Showing Up

Jenny is on the Board of Trustees and an alumna of the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard. She is now on staff at Harvard and volunteers with Harvard Interfaith Prison Education (HIPE). Here, Jenny reflects on her first earlier this winter to the prison. 

Ironically, on my first trip to a prison, I worried about being judged.

I had signed up for Harvard Interfaith Prison Education (HIPE) a few weeks earlier, and there was some fear mixed into my decision to participate. My life has been one of great privilege, and it was hard for me to imagine what I could offer someone who had had to face challenges greater than I had ever encountered. I half expected my mentee to call me out on it and ask me why he should bother to talk to me when I couldn't have even the smallest inkling of what his life was like.

He didn't, of course. He was far happier to see me than I would have ever thought I deserved, and that turned out to be just one part of an attitude that was frankly amazing to me.

We get so many harsh presentations of prison and prisoners in popular culture. I'm sure many of them have at least a partial basis in reality, and I fear that some of them don't come close to the terrible conditions many prisoners face. But that harshness, however much it might exist in is life, did not exist inside the man I met.

It's not that he was cheerful about everything. He didn't try to make his life seem perfect. But it became clear from everything he said that he has been making use of all the resources available to him to try to build the best life he can. He takes classes and studies with fellow inmates and requests books from the library and works out and referees the prison basketball league. There is a lot of potential for life in prison to become empty, but he has managed to fill it.

It is a joy to be at the disposal of someone who is looking to see what good he can get out of a situation. To him, our visit became not something to be picked apart and found inadequate, but another source of value to add to his life. There were gaps between us -- in experience, in living situation -- but they were gaps he wanted to bridge, not use as a weapon.

It drove home to me some of the things that tend to hold me back from helping people. I tend to be a perfectionist; it's what led me to Harvard in the first place. And there is something to be said for trying to help the best we can, for training ourselves to serve others better, and for stepping back to examine our service to make sure it's as good as it can be. But there's not much excuse for holding back because we're worried about being judged and found not up to the task. Those are the times when it's most important to show up, do what we can, and possibly end up changing someone's life for the better.

An Epiphany Sermon: Going Deeper

This sermon was given by the Chaplain, Revd. Luther Zeigler, on February 16, 2014, at the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard.

There is a version of our faith that goes something like this:  The Old Testament is about “law,” while the New Testament is about “grace”; the Old Covenant is an oppressive system of rules, while the New Covenant liberates us with the gospel of love; the former world is governed by a vengeful judge who wants nothing more than to trip us up for failing to conform to his requirements, while the New Jerusalem is overseen by a God full of mercy and forgiveness for every last one of us.  And at its worst, this tendency to insist upon a sharp contrast between the old and the new has led to a pernicious caricature of Judaism as a particularistic and legalistic tradition from which the more generous and universalistic religion of Christianity saves us.

A close reading of Matthew’s gospel – and of the Sermon on the Mount in particular, from which today’s reading is taken – tells a rather different story.  Let’s summarize where we are:

In chapter one, through the deceptively boring device of a genealogy, Matthew gives us the first hint about Jesus’ identity:  this child is descended directly from the family of Abraham, through King David, and born of a virgin, in fulfillment of the prophecies of Isaiah. Then, in chapter 2, we hear how God’s messengers protect the infant messiah from the scheming of a jealous and murderous imperial king, just as the Hebrew prophets Micah and Jeremiah foresaw.  We meet John the Baptist in chapter 3, who is portrayed as the new Elijah, preparing the way for the very messiah so long-awaited by Israel.  Chapter 4 finds this beloved Son driven into the wilderness for forty days, repeating the exodus of his forebears, to be tempted by the forces of darkness just as they were tempted.  And then, like Moses, who gathered and led a people out of bondage, so too does Jesus call a community of disciples out of the captivity of their impoverished lives to be a renewed people.  And thus, we come to where we are today:  chapter 5, the famous Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus, the new Moses, teaches his followers what God commands from a mountaintop.

There is no mistaking in Matthew’s carefully constructed narrative that Jesus’ life and teaching is in complete continuity with the covenantal relationship established by God with Israel through Abraham, Moses, and David.  And lest we doubt this, Jesus tells us right up front in verses 17 and 18 of his sermon:  “Think not that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets:  I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.  For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.”

This is an enormously important key for unpacking everything that follows in his sermon because here Jesus takes off the table any understanding of his words that would view them as displacing Torah.  Whatever the antitheses offered by Jesus in today’s gospel text may mean, they plainly are not “replacement commandments” for an old, arcane, and outdated Mosaic law.  Rather, Jesus is calling us into a deeper understanding of this very same Torah.

Torah, as today’s lesson from Deuteronomy and our Psalm remind us, is not so much a dusty set of laws as it is a way of walking in relationship with both God and neighbor.  The Hebrew people understood these teachings not as a legalistic burden, but rather as a living and breathing guide for shaping their communal behavior so that the nations of the world might see in them what the God of Israel looks like.

Torah is thus more like a constitution for living in community as a faithful people than it is a code of individual ethics for the purpose of achieving personal goodness.  As post-Enlightenment Westerners, we are trained to view the world in individualistic terms, each of us discrete Cartesian egos, responsible for our separate destinies, encouraged to be self-reliant and self-sufficient.  These are the virtues the West celebrates.  Yet, this distorted focus on the individual, and his or her right of self-determination, is decidedly unbiblical.

For Jesus, like the Hebrew tradition from which he emerges, keeping Torah is not primarily a personal matter, and salvation is not primarily an individual project.  Torah is, rather, a revelatory expression of what it means to live together as God’s children, and through Torah God redeems not individual souls but a faithful community.  And, just as the Torah was not given by God to Israel to produce a collection of heroically righteous individuals, so too would it be a mistake for us to understand Jesus’ antitheses in his Sermon on the Mount as an effort to one-up Judaism by creating a super-righteous band of personal followers. 

The teachings of the Sermon on the Mount are, rather, a divine commentary on Torah intended to draw us as a community, as the gathered Body of Christ, more deeply into the nature of God by revealing the fundamentally relational character of God’s will for us. 

Let me illustrate this point by exploring just one – the very first – of Jesus’ antitheses.  Jesus says:  “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not murder, and whoever murders shall be liable to judgment;’ but I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.”  He continues:  “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.”

Plainly, Jesus keeps the traditional prohibition on murder in tact; but he goes deeper, insisting that it is not enough to understand God’s will for us merely in terms of what we are to avoid.  We instead must see what lies at the source of human conflict – the angers and resentments we often harbor toward one another and that can eat at our soul.

Jesus’ words recall not only the sixth commandment, but also the foundational story of Cain and Abel that underlies it.  Jealous that God favored his brother Abel’s offering over his own, Cain allows his anger to swell.  Though warned by God that sin is “lurking at his door,” Cain gives in to the anger, and rises up against his brother. And so, murder enters the world through Cain’s unbridled anger, and our relationships with God and each other lie shattered.

We come into a world, this story teaches us, where rivalry is the norm and people take revenge upon one another.  From the beginning we learn to blame others for whatever is undermining our place in the universe.  We make those others scapegoats, sacrificing them in order to restore our identity and status.  This is the human cycle of violence.

Yet, Christ teaches us in his sermon, and shows us with his life, that into our vengeful world has come One who is utterly benevolent, who is not in rivalry with anything or anyone, and who transforms everything from within, including altering human motives and desires.  He is the pattern who changes everything about what it means to be human.

Thus, the kingdom into which Jesus calls us requires more than a mere promise not to murder one another.  We are invited to go deeper, to uncover the anger in our hearts, to confront our resentments, to diffuse the hostility, and to be reconciled with one another – and all this before we can ask for reconciliation with God. 

And so for centuries the Church has in its liturgy placed penance, the confession of sin, and the exchange of the peace – in a word, the practice of reconciliation – immediately before the Eucharistic feast.  Before we come to the Lord’s Table to share in Christ’s love for us we are urged to show that same love to each other.  The passing of the peace, as we call it, is more than genteel politeness, more than a half-time show of hospitality; done faithfully, it is the opening of our hearts to each other in preparation for receiving Christ’s own body and blood. 

Jesus’ teaching about murder and anger – like his teaching about divorce and lust and deceit and swearing oaths – are centered on the quality of our relationships.  Our God is a God who cares deeply about our relationships, and desires those relationships to have the same health, vitality, and purity as does His relationship with us.   These are not commandments intended merely to guide our external conduct, but commandments designed to change our hearts.

Christ’s call to be free of anger and malice, to rid ourselves of the distortions of lust, and to live without deceit or pretense, can seem impossibly hard.  And, but for God’s grace, it would be.  The good news, though, is that the Christ who gives us these commandments, and calls us into this holy life of community, is the very same Christ who assures us that He will chase down every lost sheep, and welcome home every prodigal son or daughter, when we lose our way.  He invites us to be faithful witnesses of the Kingdom he describes and embodies, even while he knows that we will from time to time stray from that vision.  And for this we can be forever thankful:  that while Christ is constantly calling us into new and healthier ways of being human, as he does today, he is at the same time loving us just as we are.  Thanks be to God.

"We love because he first loved us": A Morning Prayers Homily

Alice Kenney is a senior at College and the Vice President of the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard. She gave this homily at Morning Prayers in Appleton Chapel at Memorial Church in the Yard.

A reading from the first letter of John: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.  Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.”  About ten verses later, John writes, “We love because he first loved us.”  I have recently come to regard this final verse as the foundation of my religious identity.  I now believe that whatever love I can offer others is always a reflection of God’s love for me and for each one of us. 

            For most of my life I spurned God’s love, skeptical that He could care for someone as messed up as I was.  This was partially the result of misreading Jesus’ commandment to “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Somehow I understood him to mean “love your neighbor more than yourself,” or even “love your neighbor at the expense of yourself.”  I am not surprised that I distorted Jesus’ words in this way.  After all, we don’t often see Jesus take a break, and the stories of great Christians tend to be about women and men who gave everything they had in the service of others.  Until about a year ago, I believed that unless I was constantly putting others’ needs before my own, I was selfish and unworthy of being loved.  I began to love and idolize the wonderful person I thought I could be, if only I tried hard enough, and to feel completely disgusted by the un-martyr-like person I actually am.

            This need to be a perfect practitioner of charity spread to other realms of my life, so that even morally neutral subjects such as performance in school and my level of extracurricular commitment became ways for me to criticize my value as a person.  I also came to believe that eating anything that might compromise my health (perhaps by clogging my arteries with cholesterol, or bringing unnatural chemicals into my body) was a selfish waste of earth’s precious resources and the body God had given me.

            My concern with healthy eating ultimately became an eating disorder that plagued me in various forms from when I was 9 until I received adequate treatment in January of 2013.  Though eating disorders are sometimes mistakenly thought of as a result of a superficial preoccupation with physical appearance, church history is full of female saints, such as Catherine of Siena, who used bizarre food practices to indicate their dedication to saving humanity.

            The problem is, beating myself up for procrastinating from an essay or eating slightly too much became a very time consuming obsession.  I was walking on egg-shells throughout my existence, constantly afraid I would mess up.  And when I did mess up, which became increasingly often, it was so hard to get back on track, and I took to wallowing in my failures.  All the worry and guilt took up a lot of mental energy, and ultimately my effort at self-denial became a rather egotistical occupation.

            Another issue was that instead of celebrating my friends, I became strangely jealous, both of their accomplishments and their problems.  Everyone else, it seemed, had it all together.  Even when they struggled, it was always for some very legitimate reason, such as illness or another person’s mistreating them.  When I had trouble, it always seemed to be my own fault.  The words of the Psalms, and other parts of the Bible that are meant to be reassuring, always just made me feel guiltier. There was nothing I needed protection from except myself.  I had managed to convert a message that was meant to spread love in the world into a vehicle of self-hatred.

            One day my best friend told me that God loves me just exactly how I am, regardless of anything I do or say or think or fail to do or say or think.  This, he reminded me, was really the message of Christianity.  It took me a while to actually believe my friend.  How could God love me when I was so bad and so wasteful of all he had given me?  I felt sure that my friend didn’t really understand the extent of my depravity.  I figured I had him fooled, just as I had the rest of the world, and maybe even God, fooled too.

            But my friend was right.  God does love us unconditionally, and we are called to respect His love and accept it.  After a year of focusing on taking care of myself, and embracing my best friend’s loving kindness, I feel so much more connected to other people.  I can admire my friends without feeling jealous, and I have the energy to reach out when one of them needs a hand.  Recognizing God’s deep and very real love for me has given me a foundation from which to more activity love others.

            Let us pray:  Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross, so that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace.  Help us to recognize your love, and welcome it, so that we might then radiate love out into the world. Amen.

"It gathers to a greatness"

In the midst of this cold Boston winter, we've been blessed with a few days of bright sunshine and clear blue skies. Our Kellogg Fellow can't help but be reminded of this, one of her favorite poems by one of her favorite poets, Anglican-turned-Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889).

Hopkins' view of the world includes both the grandeur God saw when he said "It is good," as well as the tread, smudge, and smear that humanity has left upon it. But for all this, "the Holy Ghost over the bent/World" still breathes . . .

God's Grandeur

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;	5
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;	10
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The Intersection of Love and Social Justice

Abi Strait is the new 2013-2014 Micah Fellow at ECH!  She comes to us from Wisconsin via Lutheran Volunteer Corps in Delaware, where she worked at the Ministry of Caring. As a Fellow in the Life Together Program, she'll be splitting her time between ECH and our mother-parish, Christ Church Cambridge. 

Luther and I have been working with Harvard students and the Harvard Chaplains over the past few months to plan an event in remembrance of Martin Luther King Jr. The event is scheduled to fall this year on Friday, April 4 - the anniversary of King’s assassination in Memphis.

Between planning for this, and the fast approaching of Valentine’s Day, I’ve been reminded of something I read by King regarding the intersection of love and social justice. This February 1957 article ‘Nonviolence and Racial Justice’ written by King was sent to me by a friend this fall. I’d like to share a section of it, entitled ‘The Meaning of Love,’ here:

“In speaking of love at this point, we are not referring to some sentimental emotion. It would be nonsense to urge men to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. ‘Love’ in this connection means understanding good will. There are three words for love in the Greek New Testament. First, there is eros. In Platonic philosophy eros meant the yearning of the soul for the realm of the divine. It has come now to mean a sort of aesthetic or romantic love. Second, there is philia. It meant intimate affectionateness between friends. Philia denotes a sort of reciprocal love: the person loves because he is loved. When we speak of loving those who oppose us we refer to neither eros nor philia; we speak of a love which is expressed in the Greek word agape. Agape means nothing sentimental or basically affectionate; it means understanding, redeeming good will for all men, an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. It is the love of God working in the lives of men. When we love on the agape level we love men not because we like them, not because their attitudes and ways appeal to us, but because God loves them. Here we rise to the position of loving the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed he does.

“Finally, the method of nonviolence is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice. It is this deep faith in the future that causes the nonviolent resister to accept suffering without retaliation. He knows that in his struggle for justice he has cosmic companionship. This belief that God is on the side of truth and justice comes down to us from the long tradition of our Christian faith. There is something at the very center of our faith which reminds us that Good Friday may reign for a day, but ultimately it must give way to the triumphant beat of the Easter drums. Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but one day that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. So in Montgomery we can walk and never get weary, because we know that there will be a great camp meeting in the promised land of freedom and justice.

“This, in brief, is the method of nonviolent resistance. It is a method that challenges all people struggling for justice and freedom. God grant that we wage the struggle with dignity and discipline. May all who suffer oppression in this world reject the self-defeating method of retaliatory violence and choose the method that seeks to redeem. Through using this method wisely and courageously we will emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man into the bright daybreak of freedom and justice.”

A Beery Conversation and My Love of Scripture Readings

This summer I made a new church-friend, a guy about my age, also a convert from another denomination, also committed to the work in this diocese and the broader Church. As we talked about liturgy, he mentioned that one thing especially felt jarring or out of place: the Scripture readings.

I was flabbergasted! I was astonished! The readings have always been for me the most reliably interesting part of the service—the most complicated, often the most beautiful, certainly the most urgent. Yes, sometimes it’s hard to hear past the stilted reading or the squealing radiator—but even then, isn’t it one of the best parts of the service?!

My new friend and I were discussing this over a beer, so perhaps my head was too hoppy; all I was able to spill out was an insistent recommendation to read Robert Alter, and that beautiful summary of Structuralist literary theory: “Meaning is context-bound but context is boundless.” I don’t think my beery protestations made an impression.

I’ve continued to turn it over in my mind, hoping for a less alcoholic and more coherent explanation. And I think this is what it comes down to: How could you not love the moment of the week where the living words of God the Holy Spirit come into direct contact with your life, your week, your time and place? These ancient words, inspired by God and born into a deeply foreign (to us) context, are re-contextualized and given new layers of meaning every time we read them.

This re-contextualization on Sundays has multiple (exciting!) parts:

1. The makers of the lectionary have carefully placed voices of the Bible in conversation with each other, and then framed them with a Collect, a collecting prayer. This is true of the Daily Office readings to some extent, but is most noticeable on Sundays, and is truly remarkable on Feast days. There are often underlying ideas and patterns linking the texts, commenting one on the other indirectly, providing a complex new context.

2. The readings are then recontextualized by the place and time in which they’re read. How we hear Jeremiah or John differs if we read it in 1890 or the Sunday after September 11th—sitting in Trinity Wall Street or St. Mary’s, Dorchester—in a rural farming parish or in the center of Tokyo. In each of these places, different nuances and angles will stand out.

3. They’re more closely contextualized in the life of the person hearing them. The story of creation or the Magnificat will sound different if you’ve just gotten married or if you’re mourning a loved one.

4. And the most visible overarching context—so visible that it becomes invisible to many of us—is the context of the Eucharist, or of Morning or Evening Prayer. It’s not just a quiet moment where we take some time to read a foundational text of our religion. The liturgy of the Eucharist frames the texts within the particular story of God's great love shown in his dying on a cross—humanly, painfully—and of his being raised again and giving us a radically different kind of life.

But that idea that “Meaning is context-bound but context is boundless” both does and does not apply to the Bible. We believe the Scriptures have things to say which don’t depend on where you were born or what year it is. We believe that nestled somewhere within them are truths for everyone. But it shows up in our lives in radically different ways, depending on where and when and who we happen to be. 

And being Episcopalian, we get a chance to sit still with others and wait for this truth to come to us every Sunday.

How could that not be one of the most thrilling parts of your week?!
 

Emily Garcia is a literary nerd, a Postulant for Holy Orders, and the Kellogg Fellow for ECH.

An MLK Sermon: Dr. King and the Future of Our Church

“make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel. . . .” Ephesians 6:19

The Reverend Luther Zeigler

Christ Church Cambridge

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Across our nation this weekend, millions of Americans will be celebrating, as we are this morning, the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  King’s name has become virtually synonymous with the major achievements of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, ranging from the Montgomery bus boycotts of 1955, which led to the integration of that city’s public transportation system; to the dramatic demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, which exposed to the world the injustices of America’s most racially segregated city; to the March on Washington in 1963, which galvanized a nation, and played a pivotal role in leading to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Indeed, during the less than 13 years that King led the modern American Civil Rights Movement, from December 1955 until April 1968, Americans arguably achieved more genuine progress toward racial equality in this country than the previous 350 years had produced.

It was King’s methods, of course, as much as his outcomes, that were his real gift to us. While others advocated for freedom by “any means necessary,” including violence, King resolutely refused the temptation to strike back with force, using instead the power of words and the embodiment of nonviolent resistance to achieve seemingly impossible goals.  Drawing on Gandhi and the gospels in equal measure, King demonstrated what today’s gospel teaching about loving one’s enemies really looks like, and the power such love has to transform even the darkest of hearts and the most pernicious forms of institutionalized hatred.

Yet, King was so much more than just a civil rights leader.  People tend to forget that in the last three years of his life, the focus of his work shifted from racial injustice to economic injustice more broadly considered. His work in these years culminated in the “Poor Peoples Campaign,” an ambitious effort to assemble a multiracial coalition of impoverished Americans to advocate for economic change.  In these years, too, he became an outspoken critic of the Viet Nam war in particular, and of our national obsession with military power and spending more generally.  Indeed, King’s visit to this Church in 1967 was an important part of that anti-war message.

As important as King’s legacy is in all of these areas – as a champion of racial equality, in solidarity with the poor, and in opposition to war making – my focus this morning lies somewhere else:  namely, King’s theology of the church and its role in society. 

When I served as a chaplain in elementary and secondary schools before I came to Harvard, I was always struck by how few of my students knew what King’s vocation was.  They could quote his “I have a dream” speech by heart, but only a handful of them would know that King’s first and primary calling was as a minister of the gospel.  As King puts it in his autobiography: “In the quiet recess of my heart, I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher.  This is my being and my heritage, for I am also the son of a Baptist preacher, the grandson of a Baptist preacher and the great-grandson of a Baptist preacher.”  Even near the end of his all too short life, with all the public exposure it brought, King would say that being a preacher “was [his] first calling and greatest commitment.”

My students can be forgiven perhaps for not knowing about King’s identity as a pastor because, when you think about it, nearly all of the iconic moments in King’s life story played out on a public stage rather than within the confines of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church or some other church sanctuary.  The images that we most remember are of King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963, or sitting pensively in a Birmingham jail, or being arrested in Montgomery during the bus boycotts, or marching with other freedom fighters in Selma, or sitting at LBJ’s side in the White House as the President signed the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964.  So few of the really memorable photographs of King are in the pulpit or within the four walls of a church building.

This is no accident, I think.  For one of King’s core teachings is that the church is not a building, or some event that takes place on a Sunday morning. Rather, the church is you and me – the Body of Christ at work in the world.  King puts it bluntly in his autobiography when he writes:  “It is my conviction that any religion that professes concern for the souls of men [and women] and is not equally concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried.”  (p. 18.)

King reminds us that our vitality as Christ’s church depends upon our willingness to engage meaningfully and consistently with the world and its problems.  To be sure, we gather here on Sundays to immerse ourselves in the Word that defines us and in the sacraments that feed us; but the real work of the Church happens on the other six days of the week.  Pope Francis could well have been quoting King when he wrote late last year: “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”

Which is why it warms my heart to be able to share with you the news that the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard is today one step closer to living into King’s legacy and becoming a truly vibrant center for social justice on Harvard Square.  This past Friday, seven young adults from our diocesan Life Together program moved into our house next door at Two Garden Street.  No longer will we be known as home to the Hasty Pudding Club.  Instead, young Christians committed to important work in the community will be in residence there, living in an intentional religious community, and sharing the house with our own Chaplaincy students. At the same time, we are moving our chaplaincy offices from the basement up to the main floor, and soon enough I hope you will see a steady stream of young people going in and out of the house as it becomes a place known both for its spiritual vitality and social engagement.

Give us a week or two to get settled, but then we welcome you to stop by, say hello, and check out what’s happening in our house.  Come meet Abigail Strait, our own Micah Fellow and Wisconsin native, who works with me in overseeing our Chaplaincy’s interfaith prisoner mentoring program at Norfolk Correctional Facility.  Or get to know Charlie Emple, a Bates College alumnus, who is dedicating his internship year to supporting our diocesan anti-violence “B-PEACE” project by nurturing school-church partnerships in low-income areas. Or Greg Johnston, a recent Harvard graduate and alumnus of our Chaplaincy, who is spending his year with Massachusetts Communities Action Network, working to raise the state minimum wage. Or Joe Sheeran, a fellow Oberlin grad, who works this year at Episcopal City Mission, helping with various urban ministry initiatives. Or Kacey Minnick, a young woman from Tennessee who is placed at St. James, Porter Square, working in that church’s young adult and food ministry programs.  Or Laura Shatzer, a recent Harvard Divinity School graduate, who is doing important ecumenical work with the Massachusetts Council of Churches.  Or Seth Woody, a Texan who last year interned over at the Monastery and now is working with Dorchester Bay Youth Force helping to form and support teen leaders, particularly those who live in economically disadvantaged areas.

These are the seven, extraordinary young adults who will be sharing their lives with us this year.  Most of them could have gone on to careers with investment banks or law firms or in other corporate contexts, but instead they chose to devote themselves to serving the needs of the forgotten or marginalized or those most hurting in our world. By housing these Life Together interns under one roof with the Chaplaincy and our Harvard students, my hope is to create myriad opportunities for fruitful mutual ministry between these two communities, as students and interns begin to worship together, share meals and conversation together, and learn what it means to integrate one’s spiritual convictions with a life of service.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the great prophets of our age in part because he had the imagination to dream and the courage to pursue that dream against all the odds.  On a much, much smaller scale, we have been inspired by his example to dream too; and our prayer this morning is that with the help of this great parish family and the support of our diocese, we might be given the grace to make that dream a reality.  Our dream is that through this exciting new partnership between a venerable campus ministry and a dynamic young adult ministry, the house at Two Garden Street – your house at Two Garden Street – will become what it was originally intended to be:  a spiritually alive, socially engaged, and profoundly welcoming center for Episcopal life at Harvard. In the words of St. Paul from today’s epistle reading, may God help us “to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel.”  Amen.