A number of people have asked if I would post the text of my remarks at St Stephens on 9 November. This time there is no attribution to acknowledge, so I guess I can. Thanks to everyone to your kind attention and feedback. David H. Henderson 503.313.1448 Sunday, 9 November 2014, Proper 27, Year A The Lesson from the semi-continuous track: Joshua 24: 1-3a, 14–25 The Epistle: I Thessalonians 4:13–18 The Holy Gospel: Matthew 25:1–13 Spirit of truth, speak through these words, if they are worthy; and if they are unworthy, O God, speak in spite of them. Amen. Let’s begin our brief time together this morning with a little game of imagination, shall we? Let’s imagine that you and I are suddenly caught up inside a huge, transparent bubble. At first, we are alarmed, because our world is disrupted, but before long we come to feel very much at ease. We float along noiselessly among the clouds, admiring the landscape we normally see only from the ground. We notice that whenever we feel hungry, food suddenly appears — and not just food, but delicious food, all our favorite dishes. Anytime we want to go someplace, we are magically transported there, and we never get tired or sleepy. Although we never speak to each other, we can see one another clearly and begin to feel very close. As we look around, we realize that everyone we have ever cared about is being pulled up into our bubble with us. OK. I’m popping the bubble. You know — don’t you? — that such a bubble does not exist. I mean, I started that little exercise by announcing that we were going to imagine it. I probably didn’t give you enough time to enjoy our little fantasy, but — well, duty calls us. And, after all, since we were using our imagination, we knew that our game would eventually come to an end. The quality which human beings have to envision something that has not happened is quite remarkable. We have been pointed to it by influential persons throughout history. Some of those people have been so very good at it that the passage of thousands of years is not enough to erase the images they convey. Think, for instance, of the fable of the tortoise and the hare: we all know the story, and we all understand its central moral — “Slow and steady wins the race.” But the story itself may be three thousand years old or more. Still, it is so imaginative, so creative to suppose that a tortoise and a hare should have a race, that the very premise of the story itself is a great lesson, and a memorable one. The scriptures of our canon are filled with stories which also have memorable premises and characters. In fact, the reason our Bible is put together in the order it has today is because we are invited to see the stories of God’s people as one continuously unfolding epic. The central focus of the little stories which make it up is not on the fact that they actually happened, but on the important truths and values they convey. As the story unfolds, God’s people embrace and discard these values as their faith matures, sometimes exercising good judgment, and sometimes not so much. One of these teaching stories, which comes to us from the Hebrew scriptures is the passage which we heard first this morning. The events as they are described in the book of Joshua probably did not happen. The Jordan River probably did not back up when the Ark of the Covenant went before the people into the Promised Land. Joshua most likely did not divide the people into twelve groups and assign eleven of them to a specific territory each. The proud and enormous city of Jericho was not likely flattened by the shouts and trumpets of God’s people in procession around it. And Joshua probably never called the people together to give a farewell address on the day he died. But the story is not recorded to give us facts about history; it is written to teach a lesson — the lesson that our walk in faith is characterized by points where we are called upon to renew our commitment, and that these commitment-points happen in our lives on a regular basis. Some of them seem really important when we look back at them later. And if our memory of them seems a little foggy, we are likely to “plug in” some embellishments from our imagination to make things fit. This creative “plugging in” effect is instinctual; we just can’t help it. In fact, it is so difficult for us to turn off this creative imagination that in a court of law, where we want somebody to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” we make them swear that they will do their very best not to embellish the facts as they saw them. But as we are finding out, even when sworn witnesses have convinced a jury of the so-called facts, those “facts” as they have been presented have convicted and imprisoned many innocent people. Right now, as you are looking around this room, your peripheral vision is plugging into your brain things that are not within the range of your eyesight. The fact that you can see anything other than the tunnel of light right in front of you is a testimony to your brain’s capacity to “fill in” what you saw the last time you turned your head to the left and the right. You probably know who is sitting behind you, and somewhere in the focus of your consciousness, you can draw a face to go with that personality, and you may even dress the person behind you in the clothing you noticed they were wearing. To think that our spiritual life is exempt from this imaginative creativity is, I think, intellectually dishonest. And, although the kind of creativity our brain uses to supply us with peripheral vision is a very different kind of imagination than our “spiritual vision,” I believe that the same principle applies. We also have an enormous capacity to “fill in the blanks” when it comes to our imagining spiritual things. Sometimes, we are so viscerally certain that we have experienced something divine, we can fill in what may be factually missing in order to rationalize the power of that experience. I think it would be intellectually dishonest as well to say that we have a lot of control over that effect. In fact, our ancestors in the faith have pretty much chosen to “go with the flow” wherever this imaginative power can take us, haven’t they? Why would this option have made sense? I mean, you and I live in a fairly cut-and-dried world factually. We get really outraged when we think someone has bamboozled us with an untruth, and we punish, legally or by our ostracism, those who have foisted some lie on innocent people who don’t know any better, or don’t have access to the facts. And we’re really suspicious when the issues as they are presented to us appear implausible. Oftentimes, the truth is so incredibly complicated, that it is easier to think that someone has conspired to mislead us than it is to believe the complicated truth. Think, for instance, of how popular the idea once was that the Apollo astronauts had not actually landed on the moon, but had used clever photographic tricks to justify the expenditure of millions of dollars on the space program. The fact is that building a craft which would travel to the moon and back was such a complex enterprise, and such a monumental achievement, that some people prefer not to allow it into the framework of their conscious assent. But many years before the moon mission became a reality, an author by the name of Jules Verne had envisioned the use of a powerful rocket to go to and from the moon. Now, given this reality about the human mind, how do we approach the passage from First Thessalonians this morning? I have to tell you, in order to be intellectually honest, that I do not believe that all of humanity is waiting for a time when a loud shout will wake the dead, and that we will rise up with our departed loved ones to float around forever in the air with Jesus. I personally am not comforted by such an image. But I think St Paul actually did accept these things, and that he and those to whom he was writing did take comfort from that image. In fact, there is a phrase in this passage which suggests that he was declaring something which he believed Jesus himself had taught (“by the word of the Lord — 4:15). Now, none of the four canonical gospels contains this teaching, or even anything like it, but that implies that Paul might have had a source which is no longer extant, and to be fully honest we have to acknowledge that possibility. The important thing about this passage, however, is the “moral”: that the thought of God’s presence is something which brings us profound comfort, especially at times of loss, and that we should encourage one another creatively with regular remembrances of this teaching (verse 18). And, although I am not by any means the only Christian who finds this passage fanciful, or even disturbing, there are many sincere believers who really are looking for a literal fulfillment of Paul’s prediction, and in the interest of fullest disclosure, I must acknowledge their understanding of it as well as my own. But I think when we step outside the realm of evidence for our truth claims, we must be honest enough to admit where the provable truth ends and where imagination begins. You see, you and I live in a setting in which it is possible for someone to stand up and actually talk about intellectual honesty and the human imagination. St Paul and those early Christians to whom he was writing did not live in such a privileged place or time, and the fragility of their ordinary daily lives is far beyond my ability to comprehend. But unlike us, they also did not live in a world like ours, where any forthright person is obliged to acknowledge the possibility of nuclear holocaust, or of pandemic disease, or of the horror of witnessing events like the deaths of thousands of people within seconds of their occurrence. It is difficult to come to our time of prayerful thought and not be aware of those in our world this morning who do not know if the sun will set before someone beheads them or guns them down because they claim the name of Jesus. I have never been in fear for my very life because of my attitudes about faith; have you? But hundreds, perhaps millions, of Christians who are alive today will pay with their blood for daring to wear a cross, or baptize their children. One of my friends who is currently making a study of the End-Time passages in the Bible is convinced that on March 22 last year, we entered a seven-year period which is called in Matthew’s gospel “great tribulation,” and I suppose if I lived in northern Iraq or eastern Syria today, that might appear to be the most plausible description of my world. In fact, if someone were to burst through the doors of this building in the next few minutes and plow us all down with a machine gun for meeting in the name of Jesus, our neighbors might respond with outrage; but in some parts of the world on this Sunday morning, the very act of showing up at church is to take a potentially fatal stand, and making it to the end of the worship service without being blown up is a major victory. The world St Paul’s contemporaries negotiated every day was a lot like that. One of the reasons we have such contempt towards the ISIS militants is the crude nature of their advance, isn’t it? They are not above using tools of warfare which are like those the Crusaders used, when our ancestors in faith saw the world very differently than we do, and when the values they embraced were values which, thank God, we have come to discard. But the facts of their dangerous lives did not prevent these early Christian believers from employing their imaginations, just as there are brave Christians today who are taking their stand for the truth on pain of death. Just as Jules Verne imagined a voyage to and from the moon years before that was even possible, the early Christians foresaw a time when this Age would come to a conclusion; and they had the daring to foresee it as a time when people wrenched apart by conquest or death would be reunited; a time when joy would be the rule rather than a rare exception; a time when everyone would come to believe that a Power Greater than Ourselves could restore us to sanity. On the basis of Paul’s own testimony, such an image of the close of the Age might have been exactly what Jesus himself predicted. As other writers of the Christian scriptures imagined this development of events, they drew heavily from the tradition of the prophets of old, who foresaw a day when humankind would beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks (Joel 3:10); when the wolf would live with the lamb (Isaiah 11:6); when the young child would play over the den of the cobra (Isaiah 11:8), and when no one would kill or destroy on God’s holy mountain (Isaiah 11:9). I submit to you this morning that the reason we have lost sight of this precious image is that we have discarded our ability to engage in holy imagination. When we imagine a city in which disparate peoples dwell, we insist on its having a wall between them. When we fail to craft our words and our deeds so as to win the hearts of those who turn to us for help, we insist on destroying them instead. Jesus told a story about this aching absence in the human heart. There were ten maidens who were charged with carrying oil lamps in the procession of a bridegroom to meet his bride. Five of the maidens were smart, and five of them were just silly. The five smart ones not only filled their lamps with oil, but they secured a stock of extra oil as well. The silly girls simply prepared for a short spell, and although they had fully functional lamps, the lamps burned out quickly. They had gathered no extra equipment for their task. Much of the efforts of the modern Church are like those of the silly maidens. Oh yes, the kind of lamp we have is just as good as everyone else’s, and our lamps are gloriously trimmed and prepared; but they are prepared for the short haul, and when more discernment is called for, when more serenity is called for, when more creativity is called for, we run out very quickly. The silly maidens were good for the job, as long as the job did not require very much; that is why they were silly. But when assiduous thought, planning, and dedicated execution were demanded, they fell short. They were not creative enough to imagine that things could change, and change quickly. And like them, we often foresee only what is in the narrow tunnel in front of our eyes. We have no orientation towards sustainability; we merely see the short term. We lack the imagination to prepare for what we can be pretty sure is coming, and we do not know when it will arrive. Oh, to be sure, our lamps are as good as anybody’s. But when we open the ears of our imagination, we hear Joshua calling across the thousands of years, challenging us to make a choice that we can stick with, one that will stand the test of time. And we are called to do this now — today, this very moment — because we are not promised another day or another hour. I’m sure that most of you know that the candles on our altars at St Stephen’s are not really candles. They are tiny oil lamps. At the top of each brass follower is a wick which extends deep down inside the shaft of the candle. Some of the candles we use here still have the same wicks they have had since long before I came on the scene. But it is the oil which is burning when you see a lighted oil candle, not the wick. The wick is there mainly to convey the oil. When the oil dries up, or when we fail to refill the candle, then the wick dries out and begins to burn, and eventually the light will fail. The wick in our spiritual lamp is the faith which God’s people have gathered around for hundreds of years. It is the perceptible stuff of our common life: the Creeds, the scriptures, the sacraments. And when we affirm our faith in the ancient words of the Nicene Creed, for example, we are not so much acknowledging that the tenets of the Creed are still intellectually viable, because our world has changed around that Creed. The affirmation of our faith is not an attempt to impose ideological uniformity on everyone who recites the Creed; we are not asking people, for instance, to “buy into” the idea of the Virgin Birth, because for some people that would be impossible. Instead, we are affirming the faith of everyone who has followed the Truth as it has shone upon them; in our imaginations, we see a line stretching all the way back to the apostles, and we take our place in that line. I have no more obligation to embrace all the doctrinal fine points in the Creed than I have to wear a toga or bind a phylactery on my forehead. But if I join that line — as I willingly do, and as I invite you to do as well — I am committing myself, heart and hand, to awaken the imagination which lies deep inside and discern the best way for me to live authentically in the demanding world which I inhabit. I have to have the creativity to accept that your light may not be the same light I read by. I have to embrace the truth which has come to me and operate accordingly; because to do anything less would be complete foolishness. I must replenish my reservoir of imagination from a holy supply; otherwise, my lamp will burn darkly and produce more smoke than light. I don’t pretend to be any more faithful to my truth than God’s people were when they told Joshua that they would follow God, and I expect that I will fail often, just as they did. I am at least honest enough to allow for my humanity and my sinfulness. But I hope that I can inspire with these frail words an awakening of our ability to imagine how our life can be better, and fuller — and, yes: even more holy. We must awaken these truths inside us today, because we are not promised a tomorrow. We must do so here, because here is where God has placed us. We must do so now, because we do not know the day or the hour when everything comes to its inevitable end, for us or for the world. Now unto the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible, the only-wise God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. (I Timothy 1:17)
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 01:46:42 +0000
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