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[Church of the Brethren News Services]

Date:      June 30, 1998
Contact:  Nevin Dulabaum
V:  847/742-5100   F:  847/742-6103
E-MAIL:   CoBNews@AOL.Com

(This text was submitted prior to Annual Conference)

Annual Conference 1998    						Tuesday evening, June 30, 1998
Orlando, Florida

Preacher: 		William Willimon 

Sermon title: 		“Faithfulness: Keeping On Seeing That Which Is Not Seen”
Scripture text:	Hebrews 11:1-3

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not
seen….”

Harvard preacher, Peter Gomes, calls the Bible, “a book of imagination.”  The
Bible — book of imagination.  First, it is a book about the imagination of
God, of God’s vision for the world, that dream God is bringing to bear upon
the cosmos.  Then, it’s a book meant to stoke, to fund, to kindle the
imagination of the church.

That’s how I want you to think of the Church of the Brethren, as a people
produced by the imagination of God, as a people with faithful imagination.  

Of course, folk don’t always think of the church as being overly imaginative.
You know the “Seven Last Words of the Church.”  Last Sunday, greeting people
as they left worship, a kid asked me why I was wearing that colorful thing
around my neck.  I informed him that the thing was a stole, pastors like me
wear stoles on Sunday.  
“Why?”  He persisted.  

“Well,” I explained, “these used to be worn by Roman officials as a sort of
necktie, sometimes it served as a handkerchief.  When Rome adopted the church,
clergy became officials of Rome.  That’s why we wore them.”

“There must not have been Romans around for at least two thousand years!”
persisted this kid.  “How come you’re still wearing them?”

I answered, “We clergy are considering wearing something else, but we don’t
want to move too fast.”.

I thumbed through the program of all the business  you all have got to do
before you can go home at the end of  you 212th Annual Conference and, as far
as I can tell, most of your business is yesterday’s business, administration
of somebody else’s good ideas, reports on what happened last year.  

And that’s the way it usually is for the church.  We’re good at recollection
of yesterday, not all that adept at leaning in to tomorrow.  And yet, Hebrews
says, faith is an act of the imagination, the “assurance of things hoped for,
the conviction of things not seen.”  Faith is imagination and that’s in the
future tense and church usually talks in the past tense but I’m saying that
the Church of the Brethren is a product of the imagination of God. God’s big
ideas for the future.

The world is forever telling us Christians to “face facts,” to “accept
reality.”  “Prayer is fine, but sometimes, you’ve just got to face facts.”
“We had hoped to raise the budget this year, things seemed so upbeat at
Easter, but I guess we just have to accept reality.”  Keep close to what’s
seen, keep stroking the known and the visible, work within the safe confines
of the predictable.

Yet who defines the “facts,” and who gets to say what’s real?  That’s what I
want to know.  Every time you gather, here as the whole church in Orlando, or
you in your little congregation in Kokomo, you’re in a kind of battle over who
gets to name the “facts” and who gets to say what’s real.  That’s one reason
why church can sometimes be so tense, so unpleasant, because the world would
rather live by the prose of CNN, IBM, and GM than by the poetry of something
like Hebrews and, as we’ve said, the Bible is a book meant to fund, to stoke,
to ignite the imagination.

It is fitting that after reading tonight’s scripture, we turned first toward
our children, for children do seem to be better at imagination, that us
grownups.  “Now faith is the assurance that the world is not as it first
appears, the conviction that things can get interesting, even on a Tuesday.
Faith is the grace to look at the world through four year old eyes.” 

The students were telling me that last semester a male professor walked into a
course in introductory physics and proceeded to give a forty-minute lecture
attired in a red dress, with matching red purse and heels.

At the end of the lecture, one of the students had the temerity to raise his
hand and ask, “Hey, professor, what’s with the red dress?”

Said the professor, “I’m glad you asked.  I was beginning to wonder what it
might take to interest you people.  What is with the red dress?  Well, we
shall learn in this class that most of the really foundational, really
interesting discoveries in physics were made in the Thirties, the Forties.  We
haven’t made many major discoveries in physics in the past fifty years.  Why?
I personally think it’s because of the sort of people we’re attracting to
physics.  We get these students who think we know something.  They drift in
here, write down what we tell them, spit it back on the exam, and, well,
people like  that don’t make many discoveries.  I’m looking for a few people
to come into physics expecting to be shocked, just dying to be surprised.  I’m
looking for somebody with some….imagination.”

Now faith is the expectation of things hoped for, the conviction that we shall
be shocked.  Faith as a noun (“the Christian faith”) just sits there.  Faith
as an active modifier (“faithfulness”) is a continuing direction, a
disposition, a way of moving in the world.  

When I took “Christian ethics” in seminary, we were taught that ethics
involves consideration of each conflicting alternative, weighing the options
for action in a given situation, then rationally narrowing down the options to
the one right thing I ought to do, ethics as narrowing of alternatives.  

But what if faithfulness is dependent, not on narrowing my alternatives (“This
was the only thing I could do in this situation.”) but rather in exploring,
multiplying, exploding the possible alternatives?  What if faithfulness to God
is not so much of a matter of being certain that I’ve done the one absolutely
right thing in this situation but rather a matter of being dependent upon God
to ignite my imagination?

A few years ago I was down here in Orlando and this pastor told me about an
experience in her church here.  Her church, she said, was an older, downtown,
declining inner city congregation.  Most of the members commute in on Sundays
to keep the church going.  They have had, for sometime now, a problem with
vagrants, with homeless people in the neighborhood surrounding the church.  In
one month, the church was broken into six times.  Six times!  The board met,
considered purchasing an expensive new security system, new locks for the
doors, bigger bars for the windows.

Gladys said, “Is anybody else here on the board bothered by a church locking,
and alarming, and barring all it’s doors to people in need?  I know we’ve got
a problem with the break ins, still, it just doesn’t seem right for a church.”

“Well what do you want us to do Gladys?” asked one of the board members, “just
throw the doors and windows wide open and tell all the homeless,  ‘Come on
in!’?”

“Why not?” said some smart aleck in the back of the room.  Why not?  They had
prayer, they took a vote, and the next night, they unlocked all the front
doors, left on the lights.  Seventeen homeless men wandered in.  The pastor
said, “You get seventeen homeless men in your church overnight, well, we
either had to decide to grow up and start acting like a church or get better
locks for the doors.”

When she told me this story the church had mobilized, had hosts every night of
the week serving at the church, meals, medical care, job counseling.

You leave a church to its own devices, you’ll end up with a form of Rotary or
the Women’s Garden Club, we’ll sit through reports of yesterday’s bold
decisions and Roberts Rules of Order ourselves to death.  But you biblically
stoke our imagination, you wrench our gaze off what is safely, securely seen
and get us to stand on tiptoes straining toward what is unseen and well,
you’ll find church as a gift of the imagination. 

Because faith, at least the Christian faith, is “the assurance of things hoped
for, the conviction of things not seen….”

See Jesus squatting there in the dust with a gaggle of common fisherfolk and
former tax collectors and daring to tell them, “You are the light of the
world!”

Poor Paul, telling that ragtag crowd at First Church Corinth, after he had
just chewed them out for fighting in church and acting bad in bedrooms, “You
are God’s treasure.”  Now to look at the church, us, and call them that, well,
it takes some imagination.

Your little congregation, the one you’re representing this week here at
Conference, you are God’s answer to what’s wrong with the world.  Your
congregation is a sneak preview of God’s redemption of the world.  What is
invisible to the world, namely, the Kingdom of God, is made manifest to the
eyes of faith, eyes graced with the imagination of God.  

I wish we would spend less time in the church bolting down the pews, and
following proper procedure, and plodding through the program and more time
nourishing, stoking, dreaming about things hoped for, things unseen.  Church
at its worst is far too easily pleased with things as they are, too
comfortably accommodated with the facts of life, too content with reality as
presently defined by the powers-that-be.  Church at its best keeps on being
assured, steadfastly convinced that the “Kingdoms of this world shall become
the Kingdoms of our Lord Christ and he shall rule forever” (Revelation).

Did you see in the paper about this woman in Louisiana who had raised, even on
her income as a maid, sixteen foster children?  This reporter went out there
and found her and asked her how she did it.  How in the world did someone like
you, on limited, fixed income do this.  
She answered, “I guess I just saw a new world a’commin.”