During Lent this year we have been exploring “The Work of Imagination.” 

I love the word imagination as a theological term; as a word that helps us explore and understand the nature of God in the world. 

I have been pastoring at HMC for 12 ½ years now and when I first began we did not initially ask the conference we are a part of (Allegheny Mennonite Conference) to license me toward ordination because we were in the middle of a reconciliation discernment process with the conference around the discipline our congregation was under at the time due to being welcoming of LGBTQ people…and if you don’t know this about me: I am queer and trans…so it wasn’t a great time to push the conference into another level of discernment over whether it would even be willing to license me…and…if we ended up parting ways with the conference out of the reconciliation discernment process we were in the midst of we would have had to find a new conference affiliation and my licensing process would have had to start over anyways so we determined it was best to just hold tight and see how the path unfurled.

As it turned out, the outcome of the discernment process was that the conference decided that it would use the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective from 1996 as a guiding document (as it was written and intended to be), not a tool for discipline and therefore, HMC was welcomed back into full membership with AMC. About a year after that decision, the then conference minister resigned and soon after the conference hired Dave Mishler to come into a deeply wounded, traumatized, and recovering conference to help shepherd us into whatever the next season would be for AMC.  

I remember clearly one of the first times I heard Dave Mishler speak about his hopes for the conference and he said that his hope was that Allegheny Mennonite Conference would become a conference with the greatest diversity we can imagine. The greatest diversity we can imagine. 

I was stunned. (In a good way). I had never heard institutional leadership authentically embrace imagination as an actual hope, goal, or even part of the possibility of their thinking. 

Yet here was Dave, our new conference minister not only making space for and calling forth imagination – he also paired it with the word diversity. I was excited.  And a little bit worried for this man – did he really understand the implications of his hope? I can imagine a lot of diversity. And I’m certain others can imagine even more kinds of diversity. Imagination, in its good moments, is boundless! When we pair hope with imagination we are surely opening ourselves up to unexpected possibilities. 

And while I wouldn’t say AMC has achieved the goal of being as diverse as we can imagine – that hope, fixed on imagination, being used as a guiding principle in our shared life and work has definitely created space for transformation, healing, and ongoing imagination to thrive as we seek to follow Jesus together. 

I’m curious how the word imagination is sitting with you this Lenten season. Have you noticed anything about spending time with it? Where are you experiencing imagination in your living right now? What connections are you discovering between imagination and your understandings of God?

Call it out…

This thinking and naming part of the work of imagination that we are invited to in this season. It is an invitation to practice, to put effort and energy into putting our imaginations to work and paying attention to what we notice and experience in that act. 

I’m going to invite us into one more act of imagination right now – and I’m going to focus us in a bit more – I want you to imagine Jesus. What do you imagine you understand about Jesus, about who Jesus is, or what Jesus models.

Again – I invite us to call out our imaginings…

I too imagine a lot of things about Jesus – a model of life lived in connection with God. A teacher of ways we humans might live God’s love into the world. A companion. A healer. A fierce advocate for freedom and justice. A person devoted to his faith practice and community. 

What I often fail to imagine is a Jesus who is willing to call a woman a dog and tell her to go away because she is not an intended recipient of God’s mercy. And yet, in the scripture we read today, that is exactly what we get to confront with our imagination. We get to imagine a Jesus who sets a harsh boundary and declares that there are some people more worthy of God’s care than others.  

If I am honest, I don’t particularly care for this confrontation of imagination. I don’t want Jesus to behave the way he does in this passage. I don’t want him to act like a normal human being. I don’t want to imagine what this Jesus would write in the comments section of a social media post. It is painful, it is dehumanizing behavior, and it is disappointing. 

And it is human. 

Who among us hasn’t been harsh at one point or another in our living? In our relationships? In our behavior towards others? Letting our reactions be fueled by prejudice and judgment based on our own standards and context? As much as I do not wish to imagine this Jesus, as I have lingered with this story this week, I have found myself being grateful for this moment in the Jesus story, not because it showcases the ugly possibilities of human interaction (and in so doing perhaps makes Jesus more relatable), also because it highlights the possibility of transformation when we activate our imaginations and open ourselves up to new perspectives. 

Let’s spend a little time with this passage and unpack it a bit more with imagination. 

When we encounter Jesus in this story – he is fresh off an exchange with some religious leaders about whether or not a ritual washing of hands before eating is essential to keeping one pure and clean. He has just told the gathered group that it isn’t what we take into our bodies that has the capacity to defile us. Instead, it is what sprouts in our hearts and pours forth from our mouths that can make us unclean. This is a challenging word to not only the religious leaders, but also to his disciples as it offers a different perspective on the rituals and practices of their faith. 

He has since traveled away from the heart of his familiar Jewish community to the region of Tyre and Sidon – a place in which he and his disciples are the foreigners in a primarily Gentile land. And yet, even in this place, Jesus is recognized as a holy channel to God. For a Canaanite woman comes to him and cries out:

 “Heir to the House of David, have pity on me! My daughter is horribly demonpossessed.” 

Imagine this moment with me – a parent urgently seeking to care for their child calling out in desperation:

“Have pity on me! Have mercy on me! Kyrie Eleison!!”

Let’s imagine this using this growing worship arts image. Perhaps the woman’s voice is those two small lines off to the side. 

“Kyrie Eleison!” rising again and again…one voice in a vast expanse…

And at first, Jesus responds with silence. 

Perhaps Jesus’ silence is the flat expanse there in the landscape – a space of waiting – as the sound of that cry for mercy travels across the gaps of culture, tradition, and expectations, awaiting whatever might echo off the rising landscape and return to this person seeking mercy. 

While Jesus offers silence, the response that does resound is not an echo of mercy at all, it is cry of impatience and disgust from the disciples – perhaps represented today by these bigger lines on the left: 

“Jesus, get rid of her! She keeps calling after us!” 

Get rid of her…her persistence and presence is making us uncomfortable. The disciples look to Jesus to be a buffer between them and this woman. And while we might hope – and maybe even expect – that Jesus would act Jesus-y in response to his disciples in this moment by inviting them to the top of the mountain to see from a new perspective and perhaps to even hear the cry for mercy with new ears…he doesn’t. 

His response feels more like he fell down the mountain and got pinched between some rocks at the bottom – rocks of religious tradition and expectation that he is committed to securing.

Turning to the woman he finally says: “My mission is only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.” 

Having heard this response – the woman’s request only grows more insistent: “Help me, Rabbi!”

She recognizes him as one with authority and power, as a leader and a teacher and as one who has the capacity to offer assistance.

Instead of helping, he responds with:

“It isn’t right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

In this moment of the story, I can’t help but think of all the times the excuse for terrible politics and decisions in this country and in our own denomination has been: “Think of the children!” This is a way that imagination can go awry: when we use it as a manipulative tool to induce anxiety and fear while disguising it as an act of care for the vulnerable. Imagine the suffering of all those children out there if…fill in the blank with any contentious topic and cry out for preservation of your own perspective. And Jesus himself falls victim to this way of thinking. He imagines, for just a moment, that there isn’t enough of God’s mercy to share beyond his own community. He imagines, for just a moment, that there are boundaries to God’s grace and love. He gets so caught up in the longstanding perspective of what has been instead of opening himself up to healthy imagination that may reveal a path to new possibilities.    

When we get caught up in abstract ideas and ideals about what ‘should’ be, when we fixate on our own perspectives, and are limited in our imaginations about what ‘might’ be – we can miss real embodied human needs right in front of us. 

Jesus, in a moment of limited imagination, says:

“It isn’t right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

And this wise woman, this parent on a mission of mercy for her child calls him on it:

She says: “Yes, yet even the dogs get to eat the scraps that fall from the table.”

She affirms Jesus in caring for his own community – yes, and…there is more than enough of God’s mercy to spread around. If he is so interested in thinking about children, she reminds him that her child in particular is in need of a scrap of that mercy at this moment and she is asking Jesus to simply help it fall upon them. Her action is a confrontation of imagination. She uses her own imagination to invite Jesus to expand his. She invites him to shift his perspective from only attending to those at the table in his community by also paying attention to those that are at the margins. 

And Jesus accepts her invitation. He chooses to travel the path from the limited perspective of preservation and exclusion to a space of expansive imagination and possibility. He models for us all that we can change our minds, hearts, and actions. This is the power of imagination – it reminds us that transformation is possible and it is the practice of imagination that makes it possible.

Jesus, in a practice of expansive imagination, responds with mercy: “Woman, you have great faith! Your wish will come to pass.” 

Perhaps we might even read that as: You have great faith! What you imagine will come to pass.

Practicing imagination makes space for the possibility of transformation. It invites us to expand our perspectives – to simultaneously see a bigger vista while also recognizing and tending to spaces of particular need in our midst.

You have great faith! What you imagine will come to pass.

For the Canaanite woman, her faithful imagination was fixed on mercy and healing for her child. 

What might we fix our faithful imaginations on?