SERMON NOTES FOR 12.12.10
Imagine that you are holding a handful of M&Ms in your hand. Look at them, sort through them with your fingers. If you want to, do what I like to do and sort them by color – brown over here, orange over here, blue, green, etc. Note the little M in middle of each one. Now reach out and pick up one of your favorite color – mine would be blue. Put it in your mouth, taste it, feel how it crunches, feel the soft chocolate in the middle, notice how it tastes. Now if you get bored with the sermon, feel free to eat the rest of them too. Otherwise you can put them in your pocket and save them for later.
Or, if you’re on a diet, you might want to go ahead and eat them right now. That’s right – eating imaginary M&Ms apparently helps you lost weight. At least that was the finding of a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon: those who imagined eating M&Ms ate fewer of them when offered real M&Ms later. Apparently if you imagine eating them, you feel full, as if you had eaten them. Imagining something makes your brain believe it is real. Which a lot of people believe to be true in a lot of contexts – if you want something to happen, visualize it happening. It’s a kind of prayer. Imagining something, in a way, makes it reality.
In fact, this is the job of a prophet – not to foretell the future. The prophet in the Bible is the person who imagines a reality that no one else can see. The prophet is the person who can see God’s will coming to life before it happens. The prophet looks at ordinary prosaic life and sees where God is working – sees an underlying reality that others don’t see, by the power of imagination. And by imagining this reality, the activity of God that underlies everything that exists, and describing it to others who come to believe in it, the prophet helps make it come true, as an outer, visible reality and not just an imagined one. Without a vision, the people perish, said one prophet in the Bible. The prophet is the one who opens the eyes of the people to God’s vision.
In our scriptures today, we hear of three prophets: Isaiah, Mary, and John the Baptist. Isaiah speaks to a people in exile, and describes a vision of how God is working with them, even in exile, and a vision of what they will become. Mary sings the song we hear in place of our psalm today – the Magnificat, named for the Latin word that begins it, meaning “My soul magnifies the Lord.” Mary has stood in the presence of an angel, she has heard that nothing will be impossible with God, she has discovered that she is pregnant, and she has come to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who is also miraculously pregnant. Seeing Elizabeth, Mary breaks into song, not a characteristic song for an uneducated peasant girl: Mary turns into a prophet who can see God’s reality when no one else can see it. She has been told that she will bear a son who is the Son of God. And she understands not only this fact, but what it means – she describes a vision of God’s hope for the world. The famous preacher, Barbara Brown Taylor, says: Mary is not just singing the song, the song is singing her. She sings of the greatness of the Lord, she sings of God who brings down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly, she says the hungry will be filled and the rich sent away empty.
We who are skeptical may believe that this is religious romanticism. But don’t underestimate the power of the religious imagination. The government of Guatemala in the 1980s didn’t – they forbade anyone to sing Mary’s song – afraid that people would take it to heart and begin believing in the power of God to bring down the powerful. Afraid that imagining God’s truth would make it start to happen, they knew and fled in fear from the great truth that the prophetic imagination can truly help God describe and therefore create a new reality.
But what if the converse is true? If you can’t imagine it, you can’t make it reality? What happens if you can’t imagine a reality that runs under the surface of all things? What happens if you believe that the mundane everyday world is all that exists or can exist? Maybe you can’t see a deeper reality even if it’s there.
Some reporters at the Washington Post decided to test this question in 2007. They set up a hidden camera in L’Enfant Plaza subway station, where thousands of people pass through every day. As the camera rolled, a young man in jeans, Washington Nationals baseball cap and T-shirt walked into the station, set down a violin case, took out a violin, put a few dollars and coins in the case to seed the pot, and began to play. For the next 43 minutes, as 1,097 people passed by, he played 6 classical pieces – some unknown but exceedingly difficult, and one, perhaps the best-known and most beloved religious song of all time, Shubert’s Ave Maria.
Each of those 1,097 people passing through the subway station had a choice: rush on by, stop to listen, put a little money in the case? As the Post said, the violin sang, it sobbed, it shivered. What the commuters didn’t know was that the young man was Joshua Bell, one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing his multi-million dollar Stradivarius; 3 days before he had sold out Boston’s Symphony Hall, where pretty good seats went for $100.
Here’s a short clip of what happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnOPu0_YWhw
In that 43 minutes, 7 people stopped to listen for a while; a few put in money; only one person actually recognized him. Many people interviewed later didn’t even remember there was a musician in the subway station. Many of those had iPods in their ears, their music already pre-programmed, but some didn’t have their iPod as an excuse – they just didn’t notice. Interestingly, every single child who walked by stopped, pulled their parent toward the violinist, wanted to listen, and every single parent hurried their child away.
The Post’s question was this: “His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?” The answer, apparently, was no. We expect to hear beauty in a symphony hall. In a subway station, we can’t imagine it – so we just don’t hear it.
John the Baptist had this problem in the gospel today – what he imagined the Messiah to be was what we heard in last week’s gospel – wrath, fire, separating wheat from chaff, awe-inspiring displays of God’s power. Yet that isn’t what Jesus is doing, so he has trouble imagining this is the Messiah, and he rather plaintively sends a message to Jesus – are you the one to come, or is there another? Jesus sends a message back to his cousin inviting him to imagine a different reality, a reality that the prophets Isaiah and Mary had described. The blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, poor have good news brought to them.
Imagine, Jesus says, that this is how God works – not by smiting the wicked, but by bringing new life and healing to the poor and suffering, as Mary sang in her beautiful song. Imagine that God’s kingdom could become a reality on earth in a whole new way than John had imagined – a way that comes quietly, like a baby in a manger, to the least and the lowest, without displays of power, but with humility, with healing, with love that invites the world to join in.
We don’t know whether John was convinced – Matthew doesn’t tell us – but we know that this was exactly how Jesus continued his ministry, in a way that only those with God’s imagination could understand was God’s kingdom. The powerful understood it, and had him put to death, but Jesus’ kind of ministry was so unimaginable to most people as a picture of God’s kingdom that most of them missed it altogether.
Could this be true of us too? Could God be in action all around us and we can’t see it because we can’t imagine it? Could the Holy Spirit be weaving beautiful music all around us, sobbing, singing, sighing, the most beautiful music we’ve ever heard, the music of the Kingdom – and we can’t hear it because we can’t imagine it? Maybe we can only imagine Jesus at work in church, and can’t see or hear what he’s doing the other 167 hours of our lives. and because we can’t see or hear it, we can’t live in the reality of God’s kingdom, we can’t be like Mary the prophet.
Maybe we’re the blind and the deaf who need to be healed, we’re the lame who need to be taught how to walk, we’re the dead who need to learn to live. We’re the poor who need to hear good news, or we’re the rich who need to understand that feeding the hungry and helping others is part of our mission.
So let’s ask God to open our eyes and ears. Let’s ask Jesus to show us: where is God working in our lives? What is God calling us to do with the 167 hours a week that we’re not in church? Each one of us has a call from God – a call to teach a child to read or understand the mysteries of science, a call to provide accountability for an organization’s money, a call to relate to the person in the next cubicle or the house next door in a way that enriches their lives and helps them experience God’s love, a call to raise children, a call to love a spouse, a call to help the poor and the needy, a call to make life beautiful for others.
If we could only recognize God’s work in the world all around us and understand that everything we do is holy, if we could open our eyes and ears and see Christ here and now, all of life might be infused with the sweetness of his presence. And our very lives might sing Mary’s Song.
Like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvlTuBnpKpc&feature=related
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