SERMON NOTES FOR 8.22.10
“In 1930 Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, a prominent leader in the American Jewish community of New York, fired off a telegram to Albert Einstein. The rabbi did not waste words: ‘Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. 50 words.’
‘The telegram was prompted by a public altercation that had arisen when Einstein published a statement that, to the consternation of some of his fellow scientists, he always referred to himself as ‘religious.’ He had written:
The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly; this is religiousness. In this sense … I am a devoutly religious man.
“Using fewer than the 50 words allotted him Einstein told the rabbi that he leaned toward the kind of God Spinoza describes, ‘who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.’ He did not, however, believe in a God ‘who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.’” (Story quoted in Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith, New York: HarperOne, 2009.)
We Christians don’t agree with Einstein’s idea of an impersonal god. But what Einstein possessed was the first prerequisite for faith: a sense of awe, an ability to sense the ultimate mystery that lies behind all things, the capacity to imagine that beyond all the things our bodies and minds can sense and observe, there lies another reality that cannot be described. Einstein had the capacity for imagination.
You can argue that the capacity to imagine what cannot be observed is what makes us human and sets us apart from other creatures on earth. You can also argue that the capacity to imagine is what makes possible all human progress, including the process of scientific discovery. After all, if you cannot imagine it, you cannot discover it, you cannot invent it, you cannot make it a reality. Einstein’s theory of relativity is not something you can observe if you look around this room, any more than you can observe that the earth is round. To put forward his theory of relativity, Einstein first had to imagine a reality that makes no sense in the world that we ordinarily move around in.
In an article in the New York Times, August 15, 2010, Timothy Williamson, a logic professor at Oxford entitled “Reclaiming the Imagination” – says that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is arrived at by a combination of imagination, experience, observation and judgment in constant cycle of interaction.
For instance, he says, imagine that you are a primitive hunter, walking through the woods in the rain. You are wet and cold. You see a cave. You imagine yourself walking into the cave and lighting a fire and getting warm and cozy. Because you can imagine it, you can make it happen.
But you can also say to yourself, what if there’s a hungry bear sleeping in that cave? And you can make plans for what to do if a hungry bear comes charging out of the cave at you.
And you can imagine more, says Williamson. You can imagine that the bear isn’t hungry but lonely, and that he will see you coming and come out of the cave and give you a great big bear hug, and take you into the cave where you will be best friends for life. You can imagine it, but based on everything you know about bears and everything your friends have ever told you, it doesn’t seem very likely, does it? So when you're making your plans for the cave, you can leave that scenario out and just concentrate on the possibilities that actually seem likely to happen.
We are able to plan for the future because we can imagine alternate realities, judge which are most likely, and plan accordingly. All human inventions, decisions, and plans are based on this ability to imagine what you can’t yet see. Even in the scientific method: questions for experimentation are posed by imagining a hypothesis, imagining the possible outcomes if the hypothesis is true, then designing experiments to test whether those outcomes are achieved. A constant cycle of imagination, observation, judgment, and experience is the basis of all human knowledge and all human action.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the scriptures for today, where two intriguing stories call into question Einstein’s view of impersonal deity – these are stories of personal encounters with God. In our Old Testament lesson, we have the call of the prophet Jeremiah. As a young boy, Jeremiah becomes aware of a personal and individual call from a God who says, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you” – a God who knows Jeremiah so well that he knows that Jeremiah will have the rare gift of prophetic imagination. While other religious leaders in Israel have become complacent, oppressing the poor and engaging in a disastrous foreign policy, Jeremiah will be able to see what they cannot see, will be able to imagine God’s view of their activities. And Jeremiah will not be able to rest until he has spoken God’s words to them and described to them an alternate reality. No one believes Jeremiah and he suffers a lot, but Jeremiah is proved right by the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon in 587 BC. And it is from the vantage point of his career as the prophet whose imagination has become reality that he tells this story of his call as a boy. It is not his own words he speaks, but God’s, and God’s words have the power to make things happen – become reality.
We are not all, like Jeremiah, called to be prophets – yet we are all known as he was known, called as he was called, to the exercise of imaginative ministry, the ministry of making God’s word active in this world.
For a picture of imaginative ministry, the work of making God’s word active – take a look at our gospel story today – another healing story, one of the many healing stories in the gospels. A woman doubled over in pain, her vision limited to her toes, is healed. In reading healing stories, it is tempting to say, why her and not me? God does heal still, in miraculous ways – but that is not the point of the healing stories in the Bible – the healings themselves are not the point.
To understand what is the point, you need to understand that Jesus had one passion that he never let go of, one thing he never stopped talking about. Jesus’ mission was to proclaim the kingdom of God on earth – a kingdom that Luke says will release the captives (like the woman in the story), open the eyes of the blind, proclaim good news to the poor. Jesus has the prophetic imagination too – the ability to imagine a world that does not yet exist – a world where every person is healed and joyous, where every person is free from oppression, where every person has enough to call their life abundant, where no one is blind, lame, bent over or weighed down.
Every word Jesus says is to proclaim this mission, every action he takes is to help it come true, every healing he does is a real-life enactment of the kingdom of God that he can imagine. Remember, if you can’t imagine it, you can’t make it a reality. Think of Jesus’ life as one long enacted parable of the kingdom of God. Jesus’ life and Jesus’ healings and Jesus’ teachings allow us to experience some little bit of that kingdom of God that is to come.
And if we can imagine life without sorrow, life without injustice, life without weighed-down, bent-over pain, life without fear, life lived in self-giving service to God and to others, life where we can truly love our neighbors as ourselves and be loved by them in return; if we can imagine life lived in the kingdom of God, then we can begin to make it a reality, right here, one moment at a time.
And how do we begin to imagine the kingdom of God? God has given us a gift that allows us to live that reality one day a week, an enacted parable of the kingdom. It is the gift of Sabbath, our day to experience the freedom God gives. We see an argument erupt over Sabbath keeping in this gospel, because Sabbath to the Jews was not just a day of going to synagogue, a day of religious obligation. According to commentator Richard Swanson: “Sabbath is not just a day of rest. It is a day of promise….Sabbath is welcomed into the house as a queen would be welcomed. Sabbath provides a foretaste of the culmination of all things, a glimpse of God's dominion, a little slice of the messianic age dropped into the midst of regular time. Sabbath offers a remembrance of God's promise of peace and freedom for all of creation. It is a good thing, a gift from God.”
There are two strands of Jewish tradition explaining the origin of the Sabbath: honoring God’s work in creation and the fact that God rested on the 7th day, and also remembering the Exodus from Egypt and the fact the God liberated the people of Israel from bondage as slaves – Jesus refers to this when he says this woman has been released from bondage. As Christians, we have added a third meaning – we have moved the Sabbath to Sunday to remember Jesus’ resurrection – we remember and celebrate our own liberation from evil and death.
In other words, our Sabbath is an enacted parable of the kingdom of God – our way of experiencing God’s reign here and now so that we can enact it in turn. Sabbath is not something we do out of obligation to God. It is something God does for us: an enacted parable of community, love, joy, service, sharing a meal that is God’s gift of God’s self to us, where. there is enough for everyone and no one is excluded from the table.
We need that experience. what we experience here allows us to imagine what God’s kingdom would be like if it were lived every day in our world. And if we can imagine it, we can begin to make it a reality. We can listen for God’s call, God’s knowledge of us that is so intimate and so deep that God can imagine us becoming what we were created to be. We can remember that we, too, have been set free from enslavement to Satan, to fear and to death. We can look around us and ask who else in our community might still be held captive, waiting for release. We can begin to work to heal the bent-over people, the people weighed down by burdens of poverty, of grief, of loneliness, of hopelessness.
If we can experience it, we can imagine it, and if we can imagine it, we can work to make it come true – seven days a week, in Jesus' name.
