News and Views

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling called the clergy of the Baltimore-Washington Conference to a time away for deep engagement with God’s Word, one another, and the teaching of the Rev. Robert Hill, a New Testament professor and dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University. The Pre-Advent Day Apart was held Nov. 15 at Brook Hill UMC in Frederick.

The Day Apart, the bishop said, was a time for the pastors “to just be,” and prepare their minds, hearts and souls for Advent with worship, learning and fellowship. Easterling, an alumna of Boston University, introduced Hill as a pastor and academic whose passion lies at the intersection of theology and our lives.

The theme of Hill’s teaching was “Precursors,” and he began the first of his three sessions with the clergy that day by running his hands along the blue fabric that flowed from the altar, representing the River Jordan.

“Our lives are rivers and rivers move and flow to the sea,” he said, quoting poet Antonio Machado. “Far down by the river, we hear John the Baptist, a precursor. … To get to Bethlehem, we have to go down by the river and there he is.”

“Start with memory,” Hill said. John the Baptist challenges today’s Christians to remember, note and unite the seeming opposites of heart and mind, or creation and consciousness. Like theologian C.S. Lewis, he said, when we cast our eyes to the night sky we will probably have “starry skies above me and the moral law within.”

Paul offers a voice of consciousness. It’s a voice that precedes Charles Wesley’s charge to “Unite the pair disjoined, knowledge and vital piety.”  “That’s your song to sing, ring that bell, tell that tale,” Hill challenged the pastors.

But, there must also be a connection between the mind and the heart, he said. In academia, “sometimes we mistakenly think that if you can get it down on paper, you don’t have to live it through in life.” This simply is not so.

“Empathy,” said Hill, “is like oxygen.” It enables others to breathe deeply, “it allows another person’s soul to emerge.”

He encouraged people to claim and preach from the head and the heart – and to not forget the hands. “Real change is hard,” he said. “But it can happen in real time, when real people apply some real elbow grease to it.”

It is this real work of the hands that allows United Methodists to follows Wesley’s admonition to “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”

The Rev. Howard Thurman was one of Hill’s predecessors at Marsh Chapel. Thurman wrote in a poem: “When the song of the angels is stilled, When the star in the sky is gone, When the kings and princes return home, When the shepherds are back with their flocks, The work of Christmas begins ...”

The work of Christmas, Thurman said, is to care for the lost, broken, hungry, prisoners, and nation, and “to make music in the heart.”

This heart-music is possible, Hill said, in part, when we “lean back a little bit into some of the arms holding us over many generation.”

“’Who told you who you was,’” he playfully asked. “We are shaped by those who have brought us to this place and brought out the height, and depth, and breadth of who we hope to become.”

One of our shared precursors,” Hill told the clergy, is Elijah, the prophet and “troubler of Israel” who in 800 BCE traveled by the River Jordan and still influences our faith today.

Hill outlined some of the precursors who have shaped his life and church. Elijah’s spirit, he claimed, moved in the minds of:

• Jonathan Edwards, the Puritan, who saw the divine light shining in every soul, and recognized the central of the experience of faith. He believed a person may know honey is sweet, but won’t know what sweet means until he tastes honey.
• President Abraham Lincoln who, in his second inaugural address, said, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds.”
• Ray Bradbury, the author of “Fahrenheit 451,” who wrote about legacy and the burning of books. He wrote, “The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.” And, “It doesn't matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.”
• Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who said, different are the languages of prayer, but the tears are all the same.
• And, the Spirit of Elijah also lingered in the lives of, author Harper Lee; Congressman John Lewis, who courageously walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to protest segregation; the Rev. Gardner Calvin Taylor, known as the dean of the nation’s black preachers; the ubiquitous Rev. Peter Gomes, chaplain of Harvard Chapel; Hiawatha, the co-founder of the Iroquois Confederacy; the abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass; and Susan B. Anthony, the suffragette.

Hill encouraged those to take time this Advent to reflect upon their precursors – the Elijahs who shaped their spirits – “authors, pastors, relatives, all the people who ‘told you who you was.’”

“I also wonder if you will have a chance to share memories with your people, to offer stories of precursors and to allow those stories to be woven into the Advent community?” Hill asked.

“You have the capacity to speak an intervening word, a saving word,” he told the pastors. “It is our role in life and work. … That’s what we’re here to do – to preach the Gospel that it may be heard in a careful and loving manner.”