A Word from Pastor Nathan

Last Sunday, I attended a concert of The College of Wooster Chorus at a church in Rocky River. Sundays are already long days so I debated on whether to go, but I opted for it.

Dr. Lisa Wong, conductor of the chorus and the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, advertised the upcoming concert with the word “Imagine.” I was hooked. The concert included a variety of sacred and secular works, though I’m never comfortable with that dichotomy as secular works often sound like gospel. The third piece on the program was “Pure Imagination,” which you may remember from the original Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder) film.

The opening lyrics are, “Come with me and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination; take a look, and you’ll see into your imagination. We’ll begin with a spin, traveling in the world of my creation; what we’ll see will defy explanation.” Aside from the nostalgia that the song brought to mind, I heard an invitation to imagine anew, and that call felt holy.

After living under the threat of a lethal virus, and now war raging in Europe, it’s easy for us to resign our imaginations and conclude life will be more of the same. Perhaps one of the greatest threats the powers of sin and death wield is to quell our capacity to imagine.

In his book, The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann writes, “The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.” Pure imagination is holy work.

What I love about our shared ministry is that we imagine the future God wants and ultimately will have. To paraphrase the lyrics of the song, ‘There is no life we know to compare with pure imagination; living there, we’ll be free as we truly wish to be.’ Imagine that, church. Imagine that.