Proper
27c.07
November 11, 2007
Our Gospel lesson sets better with some folks than with
others.
John Stone Jenkins, a venerable Episcopal priest was teaching
a New Testament
class at his church in New Orleans.
When he came to this passage, one older ladies said,
“Does
this mean I won’t be married to Harry in heaven?”
Fr. Jenkins said, “Yes that is what Jesus says here.”
She replied, “Then if I can’t be married to
Harry, I’m not going.”
But the woman next to her chimed in,
“Well,
if I had to spend eternity with George, I wouldn’t
go.”
So there you have it.
When God sets out to create a heavenly paradise for us all,
he may
discover what priests have known all along.
You can’t please everybody.
The Sadducees in today’s lesson are asking a sarcastic
rhetorical question
to make
fun of belief in the resurrection.
Using the example of a woman who has married seven brothers
and outlived
them all, they ask whose wife will she be in heaven.
Jesus takes their sarcasm as an opportunity to teach something
fundamentally
important about the religious imagination.
Nothing could be more basic than this
because
the religious imagination is the human faculty
where faith
resides – and everything depends on faith.
The Sadducees’ problem isn’t just that they
don’t believe in the
resurrection.
It’s their failure to conceive what resurrection even
means.
They have a mundane, trivial vision of the resurrected life.
The best they can imagine is a resumption of this life as
it is.
The Sadducee’s vision of the resurrected life
isn’t much
different from the vision many Christians have today.
Most modern Christians think of the resurrection
as a resumption
of life as we already know it,
only smoothed
out, tweaked a bit, maybe over hauled.
They aspire to an eternity spent doing pretty much
what we are doing
now – only with more money and better weather.
This, brothers and sisters, is an utter failure of imagination.
The pictures of resurrected life in the New Testament
are about a whole
new order of being.
Jesus says, we will be like angels.
We will be children of God.
It isn’t that there will be some joy of relationship
we are deprived
of in the next life,
but that all
joys of relationship will be fulfilled and perfected,
so that the limitations
on love in this mortal state
no longer apply.
We will love no one less, but everyone more.
The Biblical and traditional picture of heaven
isn’t this
life air brushed.
It’s a state of transcendent bliss, lost in wonder,
love, and praise.
It is a state of such perfect happiness and delight
that all the
sufferings, all the grief and guilt and shame
of our present
life fade into insignificance by comparison.
The basic problem here is the failure to stretch our imaginations
toward a good
that we have not experienced.
It is the imagination that leads us toward and eventually
into
a reality beyond
our reckoning.
That’s what transcendence means – going beyond
what we are.
We grow only when the imagination stretches out from our
souls
feeling it’s
way toward something more expansive.
Dante had the greatest respect for the righteous pagans.
In the Divine Comedy, the Roman poet Virgil, a righteous
pagan,
was Dante’s
initial spiritual guide.
But in Dante’s map of the afterlife,
he consigned
the righteous pagans to Limbo.
This was not bigotry or religious prejudice.
It was that Dante did not believe we could achieve
anything greater
than we could imagine.
And the righteous pagan’s highest image of the after
life
was something
like Limbo.
The religious imagination is that important.
It is the hand with which we touch the Otherness of God.
Karl Barth, Immanuel Kant, and in our time George Kaufman
have insisted
that God is utterly different from our experience.
They may over state the case. I think they do.
We can have some experience of God.
But 97% of God is beyond our experience or understanding.
If we are to touch this otherness of God,
we can do so only by
imagining something different
than how things are.
It is like George Bernard Shaw said,
“Some men see
things as they are and explain why.
I dream things that
never were, and ask: why not?”
Ironically the self-proclaimed atheist Bernard Shaw
may have been closer
to God
than the so-called
believers who reduce their image of God
to something they have seen
or heard in mortal life.
God inherently cannot be proven or displayed because God
is mystery.
We can only imagine our way toward God,
dream our way
into God.
Jesus and the early Christians thought and imagined outside
the religious
box of the earlier religions.
That is what Christianity essentially is – a spiritual,
imaginative
out of the box-ness.
When we make Christianity into a new box,
people have to
look to other religions to set them free,
and so they become
more Christian than we are.
Our imagination or failure thereof
plays out in
our lives right now in two particular ways.
First, it affects how we pray and how we hope.
When we ask God for help, we may have very specific ideas
as to how God
ought to help us.
We want God to tweak our little lives the way we plan
in our little
imaginations.
But maybe God has something bigger and better in mind.
Maybe God is going to heal and redeem us
in ways that
we have not foreseen and could not now fathom.
If we look back over our lives,
we are very likely
to see, God has done it before,
and God may well be planning to
do it again.
Second, imagination is about how we relate to any form of
otherness.
In his classic book, Love Is Stronger Than Death,
Peter Kreeft says death is utterly
other than our experience of life.
Whatever comes next is utterly other than what came before.
It is the ultimate change, the ultimate meeting with otherness.
So how we face death depends on how we deal with otherness.
How do we approach the strange, the different, the unfamiliar?
With fear or hope, with aversion or curiosity, with contempt
or admiration?
If we were to hear that in 2010,
there would be
a brand new Book of Common Prayer,
would we greet
the news with enthusiastic interest
like the next episode of
Harry Potter
– or would we assume it will be a theologically shallow
poetic atrocity
and leap into
mourning for the beloved old 1979 Prayer Book?
Don’t worry, there is no new Prayer Book in the pipeline.
But if there were, it would be an example of otherness,
and it would
be a test of our willingness
to imagine something beyond
our experience,
to “dream
things that never were and ask: why not?”
The religious imagination is the opposite of fear,
and it is the
opposite of despair and it is the opposite of oppression.
The religious imagination reaches out into the mystery
in a spirit of
hope and delight in the revelation of something new.
If we imagine God as someone like we already know, only
bigger
– if we imagine
the resurrection as this life made longer and smoother
– then we are
not stretching our religious imagination.
We are atrophying it.
We are crippling ourselves in our capacity to negotiate
the change,
the otherness,
which is the essence of both life and death.
Everyone from Moses to Heraclitus to John Donne
have taught us
that reality is in constant flux.
If we are to engage reality, we need a spiritual imagination
that surfs, that
flies, that dreams.
Jesus began the process of our redemption
by proclaiming
the Kingdom of God,
by inviting us
to imagine a tomorrow better than yesterday,
not just like
yesterday with a few minor adjustments,
but utterly and completely
new.
Jesus held up a picture of the otherness of the Kingdom.
Does that scare us as it did the Sadducees who killed him,
or does it enlighten
our hearts with hope
as it enlightened the hearts
of the disciples?
This
is the test of our way of life, now and forever.
Amen.
