Have You Not Heard? Have You Not Seen?
Matthew 5:33-48; Ephesians 5:8-14
April 3, 2011
There’s a beautiful image returned from the Hubble telescope about a decade ago. On the Hubble web site it’s described this way:
“’Starry Night,’ Vincent van Gogh's famous painting, is renowned for its bold whorls of light sweeping across a raging night sky. Although this image of the heavens came only from the artist's restless imagination, a new picture from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope bears remarkable similarities to the van Gogh work, complete with never-before-seen spirals of dust swirling across trillions of miles of interstellar space.”
Last Wednesday was the 158th anniversary of van Gogh’s birth. If anyone in human history understood the play of light and imagination, it was van Gogh, who said once, “I have a terrible need of, — dare I say the word? Religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.”
I understand the impulse. Sometimes, when I feel a terrible need of being bound back to the tradition and community of Christ (that’s my personal definition of religion as it pertains to Christianity) I go looking for the inspiration of compelling, mysterious beauty. If the night sky is unavailable, sometimes I come in here and look at the windows.
Take a moment to look around.
We may not have every possible color shining through, but Roy G. Biv is well represented.
As you take in these beautiful colors, the various shades of light shining through this glass, what color do you feel like this morning?
I spent quite a bit of time in here last week. Perhaps because it was so gray out, and so colorful in here. When I’m stuck for inspiration I walk the sanctuary and look at the windows, and I lift you up in prayer.
We’ve shared a great deal during this first month of the journey of Lent: letting go of what needs to be let go of, giving voice to our lamentations, building on that broken ground a stone foundation of hope.
This week I want to extend that.
In the book of Hebrews faith is defined as the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen (Heb. 11:1).
I reckon that is the perfect Lenten point of view from a North American perspective. After all, Lent falls, for us, in spring when the greens of summer are as yet unseen but the evidence of their coming is all around us. Even during such a gray week as last one, things unseen are working their way to full bloom.
Besides all that biological evidence all around us, baseball season began again! Heck, even though last Thursday was a cold, drizzly day, it was also opening day, and from that vantage point it was even possible to imagine the Nats as playoff contenders – if you have a very good imagination.
Imagination, Einstein famously said, is more important than knowledge. I certainly cannot speak to how that plays out in physics or in the science behind Hubble or in the mechanics of a baseball game or even in the production of great art, for in all of that there is a balance between knowledge and imagination, between technique and inspiration.
But I can tell you that imagination is far more important and powerful than knowledge when it comes to Christian faith. It’s not that knowledge is worthless to the life of faith – far from it. We do need to learn the history of our own tradition, and, indeed, of our own small congregation. We do need to know about the history of the texts that are central to our tradition. It does matter that we understand that the authors of the Genesis creation accounts were not engaged in writing a scientific account of the beginnings of the universe but were, rather, writing an account of the beginnings of a particular people and of that people’s multi-faceted relationship with their Creator.
The Genesis account really was something new, sprung from the imaginations of writers trying to give words to the beginnings of their people’s faith story. That people’s story of faith and doubt and struggle and exile and unbelief and restoration is marked throughout by imaginative renewal. God’s covenant with God’s people is renewed over and over and over again.
“Out of the depths I cry to you,” the psalmist says, and over and over and over again God responds.
From the depths of enslavement, God renews the covenant through promised liberation in the imaginative actions of Moses.
From the depths of exile, God renews the covenant through promised restoration in the imaginative witness of Isaiah.
From the depths of oppression under the crushing weight of Rome, God renews the covenant through promised reconciliation in the imaginative life of Jesus.
Liberation. Restoration. Reconciliation. These are the constant promises of God renewed in every generation through the creative acts of God and the imaginative responses of God’s faithful servants.
That renewal comes through a distinctive interpretive practice of the faithful, and through their willingness to pay the price that comes with making things new.
Jesus’ words in the section of Matthew that we read a few moments ago demonstrate the practice, and our entire journey of Lent toward Jerusalem and the cross reminds us of the cost.
Jesus gives distinctive voice to the interpretive practice in his refrain, “you have heard it said … but I tell you.”
Every time he uses that refrain he begins by quoting the sacred scriptures of his own people, and then proceeds to reinterpret them for his own time. For example, an eye for an eye was an early Judaic rule of justice that aimed to reduce tribal violence. An eye for an eye was a rule that tempered the violence by balancing injury for injury in an age when mass slaughter was often the response to relatively minor insult.
But Jesus pointed beyond that tempered violence to a reign of nonviolence, taking the sacred text and reimagining it.
Jesus had a new mind for his time, and, in the Sermon on the Mount, his essential teaching might be paraphrased that way: you’ve got to get a new mind for a new time.
The title of this brief meditation, “Have you not heard? Have you not seen?” is taken from God’s words in Isaiah, when God says, “Behold, I am about to do a new thing! Can you not see it?” You’ve got to get new eyes for this new time, as well.
I began with the amazing images from Hubble. Before anybody here was born, Herman Oberth got the idea that a telescope in space might “see” things that no telescope on earth could see. One can imagine him saying, “you have heard it said that the telescope on Mt. Wilson is the greatest ever, but I say to you if we could just put that sucker in space ….”
I don’t know if Dr. Oberth thought he might see images that would remind the world of van Gogh or not, but I don’t have any trouble at all imagining van Gogh saying something like, “you have heard it said that if you want a figure to appear holy just give him a halo, but I say to you ‘I want to paint women and men with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize and which we seek to give by the actual radiance and vibrations of our colouring.’”
The artist and the scientist – each had a mind for a new time, and not necessarily a time which their contemporaries could imagine.
Jesus had that same mind – an imagination that saw a future otherwise and began living into it in his own time regardless of the ridicule, regardless of the persecution, regardless of the risk.
He had to set aside that which needed to be set aside. He lamented that which needed to be lamented. He constructed a foundation of hope. And on it he imagined a future in which the poor, the mourners, the peacemakers, the pursuers of righteousness and justice would all be blessed.
Imagine that. If you can.
Imagination is a multi-color word to me, and when I think of great imagination I think of van Gogh, of Marc Chagall’s American Windows at the Art Institute in Chicago, of the artists in my own family. Individuals gifted to see things in ways that I don’t imagine until I look at their work, and get to step forward into their world. When I step back from that world of artists and colors, I try to hold onto that same imagination in broader social and theological terms, and imagine a future otherwise for the church and the society in which we live.
That’s why you have a piece of colored paper this morning – a small spark for your own faithful imagination.
What do you imagine today for the church and the social world of tomorrow? We know, all too well, that the world we live in is marked by so much that we need to let go of – the fears that we cling to, the false idols of security that we construct. It’s marked also by so much that we lament – the suffering that scars us, the violence that destroys.
But we know that the God of hope goes before us – a pillar of fire shining in the night, a light that the darkness shall not overcome. In that light we can see the bright colors of a new dawn breaking forth: a future otherwise.
What will it contain? What do you bring to it? What, this day, is your hope for the days to come?
I invite you, in the next few moments of quiet, to take the colored paper you received a while back, and on one end of it jot down one hope for the days to come. On the other end, jot down what you can do to bring that hope to fruition. Then tear the paper in two, and as you leave, to go forth into God’s beautiful, multi-colored creation, drop the end with the “hope” into the basket at the door, and we’ll put our colorful hopes on the stones of hope from last week, to be with us through the remainder of this Lenten journey.
Keep the other end – the one that says what you can do to bring hope to life. Carry it with you as a sign of your own promises, and as a reminder to live into those promises day by day.
April 3, 2011
There’s a beautiful image returned from the Hubble telescope about a decade ago. On the Hubble web site it’s described this way:
“’Starry Night,’ Vincent van Gogh's famous painting, is renowned for its bold whorls of light sweeping across a raging night sky. Although this image of the heavens came only from the artist's restless imagination, a new picture from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope bears remarkable similarities to the van Gogh work, complete with never-before-seen spirals of dust swirling across trillions of miles of interstellar space.”
Last Wednesday was the 158th anniversary of van Gogh’s birth. If anyone in human history understood the play of light and imagination, it was van Gogh, who said once, “I have a terrible need of, — dare I say the word? Religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.”
I understand the impulse. Sometimes, when I feel a terrible need of being bound back to the tradition and community of Christ (that’s my personal definition of religion as it pertains to Christianity) I go looking for the inspiration of compelling, mysterious beauty. If the night sky is unavailable, sometimes I come in here and look at the windows.
Take a moment to look around.
We may not have every possible color shining through, but Roy G. Biv is well represented.
As you take in these beautiful colors, the various shades of light shining through this glass, what color do you feel like this morning?
I spent quite a bit of time in here last week. Perhaps because it was so gray out, and so colorful in here. When I’m stuck for inspiration I walk the sanctuary and look at the windows, and I lift you up in prayer.
We’ve shared a great deal during this first month of the journey of Lent: letting go of what needs to be let go of, giving voice to our lamentations, building on that broken ground a stone foundation of hope.
This week I want to extend that.
In the book of Hebrews faith is defined as the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen (Heb. 11:1).
I reckon that is the perfect Lenten point of view from a North American perspective. After all, Lent falls, for us, in spring when the greens of summer are as yet unseen but the evidence of their coming is all around us. Even during such a gray week as last one, things unseen are working their way to full bloom.
Besides all that biological evidence all around us, baseball season began again! Heck, even though last Thursday was a cold, drizzly day, it was also opening day, and from that vantage point it was even possible to imagine the Nats as playoff contenders – if you have a very good imagination.
Imagination, Einstein famously said, is more important than knowledge. I certainly cannot speak to how that plays out in physics or in the science behind Hubble or in the mechanics of a baseball game or even in the production of great art, for in all of that there is a balance between knowledge and imagination, between technique and inspiration.
But I can tell you that imagination is far more important and powerful than knowledge when it comes to Christian faith. It’s not that knowledge is worthless to the life of faith – far from it. We do need to learn the history of our own tradition, and, indeed, of our own small congregation. We do need to know about the history of the texts that are central to our tradition. It does matter that we understand that the authors of the Genesis creation accounts were not engaged in writing a scientific account of the beginnings of the universe but were, rather, writing an account of the beginnings of a particular people and of that people’s multi-faceted relationship with their Creator.
The Genesis account really was something new, sprung from the imaginations of writers trying to give words to the beginnings of their people’s faith story. That people’s story of faith and doubt and struggle and exile and unbelief and restoration is marked throughout by imaginative renewal. God’s covenant with God’s people is renewed over and over and over again.
“Out of the depths I cry to you,” the psalmist says, and over and over and over again God responds.
From the depths of enslavement, God renews the covenant through promised liberation in the imaginative actions of Moses.
From the depths of exile, God renews the covenant through promised restoration in the imaginative witness of Isaiah.
From the depths of oppression under the crushing weight of Rome, God renews the covenant through promised reconciliation in the imaginative life of Jesus.
Liberation. Restoration. Reconciliation. These are the constant promises of God renewed in every generation through the creative acts of God and the imaginative responses of God’s faithful servants.
That renewal comes through a distinctive interpretive practice of the faithful, and through their willingness to pay the price that comes with making things new.
Jesus’ words in the section of Matthew that we read a few moments ago demonstrate the practice, and our entire journey of Lent toward Jerusalem and the cross reminds us of the cost.
Jesus gives distinctive voice to the interpretive practice in his refrain, “you have heard it said … but I tell you.”
Every time he uses that refrain he begins by quoting the sacred scriptures of his own people, and then proceeds to reinterpret them for his own time. For example, an eye for an eye was an early Judaic rule of justice that aimed to reduce tribal violence. An eye for an eye was a rule that tempered the violence by balancing injury for injury in an age when mass slaughter was often the response to relatively minor insult.
But Jesus pointed beyond that tempered violence to a reign of nonviolence, taking the sacred text and reimagining it.
Jesus had a new mind for his time, and, in the Sermon on the Mount, his essential teaching might be paraphrased that way: you’ve got to get a new mind for a new time.
The title of this brief meditation, “Have you not heard? Have you not seen?” is taken from God’s words in Isaiah, when God says, “Behold, I am about to do a new thing! Can you not see it?” You’ve got to get new eyes for this new time, as well.
I began with the amazing images from Hubble. Before anybody here was born, Herman Oberth got the idea that a telescope in space might “see” things that no telescope on earth could see. One can imagine him saying, “you have heard it said that the telescope on Mt. Wilson is the greatest ever, but I say to you if we could just put that sucker in space ….”
I don’t know if Dr. Oberth thought he might see images that would remind the world of van Gogh or not, but I don’t have any trouble at all imagining van Gogh saying something like, “you have heard it said that if you want a figure to appear holy just give him a halo, but I say to you ‘I want to paint women and men with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize and which we seek to give by the actual radiance and vibrations of our colouring.’”
The artist and the scientist – each had a mind for a new time, and not necessarily a time which their contemporaries could imagine.
Jesus had that same mind – an imagination that saw a future otherwise and began living into it in his own time regardless of the ridicule, regardless of the persecution, regardless of the risk.
He had to set aside that which needed to be set aside. He lamented that which needed to be lamented. He constructed a foundation of hope. And on it he imagined a future in which the poor, the mourners, the peacemakers, the pursuers of righteousness and justice would all be blessed.
Imagine that. If you can.
Imagination is a multi-color word to me, and when I think of great imagination I think of van Gogh, of Marc Chagall’s American Windows at the Art Institute in Chicago, of the artists in my own family. Individuals gifted to see things in ways that I don’t imagine until I look at their work, and get to step forward into their world. When I step back from that world of artists and colors, I try to hold onto that same imagination in broader social and theological terms, and imagine a future otherwise for the church and the society in which we live.
That’s why you have a piece of colored paper this morning – a small spark for your own faithful imagination.
What do you imagine today for the church and the social world of tomorrow? We know, all too well, that the world we live in is marked by so much that we need to let go of – the fears that we cling to, the false idols of security that we construct. It’s marked also by so much that we lament – the suffering that scars us, the violence that destroys.
But we know that the God of hope goes before us – a pillar of fire shining in the night, a light that the darkness shall not overcome. In that light we can see the bright colors of a new dawn breaking forth: a future otherwise.
What will it contain? What do you bring to it? What, this day, is your hope for the days to come?
I invite you, in the next few moments of quiet, to take the colored paper you received a while back, and on one end of it jot down one hope for the days to come. On the other end, jot down what you can do to bring that hope to fruition. Then tear the paper in two, and as you leave, to go forth into God’s beautiful, multi-colored creation, drop the end with the “hope” into the basket at the door, and we’ll put our colorful hopes on the stones of hope from last week, to be with us through the remainder of this Lenten journey.
Keep the other end – the one that says what you can do to bring hope to life. Carry it with you as a sign of your own promises, and as a reminder to live into those promises day by day.
posted by David Ensign at
7:11 AM
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