Sermons

As a parent my children were always privileged by my imagination. Some children have fathers who help with homework or coach their team or provide a sense of strong assurance. Mine got the joy of fishing stories and spinning of yarn. Some might call them tall tales or exaggeration; I believe it is best understood as having no interest in being dull. Why be dull?

For instance, seeking to compliment our youngest on his bright mind and advanced understanding, I explained to him how the hamster in his head is a really fast runner. The hamster in your head runs on a wheel and when you are smart and you know big thoughts that means the hamster is running really fast. So instead of saying. "you're smart," I said, "boy that hamster is running fast today."

I thought this was fun and quite funny.  The pediatrician, not so much.  Taking David in for a visit, the pediatrician was checking his ear.  He pushed the scope away and asked, "can you see it?"  "See what," the doctor said?  Without a blink of doubt David said, "the hamster.  Can you see the hamster in my brain?"  As if he could tell this was the work of a dad, the doctor chose to glare at me and said, "there is no hamster in your head." 

For a time all my children have been under the impression that I was a rock-n-roll star, a professional basketball player, a spy.  Like my grandfather I have convinced grandchildren that I walked to school, barefoot, through the snow, uphill both ways.  When our eldest grandchild came of an age where questions became plentiful, he learned to verify my answers.  Asked my age I said, "99.  I am 99."  Off he ran and then came back to say, "Gramma says your 50."

When our Malawian daughter Ruth came to live with us, she too sought to verify everything.  On her first Halloween I told her, “tonight you will dress as a princess and walk the neighborhood, and people will hand you candy if you ask them for candy.”  Off she ran and returned with an obvious conundrum: sometimes the crazy things he says are real.

It is for this reason that my favorite Dr. Seuss book was his first, And to Think I Saw it on Mulberry Street.  A young boy offered a very dull description of his walk home from school; yet, bid to open his eyes, look around, see what you can't see, then his description became a wild account filled with elephants and marching bands and fire trucks.  Even as a boy I believed there is so much to the world if you just take a look.  And if you really want to see things, use your imagination.

Ten years ago, Pixar made a very imaginative movie, Inside Out.  Our eldest son demanded we watch it.  He was quite persistent and pushy so I held off as long as I could, which is the second gift I gave to my children, orneriness. 

What a great movie so imaginative.  The movie seeks to convey what happens inside us when we are happy, sad, afraid, disgusted, and angry.  Each of these primal senses are represented by a colorful person.  Joy is yellow, anger red, sadness blue, disgust is green, fear is purple. They all take turns at a control board guiding their person.

I thought this was a bit of pop psychology, an affirmation of feeling, being guided by emotions.  Nothing wrong with this. Just not very outside the box.  I hunkered down to be manipulated, cajoled into a sense of respect, valuation of feelings.  But then the pictured changed.  If I remember right, I exclaimed words not fitting for a Pixar film.  Stunned, I kept saying, no way.  Can't be. But it was

This was not a cute tale of a young girl, Riley, moving to a new city, this was an extremely imaginative, incredibly accurate vision of Platonic philosophy, this was neo-Platonic metaphysics, Augustine, Aquinas, the medieval mystics with a plot and great animation.  Stunned I just laughed.  How is this possible?  Pixar? With each scene unfolding with circles illumined as memory, stored and retrieved, with memory castles and oblivion the achievement of the film grew and grew. 

When joy and sadness head off on a quest to save core memories and find edges of consciousness, it was nearly too much.  Yet the greatest part of the film was the centrality of memory, memory being the key to all things.

To understand the power of this you may need a quick refresher on modern philosophy.  Beginning with Newton and Descartes and Hume and Kant, the soul was changed from a wild struggle of memory, understanding, and will, the twisting turning writhing soul was exchanged for a mind.  What was a soul became a mind.  A mind which worked like a machine.  Exploration and eternity were put aside for what we could measure and determine and mostly control here and now. 

The greatest part of this modern view is to see memory as a kind of storehouse of items and objects that can be accessed and controlled.  Think computer storage- memory cards.  Memory went from being the beautiful, the good, and the true in us, memory went from being alive, to a set of dead specimens behind glass, in jars on shelves; the firing of a synapse.  And we should not paint too bleak a picture.  Sacrificing memory for reason and logic we reached the moon, broke the speed of sound, smashed the atom. But at a cost.

For to achieve this, not only was memory cast aside, but so was emotion.  Objective observation was now the gold standard.  No quest of love, no heroic journey of conflict and contradiction.  There is a reason why we have invented machines to be human.  You can if you see being human is like being a machine.

With this refresher maybe now you can appreciate how stunned I was.  For not only did this little movie resurrect ancient wisdom, paint a living image of the soul, and do this in less than two hours, but it also showed how emotion shapes memory, changes memory, has a power no law can determine.  Not only did they get Plato right, but they asked Descartes to take a break, move to the side for a bit. Inside Out undid 500 years of philosophy and resurrected Socrates and Plotinus.  Wow.

Each time I have preached on our passage today I have struggled to convey what the movie did so well.  I struggle because you need to undo your imagination, how you remember forgotten things, you must turn them upside down to see what Jesus calls us to see.  The light, the lampstand, the darkness, and the soul.

On your cover is a set of pictures from the cathedral in Santiago de Compostella.  At the top of the dome above the center of transept, you will find an image of the trinity, a triangle with one eye.  Yet, beneath that eye is a clear story, a set of windows bringing light to the mysterious darkness of the sanctuary.  It's hard to see this with how limited our imagination has become.  But the eye and the clear story represent two types of light.  The natural sight is the clearstory; the eye is immaterial light, the light of the first day, the light separated from darkness before there was a sun, a moon, or stars.

Jesus says if the light in you is darkness that's bad.  Not good.  Sometimes we can hear claims of Jesus where what he says is contradictory and we can shrug it off as above our pay grade, or crazy things in the bible, or Jesus is not talking plainly.  But we don't have to dismiss this or wait for the sermon to be over.  We don't have to pass over this if we see this in terms of memory, the ancient view of memory and the soul.

Before we get there, it is important to differentiate how the types of memory come to us.  You walk into a room, you smell something, there is a song and suddenly you are filled with laughter and joy and happiness.  Suddenly you are caught up in a good memory.  This is light inside us.  But then you can walk into a room, smell something, hear a song and suddenly you are wrapped in barbed wire, weighed down by demons.  This is the darkness in us. 

For the ancients, memory was darkness and light.  Memory filled us.  Woe to the one whose soul's light is darkness.  They would have got that.  Darkness is not immorality or sin or falsity.  Darkness is the tragic, despair, sorrow; the hard memory we cannot shake.  How many times have you remembered something you desperately want to forget?

If you watch the movie Inside Out and you know what they are doing, then you will see the way memories are illumined or darkened.  They did such a great job revealing the ancient view of the soul, the view Jesus is offering when he speaks of a lampstand.  The movie is told around a lampstand.  Crazy.  But what is crazier is when they shifted from philosophy to theology.  I distinctly remember thinking, no.  They can't.  And then they did.

As the story of Riley the twelve-year-old girl uprooted from Minnesota to San Francisco, as her childhood memories are rattled, kept and lost, there is a great claim, an image worthy of Jesus.  Joy realizes she can't keep memory free of sadness; she must let the child risk the possibility of joy and sorrow, love and hate, freedom and order.  She must not lose memory; but she must let memory be born anew.  Riley leaves dreaming innocence for the ambiguity of life where she must rise and risk, try, fail, and try again.

Not all the time, not at every moment, and not with each one, but the chances are good a twelve-year-old at Camp Johnsonburg this summer will discover life is a risk, an adventure, a path of wild imagination; life is beyond what we can see or determine.  Innocent emotions will become complex and ambiguous.  Some will not.  In the end some will be as much of a knucklehead as they were in the beginning.  That's okay.  Just consider for a moment though you are the ones who are creating places where memories are not only made, but where the simple memory of innocence will be reborn unto the possibilities of life and love, mercy and joy.  And it could be that the one who finds new life this summer is you.

The soul is filled with memories. They come to us; they come and go.  You're not a memory machine; you are so much more than a brain.  Learning how to welcome the light, learning how to navigate the darkness, this is not knowledge, nor will power. This is the eternal in us, the light and darkness of the first day.  Remember Jesus said, don't be filled with darkness.  Be full of light  Or the great claim of John, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness doesn't overcome it. Put your light on a lampstand.

It is true there are no hamsters in your head.  But it is just as true that life is so richer for those who are more curious than certain, more imaginative than sure, more merciful than judgmental.

We are ever being born anew, ever being called from the fears and demons that drag us down.  We just don't always listen.

There is light that shines in us.  Bid it welcome.  Look to what is good and true and beautiful and be born anew.  Just like Riley.  Just like the camper who finds their heart filled with courage and joy.  Let it be so for us as well. Amen.      

Speaker: Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

June 15, 2025

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