The term “Truth decay” was coined by Matthew Fox in his book Creativity for addressing how religion distorts the message and experience of the gospel. Today’s gospel ends our five week exploration of Jesus’ sermon on the Bread of Life. After his teaching, Jesus notices a reticence of some of his listeners and hears some plaints of his disciples, saying, “This is a hard saying; who can understand it?’ And Jesus responds, “Does this offend you?” It offends some, and they walk away.

In John’s Gospel, in particular, Jesus not only speaks in parables as he does in the other gospels, but he speaks on a non-literal level, a symbolic level about his mission and Abba God and himself. And generally there is a lack of understanding between Jesus and his audience and his disciples. Nicodemus confuses Jesus’ message about being born again in the Spirit. He literalizes the conversation, or the Samaritan woman at the well. But she fares better than Nicodemus because she persists in her conversation with Jesus and realizes that he is talking metaphorically about “living water” and eternal life.

At the end of his sermon on the Bread of Life, Jesus has confused and offended the fundamentalists among the crowds. He has proclaimed, “I am the living bread come down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I give is my flesh.”

Immediately, the fundamentalists ask, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” It is cannibalism, it violates the purity laws. This problem of literalizing the message exists equally strong with contemporary fundamentalists. Truth decay happens in the politics as we listen to candidates for the presidency, but it also occurs in religion equally. In both cases, I would this decay of truth a crisis of imagination. Literalizing Jesus’ words distorts Jesus’ message. You do not exercise your imagination in interpreting Jesus’ words and stories literally. What is so threatening about using our imaginations?

Religious fundamentalism has an endless capacity for simplification, generating uniformity and authoritarianism, and hatred of those with imagination. It encourages neither understanding of, nor sympathy for, nor an expansive appreciation for the plurality of new possibilities. It fosters unconditional belief while actively discouraging any folks to think for themselves.

Matthew Fox tells a story that a county election of a new school board in New Hampshire resulted in a majority of Christian fundamentalists. Their first decree was that no teacher in the school district could use the word “imagination” in the classroom. Fox narrates how he asked some citizens why they were afraid of the imagination, and their response makes me cringe, envisioning Church Lady from Saturday Night Live: “Satan. Satan lives in the imagination.” They insecurely identify our imaginations with evil.

Christian fundamentalists oppose fantasy-role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons or the myriad of computer fantasy quest games. What they attempt to preserve is their own socially constructed reality as God given, and they fear any other possibilities. Fantasy-role games, however, teach people how to imagine and play with possibilities.

I feel sorry for fundamentalists who exclude their imagination because they also exclude the powers of creativity. The response of the New Hampshire fundamentalist indicates a fear-based world, where imagination might reveal new possibilities, new dreams, many interpretations of texts, and hopes for ourselves and our world. It is the place where the Holy Spirit works to generate creativity and thinking outside the box.

Fear of imagination leads to a system where thought police censor us, and authoritarianism kills the imagination and transforms mind control into a god. It is the rule of law over Spirit. I have fought my whole life against such narrow mindedness and lack of imagination. For myself, imagination is the fount of our personal creativity of the artist, the poet, the musician, the gardener, and the many ways each of you express your creativity. We co-create our lives with the Spirit. Creativity and imagination are the playground of God’s Spirit.
When l look back at my childhood and education, I credit my imagination for stretching my mind, dreaming and freeing me to imagine what Jesus means by the reign of God. I fell in love with the English romantic poets in high school, fantasy works such as Lord of the Rings, and science fiction. They helped me to imagine a world where people might be free, loving, caring for one another, establishing peace, and living with nature. I have taught courses on religion and the Lord Rings, or with Gene Roddenberry’s series, or science fiction. I found students using their imagination anconstraints d the language of science fiction and Star Wars as means to express their spirituality and finding meaning in the world.

I understood that Jesus hardly ever spoke literally, maybe with the exception of the commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That could be taken literally, or when Jesus proclaims the forgiveness of sins. And his notion of neighbor was illustrated by the parable of the Good Samaritan, Our neighbor was the stranger, and he broke the imaginative constraints of his disciples by widening the definition of neighbor to include Samaritans, “a hated group” and a Gentile.

Jesus was a brilliant storyteller, and he spoke in parable and metaphor to talk about God as Abba. The name of God was so holy that Jews would piously replace the name of God with “My Lord” (Adonai). He spoke intimately that God was Abba, “daddy”—an intimate metaphor. God was like an intimate loving daddy, and he spoke of God as the father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. This broke with traditional orthodox Jewish piety.

But Jesus used his imagination in the creation of his parables and stories, or when he symbolically acted out God’s reign through inclusive meals, washing the feet of his disciples, or riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Through his own creative imagination, Jesus spoke to our imaginations, to inspire an imagined world where we and God meet, where we respond with awe and wonder, where our hearts and emotions are touched by Jesus and God. Jesus’ religious imagination has poetry to enchant rather than coerce, to touch our hearts and move us to imaginative engagement and action than command blind obedience.

Matthew Fox writes, “Imagination takes us to nothingness, to emptiness, to what is not yet and therefore to hat might still be. The space of elsewhere, indeed. No wonder the prophets relied so heavily on the imagination.” Imagination allows us to imagine the elsewhere from our social conditions.

I will make two bold claims this morning about our imaginations and scripture:

First, we cannot read or listen to the gospels or scripture without imagination. Fundamentalists try their best to read the gospels literally for a sake of notion that truth is unchanging and easily measured. This style spiritualizes Jesus, makes him safe and unchallenging. It strips power from the historical ministry and message of Jesus; it flattens the message of Jesus who spoke in poetry, parable, symbol, and metaphor. He performed archetypal and symbolic acts. His storytelling and symbolic actions entertain paradox and ambiguity, and through your imagination and faith, you fill in the ambiguity gaps with your own experience. You play with his words with your imagination, and the Spirit opens new meanings to stories you have heard so often and discover unexplored or surprising meanings.

If Jesus is a poet and storyteller, one can only approach Jesus’ poetry and symbolic saying with imagination, intuition, and our emotions. When we imaginatively approach these stories of Jesus and his stories and action, we perceive multiple levels of meaning and are enrichened a range of new possibilities that we have previously missed. The living word—Jesus—is encountered through imagination and prayer.

Let me give you a technique I use when I approach the gospel. It is called “imaginative composition of place:” This is a prayer or meditative technique used in reading scripture. You enter a scriptural text by imaginatively envisioning yourself in the story as much detail as you can visualize. I would ask folks in bible study on a given text: Where are you in the gospel story? Who are you in the story? What do you see around you? Jesuit Joseph Tetlow writes about this technique: “You do not merely imagine the event as though you were watching it on film….You enter into the scene as though you were a part of it, standing warm in the temple or ankle deep in the water of the Jordan.” Try this approach to scripture; it is like entering a virtual reality or the holodeck of Star Trek.

Secondly, I want to claim that there is no possibility of faith or a heart to heart relationship with Christ or God without imagination. If you tap into your imagination, you move into a spiritual realm of faith, for heart will have little difficulty of envisioning a gospel story. Your emotions and passions are stimulated along with your imagination. The living word—Jesus—becomes alive, imaginatively connects deeply into your emotions and experiences of life. Suddenly it reveals or unveils or perhaps awakens to weaving your story and Jesus’ story into a new interwoven story in which Jesus and you participate. Imagination opens the paths of hope and love. Without imagination in prayer, we cannot travel the path of discipleship that invokes compassion, love, forgiveness, peace, hopefulness, and working for social justice and caring for the Earth and neighbor.

Jesus expresses God’s dream for us. When I say “God is incarnated in Jesus” in John’s opening prologue. Jesus is described as God’s Word (logos), and that Word was present at creation and has become enfleshed in our stories and our imagination. And the Spirit hovers over creation and continues to be in our creativity. Are not fundamentalists suppressing the Spirit and the incarnate Christ when they suppress the imagination?

The brilliant Austrian psychologist, Otto Rank, a member of Freud’s inner circle, taught that artists give through their creations a gift to God. Our many gifts of creativity originate from God, and they are places where we intimately encounter the Spirit and Christ. When we express these gifts of art and creativity, we express God’s grace. It becomes an act of generous gratitude and intimate and imaginative connect with Christ and the Spirit.

One of my favorite mystics is the 12th century Hildegard of Bingen, who wrote music, poetry as well as texts on gardening, medicine, and theology. She writes, “The Word manifests in every creature.” It was an expression of God’s greening grace—constantly creating, refreshing our imagination and inviting us to imaginatively appreciate the creative present of the Holy Spirit and Christ in our creative abilities and ability to love. God has touched our hearts through Christ and the Holy Spirit. And our art and imaginative creativity touches, in return, God’s heart.

Now you protest that you have little imagination and no artistic creativity. I will counter your protests with the claim that each of us are creative and that we artists of our lives. Let me give you examples: The two Gregories express their art in gardening; Cindy and the happy hookers with their work to knot a 170 scarfs for a women’s shelter by Christmas; Rev. Joe in his creating pyskany or decorated eggs; or Joe’s facilitating The Artist’s Way, the choral group and out musicians, our feeding program, our commitment to care for God’s creation, and all what we do personally and communally to realize God’s dream for us and all creation. My creativity comes out in ministry and my theological writings. We are all artists and poets of our lives. Tap into your imagination, live faith, and unleash the power of the Holy Spirit who colors outside the box and brings a creative play in our relationship with God.

On Pentecost, The Holy Spirit inspired Peter to quote the prophet Joel:

I will pour my Spirit on upon all flesh,
And your sons and daughters will prophesy, and your young men and women see visions,
And your old men and women shall dream dreams.
Even upon the slaves both men and women I will pour my Spirit.

Our imaginations need to be unleashed in our hearts and to be touched by the Holy Spirit.