Intern Minister Cara Fortner's sermon urges us to harness our passions, grief, and rage and exercise our prophetic imaginations to call out the wrongs in this world and work toward a more healed and whole expression of beloved community.
UUFairfax Sermons
120124 Sermon Podcast- The Audacity of Imagination by Cara Fortner
- Welcome to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fairfax. We hope you enjoy this sermon from a recent Sunday worship service. - Years ago, very pregnant. I was lying in bed having just gotten back to sleep after a night of discomfort, which kept me awake for the most of the night. It was quiet, my husband was sleeping soundly next to me and the dogs were unmoved, but something woke me. And this time it wasn't the sciatica pain or the unholy heaviness of my legs, which made moving them a Herculean effort. My body was angry at its lack of rest and now having been woken up for no apparent reason. But my mommy senses were tingling. I heaved myself out of bed and into the hallway. I turned my head to see my three-year-old standing at the sink. Raise of the early morning sunlight coming through the bathroom window. She was standing on tiptoe at the step stool, leaning over, and then I noticed the water everywhere. The sink was full, water was spilling down the sides of the sink and onto the tile floor. I ran to the faucet, turned off the water, turned to my cherub-faced child and said, "What are you doing?" She looked at me and said, "I'm gonna go swimming." (audience laughing) I stood confounded, unable to process what I found myself in. I unclogged the sink for she had stuffed a toy in there and the water began to drain. And the water on the floor was maybe about a centimeter high and maybe more, but the lip at the doorway did its job of keeping the water from going out into the carpeted area of the hallway. But if I had waited seconds longer, it would have definitely flooded the carpet. Baby, I said, "We can't go swimming in a bathroom. "Bathrooms aren't made for that." She pouted, disappointed. It would have been fun. I nodded, it would have been. I tell this story because our imaginations give us both the best and the worst ideas. And three-year-olds managed to do that the best, better than anyone else. And they have just enough working understanding of the world around them to put into action that which they imagine. It's why three-year-olds are exhausting. (audience laughing) But when you step back and look at the world around us, so much of it comes from this beautiful gift of imagination. It is the creative spark of the human spirit. It's how we have built magnificent works of engineering and architecture, buildings that scrape the sky, rockets that take us to the moon, telescopes that show us the impossible magnitude of space, technology that enables us to talk to people across the globe. It's how we've created art and written stories and songs and poems that have confronted us, empowered us, challenged us, comforted us, and given us insight to others' perspectives and experiences. It's how we've built systems of government, law, and order programs to benefit the good, the greater good. And while our imaginations have given us some pretty amazing things, they have also led to some horrific ones like war and genocide, Holocaust. These came from the same creative spark of imagination, the rooted in greed or fear. When we are afraid, our imaginations can run wild, creating monsters that aren't there. Much like how a three-year-old might imagine a monster underneath their bed, the unknown of the darkness, stimulating a response in the mind, creating more fear than these kinds of monsters aren't real but they can feel real and they give characterization to the fear of the unknown, the darkness in which we cannot see. Years ago, I served on the board at the UU Reston Church and we were each asked to place an item on our table to remind us of what grounds us in our leadership and our faith. A woman I served with had a frame that said, don't believe everything you think. It's a good saying. Our minds have all kinds of thoughts, many of which are based on perception. What we perceive to be true is so often, so far off the mark, it's incredible. Like swimming in a bathroom, some ideas just don't hold water. Our perceptions can lead our imaginations to some very interesting places, especially in our attempts to understand the world around us. We have attempted to answer big questions like, why are we here? What happens after we die? How did we get here? God, God's divinity, still small voice, creative power of the universe, these are just a few of the ways we have expressed as a people a hope for understanding these big questions. The way we think about God is really the greatest audacity of our imaginations. God is the word we have given to explain the unexplainable, based on our limited perceptions and on all that we don't understand, in the darkness under our beds, we have created answers. And some of us have created a God who will judge us, who obliterates our enemies, and will redeem those who believe in him. Some of us see God as one who would become human and give his life in order to save his fallen children from the eternal torments of hell. There are others who see God as a liberator, a chainbreaker, a wayfinder for the lost, or as one with a special tenderness and hope for the poor and depressed. There's the way I think about God, which is as a process or as a movement. That is all around us, which we can reach out to and with which we can participate to make the experience of life more meaningful and more loving. There are multiple versions of God just in the Judeo-Christian traditions alone. Meister Eckhart, a 14th century theologian, once preached the words, "I pray God to rid me of God." Elizabeth Johnson, a Catholic theologian, asks, "Why would you want to eliminate God "the way you rid your house of termites?" Because, she says, Meister Eckhart thought the narrow, puny notions of G-O-D, many people carry around in their imaginations are both unworthy of God and damaging to the human spirit, damaging to the human spirit. Bad theology has caused so much damage throughout history, including justifying slavery, condemning, consenting love between adults and casting women as not much more than meat for men and their children to consume. And as far as we have come, we are still nowhere near shedding these insidious, maliciously formed ideas which hold people down and elevate the powerful. I am enraged. Luckily, the Hebrew Bible is familiar with rage and there is much wisdom there. Plenty to rethink, I will also add. And if you want a feminist perspective, I highly recommend the book standing again at Sinai by Judith Plaskow, where she imagines women were present during the writing of the Torah and whose perspectives were incorporated, not just written as peripheral characters in men's lives. But the Hebrew Bible is full of imagination. There's the apocalyptic literature in the book of Daniel, the wisdom literature made up of the book of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. It's just bursting with allegory and metaphors to help us struggling people, to deal with the difficulties of their lives. The Psalms and the book of Lamentations are ripe with revenge fantasies of a wronged and angry people. And the prophets are defined by the use of their imaginations to call out the injustices they witnessed in their time and demand better from their people for a brighter future. The Hebrew Bible is written from the perspective of an oppressed people, a people who know rage and injustice. And it is full of what Walter Bruggemann, a prolific writer and biblical scholar, calls the royal consciousness, which is the pervading worldview of the dominance of those in power, who through politics and affluence, economic affluence, not only aligned themselves with God, but are empowered by a God who legitimizes them and what they do. The patriarchy, colonization, consumerism, white supremacy, these are all markers of today's royal consciousness. The dominant powers that pervade our everyday lives in discrete, constant, unassuming ways, along with in-your-face freedom-taking practices like regulating women's bodies and criminalizing black and brown people for merely existing. Though Bruggemann might say more precisely that Christian nationalism is today's royal consciousness, because he relates it so deeply to God being used as a way to uphold dominance, affluence, and power. Prophetic imagination is the counter to this royal consciousness, and it has endured through millennia. Of those of us unwilling to let the horrors around us caused by fellow humans stand, prophetic imagination calls on our passions, our grief, our rage, and our knowledge of justice and not just blind justice of the courts, but knowing what is right and what is wrong based on the deep connection to these passions and emotions that we have. Prophetic imagination is the calling out of deep injustice based on experience of anguish and a hope for a better future. I wonder as the people of faith who hold a variety of theologies, who come together to cultivate good for goodness sake, if we might be able to imagine a power that exists in the darkness, in the unknown, that isn't a monster, that isn't vengeful, that isn't born out of greed or created out of fear, but is a power instead that moves us in a loving direction, a power that speaks to and works in partnership with the loving divine power within each one of us, a loving direction that grounds us in what we know is right and what is wrong, and gives us the fortitude to wrestle with the blurry areas and muddy waters in which we find ourselves, a loving movement in which we can exercise our prophetic imaginations to call out the wrongs and work towards a more healed and whole expression of beloved community. Because in a universe where imagination leads to so much, my greatest hope is that we can imagine a more loving way. - Thank you for listening to this sermon from the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fairfax. To listen to more sermon podcasts, go to uucf.org/worship-services and scroll down to sermon podcasts. [BLANK_AUDIO]