SpongeBob and our Imagination

To open this sermon, I am going to use a millennial illustration that hopefully gets explained well enough for everyone here. It requires using a bit of imagination. What if sea creatures acted like humans? In the 2002 cartoon Spongebob Squarepants, the sea sponge named Spongebob and his starfish buddy, Patrick, order a large screen television. However, when the package arrives, they quickly take out the tube TV and throw it in the trash. Then proceed to hop into the giant cardboard box.

Spongebob’s squid neighbor, named Squidward, a short-tempered, sassy, condescending squid, can’t believe what he just witnessed.

Squidward says to Spongebob and Patrick: Let me get this straight. You two ordered a giant screen television just so you could play in the box?

SpongeBob replies: Pretty smart, huh?

Patrick says: I thought it wouldn’t work.

SpongeBob gestures to Squidward: With (hand gesture) imagination! I can be anything I want! A pirate! A football player!

Patrick interjects: A starfish!

Squidward replies: You’re already a starfish.

Patrick exclaims: See, it works! You try!

Squidward says sarcastically: Okay, let’s see. I’m imagining myself watching TV, and there it is! Can I have it?

SpongeBob replies: Sure, but if you change your mind, we’ll be in this box!

Spongebob and Patrick go and play inside the box. The box erupts with incredible real life sound effects of avalanches, cops chases, and rocket ship launches. Squidward cannot understand how they are making the incredible sound effects from inside the box. When he asks them, Spongbob says it’s with their imagination! The vividness of their imaginations bothers Squidward so much, he is unable to enjoy his new large screen TV.

This is an old trope. Kids need to get off their screens and use their imaginations. Or Babies that are often less interested in the toy that they were given, than the box that it came in.

As adults, our imaginations are often looked at with nostalgia. We remember playing as kids, pretending to be super heroes, teachers, store clerics, or our favorite sports stars. It is not uncommon to hear someone while playing basketball yell out Kobe or Curry when taking a shot during a game. Pretending like they are the superstars they see on TV.

There are studies that talk about how our addictions to screens, especially at a young age, harm children because of how crucial imagination is for children’s development. Through play, kids tackle the things that they don’t understand in their everyday life. They act out the challenges they face, through their imaginations. Almost like they come up with case studies to process, and then go through them using their toys or art supplies, or simply nature.

Perhaps some of us lose our imaginations as we age – but I kind of doubt that. As adults, we may not be play a make believe game of a princess trapped in a tower, but we are working through the things we face in our minds. We imagine different scenarios that we might face. A teacher imagines how they will respond to a kid. A farmer imagines how they might deal with too much or too little rain. A sibling imagines how they might respond to a parent or another sibling.

Prophetic Imagination

Old Testament Scholar Walter Brueggemann writes about the “Prophetic Imagination” used by the prophets of the old testament.

Prophetic imagination being the ability to envision alternative realities and possibilities beyond the present societal and cultural conditions.

In the old testament, the prophets, like Daniel, or Isaiah, or Ezekiel, all these books that are hard to understand, are the prophets challenging the status quo and inspiring the readers to imagine a world aligned more with who God is calling humans to be.

The world cannot be transformed without imagining what it might be transformed into.

The Prophet Isaiah calls the people of Judah to repent – to change their ways. He offers scary warnings of God’s wrathful judgment. But his imagination includes a vision of hope and restoration. That God will come and restore and redeem the Isrealites. He imagines a rebuilding of Jerusalem and the establishment of a new covenant. But not just in Jerusalem: He spoke of God’s plan for the entire world – a time when all nations would acknowledge the God of Israel.

The later half of the book of Isaiah was probably written after the Israelites came out of babylonian exile, struggling to know who they were after being in captivity for so long. They needed to imagine a vision for the future to sustain in order to sustain their struggle..

I think we can relate to this need for a vision of hope for the future.

Funny Feeling

In 2020, musician and comedian, Bo Burnam, a wrote a song that I would like to sing for you all during the sermon. Perhaps a creative act to end this series on. In his song, “Funny Feeling.” Burnam is pessimistic about the future. Like an old testament prophet Burnam names the things that feel wrong with the world. He sings about the funny feelings he experiences when he encounters a world that doesn’t seem right.

I have shortened some verses to keep it moving.

[sing song]

Burnam thinks that some sort of cosmic justice will put an end to this funny world we live in. That we were overdue for the things that we have done, and as a result, it will all be over soon. These words are apocalyptic.

Perhaps it is near the end, the end of this way of being. Not unlike the words of the old testament prophets, who call for the end of things.

And also not unlike the apostle Paul, who’s words we read for scripture today. But the image that is proclaimed in the bible is not an ending of despair. It is hopeful. It is an end to the pain in the world tied to the proclamation of a new beginning. A resurrection.

Paul’s Imagination

The apostle Paul is apocalyptic. He imagines that the word is already coming to an end. That God is changing the world. I can resonate with this, as a 21st century American, watching the world dramatically change every day. Things that once were, even 30 years ago, are no longer.

Yes, things come to an end, but the work of Christ is bringing about change now, in the present. Paul does not think that this change that Christ is bringing about happens on its own. He writes, “Now to him (Jesus) who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.”

Within us. God is doing work in the world, changing the world, in and through us.

When we look at Paul’s words from Ephesians that were read today, we see that the apostle Paul has a prophetic imagination. He imagines a world that is rooted and established in love. A world where we may grasp how wide, and long, and high and deep the love of Christ is – a love that suprassess knowledge. The love of Christ, who Paul says is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine.

Paul is imagining a different world than he is currently experiencing. And he is placing his hope in Christ to bring about this world centered on love, through the work that Christ is doing in his followers.

But this requires an imagination.

Martin Luther King Jr., perhaps the most significant prophet in the 20th century, imagined this world of love that Paul articulates. He calls it the “beloved Community:” A vision for society based on justice, equal opportunity, and love of one’s fellow human beings.

Nonviolence, social justice, love and compassion, reconciliation, and economic equality are all part of King’s imagined “beloved Community.” A vision that is rooted in the prophetic imaginations of the old testament prophets, and in the work of the New Testament apostle Paul.

This morning, for responsive reading, we read Reverend King’s words from his “I have a dream” speech. King imagines a world, quoting the prophet Isaiah, where

“One day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight.”

King’s imagination captured the hearts and minds of Americans and the world, and inspired those working hard for civil rights.

Ethicist Amy Levad writes that “the realization of Justice requires expansive and vivid moral imagination.” Lavad writes that Imagination “is the faculty that gives us the power to create images of our world and its possibilities.”

Mennonite peace scholar, John Paul Lederach, describes moral imagination as “the capacity to imagine something rooted in the challenges of the real world, yet capable of giving birth to that which does not yet exist.”

Imagining the Church

One of the reasons we gather together, as a community, is to use this creative faculty – our imaginations. We gather as a congregation, sift through our sacred text, we sing together, we share what we are going through with one another, we eat, we cry, and we laugh together. Our practices focus us towards an imagined future.

Our traditions, our experiences, our reasoning minds, our sacred texts, need our imaginations or our traditions become lifeless. Our traditions become something we serve instead of following the creative spirit who helps us imagine the beloved community. The creative spirit that revitalizes our community and the world around us. If that is not happening, then we better start questioning what we are doing as a church.

In a conversation I have recently had with a pastor peer, I named that amidst political chaos and a changing world, having a localized church community feels more and more important to me. In response, my friend said that in a world full of Artificial Intelligence that can fabricate words, imagines and voices so real that we cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is fake, localized communities of trust feel all the more important. In a world of politicians and journalists fabricating lies about the world we live in, we desperately need places we can trust. And while I would love to say that the church can be that needed place of trust, the capital C church does not have the best track record of telling the truth either.

But that is why a community of faith, and the priesthood of all believers is so important. We gather together with each of our imaginations. We share our thoughts, display our emotions, and compare our notes. We interact with real flesh, blood and bones, to try to bring about an authentic community of faith.

As the church, we are called to name those funny feelings, that Bo Burnan named in his song I sang earlier. The strange contradictions like “The book on getting better hand-delivered by a drone.” But instead of throwing out our technology. Instead of falling into despair, we come together. To trust one another, and to listen deeply to the holy spirit that is working through our imaginations, to imagine a beloved community that can get us through what feels like the end and to imagine the new beginning.

Our hope is not that there is no painful ending of things. Endings happen. But our hope, which has been in our tradition for millenia, is in imagining new beginnings, and living into them. Ressurrections. But we can not resurrect without imagining a new reality

One practice that this community does that I think can outlive many of our practices as a community, is noodle night. Noodle night lives into another reality. In a highly programmed world where there are never ending activities to do, noodle night has no programming. We just eat together. Something that happens seldom in the US. Conversations at noodle night can range from talking about sports, to children’s toys, to illnesses, to grief, to faith, to doubt, to impromptu karaoke. We eat, we laugh, we play, and we share deeply. You never know what is going to happen.

This has been a project that Pastor Carrie imagined a decade ago, and has emerged as a crucial part of this community.

We have to continue to imagine the beloved community. To tune into the creative spirit that as Paul says, “is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.”

May the church continue to imagine. May we not have the pessimism of Squidward. Or Bo Burnam. But may the holy spirit guide us as we call from the deep recesses of our tradition, scripture, reason, and experiences to imagine a new reality, resurrection, in a world that feels like it is constantly ending.