Sanctified Imagination
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Message for WHF on January 17, 2021
Over a decade ago I went to my first annual session of Northwest Yearly Meeting. During the workshop time of that gathering, I decided to attend one where our own Caryl Menkhus-Creswell was introducing Godly Play to everyone in the classroom. She sat on the floor of a lecture space as people looked down at her telling a Godly Play story. When she concluded one of the first hands that shot up in the air was from an older woman. Caryl called on her and she said, “tell me, Caryl, at what point in this story were you planning on telling the children in your care that they have an opportunity to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal savior?”
I felt so bad for Caryl, if I could have, I would have teleported her out of there just so she didn’t have to be so exposed. But she didn’t need me to do that. With incredible poise, she turned it back to the circle, “what do all of you think about that question? Let’s wonder together about that.” In this way, she invited us back into the story, back into imagining, to playing, to wondering.
What that woman who questioned Caryl was uncomfortable with was that this way of doing children’s ministry felt too open. By inviting us to imagine, and to insert ourselves into the story we were walking a dangerous line. For her, there was nothing new to discover in those stories. The truth to be found in them has already been squeezed out of it. There is but one way of knowing, and there is but one goal….to present our children with the opportunity to accept Jesus as their savior and to turn their lives over to him. Everything else is but a distraction from that goal.
What made that moment so uncomfortable for me, at first, was that I knew exactly where that woman questioning Caryl was coming from. For most of my Christian life at that point, I was in her world. I knew the stories. I knew what meaning was to be derived from them, and I knew my purpose. To make more Christians.
It would seem that the book that sits in our pews is a completed work, and our task is just to enter into it and to be taught what the meaning of all those words are from people we have chosen to be trusted. We have been conditioned to approach the Bible in this way because there is a sanctioned and approved way of understanding what is written within it. Any deviations or playfulness is heretical.
In this way, we sometimes feel as if we are bound by the thoughts/ideas/concepts of a text written thousands of years ago.
I think this is especially the plight of Western Christianity that depends so heavily on a rational, intellectual, pragmatic approach to engaging with the biblical text and our faith in general. Our imaginations are childish lands in which we must leave behind as we mature and “know better.” But I’m afraid that this insistence on a static understanding of the biblical story, and the story of Jesus, is precisely what has hardened our hearts and allowed us to be wooed by the evils of racism, nationalism, and capitalism.
Tomorrow we honor the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Over the last year I have read the book The Cross and the Lynching Tree by Dr. James Cone twice, and participated in and facilitated two discussion groups on it. The third chapter of the book is devoted to Dr. King. In this chapter, Dr. Cone drives home the point that Martin Luther King’s life, ministry, and activism was rooted in a profound connection between the heinous symbol of the lynching tree for black Americans and the cross of Jesus Christ.
Dr. King’s life was formed within the walls of the black church, where the cross was a central and profound symbol of connection with the suffering of Jesus. Cone writes, “The symbol of the cross-spoke to the lives of blacks because the likeness between the cross and the lynching tree created an eerie feeling of mystery and the supernatural. Like Jesus, blacks knew torture and abandonment, with no community or government capable or willing to protect them from crazed mobs.”
Just take that in for a moment. Imagine with me how disorienting the black community’s connection to the cross must have been for white American Christianity at the time. While White Christians utilized the terror of the lynching tree as a mechanism for continued domination over people of color, and felt encouraged and blessed by God in doing so, they had to be both enraged and perplexed that the black church found likeness in their suffering on the lynching tree with Jesus himself. By making that connection the roles were turned, from those believing they were carrying out the will of God, to being themselves the crucifiers of Jesus.
The Black Church arrived at this profound connection by permitting themselves to see in their own life experience the pain, injustice, and suffering of Jesus as they read it and experienced it in their faith communities. They were not locked out from the experience of the Jesus story, in fact, it was just the opposite, they saw themselves within it, they were in it, it was alive in them.
Sometimes I feel like I might just miss the entire purpose of being a Christ-follower precisely because my white, male, straight, privileged self will carry me through this life having no life experience of consequence to know what it is like to fully engage with the heart of Christ. The most important thing for me to do now, it seems, is to come to the feet of those who have suffered and know most intimately what it means to be completely at the mercy of a loving God who wishes nothing but for them to know love, justice, and profound and grace.
One of the most important modern-day Christian voices is a black woman, Dr. Christena Cleveland who differentiates the God of American Nationalism and patriarchy by the name “whitemalegod.” Here is what she has to say about all of this:
And this is precisely why whitemalegod wants to keep us imprisoned by logic, certainty, and tradition. In the Antebellum period, the white human traffickers who enslaved my Black ancestors prohibited them from reading the Gospels for fear that they would discover the truth that Christ is the Liberator and revolt. In the same way, whitemalegod knows that if we begin to relate to the Divine from our embodied experiences, we will begin to fight back like Joan of Arc and Harriet Tubman. Once we start co-creating the god-field, we begin to see that our imaginations are not unintellectual, misleading, stupid, or heretical. Rather, we begin to see that our imaginations are sanctified and we begin to imagine a different reality, one that is worth fighting and even dying for. When this happens, whitemalegod doesn’t stand a chance.
It all begins with a little imagination and the audacity to share it with the Divine.
I think we need to be liberated from our expressions of following Jesus that is “imprisoned by logic, certainty, and tradition.” And we need to live fully into the creative and profound reality that “our imaginations are not unintellectual, misleading, stupid or heretical. Rather…our imaginations are sanctified…we being to imagine a different reality, one that is worth fighting and even dying for.”
Dr. Cleveland, who holds a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of California Santa Barbara as well an honorary doctorate from the Virginia Theological Seminary now calls herself a public theologian and activist. As a black woman, she is entering the Western Christian world and begging all of us to cultivate a sanctified imagination. Biblical scholar Wil Gafney points out that the sanctified imagination has been a longstanding tradition of Black preachers who, “bring their imagination to the biblical text and allow it to expand the text into something that more powerfully relates to their embodied Black experience.” This sanctified imagination is described as a fertile place.
It was the black sanctified imagination, of seeing in their brothers and sisters lynched bodies, Christ himself, that sparked the civil rights movement. This connection was what stood at the heart of Dr. King’s life and ministry. Dr. Cone says, “King’s faith was defined by the mystery of divine salvation in the cross and the belief that Jesus was the answer not only to the lynching tree but to whatever troubles black people faced.”
This is a full on entering into the story. This is imagining oneself in it. And this continues on today in the black community. A Black Trans man named J Mase III imagined himself in the biblical story of Joseph in Genesis and wrote this,
[Joseph] could predict the future with their dreams; they could see things as they would be in the future, including themselves. Everyday, Black Trans folks are manifesting ourselves beyond what others have ordained for us. In [the] Koran, it is said [Joseph] ‘had half of all the beauty in the world.’ Is that not a Trans experience? It seems everywhere we go as Black Trans folks, people are focused on our features, the way we move, the way we sound. We are captivating to so many who cannot behold our power without wilting.
Asked by their father, [Jacob], what kind of gift they’d like to receive they picked a ketonet passim which only appears in one other place in the Bible and can be interpreted as a royal dress for a princess. So in this way, we see how [Joseph] may be interpreted as a Trans character by their appearance, by their choice of gift, and the absolute violence that happened to them when their brothers saw them in this effeminate garb. When their brothers saw them in this garment [Joseph] and the garmet were attacked. Their brothers tore it up, covered it in blood, and sold [Joseph] into slavery.”
As we enter into open worship I am going to borrow some reflection questions that Dr. Cleveland herself wrote, and I hope that we can bring them before God in the silence and see the ways in which they stir our hearts.
1. What was your experience of reading about the biblical character Joseph as a Trans person? What emotions did it bring up? Did you notice any resistance? What questions remain?
2. Can you think of any examples in which an authority figure used logic, tradition or “orthodoxy” to squelch an individual’s sanctified imagination? How did it affect you?
3. Describe the physical spaces that nurture your sanctified imagination.
4. Describe the spiritual practices that nurture your sanctified imagination.
5. How might a regular practice of nurturing your sanctified imagination set you free on emotional, physical and mental levels?
And it seems silly of me to invite us into such an embodied practice and just offer all of you an intellectual exercise for the queries. For those who might find movement a better open worship practice here is a suggestion. Spend time in open worship imagining yourself in a biblical story. Perhaps you can draw, paint, sculpt, or collage. What does it look like? Smell like? Feel like?