The Rev. Noah Van Niel

St. John the Evangelist

February 25^th, 2018

Lent II (B): Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:22-30; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38

Hold on just a little while longer / Everything will be alright

I learned that spiritual in my college Gospel choir, and it comes, like most spirituals, out of the experience of slavery and oppression Africans underwent in these United States. And in its simple melody and refrain are housed a kernel of confidence that defies explanation. For how could anyone living through an experience as awful as slavery not be crushed in body and spirit, let alone trust, believe, sing that “everything will be alright?” It is a song of victory for the simple fact that it was being sung at all. It is a song of strength and power and endurance. It is a song of faith. Continue reading →

The Rev. Noah Van Niel

St. John the Evangelist, Hingham

February 11, 2018

Last Epiphany (B): 2 Kings 2:1-12; Psalm 50: 1-6; 2 Cor 4:3-6; Mark 9:2-9

Buried beneath the hullaballoo surrounding memos and shutdowns and stock market corrections this past week, there was some news of actual interest and it came to us out of the jungles of northern Guatemala. There in the Tikal National Park, home of many of the most famous Mayan temples and ruins in the world, archaeologists made an astonishing discovery. Using a new topographical mapping technique called LiDAR where a plane flies over an area and bounces beams of light incredibly quickly down to the ground and measures how long it takes them to bounce back, computers can generate a remarkably accurate, three-dimensional map of the ground. And what this team of researchers discovered was that in one of the most studied and visited archaeological sites in the world, there were over 60,000 more dwellings, as well as undiscovered canals, tunnels, and temples covered by the dense Guatemalan jungle. This discovery meant that researchers had grossly underestimated the size and complexity of this central Mayan settlement and that instead of 5 million people living in the area, there could have been something like 10-15 million putting this civilization on par with the likes of Ancient Greece or Ancient China for sheer size and sophistication. But over the centuries since this civilization ended, vines and trees and plants and grass had covered all these buildings so completely, no one had ever noticed them.  This land that had be walked over countless times by scores of archaeologists who had devoted their whole lives to studying the area was hiding an ancient metropolis right beneath their feet.  One Maya specialist was quoted in one articles I read about this discovery as saying, “After decades of combing through the forests, no archaeologists had stumbled across these sites. More importantly, we never had the big picture that this data set gives us. It really pulls back the veil and helps us see the civilization as the ancient Maya saw it.”[1]

In his second letter to the Corinthians this morning Paul talks about veils too. Continue reading →