Prayer: Come Holy Spirit, come.  Take my lips and speak with them.  Take our minds and think with them.  Take our hearts and set them on fire with love for you.  In Christ’s name, we ask it.  Amen

On Palm Sunday, as you know, it is the custom in Episcopal Churches to do a dramatic reading of the Passion narrative—which is the story of Jesus’ crucifixion.  Several years ago, the church I was serving in assigned me the role of Jesus.  I couldn’t have chosen a more perfect person myself (j/k).  Anyway, the passion narrative, as you recall, climaxes with Jesus’ death on the cross.  Now, there was a young four-year-old girl in the congregation named Julie who was enraptured by the story.  In the mind of this little girl, the story of Jesus’ suffering and death was, in fact, happening right before her eyes.  Her mother told me that the girl was hanging on every word as it was read.  When the passion narrative ended with Jesus’ death and burial, Julie began to cry.  In fact her mother told me, that Julie continued to weep long after she returned home.  Being only four years old, we don’t know how much of the story Julie actually understood.  However, one thing for sure Julie knew Jesus’ death was wrong and her heart broke at this needless loss of life.  Julie had heard from her parents and in church many times that Jesus loved her, and she believed it.  His death was too much for her to take.

Now there is one twist to this story.  Julie actually thought that I was Jesus.  And that I, Miles, had really been crucified.  Well, her parents did their best to assuage Julie’s suffering.  They explained to Julie that, in fact, she had only seen a reenactment of an event that happened long ago.  They assured her that I, Miles, was only reading from the bible and that I was very much alive.  They also told her the Easter story—that though Jesus had been wrongly killed, many, many years ago, that on the third day, God’s great love for his son brought Jesus back to life.  Her parent’s words seemed to bring Julie out of her sadness a bit; however, they were not convinced that she completely believed them.  She had after all, through her imagination, seen the whole story of Jesus’ death play out before her very own eyes.  Thankfully, as the week progressed, Julie seemed to return to her normal self. 

Well, Easter arrived and the family was back in church.  At this point, I had heard nothing of Julie’s ordeal.  It was 9:00 Easter Sunday morning.  The brass and organ had fired up and the whole church began to sing out, Jesus Christ is Risen Today, and the procession began.  The acolytes led the way followed by the choir finally the clergy and I began down the center aisle of the church.  Just as I came into the congregation’s view, Julie saw me.  She bolted out of her pew before her parents realized what was happening.  She ran straight toward me, stopped me dead in my tracts, threw her arms around me, and said, “Its true you’re risen.  God brought you back to us.  You’re alive.”  By then her father had caught up to her.  He gently grabbed her hand and slowly led Julie back to their pew with a smile on her face that stretched from ear to ear.  Easter morning had come for Julie.               

Jesus says, “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.  Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”  Julie and every child like her is the reason for these words.  Julie entered the sacred story of Jesus passion, death, and resurrection through the imagination of a child—a holy imagination. 

Many of us who have had the experience of growing up have been taught and believe that for something to have value and to be true it must be objective fact.  That is if we are to make a truth claim of any sort, we must be able to create some sort of controlled experiment, whether it be scientific or social, that validates that truth claim through observable evidence.  In the minds of many, including many in the church, this has relegated Jesus’ resurrection to the realm of myth and fable.  The resurrection of Jesus becomes a make-believe story with a happy and morally upright ending. 

But not for Julie, I dare you to try and convince her that what she experienced that Palm Sunday and Easter morning wasn’t real.  Her Easter experience transcended the limitations of objective reality.  Her holy imagination allowed her to transform her perspective from the objective observer judging facts from a distance to an actual, visceral participant in the story.  She entered the sacred story of Jesus.  Julie sat at the foot of the cross and wept with Jesus’ friends as he died.  She began the process grieving and picking up the pieces after losing a loved one.  And she, along with the other women who came to the tomb that first Easter morning, was greeted by the Good News, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?  He is not here, he is risen.”  What Julie discovered in the story was life changing and it was very, very real.  We should all be so blessed.

For too long so many of us have judged scripture from a distance giving greater credibility to those things that fit within our neatly ordered boxes of reason and logic while simply dismissing the rest.  At the end of the day, this detached posture from the narrative of our faith only keeps us from experiencing the great hope and joy that the story provides.  That’s most disheartening because we are a world that desperately needs to hear some Good News.  As I said last week, we are a world that is at war in more ways than one.  We live in a time of unmatched intellectual enlightenment, material prosperity, and technological advancement, and, yet, we cannot solve the problem of poverty and hunger, we cannot make peace without the use of violence, we cannot even cure the common cold.  And certainly we have no solution for our own eventual death.

So where does that leave us?  For many the answer is quite hopeless.  And yet I ask you to consider an alternate option.  You see using the imagination of a child, like Julie, I have entered the sacred story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.  I’ve wept at my Lord’s cross, I’ve grieved his death, I’ve seen the empty tomb, and, also, I’ve heard the Good News, “Why are you looking for living among the dead.  He’s not here, he’s risen.”  Like Julie, I discovered in the story something life-changing.  You see using my faith and imagination, Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection has become the lens through which I see the world.  And from that perspective, pain and death never have the last word—hope prevails. 

Please understand.  I’m not naïve.  I know that death, disease, and disaster surround us on all sides.  I see people dying on crosses everyday in this world—in Iraq, in Jerusalem, even in underserved parts of our own nation and city.  Everywhere societal, institutional, and corporate injustices exist, people’s lives are thoughtlessly sacrificed.  And, yet, I see something beyond those needless and unjust deaths.  I see resurrection because the narrative of our faith does not end on a cross but with an empty tomb.  The story of Easter is not only that one man, unjustly killed, was brought back to life.  The story of Easter is that life conquered death.  Therefore death, evil, and the powers of darkness are defeated forever, despite what we see in the world around us.  Life conquering death is our Christian hope and the Easter story.  It is our light that shines in the darkness.  It is the Good News we proclaim to all who are willing to listen.  It is our strength when the weight of the world seems to be crashing down all around us.               

Little children like Julie have a lot to teach us about the power of imagination.  Holy imagination allows us to see beyond the cross to the power and potential of life.  Positive life-giving change in our world always begins with an individual person’s imagination.  Though we still have a long way to go, one man dared say “I have a dream” and the world he imagined, a world of greater racial equality, did begin to come into being.  If we can get in touch with our holy imagination, we can begin to revision our world and, in fact, transform it more and more into the kingdom of God. 

Imagine plenty in the midst of poverty; imagine compassion in the midst of selfishness; imagine justice in the midst of inequity; imagine holiness in the midst of depravity; imagine love in the midst of hate.  With the simplicity of a child, enter our sacred story.  Let the hope of resurrection become the lens by which you see the world.  Dream beautiful dreams.  Imagine a world characterized by only two things—life and love.  The power of Jesus’ resurrection promises us that in the fullness of time these two will be all that is left.  Amen.  

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