December 4, 2025
The Prophetic Imagination
Isaiah 11:1-10 and Matthew 3:1-11
Our Advent word for 2025 is imagination. Our theme: Follow the Star: The Power of Imagination
Hollywood gets all the credit for imagination in our culture. Recent movies like Spirited, a modern version of Scrooge, Wakanda Forever, and Avatar: The Way of Water spill imagination all over our mega, digital screens. But there’s more to imagination than entertainment.
Imagination is filled with possibility and opportunity. Life can be monotonous. The average American, for example, watches 8 hours of television, otherwise known as the “plug-in” drug, per day. During Advent we have the opportunity to be amazingly generous and thoughtful and filled with ideas for gift-giving. In the world lacking imagination, there’s hard knocks, luck, fate, and dog eat dog and life is tough and unrelenting where only the strong survive. Here we get Scrooge and the Grinch. People think in terms of coincidences, but in the words of Jethro Leroy Gibbs of NCIS, “I don’t believe in coincidences.”
Advent is our opportunity to collect our senses and take stock of how we are living and prepare once again for the Christ child to dominate our lives. Our hearts and minds are more open this time of the year to the possibilities of miracles, excess generosity, and the message of outliers. If we don’t get it during Advent, chances are we will be closed for the rest of the year.
Most children think they are imaginative and creative; most adults think we are not. Does something cause a leak in our imagination supply? What depletes adult imagination? W. H. Auden’s poem, “Funeral Blues,” (Movie: “Four Weddings and a Funeral) expresses the grief of losing the love of one’s life, but could be our ode to the loss of our imagination:
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
The church needs an activated imagination in a world that seems determined to block and diminish the kingdom Jesus has opened to all humankind.
I am tempted to believe that people leave the church when they lose their imagination. They don’t see the point. People who insist they are individuals are among the most conforming of all. Our dreary conformism is wonderfully satirized in the Monty Python film Life of Brian when the crowd repeats, altogether, like robots, the refrain, “We are individuals.” Dogmatic, boringly contrarian hyper-individuals who are all being exactly the same as each other. A new study on people who don’t go to church says that the herd instinct is a big factor. As more and more people learn that most people don’t attend church, the more people join the trend. It’s a fad not to go to church. Like wearing blue jeans with holes – once a sign of poverty and now a sign of affluence. Not going to church – it’s what everyone isn’t doing.
Ken Robinson, in Out of Our Minds, makes a passionate appeal for living with more imagination and creativity. We have imaginations, he says. As a result, we have unlimited powers of creativity.
Call it the prophetic imagination. The prophets imagined what other people couldn’t. The capacity for prophetic wondering resides chiefly in the imagination. Theologian Garrett Green has argued persuasively that in many instances the biblical term “heart” (lev; καρδία, kardia) refers to what we call imagination. This notion wonderfully illuminates the use of that word in the eucharistic liturgy: “Lift up your hearts” — lift up your imaginations, open them toward God. If our hearts are good, if our hearts are right, we are able to imagine God’s world.
In the introduction to Outliers, Gladwell tells the story of Roseto, Pennsylvania. The men in this town didn’t suffer from heart disease up to the age of 55. And for men over 65 the death rate was half that of the USA. The researchers discovered that it wasn’t diet. Neither was it exercise. These men didn’t get up at dawn to run six miles or do yoga. It wasn’t in the water. Here’s the secret: The Rosetans visited one another. They had extended family clans with three generations living under one roof and they showed great respect to elders. They went to mass together at Mt. Carmel Catholic Church. They had an egalitarian ethos that kept the wealthy from flaunting their money. They had created a powerful social structure that protected them from the pressures of the modern world. They were healthy because of the type of community they had produced.
Can you imagine our church becoming the community of Roseto, PA. How can we encourage creativity and imagination in the church? The church often gets stuck in the mud of sameness and lacks imagination. How do we create a church that makes imagination systematic and routine?
Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address: “We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.” Did you hear the word? “Disenthrall.” If we live our lives guided by ideas to which we are devoted but which may no longer be true or relevant, we have to shake free of those old ideas. If we are hypnotized by ideas that keep us from flourishing, we must change. To move forward we have to shake free of them.
I am an uncompromising advocate of regular worship. I believe people have made a wrong turn by giving up on the church, by quitting the place. I believe that life is more difficult for people who have dismissed the church from their regular practices. And I think the church has to find imaginative and creative ways to demonstrate this to people.
I am afraid that we settle for so little when there is so much available. At some point, we no longer can envision life as any other way than it is. It is that sameness that is killing us. We are better at hiding from our deepest desires than our ancestors, because we have more toys, more tools, more outlets. But we haven’t escaped what our ancestors learned: Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.
We read of two prophetic imaginers this morning: Isaiah and John the baptizer.
Isaiah says there’s a new regime. Isaiah offers a regime change from above – the throne of God. Isaiah is an outlier who envisions a biblical version of Roseto on a cosmic scale. And I’m saying that our Roseto is the Church. We don’t need a church that meets our superficial needs, but a church that teaches us how to love one another in spirit and in deed.
“Look,” says Isaiah, “A shoot from the stump of Jesse will sprout in the wilderness.” Between verse 1 and verse 2 the shoot turns into a person and the fruit that is produced becomes wisdom and understanding. With his word he shall transform the world from violence into peace. Wolves, leopards, lions, and bears will become vegans. Asp, adders, and snakes, Eve’s ancient enemy, will no longer strike with poison but will crawl harmlessly in the nursery. The taming of snakes – now that’s an agenda I love. I’m with Indiana Jones: “Why did it have to be snakes?” “They will not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord.” That’s the vision of Isaiah the outlier. That ought to be the mission of the church.
Centuries later, another imaginer of the new regime, appears in the region of the Jordan River. His name: John the Baptist. John was rough, rough as a corncob. He wouldn’t last three weeks in one of our churches. John wastes no time but goes right to work: “Repent for the New Regime has come near.” Repent means to change your mind, direction, your basic nature. John said, if you thought it was going to be a [Tea Party], you’d better think again. Your only hope, he said, was to clean up your life as if your life depended on it, which it did, and get baptized in a hurry as a sign that you had. “I’m the one yelling himself blue in the face in the wilderness,” he said, quoting Isaiah. “I’m the one trying to knock some sense into your heads” (Frederick Buechner).
I urge you to activate your imagination. And remember that you feed imagination one day, one act, one practice at a time. Day by day, encounter by encounter, opportunity by opportunity, and crisis by crisis, bring your life in line with the new regime of Jesus Christ. There is still hope that we will form communities that will be whole, healthy, happy, and holy and will protect us and keep us and be there for us. Lift the bread to your mouth in a few moments; drink from the cup of salvation and know that you are part of the real world.