Romans 5:1-5; 1 John 4:4-14
Who here this morning
likes to eat pancakes? Especially when they are all greatly gooped up
with butter and syrup? And who here
this morning also loves to make this meal? Since pancakes are one of the things I can
actually cook, I certainly do!
Years ago, I would use
one particular bowl for the batter. It
wasn’t fancy, just basic dark blue and made of some kind of hard plastic. But it was my go-to bowl for one specific
and functional reason – it was molded with a perfect lip. The batter poured so nicely over it and onto
the skillet. And I found that a good pour was quite
important to making just the right sized golden, fluffy flapjacks.
That simple, well
molded bowl comes to mind now and again when I think about how God. More specifically, about how God pours
perfect love upon each one of us every single day. This doesn’t exactly make us light and
fluffy (especially if we’ve been eating too many pancakes!) but it does fill us
with essential ingredients such as security, comfort, uplift and hope.
But how does it
happen? How does God pour perfect love
upon us? This love that we believe in
through Jesus Christ and that is a constant part of the great mix of our daily
lives?
The Apostle Paul
reminds us that this sacred gift is graciously poured upon us by the power of
the Holy Spirit. This can seem like a
fine sounding but otherwise abstract statement, so this morning I invite us to consider today one
particular way I strongly believe the Holy Spirit does this outpouring. I invite us to consider how the necessary
“lip” of God’s great big bowl of love is the spiritual gift of imagination.
The Rev. Peter Gomes, late minister of Memorial Church at Harvard
University, rightly urges us not to regard the Bible as a book of rules and
regulations. We should instead consider
it a book meant to free our imaginations, to stir us up. Throughout these sacred Scriptures, we read
of all sorts of wonderful, totally unexpected events happening in the context
of God’s great love. And without the
gracious spiritual gift of our imagination, we’d never really be able to relate
to such happenings and to appreciate the full pour of God’s truth.
Imagination, then, transports
us beyond our strict focusing on facts and figures, rules and regulations. It
folds deeper, creative comprehension of what is holy and real into lives. It is, as Albert Einstein said himself,
“more important than knowledge … for knowledge is limited to what we now know
and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever
will be to know and understand.”
So, the words of the
Bible teach us knowledge of God’s love.
We are taught that we are from God, that love is from God, and that if
we love one another God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. This is what we read, process with our
minds and emotions, come to believe and therefore what we “know.” But it’s the ongoing outpouring of our Spirit-sped
imaginations that translates this knowledge into our everyday understandings
and service. It’s what inspires our
faith and opens us up to realizing that God’s love is immeasurable, that it
truly embraces the whole world.
Sadly, I believe most
of us, most of the time, expend a lot of energy suppressing our
imaginations. This isn’t necessarily
done intentionally, it’s just we are more culturally trained to dull this spiritual
gift in favor of disciplining our lives around details, order and control. When imagination does manage to overwhelm
whatever we are focused on (such as when we find ourselves daydreaming) we
usually perceive it as an interruption.
We’ll then have some anxiety about having lost time to be thinking about
or doing what we were “supposed” to be thinking about and doing.
I believe we should
instead accept the interruption and pause to reflect on why the Holy Spirit
stirred in a particular way and time.
We should ask ourselves what it is about God and God’s love that may be
coming through in imaginative translation.
Speaking of God’s love
imaginatively coming through to a person’s life … there is a particularly good
fictional story of this. How many of
you read or watched one movie version or another of Charles’ Dickens classic,
“A Christmas Story” in recent weeks? Let
me ask you … what were those
ghosts? Representations of preternatural
beings, or, could it be they represented figments of Scrooge’s God-stirred
imagination?
Jacob Marley appears to
interrupt Scrooge’s lamentable life.
This interruption was to warn him about the eternal peril of his having
lived in such a selfishly unloving way all his days. Do you remember Scrooge’s response? He’s shaken, but not entirely convinced that
he hasn’t simply hallucinated. He tries
to dismiss the interruption based on what he knows it could be.
But something greater
than everything in Scrooge’s knowledge ledger kept overcoming him. I’m fine with interpreting it as his
imagination. And so came the visits of
three more spirits, who, each in their own way, poured the truth of holy love
upon Scrooge’s calloused heart. In the
end, ‘ol Ebenezer (whose name, by the way, means ‘stone of help’ in the Hebrew
language) becomes a totally changed human being, one who joyfully exhibits the
truth of transforming love by becoming a help to others. Why do we all relate so well and find
ourselves inspired by his story?
Because our imaginations help us make profound connections with it.
Last Monday evening,
our Spirit fed imaginations were honed in on the miraculous, world interrupting
reality of our Savior’s birth. To keep
the peaceful beauty and holy power of that silent night aglow within us, we
need to foster our imaginations. When a
spiritual tap interrupts you, don’t swat it away as if an annoyance. Even
if just for a couple minutes, take the time to notice. Receive the inspiring outpour. Let it
further form God’s love within and around you. Maybe jot it down or doodle it for reflection
later in the day. I do this most often
through writing little Haiku poems. And
as I prepare sermons week in and week out there are many random moments when
imaginative connections with the Biblical text I’m studying are made. These quick inspirations reveal relevance as
they companion my focus on the plain words and historical context of the
writing. When they happen, I usually send a text to my
email account to keep track of how our Lord is teaching me fresh
interpretation. Not while I’m driving,
though, of course … though I have pulled over to the side of the road many a
time so as not to forget an insight I’ve received.
As Einstein noted, our
imagination is not just for our own personal growth. God chooses to pour out creative love into
all of our imaginations so as to fill the whole world. This is
a truth Bob Goff writes about in his New York Times bestselling book, Love
Does. I’ve only read a synopsis of
and a couple quotes from this book, but enough to know this is pretty inspiring
stuff.
Goff is a rather
successful individual. He is an attorney
in his own law firm. He also teaches
non-profit law at Pepperdine Law School, and business law at Point Loma
Nazarene University. He is most widely
known, however, for founding a nonprofit human rights organization operating in
Uganda and India called Restore International.
And in his book, he’s
written about one particular place that has helped him in all his successful endeavors
– Tom Sawyer Island at Disneyland. Specifically,
a little picnic table at the end of a pier across from a pirate ship. He considers this one of his offices. He writes that there is no admission price
to being in this place where people of all ages can do countless creative
things. He’s reached the conclusion that
somewhere within each of us, we all have a desire to find our own Tom Sawyer
Islands, where “the stuff of imagination, whimsy, and wonder are easier to live
out—not just think about or put off until next time.”
Most importantly, he knows such open, freely imaginative
space can help us receive vital outpourings from God and lead us to accept
faithful responsibility in the world.
He writes, “On Tom Sawyer Island, I reflect on God, who didn't choose
someone else to express his creative presence to the world … but chooses
ordinary people like us to get things done.”[i] Is there some space in your life that is like
your own particular Tom Sawyer Island?
As 2012 ends, let’s
all give thanks for all the ways the power of the Holy Spirit poured God’s love
upon us and out into the world through our imaginations. Let’s locate our own Tom Sawyer Islands, as
well as become more open to imaginative interruptions. By doing so, we find ourselves living with
gratitude and gladly getting stirred up to share with one another and the world
the great love of God in Jesus Christ.
Amen.
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