Richard Hays Memorial Sermon

“A Magnificent Closing Argument” Romans 8: 18-39

February 28, 2025
Duke University Chapel
Richard Lischer, preacher

My dear Judy, Sarah, Sky, Chris and Carly, brother Whis, and to all family and friends in this church and to those joining us from afar: The Lord be with you.

You have lost your husband of 55 years, a father, a wonderful grandfather, and a brother. Chris and Carly, you have lost your home in the LA fires. And we have lost a beloved teacher and a friend. The Apostle Paul was right: our world is truly groaning

We are here not solely to remember this lovely man, and even less to summarize his achievements, but to commend him. The root meaning of the word “commend” is, literally, to place into the hands of another, to hand him on, as when Jesus said, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” In that sense, we Christians are always commending those we have loved.

In the decanal portrait of Richard placed in the narthex for today, he is seated at a table with his hand an open Bible. He assured me his hand is on the 8th chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans. He was kind enough to choose my text, which he knew is always the hardest part of preaching, or in this case the second hardest.

If you listened closely to the reading, you might have noted that this chapter does not contain a series of one-liners or isolated statements. No, the whole thing is a drama--the drama and summation of the Christian life. It is big and deep. Richard Hays understood himself to be enrolled in that life, and he completed it faithfully and victoriously.  

The drama begins where we all find ourselves today—in a restless, groaning creation, in a world on fire with suffering, loss, fear, and geopolitical upheaval. Any disinterested reader of this story might say, “This thing has no place to go but death.”

But by some majesty of love, the Spirit of God joins us in this drama with sighs too deep for words. Even in this hour and in this place, which is a room filled with words, on a brilliant campus that lives by words, the Spirit is quietly praying in the Spirit’s own fashion. In this passage, whatever hope we have has been put on the defensive. Cancer will do that. The promises of God have been put in the witness box. And because of our own failures and fears—our sins—we are in no position to testify on our own behalf. No lawyer in his right mind would put us on the stand. But Paul the teacher has left the building, and Paul the preacher has arrived. Like an old-time southern lawyer in a white suit, he delivers a closing argument for the ages. “Who dare bring a charge against the promises of God?” “I am convinced,” he says. “Nothing high, nothing low, nothing I can think of, not even death, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”

In the past weeks I’ve spent some time before the portrait of Richard. It has a serenity about it probably because he had a serenity about him. He is an exegete, but in this portrait he is not extracting something from the Bible. He seems to be receiving, listening. One of the oldest metaphors for Holy Scripture is the Latin phrase “Liber et speculum,” book and mirror. Read the book and you learn all kinds of things about other people, about Abraham and Moses, Peter and Paul and all the rest, but look more deeply—and you see yourself, just as you are and just as you hope to be. Richard was one of those “deep lookers” into scripture. And there he beheld his own life –just as we do ours. He saw himself passing through these same stations, guided by the same Spirit, empowered by the same hope, defended by the same mercies.

When you really see yourself in that mirror, you discover your calling, at least Richard did. And that calling was to teach this Scripture and to lead others through the same promises. The guide he followed was Jesus. The map he followed was Scripture. For 30 years we’ve heard the name “Richard Hays” in the same sentence with “one of the leading New Testament scholars in the world.” His books are widely translated; he was honored with awards, revered by an army of grateful students.

But his career didn’t follow the familiar pattern of academic training in which a sort of distanced objectivity is essential. Many in Richard’s generation were trained to take the Enlightenment “step back” from the text to appraise it normatively in all its dimensions, which is well and good. But to be a true leader and the truest of teachers, one must step into the text and claim it as ones’ own. Richard always posed the discipleship question: how does reading this text help us be a follower of Jesus? So, here’s my little paradox. Richard Hays was a leader/ Richard Hays was a follower/ in one faithful man! The consummate professor, he was always ready to pro-fess.

Those who pro-fess are given a language with which to do it. It is the language of faith, and Richard was its faithful curator. I can think of no better example than his recent use of the biblical word “repentance” to describe his purpose in co-writing his final book. Of course, it was written with you, Chris (and by the way, I think most children would pass on the opportunity to write a book with a parent, but you didn’t, and we are grateful ). But what’s with this word “repent”? Why not allow the shifts in culture or popular opinion to do the work for you? And if one has to say something, wouldn’t the more self-insulating word “regret” serve as well? But here’s the problem with regret: Have I told you about my regrets? . . . That’s right, regret lives only in the past . Regret is a word without a future. Repent invites a just and forgiving God into the conversation, and God always makes a future. Regret does not lead to genuine reconciliation, but repentance can and does—and did.

Richard was at home in the language-world of the bible and at home in the so-called “outside world” we all live in. He was a committed pacifist in our violent world. He once journeyed to a peace conference in Nagasaki where he prayed with those who had suffered grievously, some at our hands. He gave a lecture on reconciliation in (of all places) the Museum of the Atom Bomb. The first sermon I heard Richard preach, across the way in the Divinity School, was an impassioned denunciation of a fairly popular war, the First Gulf War. Even in his late hours, he understood the challenges that followers of Jesus are facing in America today. He knew that church is no sanctuary, if by sanctuary you mean a place of safety and silence.

When a New York Times interviewer asked what he might have done had he not become a Christian theologian, it was really a non-starter of a question, like asking a famous basketball star, ‘what might you have done if you had never found the gym?’ But if we must speculate, I believe Richard would have played first base for the Atlanta Braves, and, following retirement, would have written the definitive history of the National League, which he knew as well as he knew I Corinthian!. But, no, when pressed, his answer was music; it was always music. He came from generations of church musicians. His mother was a gifted church organist. He moved effortlessly from church music to garage bands. He was a Wiffenpoof at Yale with a lovely baritone voice, and a serious guitarist who often accompanied worship at City Well Church here in town. His special love was Mozart. And the Beatles. And Joni Mitchell always. His soul was lately fed by Mary Gauthier’s “Mercy Now”: “Every single one of us could use a little mercy now.”

One of Richard’s signature achievements as dean was our theology and arts program which brought poets, writers, and musicians to our campus. His own range in theology, ethics, literature and music fostered many partnerships and wonderful conversations across the university. He understood how music helps us hear the echoes of grace all around us, even as it does in this his final service. He clearly agreed with the words of Norman Maclean in his novel, A River Runs Through It: “All good things come by grace . . ., grace comes by art, and art does not come easy.”

Richard’s work was not without controversy, and his life was not without suffering. The rabbis had a saying to the effect that God is not only the author of all the words on the biblical page but also of the white spaces between the words. The white spaces are also full of meaning, but only to God! To us, they represent silences, gaps, mysteries, and lost memories. The white spaces are too deep for words. Even Paul says in our text—and what an unthinkable thing for a great rabbi and apostle to admit--“We don’t know how to pray as we ought.”

For sometimes, even our own faith can seem incoherent to us when we can’t find the words we think we are supposed to have at our fingers’ tips. Who will teach you what to say when your house burns down? Who can teach you what to think when your death is all but announced in a medical consultation? What’s the right word to describe how your longing for just one ordinary day with someone you love has become a fantasy? These and much more belong to the white spaces.

To the apostle Paul these are not absences, of course, but powers that wear us down at our fraying places. Death threatens to rip the narrative apart, to separate us from our rightful story. And time—time works its magic on our fraying memories, does it not? Who will tell the story of us? Who will tell the story of Judy and “Chip” to the great-grandchildren? Who will remember us? What did the thief on the cross pray? Not “Spare me this death,” but “Lord, remember me.” When Israel feared it would be swallowed by history and forgotten, God replied through the prophet Isaiah: “Can a mother forget the child at her breast? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you. See, I have engraved your name in the palms of my hands.”

But does God remember? If so, how? This is how: God remembers us in and through the One God could not forget. In the resurrection of Jesus God says to each of us, ‘See: this is how I will remember you. This is the shape of my memory.

I am convinced that great teachers like Richard never retire. They simply find other ways of teaching what they have always taught! On the subject of dying, for example, Richard said to his Times interviewer, our culture urges us to “fight cancer,” but that is to divide the children of God into winners or losers. “What I’m doing,” he continued, “is not fighting with a clenched fist. What I’m doing is opening my hands to receive whatever God has for me. . . . We ought to think that we are given every day by the sheer grace of God.” When I reread that, I can almost hear Paul in the courtroom once again, making his magnificent closing argument.

One day, not long ago, in a reflective mood, Richard said, “I used to wonder if it came down to my life, in the pinch would I really believe all these things I’ve been teaching for so many years? . . . . Turns out, I do,” he said, “ I do.”

Thanks be to God.