Sunday
July 9
Imagination and Discipleship
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to listen to the full service
Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67
Click here to listen to the meditations only
Upon this summer Sunday, let us meditate together on imagination, and its influence in discipleship. Our gospel turns to the playful imagination of children in the marketplace. St. Paul wrote in a similar way to his Corinthian congregation:
One
19 For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.
20 Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?
21 For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.
22 For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom:
23 But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness;
24 But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.
25 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
26 For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called:
27 But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;
Discipleship requires more than wisdom alone. The walk of faith evokes and involves imagination, the free play of insight, the province of children and saints.
Two
What a gift are the parables of Jesus! He taught them in parables, says the Scripture, and without a parable he taught not one thing. Here, in a story form, is the same sentiment just remembered from Paul, God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.
Jesus stands in the marketplace. He sees two warring groups of children. All community is endless contention and intractable difference. One group wants to play a game called ‘weddings’: we have our pipes, we are ready to dance, come and join us, and let us play the game of weddings. Another group wants to play a game called ‘funerals’: we have our tears, our wailing, our gathered mourning clothes and forms, come and join us and let us play the game of funerals. One game for the enjoyment of life preferred by Jesus himself, one game for the dour, self-discipline for life, preferred by John the Baptist. Come and join!
Yet neither group will give way. Groups, as Reinhold Niebuhr taught us in Moral Man and Immoral Society, have a hard time changing direction, or giving way, or forgiving, or summoning an imagination ready for discipleship. That requires a childlike heart. It requires an imagination soaked discipleship. It requires the person whom you are meant to become.
Did you ever know and love somebody who was always a bit on edge? I mean a beautiful person with a heart of gold, who was run raw by the gone-wrongness of life? This can be a rough world for a sensitive soul. Someone who has an unquenchable passion for getting things right and for knowing when things are wrong. A little of that can go a long way. If your very hunger is for what establishes the soul, you can sometimes go hungry.
Imagine with her eyes: Every child in the community was attending a safe, well-lit, quiet school, where virtually all could read at the sixth grade level by the time they finished the sixth grade level. Every sick person in the community had ample medical care, most of it preventive, and all of it shot through with a heavenly infusion of time, talent and money. Every person of color in the community felt confident entering the public spaces—theaters, churches, stadiums, stores—in every corner of the community. Every man was free to be a man. And every woman was free to be a woman. Every person is seen and heard as a real human being.
Three
Here at University, we are blessed with intelligence, youth, freedom, and reason.
We want to be careful, and caring, so we pause here. We educators sometimes tend to leave civil society to the rest of society. We have much freedom, but how we choose to use it, in relation to the rest of community and society, is another matter. We after all have that next paper to write, 50 pages of small print not including footnotes, titled with some version of the title, ‘Obscurity Squared’. To do that, one needs a capacity to spend 12 hours a day alone in a library or in front of a computer screen. To do that, to write that series of scholarly papers become books become resume become tenure become professor, can risk leaving aside, if we are not careful, or leaving to others, if we are not careful, the imaginative stewardship of forms of civil society. Girl Scout cookies. Umpire work for the Little League. Pinewood derby leadership. A seat on the PTA. Sunday worship. Neighborhood watch. Refugee resettlement work. These we have to leave in the hands of others, or at least we think we do, those basic cultural building blocks that rest on a willingness to sit quietly in dull meetings, hoping against hope for the blessed refrain, ‘I guess we’re done for tonight’. In civil society we have the chance to influence others, and to be influenced among others, in lasting, personal ways. You want to speak to others, to convince others, to educate—good. But. You cannot speak to others until or unless you speak for others. To be speak to requires first to speak for. Others will not hear or heed you, and should not, in your speech to them, if they do not, with utter confidence, feel, feel, that you speak for them as well. To speak for, you have to be with. At breakfast. Playing golf. In book club. In church. At the YMCA. Then, only then, will you enough funds in the relational bank when you need to withdraw some to say something that may then be audible. If you want people in Wisconsin to hear you, candidate, you have to go and be with people in Wisconsin. If you want people to hear you, preacher, you have to go and be with people, in visitation, on their turf. If you want to speak to others, educators, you will have to find a way to speak for others, not just to others. This is the whole genius of American civil society, from the time of De Tocqueville. Whether we will find, in the humiliations of an era whose leadership is shredding inherited forms of civil society on an hourly basis, the humility to go out and suffer with and for others, over the better part of the next decade, in order then to speak, is an unanswered question. To get to an answer we may just need some imagination in our discipleship.
Four
Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds. Our Gospel lures us and lures our imagination forward, for discipleship. Have we yet learned the lesson that what one means—by an act, a word, a statement, a vote, say—is not all that such an act means? We have experienced this lesson this year. The lesson, that is, that what you in your heart meant by an act, a word, a statement—a vote, is not in fact the limit of what that act, word, statement or vote meant: in fact it is a small part, the greater part of the meaning being found in the effect, the impact, the historical influence of the deed. Wisdom is vindicated, known, in her deeds. The meaning of a text is found in the future it opens, the future it imagines, the future it creates. (Ray Hart). So too, the meaning of an act, a word, a statement, a vote, say, is found in the future, bright or dark, which it creates. What you meant is not what it means. For that, you have to listen to those harmed, or helped, by it. Meaning is social, not individual, hence our use of words, our developed language, our investment in culture, our life in community. You may have meant it one way, but its meaning is found along another. Such hard, tragic lessons, to have to learn and re-learn.
Jesus is our beacon not our boundary. Imagination is a dimension of discipleship that is waxing not waning, needed not superfluous, crucial not peripheral. Our passages today, Genesis, Psalms, and Romans, draw our imaginations to forms of authority, and our engagement with them. In Genesis, the authority in ancestry. In Psalms, the authority in government. In Romans, the authority in conscience. In all these, the writers struggle to imagine a way forward, following the light of the beacon across the challenge of the boundary.
Five
Pause and meditate a little this summer on your own enjoyment of play. Our esteemed colleague and beloved mentor, now of blessed memory, Peter Berger did so, with imagination for discipleship, years ago in his little book, A Rumor of Angels. 1. I see grown men enthralled on a green field following a wee little white ball, which seems to have a mind of its own, for three or four hours in the hot sun. 2. I see grown women shopping together without any particular need, but immersed, self-forgetful, in the process of purchasing, God knows what. 3.I see emerging adults fixed and fixated, days on end, in the World of Warcraft. 4.Can you remember playing bridge in college all night long, to the detriment of your zoology grade? Peter Berger: A. In playing, one steps out of one time into another…When adults play with genuine joy, they momentarily regain the deathlessness of childhood. The experience of joyful play is not something that must be sought on some mystical margin of existence. It can readily be found in the reality of ordinary life…The religious justification of the experience can be achieved only in an act of faith…B. This faith is inductive—it does not rest on a mysterious revelation, but rather on what we experience in our common, ordinary lives…Religion is the final vindication of childhood and of joy, and of all gestures that replicate these. One said: “I played basketball today, on the intramural team—it was awesome.” Talk about it a bit, parents and children.
Six
Imagination in discipleship forms a wisdom vindicated, justified by her deeds. (Luke has changed the ending to ‘justified by all her children’—maybe an even closer memory to the marrow of imagination.)
Hear again the imaginative wisdom of Boston University’s own late personalist philosopher, Erazim Kohak, The Embers and The Stars, with ten of whose epigrams we conclude, this summer morning, to kindle the imagination:
‘We shall dig again the wells of our Fathers.’
‘Humans grow angry so easily, so heedlessly venting their anger at those nearest and most vulnerable, needlessly, wantonly injuring what is most precious and most fragile’.
‘Humans are not only humans, moral subjects and vital organisms. They are also Persons, capable of fusing eternity and time in the precious, anguished reality of a love that would be eternal amid the concreteness of time. A person is a being through whom eternity enters time.’
‘There is self-discovery in remembrance.’
‘We have a sense of history. But we have lost a sense of eternity.’
‘The authentic relation between beings is the personal encounter of mutual’ respect. 208
‘Most of the time we possess and covet far more than we can care for and cherish.’ 212
‘Generosity personalizes as greed depersonalizes.’
‘We need to rediscover ourselves as persons, not as need gratifying organisms.’ 215
‘The chief task of philosophy is to write footnotes to the text of experience’ 219
But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn’…Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.
– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.
Leave a Reply