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Though It Seems Impossible Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis December 23, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Zechariah 8:1-8 Luke 2:1-7
In an interview of the man who has been our guide this year as we have read and studied and preached our way through the Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann was asked to reflect on the role of imagination in biblical faith. “I have come to the rather simplistic notion,” he confesses, “that imagination is the capacity to image a world beyond what is obviously given. That’s the work of poets and novelists and artists—and that’s what biblical writers mostly do. I think,” he goes on to say “that is why people show up at church. They want to know whether there is any other world available than the one that we can see, which we can hardly bear.” The world we can see, the world that apparently is available to us is a world, to borrow again the words of Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, that is “beautiful, flawed, dangerous, full of being.” It is the world of “smallpox and Somalia, polio vaccine and wheat and Windsor roses.” It is a world, on the one hand, that is able to deliver us from disease. On the other hand, it is a world able only to diagnose what cannot be cured. It is a world in which the steady pressure of hope on some days begets a truce either around the kitchen table or across the globe; and it is the same world that, on most days, cannot seem to keep from taking up arms. It is a world created for soul-making and yet a world where souls are best made on the crucible of struggle and sorrow. It is a world of wonder to the child born of privilege even as it is a world of drought and danger and violence for the child born into poverty. It is a world where we may grow old if it happens that our years are three score and ten; but if fourscore or more, the same world is often toil and trouble because we are not soon enough cut off to fly away home. This is the world we can see but can hardly bear. Therefore we show up at church, Sunday after Sunday, in case there might be word of any other world available than the one we can see. As it turns out on this Sunday and at the end of our year dwelling in the world of the Old Testament, word of another world is spoken to us by the late sixth century prophet Zechariah. Now the visible world available to Zechariah, the world he could see and hardly bear, was a world in ruins. Returned with the exiles from Babylon, he beheld Jerusalem leveled by the enemy and the temple—God’s dwelling place on earth—destroyed. In the world that the prophet could see, evidence of God’s presence was nowhere to be found. But it is precisely there, at the ground-zero of human hopelessness, that we encounter “a man intoxicated with the vision of the coming kingdom” says Old Testament scholar Elizabeth Achtemeir, intoxicated with the vision of another world. Angelic messengers had descended from on high to mediate to Zechariah the world purposed by the God who finally had roused himself from his holy dwelling following the exile and now was about to do a new thing. Zechariah, in turn, spoke God’s word and promised world into the ruined world seen by sixth century Judeans. It was an odd world, to be sure, so odd that were it not for an air in Handel’s Messiah and a citation in Matthew’s gospel, both taken from the same two verses [“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you, triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt the foal of a donkey”] Zechariah’s word would be missed and our imagination for a world other than the given world diminished. Before us specifically this morning is an oracle spoken by Zechariah on December 7th in the year 518 B.C.—that is, in the fourth year of King Darius on the fourth day of the ninth month which is Chislev. On that day Zechariah proclaims God’s return to Zion and God’s dwelling in Jerusalem. But Zechariah proclaims more, for what follows from God’s dwelling on earth, says Zechariah, is a world astonishingly other than the world Judah could see and hardly bear. The world, says Zechariah, will be, of all things, a park-- a public park in the city “where the elderly can sit together and talk and bask in the sun,” paraphrases Achtemeir, “and little children can play in contentment and safety with nothing to threaten them—no [one] lurking in the shadows to lure one of them away with candy; no drug dealer waiting to peddle his poison to innocents; no child bruised or warped by abusive parents or stunted by poor nutrition or inadequate education; not even a bully among the group to terrorize the younger and weaker.” Listening to the promises of the politicians, one would think such a world to be within our human grasp. But lest we miss the impossible possibility of Zechariah’s counter world this morning, try to imagine not the world in which we live but the given world that lies just beyond our privileged comprehension down the Avenue. Imagine raising children in a row house bordering on a vacant lot littered with crack vials, spent bullet casings, windblown trash and broken glass on the corner of 8th and Butler in Philadelphia. Imagine growing old on a street corner in Mogadishu or Mosul, in Islamabad or Kabul, in the Cite Soleil of Port-au-Prince or the rubble of the Recreation Center in Pearlington after Katrina. Then imagine showing up in church wanting to know if there is any other world available other than the one you can see and hardly bear. “Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of their great age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets,” says Zechariah. On 8th and Butler—are you kidding me? God will do what? Impossible! Absurd! Dangerous! “Even though it seems impossible to the remnant of this people in these days,” says the Lord of hosts to our disbelief, “should it also seem impossible to me?” “In those days,” writes Luke five hundred years after Zechariah as if taking God up on God’s promise, “a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration [when] Quirinius was governor of Syria.” Luke locates the birth of Jesus and the song of the angels, as did Zechariah, in the reality of human history. This is not some other world: it is precisely the world we are given, and that is Luke’s point. There is no other available world but this world of smallpox and Somalia, polio vaccine and wheat and Windsor roses. Here to a pregnant virgin and an apparent cuckold huddled in a dark cave on the outskirts of Bethlehem, here in a place not unlike the vacant lot on the corner of 8th and Butler in Philadelphia, the Savior of this world is born. That is to say, Christ is born into this world of crack cocaine and cancer that respects neither class nor kindness; he is born into this world of real flesh that sheds both blood and tears, into this world of love that incites hatred, into this world of pain and gladness, into this world of injustice and outrage, into this world of fear and sadness: he is born into this world where we really live and we really die and there is no other world. Yet because Christ is born into this world, there is a world available here and now to you and to me other than the world that is given, other than the world we can see. Oh to those who do see what normal eyes see and hear what normal ears hear, the world appears still to be the world we can hardly bear. Smallpox and Somalia daily trump polio vaccine and wheat and Windsor roses; the parks are safe neither for children nor old men and women; war persists, hatred increases, disease stalks the finest of God’s children. In sum, death would seem to have dominion. But if the real death and the unbearable life is the life we lead and the death we must endure without God in the world, then that world has come decisively to an end in a manger. In the life, death and resurrection of this child who is born Immanuel, the world we have been promised—where God dwells with us--is available for the asking and the knocking. Still to the eye we will live in the ruins, but to the heart and mind we need never be alone or afraid. God has redeemed this world and its woes from insignificance as God in Christ has gone before us and now accompanies us in our rising and our lying down, in our weeping and in our rejoicing, in our soul-making struggle and in our character-building sorrow, in our living and our dying. “Can it really be true,” Karl Barth asked: “God in our world, God in our world? The facts cry out against it” and yet God comes “where we ourselves are, not where we should perhaps like to be…; He is where we really are, whether king or beggar, in our torn condition in which we who face death appear—in the ‘flesh.’” My dear friends who have shown up at church wanting to know whether there is any other world available than the one that you can see, which you can hardly bear, imagine the silent night and the stars and the angel’s first words: “Fear not! For I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people. For to you is born this day a Savior!” Then with the shepherds make haste to Bethlehem and the babe who is born into the world we can see which we can hardly bear—and need no longer bear—without him.
On my neck and my shoulders I feel Your warm breath. I pronounce the words of Your book, which are human, Just as your love and hate are human. You yourself created us in your image and semblance. I want to forget the subtle palaces created by theologians. You do not deal in metaphysics. Save me from the images of pain I have gathered wandering on the earth, Lead me where only Your light abides. |