Isaiah 65:17-25 Ps. 98:
2 Thes. 3:6-13 Luke 21:5-19
Lectionary Link
John Lennon wrote and sang a song entitled, Imagine, which is sheer utopian thinking. And it was a popular song, and it remains a sentimental popular song because to be human is somehow to have the proclivity we call hope be the perpetual carrot in front of our life to motivate us in our work burdened and hungry lives.
And we might blame God for taunting us with the hope for things which are impossible and that can never become actual, that is, in the sense of everything, already, all at once becoming completely harmonized without any harm being done.
To live is to be haunted by utopia. Utopia really means "no such place," but it still functions for us to chart a preferred direction in life. How many spa and work out places are called "utopia," and it really means "no such possible bodies," but you should really still to practice and train in the direction of getting better even if you can never be perfect.
The "imagined life," the utopian life is as ancient as human language users. It is found in Plato's Ideals; it is the parallel existing inner world to the actual world that includes the full range of probable outcomes and happenings from the agony to the ecstatic, and lots of just plain drudgery.
We moderns can be very partial and permissive of John Lennon's Imagine, even though it is quite pollyannish and naive, while being very critical of religious people, biblical people whose very way of life might be called utopian or hopeful imagining.
Do we permit secular imagining while eschewing biblical imagining because it seems to be of a different order?
Our readings from Scripture today are about the Bible being a book whose alternate title might be called, Imagine.
None of us think that the words of John Lennon's song are going to become literally true, and yet they function for us in a profoundly sentimental way because of a naive painful nostalgia for a perfect life that never was. Hope can make us think that we once partook of the perfect which has somehow been lost forever, the paradise forever lost.
We can mock the Isaian utopian writer who writes that God is going to create a new heaven and a new earth. Why does the writer need this new heaven and new earth? Because of infant mortality, human mortality, exile and loss of homes, and because of the predator-prey relationships which characterizes the animal world, and the seeming social Darwinism of the strong and fit dominating the weak and vulnerable. The Isaian writer wrote his "Imagine" poetic song long before John Lennon wrote his, bespeaking that it must be very human for people to continuously write their own "imagine" scenarios. From the experience of hope, humanity is impelled to write their own "imagine" scenarios, not because they think that such impossible utopias will ever be widespread, but because the impossible perfect can inspire the temporal sporadic, serendipitous, and even the intentionally labored for better outcomes.
After the pre-exilic utopian writings of Isaiah, a different kind of literature of imagination came to be. In the post-exilic period with influence from the Persian environment, what scholar call the apocalyptic genre of writing come to be. It is found in the post-exilic prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, it is found in the intertestamental writings of the Apocrypha, such as in the book of Enoch, and it is found in many other writings which John the Baptist, Jesus, and those with access to literature knew about. Living under the Roman conquest created a hopeful desire for imagining a different world. There were imagined heroic messianic figures who could intervene and deliver people from oppression. Imagine that there could be judgment and punishment exacted for those who were the oppressor. Imagine that faithful people could still hold their beliefs in a God of justice. Imagine believing in a God who had imminent active love toward us. Imagine a way to make the actual world of pain and injustice be dealt with in a resurrection afterlife where wrongs could be made right.
Different apocalyptic preachers and prophets acted in literal ways about their discourses of imagining a soon apocalyptic end with the arrival of new kings within the Empire which knew the Caesar to the only king. Many of these apocalyptic zealots were crushed by the Roman armies as well as their social movements in the various Jewish Wars.
Many Christians who had their apocalyptic Imagine stories, had to adjust them to a continual delay for actual fulfillment even while proclaiming the kingdom of God as already being realized by the experience of the Holy Spirit, namely the parallel inner reign of Christ the King within the lives of those who were privileged with the revelation of this new version of the song, "Imagine." "If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have come and fight." This phrase from the Gospel of John's Jesus on trial is an acknowledgment of the lack of a complete over lap of the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this actual world. God did not nor does not have and will not have an earthly Empire.
Today, many Christians still resort to the "Imagine," aspect of their stories of hope. It is natural to do so even while popular entertainment culture is completely dominated by "imagined" better worlds. Some biblical interpreters try to work out in literal ways the impending apocalyptic events within our world events in a one to one correspondences as if ancient writers had prescience insights like some Nostradamus on current events. Such literal interpretations have always proven to be wrong, meaning that they have misinterpreted the functional meaning of hope which come to our language products. Others are content to acknowledge the incredible diversity which the phenomenon of hope inspires in visions of utopia.
The Gospel for us is that we should not be ashamed of hope or of the stories of hope which can profoundly influence the direction of our lives personally and socially toward a better excellence. For us Jesus Christ is personified hope, who teaches us how to be related to Hope itself, as we try to instantiate in our words and deeds specific acts of love and justice which befit this Christ of Hope. Amen.
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