imagine

Tomorrow is the feast of The Birth of John the Baptist and also the celebration of our ministry with children. It might seem obvious to look at the parenting aspects of Zachariah and Elizabeth, but the truth is we know very little about how they brought up their son, even less than we do about Jesus family life before his public ministry. We can assume that John would have been brought up by his priestly father in a house which was well in line with Jewish cutom and culture.

What the Bible tells us about, and with reason, is Zachariah himself and his reaction to God's intervention in his life.

Zachariah is a prominent person in his community, a priest and a priest chosen to do service in the inner sanctum of the Temple. He was about as “establishment” as you could get in terms of how he must have lived his life and conducted the affairs of his family. And then, as he is serving, something happens, something strange and unexpected, if you like God happens. This is not the God who Zachariah was probably more familiar with, a God who was worshipped in solomn ritual and sacrifice – no this was a God of the personal and unexpected.

Zachariah reacts with skepticism and for this he is struck dumb until John is born and he confirms Elizabeth's choice of name for their son. “he shall be called John” he writes on a tablet, and he can speak again. I always wish that Luke had let us in on the conversation – what did Zachariah say about his encounter with God, how it had changed him and his new and, perhaps, frightening direction in life.

Zachariah is forced by his encouter with God and his experience in life, to turn himself around and set out on a different path. We have no idea whether he continued with the externals of the Temple and his other daily tasks – but we can assume that his heart was in a different place than it had been.

Perhaps it would be fair to say that he was a little more imaginative than he had been.

Imagination is important – it is the starting point for a lot of creative spirituality and is at the heart of our spiritual experience. As anyone who has spent time with children knows, they have adults licked on imagination. And in this context I do not simply mean imagination to be thoughts of things which are not but more thoughts of things which are and are coming, belief in the reality of things being changed and transformed. The ability to hold onto the reality of the unseen without demanding empirical evidence.

Zachariah, of course, had empirical evidence in the shape of a baby. But often life is simply not like that. We walk in a world where imagination for God (and this is not the same as inventing a God who is not really there) is vital.

There is a wonderful verse of a hymn by Horatius Bonar

Here, O my Lord, I see thee face to face;
here would I touch and handle things unseen;
here grasp with firmer hand eternal grace,
and all my weariness upon thee lean.

I think he catches the sort of imagination which I might be talking about here – that mixture of seen and unseen, that holding and being, and all held together without tension or endless explanation.

When we celebrate children and Christian Education we are not so much celebrating who knows which words or which facts but we are celebrating the power of imagination, raw imagination and an energy which has no difficulty holding onto the reality of God.

It is tempting to think of Christian Education as simply a filling up with essential information those who are to be the Church of tomorrow. It is not, it is encouraging the imagination and playfulness of those who are the Church of today.

I was talking to a child a while ago – the lesson was about church and community and we had got to baptism.

“I am not baptised,” he announced, “ I do not want to be, I would not like the water on my head.”

“ Well if you wanted to be,” I said, “ we could chat to you about that.”

“It really doesn't matter,” he replied, “ I am friends with God and that is what matters.”

And that is what matters and if he ever decides differently he will let us know. Now, don't hear me wrong. I am not suggesting a radical remake of Christian Doctrine I am just asking that all of us open our eyes to the God for whom that doctrine stands. Our children deserve the easy intimacy in which they encounter God as real – it is not unusual for me to sit with a dozen seven or eight year olds and have open conversations about how they talk to God – with no one feeling abashed or embarrassed. Yet by the time they get to eleven they are becoming guarded and skeptical – imagination cedes to pressure and a perceived rationality. But the spiritual hunger which those earlier childhood conversations fed, still remains.

This is all of our job. Week by week we have dedicated teams, often of volunteers, working with our children, teaching them stories, making sure they know the words and what things mean – but also allowing their imaginations, encouraging, I hope, those easy conversations and more than that, encouraging those conversations to continue in safe community as the cynicism of adolescence kick in.

Zechariah might have thought he was where he was going to be, that he knew God and God's ways. But God has a surprise for him, a jolt to his imagination, a change to the status quo. Children live in a changing landscape. I remember my mother telling me that, as a child, she was afraid to grow as she would not be able to see the pavement from such a height. It reduced her to tears. Children live in a world of possibility.

And then we all grow up, and we forget magic carpets and candy floss trees and somehow we often forget God as well. We are where we are and we wonder why the colours fade and where it has all gone over the years. God becomes part of the furniture of our lives, an ornament, perhaps boxed, taken off the shelf and wondered at. Perhaps we even wish we could return to our childhood wonder.

All of us have a task of imagination – of seeing the reality that is in God, that is our relationship with God. We have the task of imagining ourselves as restored and healed and of that being a real journey which we are all engaged on. Just as our children are the Church of today, just as they need safe space to learn and explore, so do we. After his tongue was free, Zechariah sang a song, which we often call the Benedictus. The last few lines are:

“By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.” Imagine that.