There’s something going on these days that I probably don’t mention out loud as often as I should.  I know many of you are staying up at night these days or waking up in the morning with a troubling sense that things are not the way they are supposed to be.  You are scared, or anxious or angry about it…or some other feeling that I’m not naming quite right.  You’re not alone, and it’s not confined to the left or the right.  Americans of a variety of political perspectives get nervous when mass protests are going on, and when citizens are killed by the government, and when local law enforcement is at odds with the federal government.  How is this going to end?  Is it coming to my city?  What will be next?
Some of you are feeling more anxious than others.  Your own level of anxiety may be a product of your personal emotional makeup; or it might be about how much these things get talked about among your own family and friends.  It makes a lot of difference if your primary means of getting the news is from the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, CNN or FOX which describe our times in startlingly different terms; so some of you may have a tape in your head that says these times are completely unprecedented; and others of you may be thinking that all of these things have happened before in the history of our country, and if a course correction is needed, that’s what elections are for.  We are all feeling slightly different about the world around us, but to be sure, there are many among us who are anxious, and although I can’t fix it for you, I want to say out loud that I know.
This sermon is about prophetic witness, which is to say it’s about what the Bible says to people of faith when we feel like things are not okay.
I wonder if you heard the words of the Psalm we read this morning?  “How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever?  How long will you hide your face from me?”  This is called a Psalm of lament.  Lament is mourning; lament is speaking out loud and being honest about sadness and suffering.  If you’ve ever found yourself wondering:  Where is God?  How is God allowing this to happen?  If there’s a God, why are things the way they are?  These are exactly the questions and thoughts rolling around in the head of the real person who wrote this psalm.  If it feels to you like lament is merely complaining, like it is doing nothing, consider this:  The great Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann said that “lament [is what] disrupts the illusion that everything is okay…” (Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination)  When the world is broken, lament is the birthplace of change.  Maybe you are feeling really down or really anxious today.  Some of you are not—I understand that.  But if you are…if today, your heart is with the refugee…the mourning parent…the hungry child…lament is doing something.  So let’s take a moment to hear the words of the Psalm once more, hear them prayerfully, and ask God for help—knowing that lament is the birthplace of change:
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,
and my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”;
my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.
But I trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord
because he has dealt bountifully with me.  Amen.
True lament takes a little longer than the reading of a psalm; but for now, here’s something a little more uplifting to think about…Even when suffering is going on, I believe that joy is okay.  By “joy” I mean something different than naïve happiness that pretends everything is okay; joy is the courage to hope and encourage others as a way to keep on keeping on.  Joy is how we keep our balance so that we don’t fall off a cliff of despair.  So maybe on some Sunday you’ve walked into worship with us and you’ve wondered how all these out of touch Presbyterians can be singing songs of praise as if everything is okay while people are dying, my answer to you is that worship is meant to keep us from despair.
On this point, a church full of white folks used to a quiet church service can learn a lot from Black church tradition.  You know the Black church in America was born out of an experience much more dire than what is facing any of us.  Can you imagine arriving at church as a slave or a victim of Jim Crow to be greeted by a bunch of joyful people, singing at the top of their voices, hands raised high above their heads in praise, shouting “Amen” and “Come on Preacher!”  Were they naïve or out of touch?  No way.  There is room in the Black church, maybe more than in this one, for authentic lament, but there’s also the belief that Sunday morning, the hour of power, is supposed to be about Good News, a promise of hope, a community to gather with where we remind ourselves that God is on the side of the good, and no matter what sufferings may face us on Monday, we need some joy today if we’re gonna get through it.  We can learn a lot about this from our Black sisters and brothers  “Would one of you white Presbyterians please give me an “Amen?”  Yeah.  When days are dark and times are hard, we have to encourage each other.  God has work for you to do and when you come to worship, it’s time to get ready.
There is work to do—God has work for us.  The second reading this morning is from the Prophet Jeremiah—a man of the Bible who knew a thing or two about hard times, lament, and getting to work…
Jeremiah lived in a time when his whole society had fallen apart.  The kingdom was led by feckless and immoral kings, Jerusalem had been sacked and the Temple destroyed, and most of the wealthy, capable or imaginative professional class had been forcibly moved away from the city to prevent them from mobilizing. These were indeed dark days, there was much to lament.
And when Jeremiah, who had spent his time in lament, listened for God, he heard God speaking words of hope:  “[One day] I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”  Walter Brueggemann called this “prophetic imagination.”  It matters not that things in the world may be broken—if we want them to be better we have to be able to imagine something better—the people with imagination and the courage to make a change are the prophets among us.
So another way to avoid sliding into despair is to get to work in these hard times; if you feel that things are not the way they are supposed to be, you can do something—and we can do things together…
Some of you in these days may be called to deepen your commitment to an organization that is making a difference or call your elected official until he knows who you are.  Some of you will take a fresh look at your vocational choice and how your daily work gives you a chance to witness to justice, reconciliation, or peace, or to speak the truth in love.  Some of you will dare to vary your news intake or listen to a neighbor who you know disagrees with you so you can build a relationship.  Some of you will march and protest; some will get out the vote; and some of you in these times when so many others seem anxious about the news of the day…some of you will keep doing what you’ve been doing—because the needs of affordable housing, child welfare, or gun violence are not going away.
None of us has to do everything, but everyone needs to do something when the world feels broken.  It has been proven over and over again that one of the best protections against your own despair is to get out and help someone else.  And in these times, when prophetic voices and prophetic lives are needed, don’t forget that what we’re talking about today is prophetic imagination—because when times are especially tough, God needs prophets who have got a little imagination.
Prophetic imagination is a hard thing to understand—because at its best it is supposed to be somewhat beyond our understanding.  It’s about a world and a system different than the one we’ve got, not just a repair of the present problems or an escape from them into heaven, but the vision, the imagination of a completely different way of being together, beginning with God’s justice and goodness.  Prophetic imagination is not a political idea of the left or the right, it’s a struggle for all of us to imagine what it is—and none of us do it quite right.
The critique of conservatives is that as long as one says out loud “Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior,” the daily struggle of the today’s most oppressed peoples is often an afterthought, or a good work selfishly meant to secure one’s own salvation.  But the critique of liberal Christianity can be just as harsh.  Many liberals see faith as nothing more visionary than hopscotching from one social issue to the next and praying you are on the right side of history.  There’s all kinds righteous indignation about the present, but there’s no vision that energizes toward a world that is truly better.  Prophetic imagination is supposed to do both things for us—compassion and justice for the present and the vision to imagine something wholly different.  We don’t have to be able to define what it is; but we must have the curiosity to want to imagine it.
The meal we share at the Communion Table is often thought of as an exercise in remembrance, but it is just as much and maybe even more, an act of Prophetic Imagination.  In a world so broken that the governors of the Empire, the religious authorities and the mobs in the streets were all about to put Jesus to death, he came to them with a ritual of peace and invited them to imagine a different world.  In that world there is a table, where all are fed and no one leaves hungry.  We are welcome regardless of where we or our parents were born or how much savings we have; what sexual orientation or gender identity we experience, what race or clan we claim as our heritage; and we come as sinners all, equal in the eyes of God are the ones you and I perceive as the greatest saints and the greatest villains of this earth; all meet at this table of reconciliation in the realm of God.  Can you even imagine it?  When you come to this table today, and receive your cube of bread and your sip of grape juice, what can you imagine?  What call to action are you to take; what courage do you need to adopt or continue; what forgiveness do you need to give or receive; what word of peace are you called to speak?  This is a table of prophetic imagination for the future.  What do you imagine?  Amen.