What Then Should We Do?

The last time I stood in this pulpit, it was March 22nd, 2020. I was preaching to rows of empty pews. Our students had been sent home, classes had moved onto Zoom, and Morning Prayers had become a daily newsletter sent over email. It was the last Sunday that ministers and musicians were allowed into the building to broadcast the service in person from the sanctuary.

For the rest of my time as interim Pusey Minister, I preached into my phone in a closet in Eliot House. I would try to imagine the sanctuary, Suzanne and Easley Hamner sitting near the front, Connie and Preston Williams sitting in the middle, Alden Fossett sitting next to Cynthia Rossano on my left, the back rows full of students, and our beloved choir in its loft.

I can hardly say what it feels like to see this church full, to see you all here this morning, you are such a beautiful sight. Like many of us, I feel, very much, the absence of those who loved this place, and couldn't wait to worship within these walls again, but who died before that became possible. I feel their absence, but I also feel their presence. We are still awash in the life and love that they poured into this community.

And today, we celebrate the fulfillment of their prayers, that the University would appoint a new minister who was compassionate and wise, a minister from whom they would learn, and by whom they would be challenged. A minister who was both a scholar whose work commanded respect within the University, and a pastor who wanted to lead and care for this congregation of students, and neighbors, and faculty, and staff.

Now there aren't infinite numbers of people who meet this description, but the Reverend Professor Matthew Ichihashi Potts, most definitely does. That he will be our minister and our teacher in the years ahead, fills me with hope.

When I saw the lectionary text for this morning, I laughed out loud, because one line from the gospel expressed my feelings about his appointment, precisely.

The one coming after me is greater than I. I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. Or in Matt's case, the clasp of his boot; since he has already managed to break his foot, playing basketball with his son, Danny, in the driveway of Sparks House. I remember Professor Walton also having a mishap or two underneath that same net. It is almost a tradition.

Those words of course, are spoken by John the Baptist, the interim prophet, if you will. I've been dying to use this joke all week.

And a harsh one, John's greeting to the crowd of people who has gone out into the wilderness to be baptized by him is, "You brood of vipers who warned you to flee from the raft to come." Now we're not, of course, meant to read this and think, "It's a good thing, John the Baptist put those sinners in their place." We're meant to feel called out by a prophet who is looking around him and seeing the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer. Seeing the strong oppress the weak, and the powerful exploit the vulnerable.

It's easy to forget, amid the sparkle of the holidays, what a fierce season Advent is. The voices of the prophets are the drone that sounds beneath our songs of cheer, reminding us that our politics are in a dangerous place. That the reckonings that have begun are far from fulfilled. That it's the middle of December in New England, and our temperatures are in the mid 60s.

The prophets have their eyes on the way things are. They don't sugarcoat. They don't look away from the hard things. They don't worry about whether or not we like them. During Advent, their voices roar.

Now, John the Baptist is a riveting figure, with his hair shirt, and his diet of locusts, and his willingness to speak truth to power; a willingness that will get him executed in the end.

But I have to confess that in this story, my heart is with the crowd. They've hiked into the desert to be baptized by him. They've sought him out because they want to change. "If you want to change," John tells them, "then be a tree that bears fruit worthy of repentance. Already," he says, "...the ax is lying at your root."

Often, the response to this kind of prophetic preaching ranges from willful misunderstanding to outright violence. In every generation, we humans go to great lengths to shield ourselves from the message of the prophets. But this crowd isn't trying to resist John's message. They don't blink an eye when John calls them a brood of Vipers. They want to know how to bear fruit worthy of repentance. And it's their words that leap off the page for me this morning. "What then should we do?" They ask, "What do we do?"

Matthew Ichihashi Potts has been appointed Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, and the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in an ongoing pandemic, in a precarious political climate, in a time of moral reckoning with the catastrophic legacy of the enslavement of human beings in this country. And in the midst of the burgeoning threats from climate change, that can only be addressed by a radical transformation of how we live.

If you came here this morning with the crowd's question on your mind, I'm sure you're not alone. What then should we do, as a nation, as a university, as a congregation, as human beings awake and alive in this world? I think it's a question Matt will hear a lot in his work as Pusey Minister. I also think it's Matt's own question, something he's trying to work out in his scholarship and in his life.

As a young Navy officer, Matt read and thought and prayed his way into a new identity as a conscientious objector; even though it meant paying back every penny of his entire college education. As a teacher and a scholar, he has been struggling with the fraught question of forgiveness. Reimagining it, not as a kind of magical thinking, but as a heartbroken and yet nonviolent practice of peaceful judgment and empowered grief, that helps us uncover and endure new life in the wake of irrevocable loss. Matt Potts is a person who has long been asking, in his thinking and in his living, what then should we do?

We're so fortunate to have Matt's moral vision as a guide in these hard times. But as difficult as these times are, there are signs of hope that Matt can and will, and already has, begun to draw upon.

Matt begins his appointment as the Pusey Minister, in a Harvard that is the most religiously diverse it has ever been. And that's good news for this University and for the Memorial Church. This campus is full of faithful people, practicing religious, ethical, and spiritual traditions, that engage with deep reservoirs of wisdom about how we should live. Wisdom that has been passed down hand to hand, generation to generation, across borders and boundaries. Wisdom that has traveled from one place to another, changing the world around it, and being, itself, shaped by the world through which it has moved.

Charles Hallisey, Professor of Buddhist Studies at Harvard Divinity School, who's here this morning, with students from the Buddhist Ministry Initiative, loves to remind us that the opportunity not only to learn about, but to learn from the religious lives and visions of those in religious communities other than our own, is one of the reasons to come to Harvard. It's part of the education to be had here.

Religious diversity is part of Matt Pott's own family heritage. The first Asian American to serve as Pusey Minister. He comes from a family that is both American and Japanese, Christian and Buddhist. When he goes to Japan, he honors the graves of his ancestors, and those ancestors are no doubt supporting him in his ministry here.

Harvard's religious diversity is not only something to be celebrated, but also something to be drawn upon, as we remake this university in a world, transformed by COVID, a world in which the inequalities and injustices of our time and place have been made so visible. And rather than floating above it, the Memorial Church is part of Harvard's religious diversity, with wisdom of its own to offer, a tradition among other traditions.

One of its gifts is that the Memorial church is one of the most permeable places in this University. You don't need a Harvard ID to come inside and participate fully in the life of this church. Here, the world can enter, and pose its questions, and share its own challenging knowledge. Here, we can cultivate friendships grounded not in age, or rank, or profession, but in shared experiences of worship, service, and fellowship.

The Memorial Church is a place for trying out new ways of living, new forms of community, and what the philosopher Simone Weil once called, experimental certainties. Things we can't know, unless we practice knowing them. Things we can't believe, unless we act as if they were true. Things we can't understand, until we find out what they mean through practicing them with others. This church is a place to practice having faith, faith in God, faith in ourselves, faith in one another, faith in a vision of a transformed world. It's a place to practice living, as the Benedictines say, in conversatio morum, a continual conversion of life, a permanent openness to change.

Now, when John the Baptist is asked by the crowd in the desert, "What then, shall we do?" His answers are powerfully specific. "If you're a soldier," he says, "...don't use your power to extort things from people. If you're a tax collector, don't collect anymore than what people actually owe. If you're a human being who needs food and clothing in order to live, then share what you have to make sure other human beings have these things too."

As I've listened to Matt preach over this semester, I think he's been powerfully specific, too. He's called us to take the life of this church seriously. When we baptize children and promise to support them, he's told us we can't just go through the motions, even if we know we will never see that child again. If we stand and promise to support them, we'd better work for a world where they'll be safe from racism and injustice; we'd better work for a world more just, more loving, he said.

When we pass the peace, when we pray together, when we sing, and study, and work together, all of these things call us to live in particular ways. Our life within these walls, and our life outside these walls, is one life. What then shall we do? Reverend Potts says, "Love. Stay turned toward love even. And especially when that seems impossible.

Maliya Ellis choir member and coral fellow wrote a beautiful meditation in the Crimson this week about Appleton chapel in which she reflected on the resumption of the daily ritual of morning prayers. And she writes at the end of her essay of about how moved she was by Matt's first sermon of the term, in which he talked about the embodied ritual life of the Memorial church. Beginning again, Maliya remembers that he talked about how beautiful these ritual activities are and how much we cherish them. We give thanks for them. Matt said these beautiful holy things in the rituals of the Memorial church and many other religious communities, we offer those things that make us human, our need for food and drink for friendship, for, for forgiveness, for a sense of God's presence, for a place to bring our fears and our hopes, and those rituals return our humanity to us shining with possibility and these ritual gestures.

We catch a glimpse of something more. We are more than we know ourselves to be. We can love more than we think we can. We can be of more use to our neighbor than we think we can. As a former Pusey Minister, the Reverend Peter J. Gomes loved to say. "The heart of the good news is that we do not have to be as we are."

And as the Reverend Charles Adams said from this pulpit, the last time a Pusey Minister was installed, "We can do so much more than we imagine we can do," he told us, what God imagines. We are blessed, in this community, with brilliant creative students, with musicians who lift our prayers on the wings of their music, with more than 42 chaplains, from so many religious traditions, with the support of the University, with pastors of pastoral depth; and now, with our new Pusey Minister, Matthew Ichihashi Potts, who will stand with us and walk with us through these days. What then should we do?