November 29, 2009 | 8:00 a.m.

Prophetic Imagination

Sarah A. Johnson
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 25:1–10
Jeremiah 33:14–16

We are a privileged people, praying at the edge of life as an act of candor. We hope for new life that comes as gift. We dream of possibility and newness—new places, new selves, new community. In our better moments, we aim to follow God’s lead toward justice, resurrection, and transformation. We strive to increase those moments as we live, love, share the good news, and become bearers of hope.

Walter Brueggemann
Prayers for a Privileged People

It is hard to believe that we have once again arrived at the beginning of the Christmas season. Macy’s may have convinced you that Christmas actually started after Labor Day, but it is this Sunday, the first Sunday in Advent, that begins the time of the year when the church enters the days and weeks leading up to the celebration of Christ’s birth. As a church that sits on Michigan Avenue, right at the center of it all, we know that it is a season that often seems to juggle the bad with the good.

The crowds increase on Michigan Avenue, and we all seem to move at a more frantic and harried pace. I made the mistake last year of entering the Crate and Barrel store on Michigan Avenue just a few days into the Advent season, only to be bombarded by a bad “Frosty the Snowman” remix and running crowds of shoppers fighting over the last formal place setting and silver candlestick holders. I needed weeks to recover. This year, many stores are even pushing the 5:00 a.m. sale, so that we can hassle one another over an on-sale place setting, coffee maker, or toaster oven, all while loaded up on caffeine and still in our pajamas. Nothing says “Merry Christmas!” like a fight on aisle four.

Christmas is also a time of year when the cold sets in and the wind that whips past our blocks on Delaware and Chestnut will become a constant companion for friends who suffer life without shelter or food. Americans will go into debt or go without because Christmas gifts are not an affordable possibility. And we all know that for many of us Christmas can also be a time of loneliness or isolation.

It is hard to juggle all of this with the excitement and wonder of the Christmas season. For along with what is hard about this time of year, there is something magical about Christmas: sparkling lights, decorated trees, elves and reindeer, children wishing for snow (at least in the south anyway), and writing letters to Santa Claus. Through store decorations and childhood imaginations, it is a time of year when we attempt to create and hope in another world.

Many of you may remember the story of a little girl named Virginia O’Hanlon, who in 1897 wrote a letter to the New York Sun, a prominent New York City newspaper at the time, asking about the existence of Santa Claus. After being told by some friends that there was no Santa, Virginia had asked her father about their claims and, clearly passing the buck, he suggested that she ought to write and ask the Sun. “Because,” he said, “if you see it in the Sun, it is so.”

Answering Virginia’s letter, editorial writer Francis Pharcellus Church responded, “Your friends are wrong, Virginia. They have become victims of skepticism in a skeptical age.” Several lines later he continued with those now-famous words: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”

It is an editorial written more than a century ago about the existence of a man with a white beard and a red suit who slides down chimneys to deliver packages, and yet embedded in the affirmation of Francis Church to a little girl in New York City is a deeply theological claim. Embedded deep in the symbols of American Christmas, you and I long to recover a world that fights against disillusionment and skepticism and discovers within our imagination the possibility to dream, to hope into existence a different and better world.

In the passage from Jeremiah this morning, there is a hopeful vision imagined through God’s promises to remain faithful to the line of David and thus to the people of Israel. Where the kings of Judah have failed, God, who is always faithful, will raise up a king to restore the royal line.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise that I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.

Those are powerful words of hope in something of a less-than-hopeful book. The context for the book of Jeremiah is the greatest crisis of Israel’s biblical history. The vision of royal governance is in the toilet. The kings of Judah have utterly failed. The people are under the control of a series of imperial powers, have been forced into exile, and have ultimately witnessed the destruction of the temple, the dwelling place of YHWH, their God. The systems in which they built their world have utterly failed. And so they are a people locked in numb despair over their circumstances; they are robbed of their courage or power to participate in and imagine new possibilities. They plod along in their circumstances because all that surrounds them is just simply the way that the world is.

And if Israel’s situation isn’t enough of a depressing picture, there is the presence of Jeremiah, who screams and cries and yells at the people, appearing to mostly engage in a lifetime project of tears and gnashing of teeth. In his book Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who, Frederick Buechner writes

The word jeremiad means doleful and thunderous denunciation, and its derivation is no mystery. There was nothing in need of denunciation that Jeremiah didn’t denounce. . . . At his lowest ebb he cursed the day he was born like Job, and you can hardly blame him. He spent his life telling them to shape up with the result that they were in just about as miserable shape as they had been if he’d never bothered. (pp.59-60)

It is no wonder that the verses in chapter thirty-three are called “the little book of consolation.” If only we could skip past the rest of the book, apologize for Jeremiah like the cranky uncle at every family gathering, the one who is ruining the Christmas cheer, and dwell here in the friendlier parts of hopeful vision. What’s with all the grief? Surely Jeremiah is like the tearjerker minister who thinks that a good cry makes for a fine funeral. But the riddle and misunderstanding of the book of Jeremiah is that Jeremiah’s grief is for a reason and serves a distinct purpose.

Jeremiah grieves the grief that the people have numbed themselves into refusing to acknowledge. The empire that they have built crumbles away, and they insist in every facet of their lives on pretending that everything is just fine. Jeremiah knows that the community must face up to its experience and purge itself of the apathy of the empire that wants it to continue to utter “peace, peace” when things are not as they should be or as they were promised or as they will be.

The riddle of Jeremiah and of the season of Advent is that grieving leads to joy; anguish leads to life. If we are to discover an authentic vision of hope in the promises of God, we must first acknowledge the darkness; we must stand in solidarity with the broken places of our lives and of our world if we are to find the light. Advent begins in the dark.

In his book The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann writes candidly about what he calls “the royal consciousness,” that is, the numb consciousness that maintains truth in the status quo, prohibiting us from grieving and thus from entertaining a genuine alternative and hopeful future.

“We become good humor men and women,” Brueggemann writes, “for who among us does not want to rush in and smooth things out, to reassure, to cover the grief. . . . In the hospital room we want to be cheery, in the marriage we want to imagine it will be all right. We bring the lewd promise of immortality everywhere.”

He continues,

We practice the royal game in our marriages and all our serious relationships, with our bodies, our age, our health, our nerve, and our commitments. . . . It is not unlike Toots Shor, that most famous saloon keeper, who dies of cancer. In his last days, when his death was imminent, he said, “I don’t want to know what I have.” This is a fair attitude of the royal consciousness: not wanting to know. If we don’t know, perhaps it won’t happen and we can pretend a little longer. When I deny about myself then I can afford to deny about my neighbor as well, and I don’t need to know what my neighbor has or doesn’t have. I can imagine both my neighbor and myself out of historical existence, and “forever” becomes not an affirmation but a denial.

The church and we as people of faith are better at this type of denial than anyone else: denial of our bodies over our minds, of systems of injustice in favor of power, of patriarchy, hierarchy, exclusion, and intentional blindness so that we don’t have to see ourselves or our neighbors, all through a complicated web of myths we continue to tell in order to preserve the status quo. Advent begins in the dark.

As I read through some books this week, I came across an essay by Murphy Davis, one of the founders of the Open Door Community in Atlanta, a food and shelter community of worship and care in the heart of the city of Atlanta. I have been unable to shake her words from the subconscious of my everyday life: “We pad and protect ourselves from the tragedy that is the common experience of most of the world’s people,” she writes. “We live in a world artificially lighted like the blinking lights of a Christmas tree: the slightest trauma and the light goes out. Until that time we are hardly inclined to seek the light, because we think we have enough of it” (Murphy Davis, “Advent” in The Open Door Reader: A Work of Hospitality, p. 251).

Standing in the darkness, acknowledging and grieving our brokenness, is not a place we like to be. It is uncomfortable. T. S. Elliot famously said, “Humankind cannot very much bear reality. We would rather build fantasy castles around ourselves, decked in angels and candles.”

But the good news is that when we are willing to grieve the truth of our lives and the way that the world is in solidarity with others, we are able to begin the journey toward the truth that an authentically hopeful Christmas spirit does not look away from darkness but straight into it.

The questions and cries that belong to the Advent season are those that have echoed from God’s people throughout the ages. From the words of the psalmist who lamented, “Why do you hide your face? O God” (Psalm 44), to Job, who questioned God’s ways and purposes from every angle, to the exiles who sat at the waters of Babylon and wept the loss of the empire they built, to the words of Isaiah: “Thou hast hid thy face from us and hast delivered us into the hand of our iniquities” (Isaiah 64:5)—all cries of the Advent season.

I had a professor who collected what he called “Advent texts” from the pages of the New York Times. They were stories of hardship and brokenness: the twin towers, corruption, lack of affordable heath care, Fort Hood, war, disease, family brokenness—modern voices of Advent to accompany the biblical ones.

As a child, I was always annoyed that in my family we had to wait until Christmas Day to place the baby Jesus in the manger. We could unwrap the little papier-mâché characters from their fine tissue paper—barn, shepherds, angels, wise men, Mary and Joseph, and even the little straw-filled manger—and assemble them on the mantle in their proper places. Everything was there, except the baby Jesus. I’m not sure which was worse: knowing that there were presents hidden somewhere in the house or that there was the baby Jesus, who lay on the sideline week after week just begging to be put in the manger. The wait was excruciating!

“Unto you a child will be born”: How we long for that child, who is the light of the world, who ignites within us possibility, imagination, and hope richer than anything we thought we could have longed for on our own.

The first Sunday in Advent bears with it this promise: God is coming, and [the] justice [of God] will prevail. It exists already in the here and now, through the faithfulness of God, who cared so deeply for the messiness of human life that he lived one, entering the world as a child in a manger, and who hallowed human death by actually dying one, and who continues to live and die with us, for us, in spite of us. To be a Christian is to every day of our lives live in solidarity with those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, but also to live most truly in the unshakable hope of those who expect the dawn. When we grope through darkness we seek light. When we grope through death we seek resurrection.

The prophet Isaiah declares to you and to me the great hope of this Advent season: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light!”

Alleluia. Amen.