appearance of horses, and like war-horses they charge. As with the rumbling of chariots, they leap on the tops of the mountains, like the crackling of a flame of fire devouring the stubble, like a powerful army drawn up for battle. Before them peoples are in anguish, all faces grow pale. Like warriors they charge, like soldiers they scale the wall. Each keeps to its own course, they do not swerve from their paths. They do not jostle one another, each keeps to its own track; they burst through the weapons and

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are not halted. They leap upon the city, they run upon the walls; they climb up into the houses, they enter through the windows like a thief. If you ever need a description of a plague of locusts, look to the Book of Joel. About 450 years before Christ, the prophet wrote this about locusts on parade. It’s unlikely that these locusts will crawl upon the walls of your house and enter through my windows, but neither of us will escape the issue that prompted Joel’s frightening vision. Joel said that the plague of locusts he described was God’s punishment for the people’s sins. Is that true? ‘‘The Lord utters his voice at the head of his army; how vast is his host! Numberless are those who obey his command. Truly the day of the Lord is great; terrible indeed—who can endure it?’’ (2:11). The conviction that catastrophes are God’s punishment for disobedience is a recurring theme in our lives, both religious and secular. Sin and consequence occur together on the first pages of the Book of Genesis. The issue was not apples, but whether or not Adam and Eve would live within the requirements of God. They chose not to do so. The consequence was banishment from the Garden. It’s the biblical way of describing the geography of the human family, our location East of Eden, outside the gate. Why? Because God had requirements that we were free to honor or to ignore. Ignoring the will of God was habitual, and the price was locusts. Truth telling was a requirement. Pinocchio was free to think otherwise, but there was a price. Some of us take this for granted and assume that every catastrophe, every sickness or accident, is a punishment for our sins, or for the sins of our family, our nation. One of our better-known television preachers let slip his conviction that the tragedy of September 11 was God’s locusts leaping upon the city as a pun-

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ishment for our tolerance of homosexuality and abortions. It’s unfortunate that the preacher had forgotten about the biblical account of the blind man. The story is a caution against the simple equation of crime and punishment. Jesus and his disciples came upon a man who had been blind from birth. The disciples were quick with their question: ‘‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’’ The punishment was obvious, but whose was the crime? Then Jesus provided one of the most freeing responses in the New Testament: ‘‘Who sinned? Neither this man nor his parents.’’ Sometimes a plague is just a plague. This encounter was not about sin, but about compassion. Jesus healed the man with mud on the eyes and a wash in the pool of Siloam. Thornton Wilder’s classic story The Bridge of San Luis Rey is another reminder that there is no easy correlation between death on a collapsing bridge and the virtue or corruption in the lives of those who died. Sometimes a bridge is not a weapon in the hand of God. Sometimes a bridge is just old and tired. Joel was a prophet and exercised his prophetic right to say that a plague of locusts was God’s punishment for a people’s disobedience. Most of us, having small claim to prophesy, will be more cautious. If some hardship befalls you and you understand it to be God’s warning, or God’s punishment for offenses known and unknown, then I will respect your witness. But if I come to your bedside with raised eyebrow or a smirk, which implies that your sickness is God’s punishment, then I have overstepped my knowledge and your right to make your own witness or to keep silence. Sometimes a bridge is just old, a plague is just a plague, and neither this man nor his parents had sinned. This caution against raised eyebrows in no way undercuts Joel’s basic premise. All of us who at least from time to time become silent in a sacred space acknowledge our responsibility to

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the One who is not ourselves. All of us who from time to time kneel at the altar of Scripture’s God acknowledge the judgment of God that falls upon us and flows through the land. Our lives are lived subject to the impact of both right and wrong. Good and evil. It is a landscape constantly changing, but we are never far from the demands of yes and no. For those of us who are in some way captive to the witness concerning God’s judgment, the stories of the plague of locusts and compassion wash in the pool of Siloam will influence our way of understanding ourselves. We will not always agree on what it is that God requires in a given circumstance. Perhaps Professor Roland Bainton gave the shortest sermon ever heard in Battell Chapel some twenty years ago. He simply reported his experience as a volunteer with a medical group in France during the First World War and then concluded by saying, ‘‘Each of us will have to make a personal decision about war and the taking of human life. I decided in France that as a Christian I cannot and will not do so.’’ And he sat down and we were all silent together. Some of us are convinced that it is contrary to the will of God for human beings to torture one another under any circumstance. Others argue that, while it is surely contrary to the will of God, the torture of a few might be necessary to save the lives of many. Day by day, war by war, those of us who strive to live accountable to our Creator have to pray, think, and argue together about what is required of us in the particularities, which can’t be avoided. What is not allowed is for us to abandon the constraints of God and just do whatever it takes to have a really great day. One evening when serving as chaplain at a college, I received a call from a jail in a nearby town. One of our students had shoplifted, was apprehended by a police officer, and broke away. The officer shot over his head, but the student stopped only when

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another officer knocked him down. ‘‘Chaplain,’’ said the desk sergeant, ‘‘If you want him, you can come and pick him up.’’ I wasn’t sure I wanted him, but I went. On the way home I asked the student why he thought he had come to thievery. He bridled. He was not a thief. He was just shoplifting. The store would never miss the stuff. The conversation fizzled. There are those who define good and evil, not by the experience of sacred spaces or the rhythms of sacred texts, but simply by terms of what best suits their current needs and desires. We have great difficulty accepting the limits of earth’s oil resources. Drill and burn. Design a foreign policy that allows us to drill and burn. Small towns don’t say this publicly, but please, no low-income housing, which attracts people with children who go to schools that cost big money requiring taxes. Let’s talk about water. Let’s talk about the legacies of privilege. Let’s talk about gated communities. The student seemed to have no sense of accountability to anyone or anything other than to his own desires. The elementary schools in my town have put up posters that read, ‘‘Do to others only what you would have them do to you.’’ So every fifth grader, after reading the poster, says to himself or herself when confronted by a tormentor, ‘‘Now what would I like done to me?’’ Hardly. A more likely response to the poster is, ‘‘Sez who?’’ And that’s the point, you see. ‘‘Sez who?’’ Christians and Jews, with the people of other traditions, understand us to be accountable to God as individuals and as communities within the family of God. We live within the framework of requirement and response. We live within the claims of God, within the fluid power of the love of God. And when catastrophes happen, we have, at least, to ask ourselves whether these hoppers,

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these cutters, these locusts that climb through our windows are a judgment that marks the integrity of God. If we are open to the integrity that judges and condemns our self-obsession, then Joel invites us to receive and be glad for the mercy of God. Finally, it is mercy, and not locusts, that is the central theme of this passage: ‘‘Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing’’ (2:13). ‘‘O children of Zion, be glad and rejoice in the Lord your God, for he has given the early rain for your vindication, he has poured down for you abundant rain, the early and the later rain, as before. . . . I will repay you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten’’ (2:23, 25). ‘‘I will repay you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten.’’ One day I was seated in my car in a parking lot. Not far away a father also waited, his young son in the back seat. Suddenly, the man twisted around and hit the boy so hard he was knocked to the floor. I jumped out of my car, but stopped. The man glared at me as though daring me to take one more step toward him. I got back in the car while he drove away. It was painful for the boy. It was painful for me to see. I suspect that when he was alone, the father put his face in his hands and wept. It’s hard to imagine what this scene meant to the Creator of both father and son. Joel rehearses the central theme of the Scriptures. The God who day by day must witness the pain of three people in a parking lot, the God who day by day endures the silence of still smoldering towers, the God who beholds the fat slow gunships raining hundreds of rounds a minute in the hope of hitting an intended target, the God who sends locusts as warning and punishment—this God will repay us with compassion for the years that the swarming locust has eaten!

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It really doesn’t have a lot to do with logic, does it? Logic seldom holds its face in its hands and weeps. Love does that. It’s love that rightly corrects and punishes for the sake of the one loved. It is love, which absorbs the cost of loving. It is love that restores the years that the locusts have eaten. This is the Love that is never less than crucified, dead, and buried. And it is out of this grave that hope arises. O children of Zion, be glad and rejoice in the Lord your God.

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Lux et Veritas Peter J. Gomes

october 28, 2001 Psalm 43:3 O send out your light and your truth; let them lead me; let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling. Let us pray. Help us Lord to become masters of ourselves, that we may become the servants of others. Take our hands and work through them, take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, and take our hearts and set them on fire for Christ’s sake. Amen. We have been going through a rough patch in these past several weeks. I refer not exclusively to your interminable celebrations, although I am sure they are part of the rough patch, but it is in the larger context that we have to be stirred and troubled and vexed as never before. It is on this occasion that we have to ask, in the words of those obnoxious and anxious Hebrews, ‘‘Is the Lord with us or not?’’ Let me step back from these recent days to a blissful summer day that now seems to me years ago but it was only a few months past. It was in high summer. It was in June. It was in England. It was at Windsor; and my host, a good and godly man and, I might well say, well placed, told me that he had a treat in store for me. Knowing what a terrible snob I am, he said, ‘‘I have arranged for us to attend the Chapel Royal tomor-

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row morning.’’ This was not Saint George’s Chapel where every Tom, Dick, and Harry tourist can wander in, but Her Majesty’s own private chapel in the middle of Windsor Great Park. It seats forty people, composed only of those who have been approved in advance by the Queen herself. My host went on, ‘‘If members of the Royal Family are in attendance, while we will not see them, we will see, moving very slightly, the green curtain behind which they sit during divine service.’’ This, needless to say, was a turn-on. So, we betook ourselves to Her Majesty’s free chapel, we were vetted at the door, and we were ushered to seats in the front of this tiny little space a third the size of Battell Chapel. Before the service began a very elegant man came down and spoke not to me but to my host, saying, ‘‘Her Majesty would be so pleased if you would bring your guest to drinks following the service.’’ Well, I paid little attention to the service, particularly not to the sermon, as I contemplated what it would be like to have drinks with the Queen and her mother. In the fullness of time we were taken from the chapel to the Royal Lodge in a room filled with flowers and aged well-bred people, and little dogs running around. And Pimm’s cup flowed ceaselessly in an incredible scene straight out of Merchant and Ivory; and into the middle of it came the same man who had spoken to us in the chapel. Approaching me this time, he said, ‘‘Her Majesty would enjoy a few words with you. Won’t you come with me?’’ There was the Queen, sitting in a sun-filled bay window with a silver cup of tea beside her; she bade me sit down, and we began to chat—that is, I began to listen. There, as well, was Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, about to become 101, who, with eyes brimming with excitement and a little bit of mischief, turned to me and said, ‘‘Wasn’t the sermon wonderful this morning?’’ Well, it was a terrible sermon, to be perfectly honest, but I did what any good, red-blooded guest would do; I lied. ‘‘Oh yes, ma’am,’’

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I said, ‘‘I was deeply moved by the sermon.’’ And she continued, ‘‘I do like a little bit of good news on a Sunday, don’t you?’’ Who would not? Who does not? ‘‘A little bit of good news on a Sunday.’’ That is what we are about in theory, all of the time, but it has been particularly what we have been about in recent days. A little good news on a Sunday goes a long, long way; in fact, longer than it used to go. We have been having Easter crowds in Memorial Church since the attacks on September 11th—crowds composed of the good, the great, the bewildered, the confused, the terrified, and the frightened—and what they have come to hear is not an analysis, not another talking head, not even public therapy. They have come to hear if there is any good news. Is there any gospel left? Is there anything that we can hear and appropriate from our tradition that will say something to us now, in this reality that is now ours? And I have discovered something since September 11th, which I perhaps should have known before but is a wonderful, striking revelation nevertheless, and it is that when I hear the words of Scripture now, since then, I hear them differently. I hear them differently than I did before September 11th, and I look for clues about me, clues about those to whom those words of Scripture were written, clues about those who wrote them—and I think that if those words cannot speak to me now, then they need never try to speak to me again. Either the gospel is for this moment, this time, our condition, our circumstances, or it is for no one ever again. So, it will not surprise you that I have found words, messages, powers, strengths, and encouragement in the gospel, in light of our human reality. That is the way it is supposed to be. When things go our way, and we suffer the advantages of prosperity and comfort and self-sufficiency and self-indulgence, the gospel always speaks to someone else in another time in a foreign language, and we are, at best, overhearing it. When we ourselves

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are stricken to the quick, however, and when we are wounded and suffering and hurting, when we are doubtful, fearful, confused, and anxious, then we hear the gospel with the ears that were meant to hear it. We receive the messages that were sent to us in the first place. We understand that there is a word from the Lord, and it is for us and it is for these very times. As I thought about what word one might bring to the good people of the Church of Christ in Yale College, and to Yale University and its friends and neighbors in this season of celebration in their three-hundredth year, I looked at the lessons that were appointed for this day. I hasten to tell you that I did not choose these lessons; they were chosen for me. You, congregation, are apparently held hostage to the liturgical year, and therefore the lectionary people tell us what we must do and when we must do it. When in Rome, I follow the Romans, and these lessons came not by my hands—although there is something here for you and for me. Maybe the first thing I should say to you is that before you move on from this service, or from this sermon, or this year or this series of celebrations, there are three things from this morning’s lessons that you might want to take as your own. You might want to appropriate them for yourselves; you might hear in them something for today. The first thing I give to you, which has come to me out of these lessons, is the notion of the power of a great vision—the power of a dream that exceeds its place, its time, its circumstances, and even its immediate beneficiaries. I refer, of course, to that wonderful passage in the little Book of Joel where there is discussion about ‘‘sons and daughters.’’ That term is not an editorial add-on by politically correct readers in the twenty-first century; that is what the Hebrew says: ‘‘sons and daughters’’ —the sons and daughters who share the dreams that the old men dream and the visions that the young ones see, and who

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are called out of darkness into a marvelous light. The power of those visions, the power of that dream, overwhelms the initial sense, in the Book of Joel, of sadness, of despair, and of abandonment. It is out of that sense of abandonment that the vision, the dream, emerges, sustains, and ultimately triumphs. There is nothing more powerful on the face of the earth than the power of a dream, the power of a vision, or an idea whose time is coming. When I think about the originating idea of this institution, I had recourse to a little book, which helped to distill all of your long history into a few phrases and a few nicely drawn pictures. The phrase that leaps out is that which actually you commemorate on October 15, for on that date in 1701, your pious Congregational ministers who founded the place expressed one of their great visions as ‘‘an institution wherein youth may be instructed in the arts, and sciences, who through the blessing of our mighty God may be fitted for public employment both in church and civil state.’’ Now that may be old news to you case-hardened Yalies who have heard it over and over and over again to the point where it may be a cliché or a canard, yet that vision for hopeful youth, that pious and powerful dream, is still capable of transforming both young lives and the world in which they are called to serve. Who knows? Perhaps this very moment, this very crisis, this very season of distress and grief may be the moment of that pious call for employment both in church and in civil state. It has already begun to work wonders; and I am among the many who does not, shall we say, either enjoy the highest confidence in or place the highest confidence in the most visibly emplaced Yale graduate at the helm of our civil state. That graduate has proclaimed himself to be a C+ graduate of this institution, a point in which he seemed to take some degree of pride—which I fear it in Cambridge only confirms standing opinion. Circumstances make the man, however, and not the man make the circumstances, and so far so very good. He has sur-

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prised us all, or at least all of us who talk about him in this fashion. He has risen, and God help him to rise higher, for we depend on his intelligence, his compassion, and his strength of will and character. Who is to say, as it is written in the Book of Esther, that he was not ‘‘called to the kingdom for such a time as this’’? Do not despair of the power of a great dream for it is the power of a great dream that has always sustained people, particularly when people are challenged or confronted. Such a great dream is at the heart of the history of this great college and university, and that is the first lesson to learn and keep from the little book of the prophet Joel: the power of a great vision. The second lesson to remember comes quite obviously from the epistle, where Saint Paul is writing to his younger successor, Timothy, of his own achievements and his own frustrations. The thing we are to learn is that there is virtue in struggle. Paul says, at the end of his career, ‘‘I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith,’’ and that is all very good for Saint Paul, who is about to retire to that senior prophet center where he can write his memoirs and put his feet up and slip gradually into prophetic senility. That is all right for Paul, who is finished with all of these things, but the burden of the message is to Timothy, who is still in the struggle, who is not retiring from anything, who in some very real sense has his best days and his greatest challenges in front of him. When we read this epistle we are tempted to think about Paul in retrospect, when the intention of the epistle is that we are to think of Timothy in prospect. It is that which I invite you to take from this lesson, for not only is there virtue in the struggle, but the best and most challenging moments of that struggle are ahead of you. There is a struggle, for an institution such as this, to maintain the integrity of its soul; and on this subject I speak with authority, for we have spent longer in trying to maintain it in Cambridge than you have, with no more notable success. One has to pray that

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our best days are before us, for if we should judge iniquity on the basis of our past alone, who among us would stand? The only way one can celebrate a glorious past is to hope that we outlive it, and actually embrace a restorative and encouraging future. So do not waste time here in 2 Timothy, wondering about Paul’s epitaph or his summary statement. It is good to have fought a good fight, it is wonderful to have finished your course, it is good to be able to say, ‘‘I have kept the faith’’; but none of us is yet in a position to say it. We are not with Paul, we are with Timothy; and therefore it is to the days ahead to which we must look. The struggle in this college church and chapel—to preserve as a whole the ideal of Christian learning and public service in the middle of a large, prosperous, and frequently hostile university—is the struggle that remains ahead of you; and it is to indicate that the Christian faith is not simply a remote aspect of Yale’s past, but it has something to do with its present and everything to do with its future. You have not yet fought the fight, you have not yet finished the course, and you have not yet kept the faith. What awaits all of you is what awaits all of us. The third thing that you might remember from what Scripture says to us this morning, naturally and expectedly, comes from the Gospel of Saint Luke, from his parable on the Pharisee and the publican. There are two things one might extract from this parable. We know what we are meant to feel in hearing the parable of the Pharisee and the publican; even the dullest among us knows that you are supposed to cheer the publican and hiss the Pharisee. That is the way it is written, that is how it is scored, that is how it is scripted, and it is about as subtle as the canned laughter on a sitcom. Bad, bad, bad Pharisee. Nice, nice, nice publican. We are publicans and not Pharisees, I will give you that, that is easy; but the fact of the matter is, where is the good news for those of us who may feel that we should cheer the publican, but who are in fact, for better or worse, counted among the

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Pharisees? Why do I say that? The Pharisees are meant to be the good people. They know the Law, they obey the Law, they keep the Law, they do the right thing, they walk only when it says walk, and they understand that if anybody breaks the Law there is chaos and confusion. We need a good word for the Pharisees, and here we are, we Pharisees, in church. If we take the script as it is so carefully crafted and usually read, where is the good news for us? Do we not get any credit for trying to do the right thing? Here is this other guy who gets all the emotional credit. We cheer him on, but we are not one with him. Why do you suppose Jesus spends so much time talking about Pharisees? He spends time because he is interested in saving Pharisees. He cares for Pharisees. He is interested in helping Pharisees to not go over the cliff, whether pushed over or pulled down by their own blindness and self-righteousness. He wants the Pharisees—that is, he wants us—to say: ‘‘Stop, look, listen. This message has our name on it. Do not worry. He will take care of the publican; there is lots of room for him, but he wants us too. He wants to save the good people who are not good enough.’’ We are the people who fill the churches of Christendom, and the word here is ‘‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’’ That word is not meant for the publican; it is meant for us. It is meant to help us remember that we are not called here by our virtues, but by our needs, and that we are not saved because we are good, but because we are not good enough. It is to us that the message applies. It is to us to whom this good news is given. Why does Jesus spend all of his time seemingly speaking to people who are not there? He does not. He is always speaking to the people who must need to hear what he has to say, and in this case, in the parable, it is the Pharisees who are his audience of opportunity and the people to whom he chooses to offer redemption. It is to us, who are here, for whom this good news is a gospel of opportunity.

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Do you remember one of the many apocryphal accounts of Oscar Wilde, when he entered the United States for the first time and cleared Customs, and the Customs Officer asked, ‘‘Have you anything to declare?’’ Oscar Wilde replied, ‘‘Nothing but my brilliance.’’ Doubtless he was a Harvard man and not a Yale man—not because of his brilliance, but because of his lack of modesty. ‘‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner. You have some good news for me; open my ears that I may receive it.’’ President Eliot of Harvard, at the 250th anniversary of our university in 1886, said, in his two-and-a-half-hour address celebrating his institution, ‘‘A great past is a positive danger for the future.’’ It was true for us, it is true for you, for the greater the past and the more of it you have, the more likely you are to focus on all of its great achievements and the less likely that you are to see that there is as much to be done ahead of you as has been done behind. I suspect you already know that. I have read your Tercentennial prose, and at least on paper it has tried to direct your attention forward and ahead and not simply backward and behind. You already have a leg up in that enterprise in your famous motto derived from my text in Psalm 43. You have discovered, or at least you should discover, that truth alone does not cut it; and that is the one unambiguous place in which you are a great improvement over your older brothers and sisters in Cambridge. We have to cozy up to the ice-cold figure of truth, while you have a little light to go along with your truth; and there is something to be said about that light and that truth that is meant to reveal the whole knowledge of God. Now, I know that your secular historians here will do everything in their power to remove any theological content from the notion of truth, and reduce it simply to the sum of two plus two or some other unadorned and uninteresting fact; but the fact of the matter is that that is not enough, and that is not all, and that was not what was meant by your pious, Congregational

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founders. They knew what Psalm 43 meant to them, through the light of their Puritan lenses, and it is no less true now than it was then: ‘‘Oh, send out thy light and thy truth; let them lead me; let them bring me to thy holy hill.’’ In a world of increasing darkness, in a world where truth is held hostage to and compromised by ideology, truth and light are no longer Hebraic luxuries or antiquities in Yale’s old colonial closet. They are the necessities of life, of everyday existence, and without them it is impossible to function in the new and dangerous world of the twenty-first century. A theologian has reminded us that in darkness there is no choice; it is light that enables us to see the differences between things, and it is Christ who gives us light. On that note, I reiterate again that I believe in the gospel that says your best days are ahead of you, that your best and shining moments are not to be found in the history books or the history that is even currently being composed. The greatest days for Lux et Veritas await us, and have yet to be written down, have yet to be experienced, have yet to be encountered. Who knows whether your moment of nobility and service may arise before your eyes in the darkness and neediest moment of our culture? For some, this may be too much. For some, you may be tired and worn out. These are depressing and enervating days. Well I give you another royal illustration, which may be helpful. In the papers this summer there was an account of one of the Queen Mother’s elderly ladies in waiting. Remember, the Queen Mother is 101 years old, so everyone around her is of a ‘‘certain’’ age. This particular lady, Lady Beatrice, seemingly decided that after sixty years in royal service it was time to hang up her tiara; and so, at the age of eighty-seven, she submitted her resignation to the Queen Mother. The Queen Mother sent for her and refused it, saying to her, reportedly with these words, ‘‘Beatrice, my dear, I must go on and so must you.’’

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So must we. We must go on, not out of sheer habit and sheer routine, but because this is our vocation, being called to the kingdom for just such a time as this, seizing our moment of nobility and opportunity as it may present itself, and being guided by light and truth through the stingy darkness of this postmodern world. The content of our hope is this: God is, and He is as seen in Jesus. So we have hope. Nothing less than this will do, but nothing more than this is necessary. ‘‘O send out thy light and thy truth: let them lead me and let them bring me; let them bring me to thy holy hill.’’ Happy birthday. Amen.

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Preaching in the New Millennium Laura Geller

november 4, 2001 Genesis 32:23–30 He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, ‘‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’’ But Jacob said, ‘‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’’ So he said to him, ‘‘What is your name?’’ And he said, ‘‘Jacob.’’ Then the man said, ‘‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’’ Then Jacob asked him, ‘‘Please tell me your name.’’ But he said, ‘‘Why is it that you ask my name?’’ And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, ‘‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.’’ It is an extraordinary honor to be here in the Battell Chapel . . . and a bit of a surprise. First, it’s a surprise because I didn’t go to Yale. Second, it’s a surprise because I’m Jewish, and I don’t usually preach in a church. Actually this is not the first time

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I have had the privilege of preaching in a church. In fact the very first sermon I ever gave was in the First Baptist Church in Providence. It was 1971, my graduation from Brown; I had been elected by my class to give one of the commencement addresses. I didn’t know at the time that it was a sermon, but in retrospect that is exactly what it was. And not a very good one. It was written with the audacity of a very young person with little life experience. It ended with these words: ‘‘When women demand to be treated as human beings, they are threatening the fabric of a society which objectifies all of its people. It is not sufficient to ‘liberate’ women into such a society; in fact true liberation, in those terms, is impossible. The women’s movement, the black movement, and the antiwar movement are all part of the same struggle—the struggle to reshape our society so as to make people whole. This is the world we are graduating into; this is the world we have to change.’’ A teacher in seminary once told me that a rabbi only preaches one sermon in his or her life—and I guess it’s true. I’ve been preaching versions of the same sermon ever since, trying to figure out what it means to make people whole. ‘‘Preach’’ is actually not such a good word for what rabbis do. In my own congregation, I don’t give the kind of sermon I am giving now. Instead, I teach. (‘‘Rabbi’’ actually means ‘‘teacher.’’) I teach a section of the weekly Torah portion, by asking congregants to turn to each other and study in chevruta, in partnership. I give them the biblical text, the text from the Torah of our tradition, and I bring commentaries from throughout Jewish history, from ancient rabbis filling in the lacunae in the text with stories of their own, to medieval commentators explicating every verse, to Chassidic rebbes who discover spiritual truths in the turn of a phase or the repetition of a word. The study partners interact with the text and the commentary and each other, bringing the Torah of their own lives together with the Torah of tradition.

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They wrestle with Torah, and through the wrestling, they are blessed. This wrestling goes back all the way to the story of our ancestor Jacob, who wrestled with a mysterious stranger. With whom is Jacob wrestling? The text is very unclear. Is it a man? Is it an angel? Himself? His brother? God? All we know for sure is Jacob’s name is changed to Israel—one who wrestles with God. It is from this that the Jewish people take their name: B’nai Yisrael, the children of this God wrestler. To be Israel means to be one who wrestles with God. So I’d like to invite you to join in this sacred wrestling match, with the Torah portion we read yesterday in synagogue. It included stories that we heard this morning—the birth of Isaac and the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael, as well as other wellknown stories, Sodom and Gomorrah and the binding of Isaac. Every Shabbat morning, in synagogues around the world, the exact same section of Torah is chanted out loud and interpreted and studied. Torah is read in an annual cycle, beginning again after the Jewish New Year when we finish the last words of the Book of Deuteronomy and immediately begin again with the Book of Genesis. So we meet these stories every year, week after week. The texts become a kind of measuring stick; they stay the same, but as we grow older, we respond to them in different ways. For example, when I was young, I never particularly connected with the story of Hagar and Ishmael. Then I became a mother, and the story took on deeper meaning. I became Hagar, desperate over her inability to protect her child. Later, as I went through a painful divorce, I understood the betrayal that Hagar felt at the hands of her husband. Now, as I get involved with the Living Wage Campaign in Los Angeles, I ask myself if I am Sarah, undervaluing the foreign-born woman who works in my house and takes care of my children. And as I have deepened my commitment to working for peace in the Middle East, I have to struggle with what it means to be Ishmael when I reflect on

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the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. This question is especially poignant today, the sixth anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. I become Hagar at those moments in my life when I feel stuck, when there seems to be no way out of an impossible situation. Then, like Hagar, I try to strengthen my hand through the hand of someone I love, as she did with Ishmael. That strength has helped me look up and find the well of water that was there all along. The Torah of tradition, these sacred stories, helps me notice that I continue to change; the Torah of tradition illuminates the Torah of my life. And, in turn, the Torah of my life, my own experience, illuminates the Torah of tradition. When my son was eighteen months old it was time for me to wean him. I was ambivalent; working full time meant I didn’t get to spend as much time with him as I wanted. I talked with a much older friend, a wise woman. She said: ‘‘You’re going to have to wean your child many times in your life. You might as well learn to do it now.’’ So I turned to Torah, and noticed a verse we read this morning that I had never noticed before: ‘‘Abraham circumcised his son Isaac at the age of eight days as God had commanded him. And Abraham was one hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. Sarah said, ‘God has made laughter for me; whoever hears will laugh with me. . . .’ The child grew and was weaned. And Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned.’’ All of a sudden, this verse that I had read and heard dozens of time, leaped out and grabbed me. Clearly I was not the first Jew to recognize the need to celebrate weaning! And yet, so many questions! Why did Abraham make the feast and not Sarah? What happened to the tradition of a weaning feast? So I explored biblical and rabbinic references to weaning. I discovered the core of a weaning celebration, a ritual probably celebrated by our mothers many generations ago but lost to the male record-

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ers of Jewish tradition. In brilliant rabbinic fashion, they substituted something they understood for a ceremony they couldn’t comprehend: so now we have a feast at a circumcision. Along the way, I discovered images that were stunning and empowering for me: in a midrash (Pesikta de Rav Kahana 12:2), a verse from Psalms (18:18) is interpreted to mean, ‘‘God took out her breast to give Israel Torah.’’ That image, of God as a mother nursing her infant child, loving her child Israel as I loved my own baby, with Torah the milk that flowed from her breast, gave me words to describe the sense of holiness I felt. It changed my experience of nursing, and it opened up my image of God. So I created a weaning ritual, by remembering and inventing at the same time. The Torah of our life changes the Torah of tradition. For countless generations, the only ones who wrestled with Torah were men. All the commentaries around the page, all the conversations around the table that bridged the centuries, were the words of men. Without the voices and the experiences of women, of half the Jewish people, the tradition was incomplete, wounded. But now, because women have joined the conversation, the Jewish tradition is being transformed for both women and men. It is becoming whole. When I began rabbinical school in 1971, no woman in America had yet been ordained a rabbi. I was the third woman ordained in the Reform movement, the fourth woman rabbi in America. (Until recently I would have said the fourth ever, but recent scholarship has uncovered the history of a woman named Regina Jonas, independently ordained in Germany in 1935. Little is known about her life and work—which ended with her murder in Auschwitz in 1944.) At my ordination in 1976, I became part of a very small sorority that signaled a major revolution. Just as liberal Judaism was

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ordaining its first women as rabbis, other religious communities were wrestling with the ordination of women as well. The first women to be Episcopal priests were ordained, without the sanction of the entire church, in 1972. The movement toward the empowerment and maybe even the eventual ordination of Catholic women began to gather steam in the early 1970s. The Jewish and Christian communities were affected by the feminist issues of the seventies: issues of equality like equal pay for equal work and access to positions of power and influence that had previously been closed to women. In the Jewish community, the questions were: can women be rabbis and cantors? Can women be counted in the minyan, the basic quorum necessary? Can girls and women celebrate their connection to their respective religious traditions in the same way that men do, by wearing the prayer garments men traditionally wore—tallit, kippah, tefillin—or by marking life transitions the way boys and men do? Over the next several decades, these issues were discussed, often fought about, but eventually answered more or less in the affirmative. There are now well over three hundred women who are rabbis in America, Europe, and Israel. And there is a generation of Jewish feminist scholars, prominent among them Yale historian Dr. Paula Hyman, who are teaching us all. As these questions of equal access were answered, a second, even more important series of questions emerged, questions that are more revolutionary. Now that women can be counted in a prayer quorum, we can step back and ask: how do women pray? Is women’s experience in prayer the same as the experience of men? Or, to push even further, to whom are we praying? Is the God who is often described through male metaphors, like ‘‘Father’’ and ‘‘King,’’ the God that women experience? And, of course, once that question can be articulated, it raises the obvious question: is the God we call ‘‘Father’’ and ‘‘King’’ really the

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God that men experience? These questions not only challenge traditional liturgy; they also push the boundaries of theology, ritual, and religious community for both women and men. One of the interesting challenges of being a rabbi is that people approach you in inappropriate places to tell you they don’t believe in God. With me, it usually happens in the market. Depending on how much sleep I got the night before, I will either engage the seeker or try to deflect the whole encounter. But if I engage, the conversation will usually go like this: ‘‘Rabbi, I don’t believe in God.’’ ‘‘Oh, how interesting,’’ I might reply. ‘‘Tell me about the god you don’t believe in.’’ Invariably, the god is the god we first met in childhood, in illustrated Bible stories, an old man who looks a little like my grandfather. He sits in a throne in the sky, and he knows if you’ve been bad or good. He is also all-powerful, so the break with this god typically happened at a moment of crisis, like when a loved one died or when a catastrophe occurred. I’ll respond that I don’t believe in that god either; that most adults don’t. And even though that image appears to be reinforced in our liturgy and in our sacred texts, it is a kind of idol worship. Idolatry is, of course, defined as limiting God, who by definition can’t be limited. We need to uncover other images of God that are part of our traditions, images that could expand our consciousness of divinity. For example, the Hebrew phase that is usually translated as ‘‘Father of Mercy’’ (Av Harachamim) might better be translated as ‘‘Source of motherly love,’’ because Rachamim might come from the word Rechem, which means ‘‘womb.’’ Thinking of God as the source of motherly love might go a long way in shattering the idol of the old man with the beard in the sky. Or, consider another example. The euphemism ‘‘Lord,’’ which Jews use for the unpronounceable four-letter name of God, obscures the powerful possibility that that unpronounceable Name

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might simply be the sound of breathing . . . that with every breath we are speaking God’s name. The task of the religious person, then, is simply to pay attention, to notice that with every breath we praise the divinity that is all around us, the divinity that connects us to every other living being. As images of God change, spirituality changes. And our understanding of what it means to live in the presence of God changes as well. Theology matters. A transcendent patriarchal god supports a vision of a political order where power is concentrated at the top. The danger of this kind of idolatry is manifested in the extremist fringes of all traditions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This is the dark side of religion. On the other hand, an imminent God who can be experienced through breathing links us to each other and helps us realize that divinity is within us and around us. It calls on us to create a world where every human being can live as if he or she really were created in the image of God. This image of God can liberate us and, in the words of my very first sermon at the First Baptist Church, can empower us in the struggle to reshape society and to make people whole. This struggle is difficult because it raises questions about authority, authenticity, and community. At the conclusion of High Holy Day services during my first year as a rabbi, a congregant rushed up to talk with me: ‘‘Rabbi, I can’t tell you how different I feel about services because you are a woman. I found myself feeling that if you can be a rabbi, then I could be a rabbi too. If you could learn those prayers, then I could learn them. Seeing you as rabbi makes me realize that I can take responsibility for my own Jewish life.’’ That congregant was a man. I didn’t fully understand his reaction until I shared it with a woman who is an Episcopal priest. She told me that when she consecrates the Eucharist, a highly

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scripted and central moment in her worship, she wears the same robes and follows the same pattern as any of her male priest colleagues. Still, she reported, people take the Eucharist differently from her. Why? She believes it is because people are used to being fed by women, so the experience is less mysterious, less hierarchical, and more shared. With women as clergy, the boundary between clergy and laity begins to break down. This has enormous implications for the sociology of religious community as more laypeople are empowered to take responsibility for their own religious lives and begin to assume roles of leadership once reserved just for clergy. What will religious institutions look like when the model is shared leadership? How will our understandings of what it means to be a religious person change as spirituality becomes more accessible to each individual? What will religious traditions become when we include the voices of all the different kinds of people who have been marginalized and ignored? And finally, how will this entire revolution influence the struggle to reshape our society so as to make people whole? Again, I return to the process of wrestling with Torah. I return to the text about Jacob, now Israel. After the divine wrestling match, after reconciling with his brother Esau, whom he had cheated, Jacob continues on his journey home. The text continues (33:18): ‘‘Jacob arrived shalem—whole.’’ How is this possible? We know he was wounded; he walks with a limp. What does it mean to say Jacob arrived whole? It means admitting that you’ve been wounded, and understanding that vulnerability is a prerequisite to blessing. For Jacob it meant facing his fears, acknowledging his failures, embracing the brother from whom he had fled, and reintegrating the parts of himself he had banished. For religious traditions, it means facing their failure to listen to the voices of all who have been

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excluded, and embracing and reclaiming their stories, perspectives, and power. And now, more than ever, it means speaking out against the dark side of all religious traditions, the idolatry of extreme fundamentalism that has so wounded us all. It is only then that we can be blessed . . . and again become shalem, whole.

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More God Than We Want William H. Willimon

november 11, 2001 Luke 15:1–10 Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’’ So he told them this parable: ‘‘Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninetynine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.’’

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‘‘I think I’m going to like majoring in history,’’ the student said. ‘‘Good,’’ I said. ‘‘It was tough at first,’’ he said. ‘‘The reading?’’ I asked. ‘‘The reading list can be long.’’ ‘‘No, the first thing you’ve got to do, in order to major in history, is to become an atheist. After that, everything’s easier.’’ ‘‘What?’’ ‘‘Yep. You find out early, that the answer to a question like, ‘What was a major cause of the French Revolution?’ or ‘What factor contributed to the Great Depression?’ is never ‘God.’ You can’t say, ‘There was a revolution in France because God wanted it that way,’ or ‘In the Great Depression, God was trying to teach us that . . .’ Around here, the right answer is never ‘God.’ ’’ Yale, though conceived earlier, is really a child of the modern world. Although Calvinist Jonathan Edwards helped get Yale started, slaveholder Thomas Jefferson really built us, as far as the curriculum is concerned. Universities tend to be the embodiment of modern ways of knowing, namely, knowledge that can be had without recourse to God. Epistemologically, modernity devised a closed system of knowing. All knowledge must be self-derived, readily available to anyone using our methods of empiricism. It has proved to be a remarkably fruitful way of apprehending the world, a means of reassuring us that the world was our world. When everything that we know about the world exclusively arises from within our world, we can run the world as we damn well please. The bad, bloody twentieth century is the result. George Marsden closes his book The Soul of the American University, an account of how the church lost places like Yale and Duke, with an appeal, ‘‘Hey, modern university. Aren’t you liberal? Don’t you believe in a free and open exchange of ideas? That’s all Christians ask, that we be included at the table in your liberal, free, and open exchange of ideas.’’ Duke’s literary

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critic bad boy, Stanley Fish, replied tongue-in-cheek to Marsden, ‘‘Who told you we were open and free? We’re liberals! In the middle of some rational discussion, the moment you say, ‘The Bible tells us that . . .’ or ‘God has revealed to us that . . . ,’ we are going to drive you out of the discussion. You have broken our basic rule—everything thought here must be democratically available to everyone, regardless of character or commitments, readily available without any gifts of God.’’ Which I think goes a long way to explain why we don’t get much of a God in the modern university. Rabbi Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People speaks of a God who cares but who doesn’t actually do anything. Empathetic but uninvolved. Deism, Stoicism, is about as much god was we can muster; any more of a god might threaten that stable intellectual arrangement that allows us to think that we are in control. Now, I say all this to indicate why we have difficulty understanding the parables that Jesus tells. It is not because we are sophisticated, critical, early-twenty-first-century people. It is because we live in a hermetically sealed, flat, cause-effect, predictable world where the only actions are ours and the only future is the one solely constructed by us. Early on, Hume noted that we concocted a predictable, reliable, cause-effect universe not because the world is that way, but rather because in a world bereft of a beneficent God, this was the only sort of world we could stand. Which is a long, roundabout way of stating why it’s hard for us to get the point of Jesus’ little stories. We flatter ourselves into thinking that Jesus is incomprehensible because he is primitive and prescientific. I’m saying that Jesus is difficult because we are modern and therefore our thinking is narrow and limited. Now, when some religious folk ‘‘grumbled’’ because ‘‘this man receives sinners and eats with them,’’ Jesus, as was his custom, told some stories in order to explain himself. ‘‘Which of you, having a hun-

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dred sheep, one strays, will you not leave the ninety-nine sheep alone to wander in the wilderness, in order to search for the one lost sheep? And when you find that sheep, will you not place that sheep upon your shoulders, run home (where you find you have considerably fewer sheep than when you left) and say to your friends, ‘I found my sheep! Let’s party!’ Now, which of you would not do that?’’ And then, ‘‘Which of you women, when you have lost, say, a quarter, will you not move all of your furniture out of the house, rip up the carpet, move all the heavy appliances out in the yard, and, when you have found your lost coin, will you not run out and shout to the neighbors, ‘You’re all invited to a party such as New Haven has never seen! I found my quarter!’ Now, which of you would not do that?’’ We all know the answer. None of us would do that! We believe in balance, rationality, and a sense of propriety and proportion. Our parties are for the purpose of getting wasted on a Saturday in order to forget the rigors of academia, not over something so insignificant as a sheep or a coin. We are not hearing a story about us, about some new program or project for our betterment. We are hearing stories about God, a God who throws parties, but only for sinners, the lost who’ve gotten found. This is why Jesus tends to love freshmen and sophomores more than seniors or members of the Yale Corporation. The main requirement for being found at a party with Jesus is to be lost. Jesus told these outrageous little stories about God to those who ‘‘grumbled’’ because of the unsavory company with whom he partied. I wonder if our grumbling against Jesus has a different source. How do we like this God who won’t stay where we’ve put him? This God who relentlessly reaches, intrudes, seeks, and saves? We enjoy thinking of ourselves as the chief actors in business between God and us. ‘‘I’m searching for something spiritual in my life,’’ we say. ‘‘I’ve been experimenting with various

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forms of spirituality,’’ we say. ‘‘I have decided to give my life to Jesus.’’ Modernity has convinced us that our lives are our own. We are the authors of our fate, captains of our souls, it’s all ‘‘I,’’ and ‘‘me,’’ and ‘‘mine.’’ Jesus parabolically portrays a God who lovingly reaches, intrudes, seeks, and saves. C. S. Lewis once said that he felt sorry for atheists. Felt sorry for atheists? Why? ‘‘Because in my experience,’’ said Lewis, ‘‘God is so damned relentless in getting what he wants. And it appears, according to Scripture, that he wants us.’’ He came to me at the end of last semester, telling me that he was in trouble with his parents. His direction in life had reversed. No longer headed for grad school, he was now headed for Soweto to work with the poor. While there last summer, God had gotten hold of him, he said, had convicted him, grabbed him, made him miserable all semester, demanded that he put his life there. I asked him, ‘‘How do you get along with your parents? What did you have to eat for dinner last night? Do you have a girlfriend?’’ (I learned my pastoral counseling at Yale Divinity School!) After an hour or so of conversation, I could come up with no satisfactory precedent, no rationale for his remarkable move, no psychological cause that would explain why he was at this point, so I was forced to conclude, ‘‘Well, I guess Jesus Christ really has risen from the dead and is loose, up to his old tricks.’’ To be a Christian is not to believe half a dozen impossible things before breakfast. To be a Christian is to be intellectually open to the possibility that something’s afoot, that the life you live may not be your own, that God really does mean to have God’s way with the world. Think of a lot of this—the buildings, the curriculum, many of the faculty, the beer—as an elaborate, subtle, really very effective defense against the incursions of a living God.

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But I’ll say this. After the trauma that we have suffered after September 11, we really do need a God who acts, seeks, saves, reaches, and intrudes. Any less a God won’t do us much good. She came to me last fall and said she had a story for me. ‘‘Like a lot of people, I was taken to church some when I was a child. But, like a lot of people, I grew out of all that when I went to college in the Northeast. Did well, got into the law school of my choice, with full scholarship. I’ve just been accepted into the firm of my choice in Boston.’’ (I’m thinking, what does any of this have to do with me? I’m a minister. Jesus had a short fuse for people like you.) ‘‘A few weeks ago my husband suggested that we come to the chapel, just for the music. He loves classical music. And, to our surprise, we like it. To my surprise we returned the next week, just for the music. Well, last Sunday, toward the close of the service, as the choir was singing that, ‘God be in my head,’ I sort of lost consciousness. I fell back in the pew. I was bathed in this soft, blue light, embraced. It only lasted a moment, but it seemed longer, for when I came to, the choir was still singing, everyone was standing there, heads bowed. When the congregation filed out, I just sat there, savoring the moment, repeating, over and over, ‘I believe. I’m back.’’’ And I, I grumbled. Here I am. A priest, a religious expert, a theologian. Why would God give something that good to a lawyer?

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Closing Prayer Frederick J. Streets

Gracious God: We have sought during this year to celebrate the founding spirit of this university and to gauge and honor its history of three centuries of educating men and women. Our reflections upon this legacy have given us joy and deepened our appreciation of Yale and for all those who have worked, lived, studied, and learned here. What began in the hearts of those whose vision was to serve you and humankind and in their modest Branford and Old Saybrook homes as a collegiate school, now stands before us here in New Haven as a distinctive university symbolized by this great Sterling Memorial Library. It is a substantive witness to their hopes and our efforts as human beings to better understand our world and one another for the common good. Yale has matured as an institution, and we are thankful that its growth and our journey have brought us to this moment. We praise and give you thanks, dear God, for how in this place women and men have found their calling, expanded their horizons, and increased their capacity to flourish in all areas of human inquiry and endeavor. Graduates of this university have contributed to the world some of the best scientific, humanistic, cultural, and artistic expressions of their generation. You, O God, have indeed wondrously made us! Yale throughout its history has devoted itself to excellence in education and research. During the worst and best of times it

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has dedicated itself to values and ideals that make it and our nation strong. God of hope, sustain us now as we remember and mourn the death on September 11th of so many women, men, and children—all members of our global family—and some of whom were the daughters and sons of Eli.1 Let us not lose confidence in the heritage of this university and nation and the power of good to overcome evil, democracy to vanquish the grip of tyranny, and the power of liberty to make us better stewards of freedom. We rededicate ourselves to knowing the best of one another and to the mission of this university. Dear Lord, help us to discover and be the guardians of those truths that unite us all and to bring light were there is darkness, hope were there is despair; to affirm the beauty of life and to continue serving others and to experience the joy of learning. Amen. Note 1. Yale University was named after its founding benefactor Elihu Yale; graduates are sometimes referred to as sons and daughters of Eli.

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Contributors

The Reverend Dr. Harry B. Adams is the Horace Bushnell Professor Emeritus of Christian Nurture at Yale Divinity School and was the chaplain of Yale University from 1986 to 1992. He delivered the Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale Divinity School in 1995. He is a member of the Disciples of Christ Church. The Reverend Dr. David L. Bartlett is the Lantz Professor of Preaching and dean of academic affairs at Yale Divinity School. An ordained American Baptist minister and author of Between the Bible and the Church (Abingdon, 1999), his 2001 Beecher Lectures were published by Westminster/ John Knox Press in the fall of 2003. The Reverend Dr. William Sloane Coffin Jr. was the university chaplain at Yale from 1958 to 1976. He has a long and distinguished career encouraging churches and their leaders to take an active stand on social and political issues. He is especially known for his leadership during the civil rights and peace movements of the 1960s and 1970s. He is the author of several books, and Yale University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree in 2002. The Reverend Dr. Jewelnel Davis is the chaplain of Columbia University in New York City. She is a graduate of Brown University, Yale Divinity School, and the University of Connecticut School of Social Work. Before Columbia she was college chaplain and assistant to the president at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.

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Rabbi Dr. Laura Geller was ordained as a Reform rabbi in 1976, becoming only the third female Reform rabbi in the United States. In 1994 she was named the first female rabbi of Temple Emanuel in Los Angeles, where she is now the senior rabbi to a congregation of more than one thousand families. Rabbi Geller has played a critical role in developing modern Jewish rituals for women and fostering equality for women in Judaism. She is a graduate of Brown University and Hebrew Union College. The Reverend Dr. Peter J. Gomes, an American Baptist, has served in The Memorial Church, Harvard University, since 1970 and since 1974 as Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church. Regarded as one of America’s most distinguished preachers, Professor Gomes in 1998 presented the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale Divinity School. The Reverend Dr. Robert L. Johnson is the former chaplain of Cornell University and was director of Cornell United Religious Work from 1982 to 2001. Before this post he was for eighteen years the director of the Wesley Foundation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has served as president of the National Campus Ministers Association, the Association for College and University Religious Affairs, and the National Institute of Campus Ministries. He is the author of Counter Culture and the Vision of God (1971). The Reverend Dr. Eileen W. Lindner is the deputy general secretary for research and planning of the National Council of Churches, the nation’s largest ecumenical agency, composed of thirty-five Protestant and Orthodox churches with a constituent membership exceeding fifty million Americans. She has previously served as director of the Child Advocacy Office. She is the author of numerous books and articles on a variety

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of child advocacy subjects, most notably When Churches Mind the Children, reporting on the nation’s most extensive child care study. She serves as theologian in residence to the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Summer Institute for Child Advocacy Ministry of the Children’s Defense Fund and is a member of the board of directors of Stand for Children. The Right Reverend Victoria Matthews is the ninth bishop of the Diocese of Edmonton, Canada, and the third woman bishop in the Anglican Communion. The bishop of Edmonton is the chief pastor of the Diocese of Edmonton. She is a former Fellow of the Yale Corporation and a 1979 graduate of the Yale Divinity School. Bishop Matthews received her ordination to the diaconate in 1979, ordination to the priesthood in 1980, and ordination to the episcopate in 1994. She has been bishop of the Diocese of Edmonton since 1997. The Reverend Dr. Frederick J. Streets has been the chaplain of Yale University since 1992 and an adjunct member of the faculty at Yale Divinity School since 1987. He is an ordained Baptist minister and graduate of Yale Divinity School. A native of Chicago, Reverend Streets served as the senior pastor of the Mount Aery Baptist Church from 1975 to 1992. He holds a master’s of social work and doctorate of social welfare from the Wurzweiler School of Social Work, Yeshiva University, in New York City. He is a graduate of Ottawa University (Kansas), which has awarded him an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree. The Reverend Dr. Barbara Brown Taylor is an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Atlanta. Ordained in 1983, she served urban and rural parishes in Georgia for fifteen years before assuming her current post as Butman Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia. In 1996, Baylor University listed her among the twelve most effective preachers in the English-speaking world. Taylor is the au-

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thor of several books, including When God Is Silent (1998) and The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion (2000). She delivered the Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale Divinity School in 1997. The Reverend Dr. Gardner C. Taylor in 1948 became the pastor of the Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, New York, and remained there until his retirement in 1990. He was the Lyman Beecher Lecturer at Yale Divinity School in 1976. Reverend Taylor has distinguished himself as a pastor and preacher nationally and internationally. He was broadcast on the National Radio Pulpit and heard throughout the world. In August 1990, he was awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President William Jefferson Clinton. He is the senior pastor emeritus of the Concord Baptist Church of Christ. The Reverend Cynthia A. Terry has been the associate chaplain of Yale University since 1993. She is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and graduate of Yale Divinity School. She is the coauthor with Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld of ‘‘Is Suffering Redemptive? Jewish and Christian Responses’’ in the book In Their Own Terms: A Learning Resource for Jews and Christians. She is the former president of the National Association of College and University Chaplains and served for two years as a Volunteer-in-Mission with the Presbyterian Church, USA, in the former Zaire. The Reverend Dr. William H. Willimon has been dean of the chapel and professor of Christian ministry at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, since 1984. A study conducted by Baylor University named him as one of the twelve most effective preachers in the English-speaking world. He is a graduate of Yale Divinity School.

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The Reverend Dr. John Vannorsdall served as university chaplain at Yale University from 1976 through 1985 and was the president of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia until he retired. He is known nationally through his fourteen years as a preacher on the ‘‘Protestant Radio Hour’’ and his three books and many articles.

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