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Can Imagination Save Us?
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| Essay by Rev. Amanda Hambrick Ashcraft
August 27, 2020
I’m thinking a lot about this moment. Under 70 days until the most important Presidential Election arguably of all time, close to six months into an unprecedented global pandemic, increasing racial uprisings, increasing inequalities, anxieties, looming questions, delayed and potent grief.
As an ordained Minister, my job is to help people remain hopeful no matter the circumstance. I’m not unlike many other clergy who, in this moment, feel exhausted and often at a loss for words.
Does our Holy Book have a word for us, even now? Is there something there within that might move us differently than hope? Can we extract something new from the tried and true promises of peace, comfort, and love, that – for those of us raised in the Christian tradition – gird our psyches? Is there anything there within that might offer a word for the living of these particular days?
I’ve always loved the prophets and was recently drawn to an oft-not talked about passage from Jeremiah chapter 4.
23 I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void;
and to the heavens, and they had no light.
24 I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,
and all the hills moved to and fro.
25 I looked, and lo, there was no one at all,
and all the birds of the air had fled.
26 I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert,
and all its cities were laid in ruins
before the Lord, before the Lord’s fierce anger.
27 For thus says the Lord: The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end.
This passage in Jeremiah’s passage is pretty depressing. God is speaking to the people of Israel – warning them – over and over again about their looming demise. I looked on the Earth and it was waste and void – a harken to the creation story in Genesis giving us the illusion that in this moment, creation is literally being UNmade.
No light.
No sun.
No birds.
Food is scarce.
Cities – once full of habitation and social life – now gone.
Commerce, governance, civility as we know it is gone.
The cause?
God’s divine anger in response to a people who’ve lost their ability to do good. God’s anger in response to a country on the way to destroying herself by infidelity to what is Holy.
We find ourselves in this text right in the middle of the desolation, to hear and feel the weeping of the Earth.
Shhhh… can you hear it?
- The destruction of the United States Postal Service?
- The corruption of power?
- The erosion of natural resources?
- The rumbling of bellies of those without enough food?
- The weeping of teachers, parents & students at the onset of a year of COVID school?
- A people who would rather fill the promises of Wall Street and white supremacy – Christian nationalism and heteronormativity - than to be faithful to that which is Holy and Just?
Shhhh… can you hear it?
A global pandemic heightening our already weeping world?
I can hear it. In fact, it’s quite loud.
Biblical scholars, including Walter Brueggemann, offer suggestions as to why this depressing passage made it into the Holy book. It isn’t some scare tactic or lame theological exercise to win devotion, but rather that it’s a rhetorical attempt to engage a numb, unaware community in an imaginative embrace of what is happening, so that we might catalyze change.
We’re quick and incorrect to skip over this passage. We are numb. We need to be called to an imaginative embrace of what is happening right now. In fact, imagination may be the medicine to tend to our increasing ails.
Imagination is often siloed to children and fantasy, so we’re quick to infantilize it as fluff and fantasia. But Imagination, the kind that passages like this one in Jeremiah harken, is anything but whimsical. It’s bold, courageous, intentional and tough.
Jurgen Moltmann reminds us that imagination doesn’t point to another world with lofty, unchecked dreams, but that it’s focused on the redemption of THIS world. This VERY WORLD you and I are living and breathing in right now.
Facing this weeping world is HARD! We need an active imaginative embrace to face it.
When we become numb we’re robbed of our potential to be fully human, but imagination, we’re reminded in Jeremiah, has the power to move us towards human and societal transformation because it alters how we view ourselves and our place in the world.
But it’s not that easy, of course.
How do we continue to be people of imagination in the face of a widely weeping world? How do we continue to be people of imagination when our culture praises quick solutions, narrow formulas for success, beauty, and education, and provides binary options – at best – for the living of these days?
Work full time from home with children who also now need instruction in the home full time; OR, send your children to school where neither they nor the administration, teachers or building staff are safe?
Shut down the USPS or save democracy?
Pay your rent or lose your home?
Stay awake in the front seat of your car after a long day or be killed by the police?
Risk your life by continuing to work a low paying job without proper protection from Covid-19, or lose your job?
Trump OR Biden?
Progressive or Conservative?
Our culture doesn’t leave much room for imagination, and thus utilizing imagination as a means for living is our prophetic work and our prophetic call. We, who everyone one of us, by virtue of being made in the image and PROMISES of God, are ordained to be people of imagination and hope.
Walter Brueggemann, who writes prolifically about imagination in his book “Prophetic Imagination” reminds us that,
“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.”
So we ask again: How do we continue to be people of imagination in the face of a culture quick to imagine nothing?
Barbara Love’s Liberatory Consciousness has a word for us here. Liberatory Consciousness is an intentional way of living that calls us to maintain an awareness of the dynamics of oppression all around and within us without giving into despair and hopelessness… all the while working to change the system and ourselves in order to create greater equity.
I think that’s what Jeremiah was doing here. I think this is what cultivating an imaginative embrace means. God helps the people of Israel become intentionally aware of the oppressive system, their oppressive selves - so that they might analyze, take action, and move towards collective liberation.
We were on the F train several years ago when my son Zane, then two, asked what that bad smell was. (You and I know that kids have impeccable timing). I explained to Zane that the smell was coming from someone living without a home nor the ability to clean himself. Zane was satisfied with my answer at the time but I revisited it with him later that day.
What did you think about that person we saw who doesn’t have a home? I asked, hoping to begin a toddler sized conversation about the right to housing and inequality.
Zane thought for a bit... I think, he said, that he has a magic wand he uses to make a beautiful home for himself.
Boom.
Imagination isn’t wimpy.
It’s damn smart.
It’s bold.
It’s prophetic.
It’s speaking a vision of what could be, what might be - what is totally different - into the world.
It’s rooted in the cross, close to our pain, close to our weeping, CLOSE TO THE STENCH OF INEQUALITY – so that we may never be numb to that which is real and here. It’s rooted in the stench to make the possibility that much more beautiful.
Every.single.one.of.us. is a prophet of imagination.
We are all called to put forth a bold vision of God’s Kin-dom on Earth, without asking if the vision can be implemented.
We are ALL called to envision a more liberated tomorrow. And we can do that
by getting close enough to the stench. Close enough to the weeping. Close enough to the PROMISES. Close enough to the prophets around us – be they activists occupying Louisville to bring justice for Breonna Taylor, volunteers passing out Census information, a Church community funding Black Lives Matter initiatives and doing reparations, a parent chairing the COVID reopening committee for their child’s school, or a two year old riding the Subway.
When we listen to the prophets all around us, we’ll stop only hearing despair. We’ll hear echoes of imagination, and each note will carry us forward. At least for today, this Minister is riding on imagination. What about you?
~ Rev. Amanda Hambrick Ashcraft
Read online here
About the Author
Rev. Amanda Hambrick Ashcraft is an activist, organizer, Baptist minister, and mother of five-year-old twins Zane and Levi and four-year-old Skyler. She is the Executive Minister for Justice and Movement Building at Middle Collegiate Church and the founder of Raising Imagination, a platform that examines social change at the intersections of faith, parenting and politics. She has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal, Refinery29, and Bust, and she is a regular writer and inaugural board member of The Resistance Prays. She and her family live in the East Village of Manhattan and fight the patriarchy and examine their racism and spirituality together, one cheerio at a time.
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Question & Answer
Q: By A Reader
I work in an Episcopal church with Holy Eucharist at the majority of services. The liturgy includes phrases such as “this is holy food” and “come to the feast” when there actually might be five or ten calories in a congregant’s tiny wafer and nip of wine. Following the service, there is usually a coffee hour with sweet snacks and cheese, hundreds of calories per person!
Ignoring any theological implications that the bread and wine might literally transubstantiate into flesh and blood — which I fervently disbelieve — why do churches continue to use such language when people obviously know this is no “feast” and at best a liturgical ritual? I cannot imagine this is an ideal way to attract youth and outsiders to worship.
A: By Rev. Brandan Robertson
Dear Reader,
This is a very fun and reasonable question. In short, the earliest Christian celebrations of the Eucharist were in the form of full meals. “Agape Feasts”, as noted by Ignatius of Antioch, were literal meals where Christians would gather together both to remember the example of Jesus and to create community with one another.
However, within a few hundred years after the establishment of this ritual by Jesus, we begin to see Church Fathers writing about how Christians were utilizing these meals as a time for gluttony and drunkenness, as well as excluding others from full participation. Whereas this feast was meant to be a solemn time of remembrance, community building, and opportunity to share with the poor, they became indistinguishable from pagan feasts that were exclusive and usually for the purpose of drunkenness.
By the time Augustine arrives on the scene, we see him writing very harshly against such practices and advocating for a more ritualized form of the Eucharist - one in which much less food and drink was offered, and it was done in an environment that would more or less resemble a liturgy of worship. >From this point onward, the evolution of the Eucharist ritual continued until it became what we have today, in most traditions, as a symbol of the Passover feast that Jesus instituted. A piece of bread and sip of wine is done to remember Christ, to the exclusion of the other reasons that the early church practiced the Agape Feast- namely, to build community.
In the modern era, many churches have attempted to return to the Agape Feast model of the Eucharist - dinner churches such as St. Lydia’s in Brooklyn, New York embodies the spirit and theology of those early meals in such a profoundly beautiful way. The entirety of their “liturgy” is to gather around a table with diverse people, share a meal, reflect on the way of Jesus, and go out into the world to serve and love. This is what the celebration of the Eucharist and Christian life was meant to look like at its best. Still, many other traditions have continued to see great value in the symbolic ritual of taking a wafer of bread and a sip of wine to transport us back to the moment when Jesus shared that sacred moment with his closest friends.
The expectation is, at least in my church, that when we participate in this simple ritual that we will do so as a rededication and recommitment to everything it embodies - namely, being a community, sharing meals with others, serving the poor, and living in the sacrificial way of Jesus. When this is the posture we take, even with a silly little wafer and a squirt of wine, then I believe that this ritual truly does serve us well.
~ Rev. Brandan Robertson
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Brandan Robertson is a noted spiritual thought-leader, contemplative activist, and commentator, working at the intersections of spirituality, sexuality, and social renewal and the author of Nomad: A Spirituality For Travelling Light and writes regularly for Patheos, Beliefnet, and The Huffington Post. He has published countless articles in respected outlets such as TIME, NBC, The Washington Post, Religion News Service, and Dallas Morning News. As sought out commentator of faith, culture, and public life, he is a regular contributor to national media outlets and has been interviewed by outlets such as MSNBC, NPR, SiriusXM, TIME Magazine, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Associated Press.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Origins of the New Testament, Part VI:
Paul's Thorn in the Flesh
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
November 12, 2009
Have you ever wondered what Paul's deepest secret was? Surely he had one. If you listen to his words, an agony of spirit is easily recognized, perhaps even a deep strain of self-hatred. How else can we read these words, "I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died. The very commandment which promised life proved to be death to me". He goes on to say of himself, "I am carnal, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate". Having thus indicted himself, he offers a rather self-serving explanation, which is little more than a feeble attempt at exoneration. "It is no longer that I do it", he says, seeking a satisfying explanation, "but sin that dwells in me". Don't blame me, he is arguing, blame sin! It is like one saying, "It is not my fault, the devil made me do it!"
Next he offers what might be a clue. "Nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh", he says. What do you suppose it is that tortures Paul? It is clearly something inside him. Once Paul spoke of "fightings without and fears within", but while he described the external threats, he never identified the "fears within". Now he seems to locate those fears "in my flesh", and clearly he believes that they have power over him to the point that he feels powerless against them. "I can will what is right", he laments, "but I cannot do it". Once more he tries to find something outside himself to blame and so he repeats his previous idea, "If I do what I do not want (to do), it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me". Still writing introspectively he states, "I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin, which dwells in my members". The word translated as "member" is a strange word, at least as Paul uses it. The Greek word for "members" is "melos", which literally means a bodily appendage - like arms and legs. How could sin dwell in one's arms and legs? How could one's arms and legs be in warfare against one's mind? Males, however, have another appendage, called euphemistically "the male organ". It is clearly an appendage, but it is also a gland that does not always obey the mind of the person to whom it belongs. This gland is stimulated on some occasions when it is quite inconvenient. On other occasions, it is not stimulated when one desires it to be. If that were not so there would be no market for Viagra or Cialis! Since Paul is constantly suggesting that evil sin dwells in his flesh, can we not conclude that whatever disturbs him so deeply is somehow connected to his sexuality? It seems apparent that such a connection is real, for he winds up this series of self-accusatory phrases with an outburst that demands some explanation, "Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?"
In other parts of Paul's epistles, he says, "What return did you get for the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death". Paul seems to feel that his life is lived under the sentence of death. He has a deep-seated sense of shame. Paul also reveals that he has a hidden aspect to his life. He calls himself "an imposter who yearns to be true", one who is unknown "who yearns to be known and one who "though dying yearns to be alive".
Paul is also a religious zealot, perhaps a fanatic. He was a strict adherent of the Torah in which he had obviously bound himself tightly. He describes himself as one who obeyed every requirement of the law. I was, he says, "Circumcised on the 8th day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless!" He even says of himself, "I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age, so extremely zealous was I for the tradition of my fathers".
Given that self-description, one must ask what was there about the Jesus movement that threatened Paul so deeply that he was moved to try to stamp it out. Religious zealotry always says more about the zealot than it does about the cause. Again, he says of himself, "I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it". One does not attack Muslims in the Crusades unless something about Islam itself is seen as an imminent danger to the Christian claims that are being made. One does not burn heretics at the stake unless the lives of the heretics threaten something deep within their persecutors. One does not oppress and murder Jews, as Christians have done through the centuries, unless the very existence of the Jews caused that which was basic to Christianity to collapse. One does not fly airplanes into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon to "kill the infidels" unless those infidels call into question the truth by which Islamic fundamentalists live. That is the nature of religious persecution. Paul was a persecutor of the Christians, so we need to ask what there was about the Christian movement that caused him to believe that if the Christian movement survived, he would not. That is the question that fanaticism in any form asks. So our search continues.
Another autobiographical detail appears in his epistles when Paul counsels those who are not married "to remain as I am", that is, single. So we know that Paul was not married. He also counselled those who could not control their sexual desires to marry, since as he stated, "it is better to marry than to burn with passion". Paul, however, never sought to alleviate his internal pressures by following his own advice. Paul actually seemed to have negativity toward women. Women do not like him to this day, especially women priests. He warned his readers against even touching a woman, yet he seemed to have a peculiar attraction for a woman's hair, about which he made overt references.
Paul also shared with his readers that he possessed a "thorn in his flesh", which he never defines, but which he had prayed for God to take away. It appears that the removal of this thorn was beyond God's power. There is finally one other revealing passage in the Pauline corpus that for me pulls this investigation together. In the first chapter of Romans, a text frequently cited to uphold the deep prejudice in the Christian Church against homosexuality, Paul suggests that homosexuality is actually a punishment inflicted by God on those who do not worship God properly. That is, Paul argues, that God, in punishment for not paying attention to the intimate details of worship, confuses human sexuality so that men are attracted to men and women to women. It was and is a strange argument, but one perhaps understandable to a religious person who feels driven to obey every jot and tittle of the law.
Some years ago, while studying at Yale Divinity School, I came across a 1930's book written by Arthur Nock in which this author raised for me for the first time the possibility that Paul might have been a deeply repressed gay man. As such he would have been taught by his religion that being homosexual placed him under a death sentence according to the law of God as recorded in Leviticus 18 and 20. Paul would also have been aware of the books of the Maccabees, which were very popular among Jews in Paul's time. IV Maccabees stated that if one worshiped God properly and with consuming intensity "all desire can be overcome".
When I put all of these things together a pattern appears. Paul was a zealot who tried with all his might to worship God properly. He bound his unacceptable (to him) desires so tightly within the law of the Jews that he was able at least partially to suppress the desires that he found natural within him but deeply troubling and intensely negative.
This was the internal pressure that caused Paul to view his body quite negatively. The promise of death, said the Torah, was the end result of the sin, which he felt sure lived in his uncontrollable "member". He experienced the Christian movement to be one that relativized the power of the law to control evil desires in the name of something the Christians called "grace", which they defined as the infinite and undeserved gift of love. He heard Christians telling people that they did not have to struggle as he had struggled to be righteous, but they had only to trust this divine love that accepted them "just as I am", or as each person was.
Freedom always frightens people who are hiding from themselves inside a rigid religious practice. So it was that Paul appears to have determined that if Christianity succeeded, his security system built on years of binding repression would fall apart. That is what led to him to persecute. That is also what led Paul to exclaim after his conversion, that now I know that "nothing can separate me from the love of God", not even, as he said, "my own nakedness".
Was his thorn in the flesh his deeply repressed homosexuality? Other theories have been offered: epilepsy, a chronic eye disease, perhaps even an abusive and distorting childhood sexual experience. None, however, fit the details we know of Paul's life so totally as the suggestion that he was a gay man. Christians could not listen to this possibility so long as they were in the power of a definition of homosexuality as something evil. That definition, however, has died under the influence of modern science and medicine. So the idea of Paul gay and a good Jew are not now incompatible. Imagine rather the power of the realization that we Christians have received our primary definition of grace from a gay man who accepted his world's judgment and condemnation until he was embraced by the Jesus experience and came to the realization that nothing any of us can say, do or be can place us outside the love of God. Paul, a deeply repressed gay man, is the one who made that message clear.
~ John Shelby Spong
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