Sermon July 17, 2016 Rev. Dr. Martha Tucker

Transcription

1 1 Sermon July 17, 2016 Rev. Dr. Martha Tucker Blessed be God who animates our lives and our imaginations in such wondrous ways that we engage in creation that we might deepen our relationships with God and each other. AMEN Imagine not being able to hear God s holy word! Imagine not being able to experience God s gifts of creation Imagine not being able to taste and see. Imagine not being tethered to the One we love and who loves us into being and through life. I cannot imagine It seems a kind of death I cannot imagine that God will ever leave us. I cannot believe in any kind of life, in joy or sadness, in which God is not reaching for us to comfort and to celebrate. That kind of faith, in the God who fully participates in our lives, who knows us and whose very knowing is what gives us life, is also the kind of faith which finds its creation, imagination, and celebration in the belief in incarnation and sacrament. The life we live, the worship we make, the prayers we pray, and the service we offer are informed and animated by the God who gave us His only Son that we might know life more fully and the Holy Spirit that we might experience the breath of God as palpably as we do breathing in and breathing out or blood coursing through our veins. I believe in all that we affirm in the Nicene Creed and more I believe in Christ the sure foundation and the IMAGE of the invisible God which the letter to the Colossians makes known to us. The image of the invisible which

2 2 makes all that God is at least partially sayable and expressable and paintable and wordable I embrace Psalm 52 and try to be like the green olive tree trusting in God s everlasting mercy.. And yet it seems to me that Amos, in the most extreme rhetoric, is describing just such a desparate devastation as this severing from God. And we dismiss it or abhor it instead of understanding it in its context and in the great line of prophetic witness. A herder and dresser of sycamore trees has also had an image a vision or series of them and I wonder if we might spend a little time with his declaration of the end times what might they mean for us..perhaps it is a very pertinent warning especially for our times now. So also, Luke s Gospel in an all too familiar passage in which we often get stuck in the dualism of prescribed behavior: to pray at Jesus feet or to be consumed by conventions and task, might we also realize a greater message or warning that false practices done for wrong reasons, i.e. reasons solely related to the power of the system, here duties which fall to women, create a mindlessness and distraction which can separate us, for Martha physically, and for all of us spiritually, from the love of God. And so, the thread which weaves these readings and our lives together this day might be righteousness. Righteousness conceived of and uttered by prophetic imagination. Might not God be calling us to engage our prophetic imaginations in order to reorder righteousness. The blessed Righteousness of which I am speaking and with which God is concerned ultimately is not a moral code in and of itself it is a life lived in right relationship with your neighbor and our God. Righteousness is the recipe for forming and shaping wondrous and deep relationships. Oftentimes righteousness is mistaken for apparent conventional acts such as Martha s attention to the details of hospitality or in the world to which Amos prophesies it is lost altogether because people have lost their way with God and replaced holy guidance with selfish accumulaton. Personal abundance seems to have trumped God s abundant grace and as in today s world there is a so much greed and terror that love and care are hard to discern.

3 3 And so Amos having last week indicated that the plumb line, balance test, was failed, this week takes that failure to its ultimate extreme, the end times are upon us if we fail the test of loving each other and loving God. That is the ultimate failure the absence of any relationship with God. I suppose that what I would like to say to you relates to my opening imaginings, because if you, like me, either cannot or do not want to imagine such a world, then perhaps together we can turn or shift or reimagine together. Because I wonder often and especially today if imagination is not the very life-giving gift which God has given us in order to begin to understand and make meaning of chaotic utterances, threatening circumstances, behavioral instructions etc. Imagination itself a grace, is what allows us, and the prophets and angels and archangels not to mention Christ himself, to move away from and to reject, false gods, false utterances, false rules and judgements based on economic lenses. Imagination fueled by love is what allows us to hope and to respond toa world wracked by terror. Imagination is that which allows us to seek and find the very incarnational and sacramental God who is steadfast love itself and teaches us that same characteristic. It is the God of eternal hope. And hope does not disappoint. I like the definition of imagination which the Hebrew Scripture theologian Walter Brueggemann offers: Imagination is the capacity to picture image the world out beyond what we take as established given. Imagination is an ability to hold loosely what the world assumes and to walk into alternative countours of reality, which we have only in hint and trace. Imagination is the province of artists and prophets. They are always stirring things up, causing trouble, subverting the obvious and the ordinary. Prophets, including the prophet Amos, hold those ordinary lives they had been leading gardener and through the inspiration of God s holiness imagine what might be. You might be asking with me at this point what is the opposite of the subversive, life-giving, eccentric and hyperbolic prophetic imagination. I wonder if it might be absence of God darkness, death without life, pestilence and famine. For when we are starved and not fed by the stream of God s holy water of grace or when

4 4 we fail to trample the needy and bring ruin to the poor we have severed our relationship with God by failing to obey.for Amos well that really is the end of life, the rotten summer fruit, the failure to taste and see, to experience God s abundant grace. So while Amos imaging comes in the form of a truism of destruction which because of such epidemic disobedience and unbelief seems inevitable, there is redemption at the end of Amos Israel is spared. And Christ might have said to Martha the time is coming and now is when if you are distracted by worry and chores for the sake of convention you have closed your heart to right relationship and love. COME FOLLOW ME These readings today and my meditation on them caused me to remember a dear friend of mine who is blind but paints. Not just complete abstract images, though that too would be amazing, but images of fantastical life. How else but through imagination might someone who has never seen a mountain, a person, an ocean, a flower, paint but by imagining holiness and engaging other senses. So too might we engage our own prophetic imaginations to image better relationships, to image love, to image faithfulness, to utter what might be we are sustained in this engagement by our God through whom all things are possible. IF we worry too much, if we focus on the wrong things, if we do not help the poor and bind up the broken hearted.well we might not have to imagine. The loss of a perceptible connection to God will be our reality. But if we respond with faith, radical faith, then we keep our hope alive, we please God. My own imagination says it is time to respond with CRAZY LOVE for all creation, radical not just random acts of kindness. I invite you to do the same: to respond with your own imaginings, to dream And I share with you the words a friend sent me just last night: Do not be daunted by the enormity of the worlds grief; do justice NOW; love mercy NOW; walk humbly NOW; You are not obligated to complete the work; But neither are you free to abandon it!

5 Trust in the mercy of God who offers us prophetic imaginations that we might not be worried of the many things but might engage in recreating and renewing our righteousness. It will be a blessing. 5