Imagination, Advent, and Christian Faith

Imagination, Advent and Christian Faith

By Reverend Gil Ott

“Prepare the way of the Lord.” In this passage, from the Gospel of Luke (3:4) in the Christian Bible, John the Baptist comes preaching to the people, urging them to prepare themselves and to have their impurities burned away. The corresponding lectionary reading from the Prophet Malachi taken from the Hebrew Scriptures, speaks of a messenger who will come to “prepare the way before me who will be as a refiner and purifier.”

In the Christian tradition, Advent is that time before Christmas when we prepare ourselves for the coming of Christ. For nearly 2000 Advents, Christians have been preparing themselves for the Advent of Christ, his promised second coming, his “return to the saints.”

I rather guess that means Christians have had no less than twenty centuries of disappointment.

Or maybe it means something else. Maybe it means that those expectant Christians—along with the rest of us—have lacked the eyes or vision to see God’s divine intrusions among us.

Peter Gomes, the minister of Memorial Church at Harvard University speaks of the Christian bible as a book of imagination. A book of imagination. He urges Christians (as well as everyone else) not to see the Bible as a book of rules or regulations, rather to see it as a book meant to speak to, to stoke, to fuel the imagination.

Ah! To fuel the imagination.

From what I can see, imagination is in short supply these days. We modern folk tend to relate more to facts and figures. We’re more into statistics than symbols. We like to keep close to that stuff we call reality. Reality, meaning only that stuff we can see and touch.

And when reality is reduced to only sensory perceptions, I think our expectations tend to shrink, to become scaled down.  We become blind to the divine intrusions among us. We become myopic. Our span of vision has become too narrow to comprehend the width and breadth of rich and diverse religious traditions that have shaped our culture.

I think our preoccupation with computers is evidence of our scarcity of imagination. I think we have convinced ourselves that we have a scarcity of facts. We need more data. Isn’t that what our political leaders and government bureaucrats tell us in explanation to our questions about pressing social and economic issues? We’re waiting for more data on those issues.

I don’t think we need more data. I mean already we have more facts than we can possibly consume. We don’t lack facts. What we lack is imagination. What we lack is courage.

What we lack are dreams and what we have is a failure of nerve, I think. A failure of nerve and no computer can give us that. Computers can indeed speak and some computers can even think, but I¹ll tell you right now, no computer will ever be able to dream.

OK, so what? 

Well, I’m telling you this because I think we’ve got a problem. We are mostly a modern, straight-thinking folk who like our reality straight-up. “Just the facts, Ma’am,” kind of folk in the words of Dragnet¹s Joe Friday.

And the problem is the bible—as well as the other great religious narratives of humanity—are “books” of imagination. They speak of extraordinary events, strange occurrences and unexpected things and yet most of us remain enamored with the ordinary, the natural, the expected and predictable. Even the most faithful among us is suspicious of claims of angels, expectant virgins, songs in the night because we are a rational, analytical, skeptical people.

But I am also wondering if it would not be equally as truthful to say we are a limited people. Yes, of course it is important to face facts. But I wonder if we have a far-too-limited notion of facts.

I have a friend who teaches at Oxford University in England. I met him while studying at Yale. Anthony believes it to be a fact that the game of Cricket is the most engaging, fascinating sport played by humanity. Cricket. Has anyone here ever witnessed a Cricket match?  They can last days and are utterly incomprehensible to me. And as exciting as watching paint dry. While at Yale I took him to a football game. Not just any football game. The Yale-Harvard game to be specific. The Game! He found American football to be as unengaging as I found Cricket. His explanation was that I simply wasn’t English. Mine to him, was that he simply wasn¹t American, each of us having been corrupted by our own experiences.

Faith, we are told by theologian James Whitehead, is the enduring ability to imagine life in a certain way. The stories and writings of the great religious narratives of human history—and most certainly the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures—fund the imagination. Churches/Temples/Mosques, Meeting Houses, etc. are where we gather to listen to these stories, read these books of imagination, so that we might more luxuriously fund the imagination. You will note how rich the Christian biblical texts are, especially for us during Advent in December. The Bible during Advent keeps trying to pry us loose from our tight grip on the present and to push us to stand on tiptoes as we greet God’s intruding future.

You know, in this humdrum, everyday world in which we normally make our way, poor unmarried moms and their babies face bleak prospects. The December heavens stay dark and Christmas Carols arrive via FM radio, not by angels. And God stays safely aloof from the world.

But in Christian Churches, in December, otherwise thin imaginations get assaulted, funded, stoked, poetically pushed by much richer fare than is normally offered. Come to church during Advent, and we will load you down with metaphors, enrich your thought, considerably broaden your notion of what can and can¹t be. Imagination means having the kind of mind that is hospitable to facts that are usually ignored. Imagination is a willingness to take risks that the world may not be as it seems. In imagination thought takes wings and rises above mere storing of facts and becomes adventure.

One reason I talk of this in my December sermons is that I’m sure some of the folks in my audience are asking themselves questions like “Will God cure my cancer?” “Will this Christmas be a time to be vividly reminded of the painful divisions within my own family, or might it be a time to heal those divisions?” Maybe they’ve got some difficult decision to make that is on hold until after the holidays. Maybe there is a change they need to make in their life, a change that is risky, so tough, they are paralyzed by fear. People tell them to face the facts, but they wonder. People reassure them, but they are not sure. And then a poor woman named Mary breaks into song. A baby cries in the barn out back. Herod the king gets nervous.

Imagine. A whole new world. Imagine, tomorrow not closed but open to the incursions of a living God. Imagine your life caught up in something bigger than you. Imagine.

Amen.

Gil Ott, MDIV, STM, is Pastor of two small churches in the Adirondack Mountains of NY. He is a graduate of the Yale Divinity School.

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