Marsh Chapel in the Cosmos
The Rev. Dr. Robert Cummings Neville, (Dean of the Chapel, 2003–2006) preaches a sermon on Matthew 20:1–16 entitled “Marsh Chapel in the Cosmos”. The Marsh Chapel Choir performs “Verleih uns frieden gnädiglich, SWV 372” by Heinrich Schütz and ” Surrexit pastor bonus” by Michael Haller.
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Marsh Chapel in the Cosmos
Exodus 16:12-15 Marsh Chapel
Philippians 1:21-30 September 21, 2025
Matthew 20:1-16
After 19 years since I left office, I am very glad to be here, or anywhere actually.
When I became dean at Marsh, I wanted to advertise a difference between my predecessors and myself. So, to indicate difference, against the advice of Ray Bouchard, the chapel manager, Scott Jarrett, the director of music, and Jim Olsen, my associate, I painted my office a very dark red. You can imagine how serious, deeply mature, scary, bordering on morbidity, dark red was. Bob Hill then wisely reversed this color as soon as he replaced me.
By now you are accustomed to Bob Hill’s preaching style, which is to build a montage, a kaleidoscope, an array of images that grip those attending service. The images articulate powerful messages that genuinely communicate. Bob often begins with a story or two from his ministry, draws out messages from them, relates them to scripture, and applies them to current life. That style of public communication draws upon the teachings of David Buttrick, emeritus professor of homiletics at Vanderbilt.
I am much older than Bob, however, and derive my preaching style from David’s father, George Buttrick, who was at Harvard during my undergraduate days. George began with the explication of passages from the Bible, developed their messages for the day, showed a sudden reversal of those messages as lying in the Bible and in the current situation, and leaving with the double assertion of those messages and their reversals to indicate a deeper meaning for all. By now you will have noticed, or maybe not, that today I have been preaching in Bob Hill’s style up until now. Let me return to my own.
The Biblical Hebrews in the passage from Exodus complain to Moses that he has brought them from the fleshpots of Egypt to starve in the wilderness. I admit that when I was a teenager, I got a little excited by the word “fleshpots,” but was always disappointed to remember that fleshpots just means meat dishes. The Lord, according to our text, takes the Israelites to be his responsibility, not Moses’s, and promises to feed them, showing himself in a blaze of glory against the clouds. The Israelites thought Moses was in charge when our text says it was the Lord. We in our modern hearts should overlook the anthropomorphism that has God talking to Moses and appearing to the people against a cloud. For us, the Ultimate is the ground of the entire cosmos, not the creator of mere Heaven and Earth but of the superhot gases from which matter comes in stars across a zillion constellations. We know the Israelites were right to hold Moses responsible for their hunger and to take the quails and manna to be accidents. But we also know that the creator of blasts of gases is the source of any goodness at all in the cosmos. So maybe Moses wasn’t entirely wrong.
Regarding the New Testament, scholars now say that the letter to the Philippians was not written by Paul but rather by a student of Paul who wrote in his stead. This Paul is of two minds, one to keep on with his ministry and the other to die and be with Christ. The Philippians need him, and so Paul will stay alive to minister. But the Philippians have such troubles of their own that they too wonder about whether to stay alive. God grants them the strength to do so but also grants them suffering! God is no miracle worker, whatever Paul thought! The creator of blazing gases makes suffering as well as blessedness, and Paul says to endure both.
We might take Paul’s thought that, to die is to be with Christ, is too easy. His cosmology assumed the Earth to be in the center with a stack of heavens above it that have different qualities and laws, going up to God. For him, to die is to leave this mortal coil, get an immaterial body with no death, and rise finally up to Jesus who is with God. The next chapter of Philippians spells this out with the story of Jesus on the top level going down to take on the body of a slave on our level. We know Paul’s cosmology is wrong, and doubt our souls endure through such changes after death as he thought. We would say that the feeling in our lives is limited to the years of our living. But also those years, and the zillion years before and after us, from the blaze of gases to whatever comes next, all, all, are eternal creatures of the Ultimate, from whom all temporal things and time itself derive. So, we each are who we are eternally.
The Gospel reading is a parable told by Jesus according to Matthew. It recounts a vineyard owner who hires people from morning to evening and ends up paying them all the same amount. Those hired early object to the equality of their pay on the grounds that they had sweated through the whole day while those last hired worked just the evening hours. Now let us say right away that the complainers are morally right about the injustice. Otherwise, we are in trouble with both unions and employers. Pay should be scaled to the work, not to the capacity of the employer to pay what he or she wants.
Nevertheless, in the parable the vineyard owner is treated as a symbol of God and thus he can give what he wants. God can be arbitrarily unjust, and life is like that: we get just what comes, and the importance of contract negotiations is to impose feeble human moral standards on wild nature. God is the source of the bad as well as the good. But the last line of Jesus’ parable is, “So the last will be first and the first will be last.” It means to comment on what the workmen thought of themselves, and it says that those who regard themselves as least deserving get the same as those who regard themselves as most deserving. Despite the fact that the eternal creator of cosmic gases and all that follows sets us in nature that is indifferent to human needs, the value God creates in us is just as good as the value in everyone else. It is the value of sheer existence and, according to Jesus, that value is far more important than the value of establishing right to work laws even when morality requires that goal. Talk about God is far different from talk about morality.
Let us pause now and turn this discussion toward our own conception of the universe. The function of a congregation is not to retreat to an ancient worldview but to expand that worldview to what we now know.
The first requirement of our age is to recognize that our contemporary discourse is not only Christian but arises from an encompassing grasp of world cultures. Looking back, we appreciate our Christian origins, but we hold this is also true for all the world’s cultures. So, we are alert to find similar points of view in East Asian, South Asian, African, and Native American intellectual histories. This requires stretching to a still parochial vision of those others, and a willingness to engage thinkers from cultures who are interested in learning from us as we learn from them.
The second distinctive mark of our time is a huge change in cosmology. We have long given up the old view that the Earth is the center of the cosmos to a medium belief, exemplified in Star Trek, that the cosmos has many suns gathered in diversely located galaxies. Yet now we are in the midst of an even vaster expansion of our view that is open to the big bang, its blazing gases, its living out the origins and collapses of finite galaxies, and its heading either toward infinite irrelevance because things are too distant for light to connect them or to a reverse crunch because the powers of attraction are stronger than those of diffusion. How could Newton or Spock even imagine a universe filled with black matter that vastly outweighs positive matter? Yet this is the scale of the world we have to imagine within our own age. If we do not think of the world in this vast sense when we meet in congregation, we deprive our religion from real relevance, however good that makes us feel on Sundays.
Looking forward, don’t our three texts make the same points?
The first is that life is as we find it. There are no miracles, no divine interventions, no interruption of the course of nature by a little God who appears as a glory against a cloud, but rather just nature. That nature began with a bang of hot gases, developed the solidity of galaxies of suns and planets (with dark matter doing who knows what), and ending up in conditions far beyond the viability of human life. Within the human moral sphere the conditions for human life are shaky but subject to some fixing: dikes to control floods, granaries to get through drought, armies to hold off barbarians, spaceships for sailing to Mars. But we know there are limits to this fixing: floods too vast, droughts too long, armies that exterminate all in nuclear holocaust, collisions with meteors that end us before we get to Mars.
Morality is how we deal with the issues of managing our fragile lives. We live from crisis to crisis, each beginning with a sense of trouble, with an implicit sense of what might resolve that, to an explicit consideration of a goal and then striving for that goal. The trouble might be small, for instance how we should look better. We realize that this is largely due to how we dress, so we resolve to figure out what dress would be appropriate and then go to the store to get it. The scale of our concerns moves from small matters like clothing to matters of our neighborhood, of the city, the region, the country, the international and intercultural community, to the Earth, our solar system, galaxies, and the cosmos. Once we are aware of the goals that are good for resolving our troubles, the goals take on a life of their own, all the way on up to concerns for the cosmos over which we have only minimal influence. Morality concerns what would resolve the situations with which we engage. The frequent failure of our morality leaves us with perpetual suffering. Religion now should abandon the view that God fixes up our moral failures. Jesus remarked, according to John, that he had already conquered the world when his trial and punishment still lay ahead of him.
God is the ultimate act that creates the entire world, from the blaze of gases to however it ends. In the middle of this is human suffering and moral causes that might resolve things in our favor, but often not, and we all die. Nevertheless, everything in the universe has its own spark of existence, and this is good. It is unconditionally good, however much it brings evil on others and itself. The recognition of this goodness in existence itself is what led the prophet to say that Moses might be right. It led the one who wrote for Paul to say it doesn’t really matter whether he lives or dies. It led Matthew’s Jesus to say that God rewards us all even when some have done only a minimal good.
Whereas Bob Hill was right to paint my red room beige, I was also right to paint it red in the first place because that signaled a fresh start. It was my privilege to nudge you to moral fervor, but even more to glimpse the Ultimate’s infusion of goodness throughout our daily lives, even at their worst, God’s eternal love for everything created.
Amen