What an Imagination!

I love watching science fiction shows. Not the horror kind, but the kind that depict possible futures, exploring space, time travel and the like. Science fiction functions as a vehicle for people to think about alternative ways of living or ways to address current social problems. Some of my favorites have been TV series such as Star Trek (all the various series), Star Wars, Firefly, The Time Tunnel, Lost in Space, Aeon Flux, Solaris, among others.

What especially appeals to me is how these shows imagine and then depict a different world from that which I experience everyday. Occasionally the things imagined come true in “real” life. Think of the communicators from Star Trek. They look and act just like today’s cell phones. I’m still waiting for the convenience of transporters to be able to teleport to work, rather than just telecommute via computers.

The ancient prophets had a similar imagination. They imagined a world different from the one they knew at the present – their present. They said things like “the lion will lie down with the lamb,” “every valley will be lifted up and every mountain made low, the crooked places made straight,” “there will be no hurting or killing on my holy mountain,” and so on.

But this was no wild-eyed fantasy, these people were talking for God. What they claimed to express was straight from God’s imagination. This was the very imagination that looked out upon the vast nothingness before creation, before the Big Bang, before time and space even existed, and imagined a universe, gave it physical dimensions, governed it with laws, imbued it with purpose and meaning, and threw in the spark of possibility – endless possibility.

Humankind, in its tiny fraction of that vast universal drama, has pursued a particular set of possibilities as it has evolved and developed over the millennia. Those possibilities have arisen from the human form of imagination. Humans have built civilizations, crafted religions, established governments, dreamed up businesses, written vast libraries of literature, created great works of art and music. Entire societies and cultures have arisen out of the exercise of the human imagination. Jesse Jackson puts it this way: “If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.”

Therein lies the crux of the matter: getting our hearts to believe what our minds have conceived. Humans will go after that which their hearts deeply desire. Two and three hundred years ago, people in Europe and North America yearned for freedom to determine their own destinies and to live according the dictates of their own consciences. This yearning burned so hard that they fought revolutions, sacrificed their lives, but eventually changed the social and political landscape of the world.

If our minds can conceive it, and our hearts can believe it, we know we can achieve it. Advent is a time of imagining the kind of world that God imagines. God uses audacious means to implant that imagination within us. God gathers an aged priest and his presumed barren wife, a young betrothed couple, ancient prophets, shepherds and traveling astrologers to deliver the vision.

It isn’t science, and it isn’t fiction. It’s a world transformed from war into peace, hatred and enmity into fellowship and love, fractiousness into unity.

Huh.

Imagine that.