The Christian imagination

Notes of a talk given at Hilton Church of Scotland, Inverness on Sunday 7th October 2012

Readings:

Genesis 2:5-17; John 20:11-16; Revelation 22:1-5

I was sitting at the morning service a couple of Sundays ago, when the thought came to mind with regard to this serve:  ‘Talk to them about imagination.’ And so I will. But this is not a lecture – simply a personal reflection on the place of the imagination in our lives as Christian people.

God is creator

Our starting place is the fact that God is a creator. God uses his imagination to see what could be, and then he brings it into being.  Both the cosmos and the great story of which we are part. God has seen in his imagination the whole of human history, and each one of us is called to help fulfil God’s dream.

We are creators

The singer Michael Card has said ‘As created beings, one of our greatest treasures, perhaps the dearest fingerprint of God in us is our ability to imagine.’ J. R. R. Tokien wrote ‘we are made in the image and likeness of a Maker’ and so we are called to use our imagination, to see, and to bring into being what is possible.  And poet Chad Walsh wrote that the artist ‘can honestly see himself as a kind of earthly assistant to God…carrying on the delegated work of creation, making the fullness of creation fuller.’

That’s all of us

Now we might feel that we’re surely just talking about people with particular gifts, skills, talents.

But no, I believe we are all of us called upon to be ‘earthly assistants to God.’ All of us can use our imaginations, all of us can be creators in the things we make and do, and the way we express ourselves to others. All of us have the God-given ability of imagining how our part of the world can be enriched, and working with God to bring that enrichment into being. Most of us cook, or garden, or work in the community, or help other people, or solve problems, or hold down a job through which we help make the world a better place. All of us can bring light, joy, order, beauty into a chaotic fallen world.

But of course it is also true of artists, musicians, poets, writers, dramatists who have the gift of inspiring us, and helping us to see things in a different way. At one there was among certain Christians a fear of the imagination, a feeling that somehow it wasn’t quite right to use your imaginations. Some Victorian Christians wouldn’t read novels because they weren’t ‘true.’  But in reality fiction and poetry can be truer than things which claim to present the facts. We need the facts of our faith, and the facts which science and mathematics reveal to us – but it is our imagination which makes the facts real, makes them live in us.

Isn’t the Bible negative about imagination?

What about the fact that some verses in the Bible seem to be pretty negative about the imagination?

Genesis 6:5 ‘Everything they thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil’ (New Living Translation))

Jeremiah 3:17 ‘At that time they shall call Jerusalem the throne of the Lord; and all the nations shall be gathered unto it, to the name of the Lord, to Jerusalem: neither shall they walk any more after the imagination of their evil heart.’ (KJV)

Notice that these verses aren’t downing the imagination as such – they remind us that like almost every gift God gives us our imagination can be used for good or evil.

Into the idyllic garden came the shadow of sin which affects every part of every human being. Our imagination is no exception.  Human hearts have imagined acts of incredible power and beauty; human hearts have also created Auschwitz and the atomic bomb, and devised the atrocity of the Twin Towers.  And the absence godly imagination is sometimes visible in the arts and music and architecture.

And many of us can find evidence in our own lives of the misuse of the imagination – we can find ourselves gripped by negative, lustful, destructive fearful imaginings from which the better part of us shrinks.

The glory of the Christian message is that there is hope. Hope for every failure resulting from the Fall, including the failure of the imagination.

John 20:11-16. Mary looks through at her tears at the figure outside the tomb. She thought he was the gardener. N. T Wright points out the significance of this. The risen Christ is the gardener, the one who through his death and resurrection undoes the spell of darkness, and puts the garden of creation, the garden of individual hearts to rights.

So how are we to deal with the dark imaginings in our own hearts which sometimes we feed, sometimes we try to push aside?  I think we need to face up to these dark imaginings, acknowledge that they come from us, listen to what they tell us about our needs and longings and bring ourselves with all our darkness and failure to God, asking him to show us what is possible, to bring light into our darkness, and to enable us to bring light, order, beauty into our fallen world.

1.Imagination in the Bible

There’s plenty of reference in the Bible to musical and artistic creativity and craftsmanship. But have you thought how much of the Bible is actually imaginative literature? The whole amazing story arc from the garden at the beginning of history to the garden at the end. Poetry. Prophecy. Visions. Metaphors. Dramas. Brilliant storytelling.

Leland Ryken says ‘The point is not simply that the Bible allows for the imagination as a form of communication. It is rather that the biblical writers and Jesus found it impossible to communicate the truth of God without using the resources of the imagination.’

What’s the purpose of this? To make real in us the bigness and wonder of God.

‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’  (Psalm 23) We read reflectively. We enter into the scene imaginatively. We enter into the emotions of the shepherd. We imagine ourselves as those sheep, guided, protected, and in our imagining God reaches out to us and assures us that he is our shepherd, we are his sheep, and we sense his call to follow him.

What about the prodigal son? (Luke 25) A brilliant piece of storytelling from Jesus. But also a reflection of the call to godly imagination.  The boy leaves home, motivated by a dream of success and indulgence. But the dream crumbles around him. He finds himself feeding the pigs, and there he hears the whisper of a greater dream, calling him home, and his imagination is transformed and he sees a better imagining, focussed on the father’s house and he makes for home. And he could never have imagined the father’s undignified run towards him down the dusty road, arms outstretched.

The facts about our need may get our backs up. It was the story of a stolen lamb which convicted King David of his monumental failure.  (2 Samuel 12) Story touches us, and speaks more deeply than ideas. And whatever we imagine of the goodness of God, we believe that, as the Prodigal Son found, the reality is greater than all our imaginings.

Something I have found powerful is the fact that there are pre-echoes of aspects of Jesus and what he has done for us in the Old Testament. For instance Joseph, rejected by his brothers and ultimately transformed into the Egyptian prime minister who is the means of saving them and their father. The one we have rejected coming to our rescue.  The whole story is alive with correspondences with the Jesus story. As we enter in to the brother’s story, and their encounter with Joseph, so we walk our own journey in relation to Jesus. For me, the three most dramatic and moving words in the Bible are where Prime Minister Joseph reveals his identity to his brother: ‘I am Joseph.’

2.Imagination in the Arts

I guess all of us will have experiences of arts or film or music which has somehow enriched us and shown us things as they really are, and drawn us closer to the light.

We owe deep gratitude to Christian artists who express their Christian imagination in their works.  It is important to say that though the best art lifts us up to the light, the best art does not deny the darkness. The best art, like the Bible, looks unflinchingly at life as it is, in all its chaos, but whispers that there is a better dream, the dream centred on the father’s house.

And art by Christian artists need not be explicitly Christian. Every whisper which draws us towards the light and reminds us that there is hope, and redemption and glory comes from God.

Look at the painting on the wall of the church here at Hilton. That dove – what it particularly suggests to me is that it is borne up as if on a current of air, and I see myself in that dove lifted up by the Holy Spirit.

I find myself particularly enriched by poems.  Two sections of poetry which have spoken particularly powerfully to me both come from the poem The Wreck of the Deutschland by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee

And at the end:

Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east,

Each of us must discover what speaks to us; or rather discover through which art forms we hear God speaking to us?

Francis Schaeffer wrote ‘Christian artists [and we can add those who appreciate the work of artists] do not need to be threatened by fantasy and imagination. The Christian is the really free person whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.’ 

3. Imagination in everyday life

a. in our spiritual practice. We use our imagination as we read the Bible prayerfully and reflectively, thinking ourselves imaginatively as we have discussed into the situations we’re reading. ‘We need to clean our windows,’ said the writer J. R. R. Tolkien ‘so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity.’  

Someone has said of reflective reading and prayer that ‘It allows the person of Christ to penetrate into places that the intellect does not touch. It brings Jesus into our hearts. It engages our feelings. It enflames us with ideals of generous service.’ Imagination is an agent of change. 

Someone else has said the same thing in a different way:  ‘If reason changes our minds, the imagination changes our hearts. It helps us feel the truth, not just know it. We can know full well what we ought to do.  But touching the imagination can inspire us with a vision of God’s reality that will compel us to act.’

b. as we empathise with others. Jesus had compassion on people. Sometimes he had God-given insights into their situations as we his followers can also receive. But Jesus’ whole mission was about empathy – he came among us to find out what it’s like to be human. He walked in our shoes.

And as we follow we are called to walk in shoes of others. To get to know them and their situation, and using our imagination to feel what it’s like to be them. And imagination also helps us to see their potential as God’s precious people regardless of how they may present in their appearance or behaviour.

c. as we see in the evidence of creation.  Over the last few centuries the misconception has arisen that though we can describe how creation works in scientific terms there are no explanations for the deeper question which asks why creation is there in the first place. We marvel at the beauty of things, but we see no guiding hand behind them. But once we reconnect our sense of wonder at the universe with our belief in God, then we see everything there is as an expression of God. The beauty of a rose, the beauty of a mountain, the beauty of a human being reflects the beauty of God.

Imagination helps us see the world as a sacrament, a physical thing which brings us near to God. This is what the philosopher   D.C. Schindler means when he says ‘The Christian imagination is a way of life, and this is because we might say it represents the point of intersection between Christianity and the world. In this case a starved imagination represents a crisis indeed.’

The world is charged with the grandeur of God (G. M. Hopkins)

In fact, imagination is an essential element of faith itself.

 ‘Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see.’ (Hebrews 11:1)  In faith we imagine the future. We turn from negative and dark imaginations, we envisage God present in our future and the future of the world. We envisage God with us tomorrow, whatever tomorrow may bring.  We’re called to help God’s kingdom come in partnership with God.  That’s a moment by moment thing, as we ask God to show us the possibilities and then pray and work them into being.  Our minister Duncan’s imagination as well as his faith was working at full strength when he envisaged the Lighthouse Project which has converted the former manse into a coffee shop and community resource. And now, the dream has become a reality.

We shouldn’t starve our spiritual imagination. See the possible. See how, in small ways, moment by moment, day by day we can roll back the effects of the Fall, and bring light and beauty and joy into people’s lives and into our communities.

Remember Mary in the garden, She thinks the risen Jesus is the gardener. And he is, in the profoundest sense, come to set to right the garden of creation. This is crucial to us as we envisage tomorrow in the garden of our hearts, in the garden of Hilton Church, in the garden of Inverness.  The gardener is there, and so although there are tears in our eyes, we need not fear as we’re confronted with the effects of the Fall.  The gardener is among us, and he invites us to dream a dream of infinite possibility.

And that dream, of course, is God’s dream. So while we are aware of the ever-present dangers of imagination – the danger of focussing on darkness, the danger of imagining the coming of our own kingdom rather than the coming of his kingdom – we need not fear. What we must do is day by day, moment by moment ask God to baptise our imaginations in his Holy Spirit, so that we recognise his dreams, and are prompted when our imaginings are out of synch with God’s imaginings.

Conclusion

Revelation 22. The end of the story-arc. The story which began in a garden was decisively redirected by the event which took place in that Easter-morning garden reaches a conclusion in the symbolic garden city of John’s vision and there is healing and goodness and peace, and the presence of Christ. The kingdom, whose gradual coming is seen in and among us as the Spirit moves, has fully come. This is the perfection which drives our imagination.

Isaiah 2:4: ‘The Lord will mediate between nations and will settle international disputes. They will hammer their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will no longer fight against nation, nor train for war anymore.’

Isaiah 11: 6-9: 

The wolf will live with the lamb, 

the leopard will lie down with the goat,

the calf and the lion and the yearling together;

and a little child will lead them. 

The cow will feed with the bear,

their young will lie down together,

and the lion will eat straw like the ox.  

The infant will play near the cobra’s den,

and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest. 

They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain,

for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

How’s that for God-inspired imagination?  How about this …..

‘You, you may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one, I hope some day you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.’

This is John Lennon’s Imagine, with his vision of the coming of ‘a brotherhood of man’, where there is ‘no need for greed or hunger’ because people share the earth and its resources, a world where there is no conflict or killing and everyone lives in peace.

It sounds rather like John’s and Isaiah’s visions of the kingdom come, doesn’t it? But how does John Lennon envisage this united world being created?  Through the abolition of religion, and the abolition of nations, and all the things people fight over.

‘Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try No hell below us, above us only sky.’ And ‘no religion too.’

It’s a poignant vision because history and our knowledge of our own natures, to say nothing of the Bible assure us that we can’t fulfil this vision without help from outside.

But what Lennon expresses in Imagine is something almost every single human being longs for on our clearer seeing days. We long for peace and brotherhood and sisterhood and harmony. Some of us dream about it. In the far country, we hear whispers of home.

And as Christians we recognise that religion is often part of the problem not the solution.

But we can go out into the community with the good news that the dream which John Lennon expressed is God’s dream too, and that God’s hand guides the story arc, that he plans to bring humanity, all of us who will accept the invitation, to the garden city of all our dreams.

And he calls us now to come to our senses like the Prodigal among the pigs, and open our hearts not to embrace a dry religious system, but to allow God’s dream to grip our imagination. God invites us to come home.  God invites us to go down to the potting shed, pick up a fork, and look to the gardener for direction. God invites us to dream the dream of the one whose dream, we are.  Today. Tomorrow.  And every day until the dreamer’s dream is finally realised.