Have you ever had the experience of realizing that relief is possible from something that has been a constant source of suffering for you and that you had come to believe was inevitable? You had grown so accustomed to this source of suffering that you had assumed it was just the natural order of things. But then you have an experience that lets you see that, in fact things don’t have to be like this. Things can be different. Things can be better. There’s a way out.

            For example, this can be the experience of a kid growing up in a dysfunctional household and going over to a friend’s house and realizing that – wow! – families could actually be loving and good humored … and I want that for myself.

            Or you hear about Black Americans going to other countries and being astonished to experience life without the unrelenting stress and threat of being treated as less-than-fully-human because of racism. My God! It doesn’t have to be as bad as it is.  

            People can experience this with recovery from addiction – realizing, wow it doesn’t have to be like this, I can actually be free of this habit that’s bringing me down, and yeah, it can be hard to stay sober, but – Thank God! – it is possible and it can feel really good to be free and to be doing right by myself and the one’s I love.

            Or, a minor example in comparison to all this is I had the experience many years ago of going to a physical therapist for a chronic problem. The physical therapist asked “What would you like to do again that you haven’t been able to do?” And I had no idea what to say. “You mean I may not have to be so limited by this pain and fear of injury?” “That’s right. We’ll get you there. What do you want to be able to do again?”

            I’m sure we could come up with lots of examples of this sort of thing.

            Suffering has a way of shutting down our sense of what is possible, a way of closing us off from the broader horizon of what’s out there and where we can go and what we can do. This is true in smaller ways of minor suffering, like my chronic injury; and it’s true in much bigger ways of major suffering, like racism or abuse. This is true for individuals; and it’s true for groups, communities, societies, even species. Pain and fear can constrict our very imaginations, and our very sense of what is real and what is really possible. 

            We say our God is a God of healing, we say our God is a God of liberation, we say our God is a God of justice and a God of peace – Why? Because God can free us from the ways that suffering constricts us. The God of all Creation as manifest through Jesus strikes humanity again and again with revelations of the ways we can indeed live in more just and loving and good and true and beautiful and humane ways. The biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, who’s a member of the UCC, calls this the “Prophetic Imagination,” over and against the constricted imaginations of what human powers would have us believe is possible.

            Things can be different. Things can be better. There’s a way out.

When we welcome into our hearts a relationship with God, one of the many things we are inviting in is this activity of the Divine that challenges us to grow past the limitations that our experiences of suffering have imposed on us. This takes healing, this takes patience, this takes community, this takes a boldness of heart and a boldness of imagination – a prophetic imagination; this takes trust in God, and it takes help from Jesus. 

This Advent, as we prepare our hearts for the dawning of Christ at Christmas, we have been exploring the prophetic roots of Jesus, the ways that the Hebrew Prophets, in particular the great prophet Isaiah, set in motion the vision and expectation that as Christians we find fulfilled in the person of Jesus. 

            There are tremendously powerful passages from the book of the prophet Isaiah that our tradition always returns to in this Advent season. In these passages, Isaiah gives us a vision of what is possible with God – the hope, the promise that God offers to us, that God desires for humanity.  
Many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Holy One Beyond Name,
    to the house of the God of Jacob,
that God may teach us God’s ways
    and that we may walk in God’s paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction
    and the word of the Divine Presence from Jerusalem.

 God shall judge between the nations
    and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares
    and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
    neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Do you believe that this is possible? Is this possibility, this promise real to you? Is it real to you that things can be different; that things can be better; that there is a way out? Is it real enough to do the good and faithful and courageous work with God as our guide to make it so?

The horrors of gun violence in our country and the horrors of war elsewhere in the world can feel so overwhelming that the stress and the suffering can constrict our view of what’s possible. 

Despair and cynicism are signs of oppression. They only serve to bolster the power of those who profit from fear. 

Enter the Hebrew Prophets and, above all, Jesus. 

Rabbi Nahum Ward-Lev, in his book about “The Liberating Path of the Hebrew Prophets” talks about how the Hebrew prophets blow apart what he calls the “royal narrative” of those who’s power and profit relies on fear:

“The royal narrative served the status quo by articulating and narrow perspective on time, viewing the present social, political, and religious configuration as the one eternal reality. The prophetic narrative offered a radically different perspective, a deeply subversive vision that placed the present crisis in an infinitely broader context … 

“The prophets challenged the power of the king by calling the people to refocus their attention on another, far greater power – the power of the creator …

            “In the place of the royal narrative that focused on the unchanging present, the prophets proclaimed a cosmic narrative in which the God of liberation was at work through time.

“The prophets viewed the crisis of their day as a crisis of forgetting, and the way out as a process of remembering … The people … had lost touch with their God who brought forth in the beginning and who continually brings forth new life each day.” (Ward-Lev pg. 40)

Now, when we see that a better way is possible, when we remember this deep remembering of the love and freedom for which our Creator has created us, this can be a tremendous relief. 

It can unleash our hearts. 

But it also can be really sad. We can see the tragedy of being trapped in a cage and thinking that the cage is the entire world – there’s no outside, so there’s no way out. How tragic!

Jesus wept over his people: “If only they recognized – if only they remembered – the ways that make for peace!” 

This means that our sadness, our sense of tragedy at the senselessness of violence is in fact a gift – it keeps us in touch with our deep remembering that it doesn’t have to be this way. 

So, please have the strength to be sad rather than cynical. This is in fact a pathway to remembering the divine reality that can give us hope and courage. 

The gift of the prophets, and the gift that is embodied in the very person of Jesus, is their insistence that the vision God gives through the prophetic imagination is real.

Notice that in Isaiah’s vision where people re-forge the tools of death into tools of life, notice that he says that people will “learn war no more.” And notice that God teaches people how to walk in God’s ways. 

War can be learned, and war can be unlearned, just as we can learn the ways that make for peace. There is an outside and there is a way out. 

Do you believe that this is possible? Is this possibility, this promise real to you, that things can be different; things can be better; there’s a way out? Is it real enough to take courage and to do the good and faithful work with God as our guide to make it so?

This takes healing, this takes patience, this takes community, this takes a boldness of heart and a boldness of the prophetic imagination; this takes trust in God, and it takes help from Jesus.

            Thanks be to God.