I believe that the use of imagination is a very important skill for Christian living. Because our faith is based on Holy Scripture, and because Jesus is the Word made flesh, it is easy for us to over-emphasize the actual words of the Bible, while missing the meaning. This is the reason I spend more time than most clergy searching for the right image for our bulletin covers. You see, I think they matter; I think they help us to understand with our hearts, what we might miss by only reading the words.

So look at the cover of your bulletin. This is one artist's sketch of Jesus sitting on a hillside. Although the sketch is fuzzy, still we can see that Jesus is alone, he looks either tired or discouraged, he is resting, and perhaps lost in thought. Or he may be weeping over Jerusalem, as we heard in our Gospel reading. I find the idea of Jesus weeping over the people of Jerusalem interesting; but when I look at this sketch in combination with that idea, I am moved by his sadness. It becomes almost a personal matter: if Jesus was weeping over those people, who is he weeping over today? Is he weeping over me? I want to know what has caused his sadness, both for the first century people, and for the 21st century people.

Did you notice that this short paragraph in Luke's Gospel, is one of the few places where Jesus gives "himself" a title? He says he must go to Jerusalem, because that is the place where prophets are killed. So he is saying that he considers himself to be a prophet, and that he expects his message, his prophecy, to be rejected, and he expects to be stoned to death. Now we begin to understand why he is sad. He is still in Galilee on his way to Jerusalem, but he has already spoken with a number of people from Jerusalem, and he is able to imagine how his message will be received. The people of Jerusalem already know how to live a righteous life; they don't need instruction from a Galilean prophet; and they don't want to change their ways.

As Jesus sits there alone, remembering the reactions of all those who have listened to him up until this day, he is overcome with deep sadness. It is like the sadness of a parent whose children are acting in self-destructive ways. A few weeks later (in Chapter 15) he will tell a parable about a father's sadness over a prodigal son, but here he chooses a maternal image. He says, to the people of Jerusalem, I wanted to bring you together to protect you, and lead you along the right path, like a hen gathers her brood under her wings. Jesus chose this metaphor for two reasons: first because he knows how extremely strong a mother's protective instinct is. The second reason, I think, is that it echoes some lines from the Song of Moses at the end of the book of Deuteronomy. Speaking of God's guidance of the Israelites in the wilderness, Moses said, "As an eagle stirs up her nest, and hovers over her young . . .as she bears them aloft on her pinions, the Lord alone guided Jacob . . . he fed (them) with the produce of the field . . . he nursed them with honey from the rock" (32:11-13) Not only is the image the same, the "context" is also the same: Moses is lamenting how the Israelites have abandoned the God who made them, and says God's degenerate children are a perverse and crooked generation (32:5)

The emphasis on prophecy, and on Moses the prophet, mean that the central issue for Jesus is the covenant, which the people have broken. Jesus' call to repentance, is specifically a call to return to that covenant relationship. And his statement in today's reading,";your house is left to you";, means that unless they return immediately, God will no longer protect them-- the people of Jerusalem are, as we say, "on their own";. The reality of a broken covenant is made more vivid by our reading from Genesis, which portrays the earliest way a covenant was made. You may remember that last Sunday I defined a covenant as "a solemn mutual agreement to a relationship of gifts and responsibilities";. In the ancient world, it was rarely a mutual agreement. It was usually an agreement between a lord and a subordinate. The subordinate person or group entered the covenant for the sake of the benefits provided: land, food, and protection from enemies. The Lord entered the covenant for the sake of the loyal service he was entitled to receive from his subordinates.

In the reading from Genesis, we hear Abram negotiating with God over the terms of the covenant. God says to Abram, "I am your Shield (that is, God will protect Abram), your reward will be very great";. And Abram objects that the reward he wants, namely children, he has no prospect of receving. God responds, saying in effect, "trust me, you will have as many descendants as the stars." And Abram said, I trust you, let's make a covenant. Therefore God directed Abram to take a heifer, a goat and a ram, cut them in half, and lay the halves out in two rows. Then both Abram and God walk between the halves of the animals, which means, "Let me be cut in half if I fail to keep this covenant". God's presence is signified by the fire and the torch. Because the animals are cut in half, there is blood everywhere, so the covenant is sealed by walking through the blood. Hundreds of years later, when Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with the 10 commandments, there was still a ceremony in which the Israelites were sprinkled with blood, to seal the covenant. This sealing with blood means that keeping the covenant is a matter of life and death.

Now let us turn to the covenant you and I are committed to: the new covenant of Jesus, which we entered through baptism. In that covenant, we promised to persevere in resisting evil, and when we fail to resist evil, we promised to persevere in repenting and returning to the Lord. Isn't this an interesting promise? We have not promised 100% effectiveness in resisting evil, and therefore "in the promise itself" is embedded the assumption that we will fail to resist evil part of the time. The element of absolute-obedience-or-else, has been replaced by the "intention" to resist evil, and by a commitment to persevere in that intention. Although this promise is not exactly in the words of Jesus, I think it does fit his teaching, for two reasons. First, repentance and forgiveness are the center of his preaching, and not as a one-time event, but as a lifelong process. Remember how he told Peter to forgive seventy times seven? That is a way of saying, persevere in forgiving others, and persevere in your own repentance. Second, he made it clear that the new covenant is truly a matter of the heart: it is not primarily about formal obedience or about behavior. It is primarily about choosing to live in a real relationship with God. The new covenant is about trusting God, loving God, listening to God's guidance, and working with God on the things God cares about.

Just at this point of asking what God cares about, we run into a problem of terminology. We who attend church are so accustomed to the language of sin, that our perspective may be too narrow. We tend to think of sin as a deliberate choice to do something we know is wrong. The intention to sin is important in Christian ethics. Yet there are many ways in which we do harm without ever knowing that we have had an effect on others. We may participate in evil without any intention to do wrong. For example, concerned people are increasingly characterizing global warming as an evil, and if it is evil, most of us have participated in by driving cars. Our world is quite different from the ancient world, because of the development of technology, communications, and a global economy.<

A couple of weeks ago I heard a secular statement of our present situation from John Holdren, the new president of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, on National Public Radio. He said, "our capacity to do harm is not matched by our wisdom";. He was referring, of course, to the facts that war is no longer conducted face to face; that we are capable of destroying whole cities; that by international travel any individual can accelerate the spread of disease; that the greed of corporations has destroyed lives and communities; that drug trafficking destroys many lives; that millions of children die before they are 5 years old from preventable causes, and that the earth, water, and air are polluted by our industries. We have not been wise enough to anticipate these results, and we are not yet wise enough to reverse them. Professor Holdren says our planet is under profound stress, and without urgent action, there will be disastrous permanent changes for all of life on earth.

The big question then, is how shall we resist evil? How shall we increase our wisdom enough to discipline our capacity to do harm? How can we learn to think about the needs of people for food, water and air, whom we may never meet? How can we build into our culture, a concern for life in the 22nd century? Part of the answer comes from the place I started: imagination. We must learn to stand in the shoes of people (and of the environment) and imagine how they might be affected by our proposed actions. We must be prepared to consider the well-being of the whole planet. And the way for us to begin, is to sit, in our imagination, beside Jesus on that hillside, and look at our modern world through his eyes. We need to share his sadness, and his desire to protect. If only everyone could open their hearts so that God's compassion would fill us, pushing out our fears and our rivalries. There is much we can learn from Jesus as he weeps: that God is like a parent who loves all of his children/ her children, that God hopes to save us all from destruction. That we the children, are called to adopt these eyes of Jesus, this heart of Jesus, which accepts the whole human family as worthy, and holy. For God's desire is to give us, all of us, abundant life, "honey from the rock".