Memorial Stories

Isaiah 6:1-8; John 3:1-17

May 27, 2018

Our imaginations house not only dreams of the future, but also memories of the past. The Sunday of the Memorial Day weekend seems like a good time to explore that notion, and we’ve begun with sharing some stories of people whose memories are sacred to us.

Mac Warford, one of my favorite seminary professors, was fond of saying that “the church is a house of memory.” What might it mean to speak of the church as a house of imagination?

To speak of the church as a house of memory means at least a couple of things: the church – the community of faith – houses the memory of a sacred story and it also houses the memory of itself – of the members and histories that make up the community. Of course, it is all too easy to slip from being a house of sacred memory to becoming a museum dedicated to preserving a past. Moreover, when we succumb to the all-too-human tendency to look back to a past that never really was – a look back through rose-colored glasses – then we begin to deal in the nostalgia business.

That has never been the proper business of the church. We may not be crystal clear at all times about what business we are in – the Jesus business, the justice business, the love business, the salvation business – but nostalgia is just not our business.

That lack of clarity makes discerning mission difficult, but, absent that clarity, few of us are willing to take the step Isaiah takes. Of course, nostalgia doesn’t lead to such steps either. That is to say, rosy memories of a past that was never really present will not lead us to answer the call of a God who is interested in a transformed future.

What, then, should we do?

I think my old prof had it almost right, but his aphorism was missing something crucial. I have come to see us – the church – as a house of both memory and imagination.

We do house, remember, and hold fast to a sacred story: the story of God’s abiding love for humanity. We also house, remember, and hold fast to the sacred stories of the people who have sojourned with this community over the past hundred years. All of that is good, and right, and appropriate.

But we hold on to those stories only to the extent that they both hold on to us and animate our lives by sparking our imaginations.

The old, old story that we hold and that holds us is the mystery that Nicodemus sought to understand when he went to Jesus by night. He knows that Jesus is a teacher come from God. He knows that through his teaching, Jesus is preserving and passing along the sacred story that binds God’s people together. He knows all this, yet he still cannot see something crucial: Jesus is more than a teacher of a sacred story long remembered; Jesus is the imagination of God become flesh in the world.

And what does God imagine? A world transformed by love.

For God so loved the world – the kosmos, in the Greek, which is to say the whole of the created order. For God so loved the world that God imagines a world made whole, healed, living as one community, which is to say “a world saved” by love.

Nicodemus can’t quite see it, though he clearly wants to. In fact, he comes back in the story much later, bringing expensive oils and perfumes to anoint Jesus’ body and prepare it for burial after the crucifixion. He is clearly looking for something, but he can’t quite see it.

This week I had this image of Nicodemus as a member of the British royal family trying to make sense of an African-American preacher teaching them about the power of love to heal a sin-sick world. Nicodemus’ position as a leader of the religious establishment blinds him to the reality standing right in front of him: the imagination of God made flesh in Jesus. Nicodemus wants to see it, but his whole life has transpired against him.

The royals, it seemed, wanted to hear Bishop Curry’s message about love and a world transformed by love such that all of us are one family, but the entirety of their lives – royal blood, privilege, unimaginable affluence – blinded them to that transgressive possibility presented right before their eyes.

Now, I’m not now nor will I ever be part of any royal family, and I am leader of a decidedly marginal religious community, but I know that I am more like Nicodemus than I care to confess when it comes to having eyes to see the imagination of God at work in the world in my midst.

Nevertheless, despite my own myopia – or is it presbyopia – despite my blindness by whatever name, I am convinced that the sacred story of which we are current stewards contains the power to transform the world if we would but let go of nostalgia and allow our souls to be set afire by the imagination of God. The world longs for salvation, let’s go out and share a saving memory and a transformative dream with a world in dire need of transformation. Amen.