4 December 2005

Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

Church of the Redeemer

New Haven, Conn.

Scripture: Isaiah 61:1-3 and 10-11

A Child’s Christmas in Connecticut: Imagination and Spirit

There is a “village” in every human heart. A sacred place.

When J.R.R. Tolkien, the Oxford professor, was first inspired to reveal the world of middle-earth, hobbits and the Lord of the Rings, it came to him in one sentence. Grading student papers, a blank page mercifully showed up and upon it Tolkien wrote this line: “in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

The rest is history. Tolkien’s Trilogy, through various polls done in the English-speaking world, has been declared “the book of the century.”

Of course what went down the hole was not a hobbit but rather the pent-up imagination of one J.R.R. Tolkien. Without his work it’s doubtful that his friend and fellow Christian C.S. Lewis from Cambridge would have authored or succeeded as he did with his Chronicles of Narnia—The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. And could there be J.K. Rowling and all of Harry Potter without these earlier voices crying in the wilderness of modern civilization? Crying, I would add, with the voice of imagination.

Deep in every human heart there is a village: a place where spirit and life run free. Imagination. The place could be Coleridge’s Xanadu, Blake’s Jerusalem, Gauguin’s Tahiti, The Land of Oz, Brigadoon, Shangri-La, Lake Wobegone, Cooperstown, New York, or Bethlehem. O Little Town of Bethlehem.

The geography here is the soul. We are talking about a place of grace. That place is as essential to human life as are the biochemical mechanisms of our hearts and brains.

And if “village” is a metaphor we use for such a place, then “childhood” is how we place that place in time.

There is a child in every human heart, as well. A sacred time.

“Childhood,” like “village,” is a word we use for the time that we believe in, where spirit and life can run free. Even, of course as we know, that spirit and life ran into dungeons and dragons as well as sacred groves and heroic redeemers.

Childhood is to time what village is to space—a place where imagination builds sanctuary and creates life.

This is not a sentimental thing. Anyone who reads or watches orcs make war or feels the presence of wraiths or of Lord Voldemort knows that we are in the world of Christian realism, of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s Children of Light and Children of Darkness.

Childhood and village is a word for our defining and hanging onto a time and place where spiritual joys and spiritual wounds happened for the first and the almost most powerful time.

Of course I speak of all this this day because it is in this place, the church, at this time, Advent and Christmas, where all this comes together, collides really. The myths of the human heart, village and childhood, meet the fact of God’s great self-expression: the story of the birth of Jesus.

Culture and religion collide here for us. The truth is that culture almost wins, and that can be sentimental. But the truth is also we would not “do” Christmas without children. Children, our own, our church’s, our state’s, our world’s; and childhood, our own with its sacred and profane memories, all gather in the village we call Bethlehem in our Christian religion.

If Dylan Thomas, in his great poem-story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” immortalized a village of secular memory, a Christian preacher might try to redeem the sacred us of imagination in the place and time we can call “A Child’s Christmas Here and Now.” Hence this little advent series of sermons entitled “A Child’s Christmas in Connecticut,” about imagination, innocence, reality and spiritual life now. We are with child, with children and within the Biblical village. This is our time and place for our imagination—that life force that is so strong in children, and for our second innocence.

I start with imagination because it is in its high season and because our souls are, as one writer says, under siege. Our souls are under siege by a culture that will sell with imagination but does not buy imagination. And imagination—as we will see with Jesus—is the spiritual power needed to defend our souls.

The Nobel poet Czeslaw Milosz said of William Blake, our English visionary, that, for him, Blake restored his earlier raptures, restored him to his true vocation (his calling): that of lover.[MSOffice1] Is that not our Christian call? To be true lovers!

C.K. Chesterton said of Blake that Blake’s critics thought that his visions were false because he was a mad man. Chesterton countered: he became mad because his visions were true. Are we to be any less mad—in both senses of mad—in our Christian visions?

I believe that behind the visions of a redeemable world that we find in all three of our English myth makers, Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, that there is the Christian imagination of William Blake and his imagined English Jerusalem. We know the hymn “Jerusalem,” and here are some of Blake’s words:

I will not cease from Mental Fight

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant Land.

It is this call to mental [MSOffice2] fight that also lay behind our spiritual definition of America as a New Jerusalem. This is life nourished in imagination, the life-blood of our souls. What better time to hail it than Christmas?!

Now we looked last week at how Jesus was born into the prophetic traditions of the Hebrew people and the wide broad plain of Messianic hope so passionately and poetically pictured by the prophets.

Many of the words we use to picture Jesus are words from the imagination of Isaiah: Prince of Peace. Wonderful Counselor. Suffering Servant. Even our Jesse Tree. Isaiah 2:1, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” In Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous “I Have a Dream Speech, the imagination of Isaiah is everywhere: the broad highway of the Lord, the mountains made into plains, and waterfalls of justice.

Today, Chapter 61 is a treasure chest of spiritual imagination. But the shocking thing is how Jesus imagined himself into those imaginings. The words of Chapter 61: the spirit of the Lord is upon me. The Lord has anointed me to bring good news—to the oppressed, the broken-hearted, the captive and imprisoned—the good news that God’s time has come. The mourners are to be comforted. The earth will bring forth a garden of spring shoots and God’s righteousness and praise will be before all nations.

The only thing more than this prophetic imagination—truly mental fight [MSOffice3] at its highest—is how Jesus imagines himself into these images. He imagines that these words are true about him. And “imagine” is the word. It was not his conclusion. It was not his visitation. It was his imagination.

In Luke 4:16 and following, Jesus, a young adult, comes to his home village, Nazareth, goes into the synagogue, on the Sabbath, his custom. He stood up and unrolled the scroll to Isaiah 61 and read: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me…” and the rest through 4 which we heard. And he sat down and said I am the fulfillment of this scripture you have just heard.

Never mind for the moment whether he was right or wrong. Most of us from today looking back want to say he was right. Of course he was the anointed one of God. Most of the people there said he was wrong and mad. Never mind our yes or their no. Look at Jesus. Look at the act of his imagination. Even if it was true, he still had to imagine it! It was not downloaded from some cosmic computer—into him and out again.

It was an act of a soul alive to spirit and to life, in the second village of his life, full of the dreams of his childhood.

Do we not need to imagine what scripture we take on as ours as alive and true now?

You must be willing to imagine that your village of sacred inner life and your childhood spirit and life are God’s place for you—where God is now for you, in you, this Christmas in Connecticut.

Amen