“Looking for a Good Fantasy”

June 18, 2006

Scripture Reading:  2 Corinthians 5:14-17

Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerr 

Blue Point Congregational Church

 

Once I heard a joke:  I have given up my search for truth and am now looking for a good fantasy!  Everyone laughs.  I laugh.  But, then I wonder maybe that is not such a bad idea.  After all, sometimes our best fantasies become the marvelous truth we seek. 

What do I mean by that?  Let me give you an example:

Howard Thurman was Dean of the Chapel at March Chapel, Boston University.  He was a grand preacher, poet, and gentle prophet.  Howard Thurman was also the grandson of a slave.  He wrote about his grandmother who was a slave on a plantation in that inhuman system of American slavery.  Particularly he tells about the effect of the church that the slaves attended on Sunday afternoon.  The owner of the plantation apparently thought that it would do the slaves no harm if the preacher went down and told the slave about Jesus on Sunday afternoons.

Thurman’s grandmother said of this old preacher that, “He hardly ever preached a sermon without going by Calvary.”   The slave congregation could always relate well to a story of a man who was treated like dirt, abused, beaten down, and left for dead. 

But Thurman’s grandmother said that the old preacher, “When he went by Calvary,” always was moved to shout, “But God raise him again!  And he is seated at the right hand of God in heaven!” 

Then the preacher would take off his glasses, and look straight into the eyes of the congregation, and lean over the pulpit , and say to them in words undeniable, “But slaves, you are not any man’s property.  You are children of God Almighty!  Never forget it!” 

Thurman’s grandmother told him that, whenever the preacher would come to that part of the story, her spine would stiffen, and she was ready to live another day. 

If Thurman’s grandmother had gone to the preacher to listen to the truth, he would have said something about how they were all slaves in a hopelessly brutal system with no hope of getting out.  However, Thurman’s grandmother had not gone to hear the truth but instead a good fantasy.  She went to hear the Word of God.  This great Word didn’t speak about slavery.  It brought vision and imagination.  The preacher looked at them in the eye and told them that they were children of God Almighty!  The fantasy caught on.  And in some marvelous alchemy transformed into freedom and turned slavery into a lie. 

Too often we think of imagination as a failure to come to terms with reality, flights of fancy, wishful thinking, and nothing more.  But the dictionary defines imagination as “the ability to represent reality more fully and truthfully than it immediately appears to the senses.”  The Word of God is not about what is, rather it is about what things can be.  It is about the God given potential in what is.  I wonder shouldn’t we make a practice of pursuing the good fantasy about who we are and what we can become that the gospel inspires us to imagine.  Shouldn’t we daydream wildly about God in us?

What is a saint?  Are they born more special than you or I?  Do they have a kind of mutant gene that makes them capable of holy things?  No.  Saints are nothing but people who had a fantastic fantasy.  It was the fantasy of finding God in their lives.  They put on this fantasy, and played their ridiculously large roles as disciples of Christ.  No matter the gap between the greatness of their fantasy and the smallness of who they really were.  In so doing, behold, the fantasy became the truth of the matter.

Mother Teresa, for instance, was great at giving up on the truth and finding a good fantasy.  She found one good fantasy in a dream.  In her early days she was stricken with a high fever.  “In that delirium,” she writes, “I went to St. Peter, but he would not let me in, saying: ‘There are no slums in heaven.’ In my anger I said:  ‘Very well, I will fill heaven with slum people, then you will be forced to let me in.’  Since then the Sisters and Brothers don’t give him a rest and he ahs to be so careful because our people have reserved their places in heaven long ago by their suffering.”  Where does Mother Teresa’s fantasy begin and where does truth leave off?  Somewhere her fantasy started becoming  the truth.

Furthermore, she would encourage her followers to fantastic fantasies.  This is her advice to her co-workers in the slums -   “Let Christ radiate his life in her and through her in the slums.  Let the poor, seeing her, be drawn to Christ and invite him to enter their homes and their lives.  Let the sick and suffering find in her a real angel of comfort and consolation.  Let the little ones of the streets cling to her because she reminds them of him, the friend of the little ones.”  She wanted her co-workers to play the fantasy that they were Christ.  By playing the fantasy, they became the fantasy. 

In one of Rossellini’s last films, General della Rovere (1959), a petty crook in Italy at the end of World War II is arrested by the Gestapo and forced by them to impersonate a prestigious figure of the resistance, General della Rovere, so that they can extract information from political prisoners.  But the conman performs his role so convincingly that the other prisoners come to worship him as their moral leader, thus he is progressively compelled to live above himself and to match the image created by their expectations.  In the end, he refuses to betray their trust; he is put in front of a firing squad and dies the death of a hero.  He has truly become General della Rovere.

Maybe we should all give up our search for truth and look for a good fantasy.  This brings me to the importance of stories.  Gail, Peggy and I were talking Wed night about Christian Education and what really sticks with kids.  It comes down to stories.  Stories are how kids put life together.  Psychologists have found that children “Are not able to bring theories that organize things in terms of cause and effect and relationships, so they turn things into stories, and when they try to make sense of their life they use the storied version of their experience as the basis for further reflection.  If they don’t catch something in a story structure, it doesn’t get remembered very well, and it doesn’t seem to be accessible for further kinds of mulling over.”  Jerome Bruner, Ph.D. 

For instance, a little girl, Emily at only 32 months would go to bed and tell herself a story about the day, 

Tomorrow when we wake up from bed, first me and Daddy and Mommy, you, eat breakfast eat breakfast like we usually do, and then we’re going to play and then soon as Daddy comes, Carl’s going to come over, and then we’re going to play a little while.  And then Carl and Emily are both going down the car with somebody, and were going to ride to nursery school, and then when we get there, we’re all going to get out of the car, go into nursery school, and Daddy’s going to give us kisses…then go….

But it goes beyond just telling a story.  Children when they hear a good story, they want to become the story.

Three year old Timothy had just heard his mother read his favorite bedtime story for the third time.  After the third and final reading his mother witnessed a strange phenomenon.  The toddler took the book and set it on the ground; then eh opened the book, gently put one foot and then the other on the open pages, and looked down in wonderment; then he began to cry.  The mother was quite puzzled at this little display until her eight year old daughter offered this simple interpretation:  “Timmy really like the book.”  It was then that the mother understood:  Timothy wanted to become part of the book. 

 

Often we will hear people say, “Oh it is just a story.”  They mean by this that is something made up, and not based on the facts.  Stories are fantasies.  However, when it comes right down to it, the only way we adults can make sense out of our lives is by the use of the stories we tell ourselves.   That is really what we are doing when we study and read the Bible.  What we really want to do is what Timmy wanted to do.  We want to put the grand and fantastic book on the ground and step right into it.  Studying and learning is about entering the Bible and being part of the Word of God.   This is exactly what God had in mind when he wrote the Bible as we find in this Hasidic tale. 

Once upon a time, God, angered by the inaccurate reporting and editorial guesses about divine nature and heavenly history, hired a human scribe and began to dictate the divine story.  For forty days and forty nights God spoke, and for forty days and forty nights the scribe scribed.  The last word having been spoken, the exhausted Deity sat down,, for God had paced throughout the entire dictation.  As the scribe finished recording the last word a quizzical look came over the human’s face – a look that quickly changed from questioning to anger.  Finally, the human scribe stood up and , with all the outrage of someone who has been plagiarized, shouted “But this is my story!”

 

Where does the Bible story leave off and our story begin?  The fact of the matter, or should I say the fantasy of the matter is that one doesn’t end and other doesn’t begin.  It is all one big long story.  The story of the crucifixion and the resurrection was Thurman’s grandmother’s story.  The story of St. Peter in heaven was Mother Teresa’s story.  The story of Jesus healing the paralytic is the cancer patient’s story.    The story of Moses lost in the wilderness is the story of the man who is in a mid life crisis.  The story of the woman at the well is the story of a woman recovering from addiction.

I want you to take a moment now.  In your bulletin I have written a list of Bible stories.  I want you to pick one that at this time of your life you can most relate to. 

• Adam and Eve and eating the apple from the Tree of Good and Evil
• Cain and Able
• Abraham called to leave the city of his father and to follow God
• David and Goliath
• Mary and the angel Gabriel learning that she is carrying the Messiah
• The prodigal son
• The woman at the well asking Jesus for living water
• The blind man given sight by Jesus
• The crucifixion
• The resurrection
• Other

That story is your entrance into the great story of the Bible.  That is how God has written you life into his divine story.  And as you go through you life in the next days, weeks, months, keep this story in the back of your mind.  Roll it over and over as events in your life unfold.  Fantasize.  If the story of your life was in the Bible how would God enter it? What would happen next?  What are you learning about God’s will?   Reach deeper and deeper into the story.  Peeling away one layer after another.  Until yo realize that the voice speaking in the Bible story is the same voice that is speaking within your life.  The voice of God comes from within us and from without at the same time.  Do this until you see that at last that story is no longer a fantasy but tre.  Not necessarily because it happened in a particular place at an exact time just like us, but because it is within us and the same movement of God that moved then is moving us now.  It always was and is.  It issues from us.  It is ours.  Even as it echoes the first word of the first page of the holy text itself, it is us.