Emmanuel Church, Bungay, Suffolk

The Minister's Sermons

"Imagine! It makes all the difference" by Revd Bruce Waldron - 13th March 2005 Lamentations 3:19-33
How are we supposed to face life when it turns sour, when things go terribly wrong and circumstances gang up on us? We used to have a cartoon tile on the wall of our bathroom in Welshman's Reef, and Snoopy is sitting on the top of his kennel, his ears all matted and twisted, a frazzled and despondent look in his eye, and he's saying "I try to take one day at a time, but today several of them have attacked me at the same time."
As we read Jeremiah, we are let into the world of a man who has had that happen to him on a regular basis, not because he couldn't handle life well, but because he lived in an age when his society was doing some terrible things and he wouldn't go along with them.
His country was in political trouble but the response of the people wasn't to become more faithful to God's ways. It was to try and accommodate a whole host of evil practises to retain power by political intrigue and moral compromise and Jeremiah felt he had to remain faithful to God. That meant putting himself on the line. He knew that what they were doing was wrong and he kept saying so.
When we read a piece of the bible like Lamentations Chapter 3, we might even imagine that we know how he was feeling, but we don't, not really. We can only take the words we read, and imagine what it was like out of the context of our own experiences and feelings. We can never really know but we can listen and try to see if our imagining is consistent with what we are hearing, and from that, we begin to get an inkling of what he was saying, and hoping.
Hearing God's word to us, out of a document that was written in a foreign land, in a foreign language, two and a half thousand years ago, is always an imaginative exercise. It is in this world of active imagining, that we can hear God speak to us through the words of another person in a far distant time and place.
Jeremiah reminds me of a few dark patches in my own life, and I expect most of you can think of moments when you've felt something like the way you imagine Jeremiah is feeling.
If you have, I wonder if in the middle of it all you've been able to also imagine God as Jeremiah did.
In the middle of al the mess, his homelessness, his persecution, his grief, he says, "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never end. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness."
If you went through something like Jeremiah has gone through, is that the way you responded?
Has Jeremiah got it right. Does the steadfast love of the Lord never change? Is there joy in the morning? Or is that a naïve optimism?
Jeremiah reminds me a bit of Deitrich Bonhoeffer, that courageous German Christian who stood with so many of his fellow Germans against Hitler's terrible power. As Hitler's flunkies led him off to be hanged just a few weeks before the end of the 2nd world war, Bonhoeffer sent his last message a friend. He had just enough time to write "This is the end - for me, the beginning of life!"
The real question is whether God is defined by our good and bad fortune.
Some people seem to talk as if that's their reality. They talk as though, if things go awfully wrong for them God must be bad or non existent - if things go terribly well for them, God must be good and real. So God is only real and good if everything goes reasonably well - all the time - for almost everyone. But they can't both be right, the people who have very good and very bad occurrences in their lives, one thinking God is real and good, the other thinking God is bad or non-existent.
Our theology cannot, logically or in any other way work on such a narrow way of reasoning.
Let me put that question another way. Do we find the reality of God by what happens out there, and by what others do - or by what happens in here - and what we do? Is God found in what happens to us, or by what we do with what happens.
What is the most influential factor in how you encounter God? Is it the events from outside? Or is it the events from inside the person of faith, your life as a faithful person, that most clearly show the reality of God.
For Bonhoeffer, for Jeremiah, nothing outside of them could change this reality of God. So Jeremiah in one breath can write "He has made my flesh and my skin waste away, and broken my bones; he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation; he has made me sit in darkness like the dead of long ago. He has walled me about so that I cannot escape; he has put heavy chains on me; though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer; he has blocked my ways with hewn stones, he has made my paths crooked."
In utter honesty of his desolation and sorrow he pours out on God his hurt and pain, and trusts that God can handle it, and so, in the same breath he can say:
"But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness."
It is not just how we interpret what we see, that helps or hinders our vision of God. It is where we imagine to look, to find the material that gives us our interpretation.
MATTHEW 20:17-28
Our imagination plays a strong hand in our faith. The way we imagine things ought to be, can blind us to much that is.
It is so easy to condemn John's mother as a dominating matriarch who wants positions of power for her children. But no one was hearing what Jesus had been saying, not even his closest disciples. They were all imagining that somehow the things he was telling them wouldn't really happen, and that Jesus' kingdom that he spoke about so often, would be the same as the kingdom they imagined.
Their imagination of what the Kingdom of God should look like stopped them from imagining the Kingdom of God as Jesus saw it.
Most of what we see and hear; much of our faith understanding is directed by our imagination. Imagining isn't about unreality. It is the way we all interpret reality, so that one person sees one reality, another something quite different.
The question isn't whether we imagine, it is whether our imagining is faithful to Jesus, or faithful to something else, whether it is a faith-filled imagination - or a faith-less imagining.
Jesus - in faith - imagined a different world, dominated by a different kind of strength, the strength of faith and loving service. So strong was his faith driven imagining that he could tell his disciples that to get to this, the Son of Man was to be handed over to Chief Priests and Scribes who would condemn him, hand him over to Gentiles, mock him, flog him, and crucify him. But on the third day he would be raised.
Now, immediately Jesus paints this grim journey, he is offered a person who wants, for the best reason, to go the way of dominant power, and in love for her sons, wants them to share it. John and James' mother, offers Jesus another imagining of power that probably won't involve all this suffering.
Jesus knows that this is false imagining. This is the type of faith that only works when we are on the winning side. And this just cannot be our experience all the time.
It is not in dominating power, but in giving of himself that Jesus knows real power lies. And this type of power has to come to grips with suffering, because giving like this will sometimes result in awful suffering. So faith cannot be tied to good fortune and an easy, comfortable existence, nor to the grasping of ever more dominating power that has the illusion of making us secure from such misfortune. That is an imagining that is false.
Jesus faith filled (or faithful) imagining will hold, and his type of power will still be there even if things are utterly horrible. It isn't dependent on the fluctuations of fortune.
So Jesus confronts his disciples with the worst possible reality. And after telling how, when everything terrible that can happen has happened, he says "And on the third day, the son of man will be raised."
This is an echo of Jeremiah:
"He has filled me with bitterness, he has sated me with wormwood. He has made my teeth grind on gravel, and made me cower in ashes; my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is …. But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness."
The passion - the crucifixion - the faithful imagination - and the resurrection. As we move through Lent to Palm Sunday, this is the meaning of the lent journey: the faithful imagination that sees that God is with us in the pain, the sorrow, the fear and the cross, but still his mercies are new in the morning and his faithfulness is everlasting. So might ours be, by the grace of God, and an imagination that is faithful.