Imagination. That’s the theme for this month’s worship services.

In my mind, this is the perfect place to start the church year. Without imagination, what do we have? How do we know which way to go?

One of the most influential Old Testament scholars of our time writes:

“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. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”

― Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

During these times of heightened culture war, our call as Unitarian Universalists is to keep this “ministry of imagination” alive. It will take all of us, tapping into our creativity, co-creating together, to transform a spiritually flattened and unjust world into one that is prismatic and inclusive.

What are your spiritual insights and how can you tap into your gifts to make these insights come alive? How bold can you be in expressing them? Perhaps you can write a story, a poem, write a song, paint a picture, design a landscape… the possibilities are endless for as we know, there is not just one path, one future, one way.

It is time for hope. It is time for imagination. It is time for us to connect + love = transformation (that’s our UUCL mission statement!).

I hope you enjoyed the many metaphors available to you in last week’s worship service. If you missed it, you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqW9pXHO_gk

This Sunday’s worship will be created around a visionary fiction piece I wrote for my Community Organizing class last semester. It’s a piece that begins to create a world that I dream about. I want you to feel invited into that world. The week following this will tell the story of how our very own UUCL came into being. We will imagine ourselves as a part of this story and contemplate how we can help shape our future so that we honor the legacy of our ancestors.

Remember, church is about being together. It is about processing the mystery of life together. This will yield great results for a collective, prophetic imagination that can transform the world.