How good is your imagination? Your answer will depend on how childlike you are. For children are the experts in living in the land of the imaginary. It is a glorious land -- where everything is possible. A land without stilting traditions and ensconced expectations. A land with no past to regret (or out-live) and no future to mask the pain of present disappointment. A land where cows do “jump over the moon,” where little boys named Matthew do turn themselves into fire trucks before breakfast, and where large, ugly, green Ogre’s do become lovable curmudgeons (if not Hollywood stars!). The hallowed ground of a child’s imagination is a sacred land where the boundary between fantasy and reality is a nether land of gloriously uncharted terrain.

            But somewhere along the way, something terrible happens to us. In the name of being “grown up” someone guides us, often against our will, to that nether land, and in the midst of another grand journey they stop suddenly there -- right there in the midst of all that really is – and they dare us to cross over. A line drawn there in the sand, a line we had never seen before. Our guide, that “grown up” someone, that wiser, more experience, more perceptible someone says, “Look!” “Can’t you see it?” “It’s not real over there.” “You don’t believe in that, do you? -- Do you!?”

            Inevitably, we retreat. And we return. To a grown up world that is more reliable than the one we left (that is, one that is touchable, testable, tame-able). We spend the rest of our lives, though, asking if it is actually more real? Maybe it is only those who in truly growing up are fortune enough to know the grace which Jesus called “becoming (again) as little children,”[1] who discover that a merely reliable world is hardly worth exchanging for the real thing!

            How good is your imagination?

            Have you “grown up” so that all you can now see is a merely touchable, testable, tame-able world?[2] If we listen carefully we might just find that living “by the Spirit,” a life that produces the fruit of patience, calls us back to our childlike world. That world of imaginary voices. That land of imaginary opportunity. Patience will call us to that sacred ground, not of make believe, but of holy imagination. For there is no God in a merely reliable world.[3] But the real world, the world which is our home, brims with God’s active presence.

            But patience, and a good imagination are required, to see it!

            Patience, if it is that ability to sit calmly, awaiting an outcome when you are not in control, is desirable indeed. It is a quality that I greatly admire and in many ways long for, though the truth is, I haven’t the patience to practice it! And all good traits and habits, though enhanced by genetic predispositions, must be nurtured through careful discipline. Since we live in community, work in community, serve in community we must pray for patience, and work for it tirelessly.[4]

            Maybe a better word to describe the value of learning that we are not always in control is “forbearance.” For there are times when all we can do is to wait passively, calmly biding our time. God is present for such trying times, but this virtue hardly describes the Spiritual fruit we seek today. They that wait on the Lord will renew their strength? Oh that it were so easy! Waiting, as you know, passive waiting, often leads only to more waiting, which gives birth to apathy, lethargy, and a lifetime of fruitless waiting. But the prophet promises that our “waiting” (our patience) will give added strength.

            My friend, Kyle Matthews, the singer/songwriter says it well:

We’re not waiting any longer

For someone to come show love for us.

One has come to be enough for us,

Now it’s up to us, to love.

            Jesus waited. But not for God. Jesus waited on God. In his life and in his death Jesus calls us to that same kind of faithful waiting. Jesus calls us to dress our faith in an apron of service, not in an air of entitlement.

N.T. Wright observes:

As God sent Jesus to rescue the human race, so God will send Jesus’ younger siblings, in the power of the Spirit, to rescue the whole created order, to bring that justice and peace for which the whole creation yearns.[5]

True patience is faith dressed in an apron of service. As Jesus’ younger siblings, are we constantly waiting -- for the time and place to serve -- or are we only constantly waiting?

            Waiting is not something most of us do well, but all of us are waiting, for something, in fact, Paul says that the entire cosmos is “waiting.” Creation is groaning (Romans 8.22), he says, and I love Paul’s argument. “Groaning in labor pains” – here is perhaps the image that we should firmly fix in our heads. Patience is like giving birth -- but from Amy’s side of the bed – not mine! Oh, I was there! I was anxious! I was waiting! But whose “waiting,” whose real labor of “patience,” brought new life into this old world?

Like an expectant mother, all the world is,

“on tiptoe with excitement, waiting for God’s children to be revealed as who they really are… longing for the time when God’s people will be… set in authority over the world.”[6]

            Authority? Hm. Authority is a difficult word for us to hear, for many reasons, and some of you are ahead of me. You are thinking of the way God’s people have already (for so long) abused our supposed authority over the creation, and our abuse, made evident in the facts of environmental destruction, global warming, and disappearing natural resources, have surely only added to the “groaning” of the whole world around us. The temptation, which humans have shown so little ability to resist, is to abuse the good, the gifts and responsibilities we have been given. But our way forward will not consist in lamenting our failure, or abdicating our authority to another. Our future is indeed waiting, and I believe that God is waiting, too, patiently-yet-actively waiting, for us to reclaim that authority. But what is our authority? Power? Prominence? Position?

Surely not. Not if Jesus is our guide. Our authority is only our imagination!

            In her excellent book entitled, The Fruit of the Spirit, Bonnie Thurston gives insight and inspiration. “Patience is intrinsically related to hope.”[7] For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience (Romans 8.24; see also Hebrews 11.1).  And how will we wait for what is not seen if we have no imagination? Walter Wink tells us, “the vision of the heart is not intellectual but imaginative.”[8] Our only authority, as ones created in the image of God, is to imagine a world that is not, and then to work actively, patiently, to see that world come to be. Thurston tells me that the word for “wait,” is an active participle, an action word which means, literally, “to imagine toward” a future.[9]

How good is your imagination?

            Over two hundred years ago, a handful of passionate dissidents set out to chart a course for a new future. To set a foundation in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To frame a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” To build a world where “all men are created equal.”[10] It was a never-before-dreamed-of world, but on this day, we celebrate, with flags and fireworks, the success of their imagination, and the active patience of thousands who have made that dream a reality. Even today as we recognize the continuing temptation to abuse our freedoms, to wrongly impose our freedoms on the world around,[11] we take pride in rightfully celebrating that freedom  -- freedom which was born out of imagination.

            One interesting thing about those forebears of ours, who planted the seeds of democracy, is that the world they imagined was distant and vague, radically different from any form of government and community practice that had ever been known. And yet, in other ways, they were already living that future.[12] Our ancestors were not imagining, completely disconnected from the reality they were living (I’m not sure it is even possible to do so). Such an imaginative idea could not have been born in native England. It was their already “new world” that gave birth to an even newer one. Such seeds only grow in the soil of a future, which is already taking root around us.

            And this is patience. Seeing the future, already. Working for the future, already. Believing in the future, already. Trusting the future, already! Henri Nouwen says that this future/present reality of patience, is the ground of faith:

 “The secret of waiting is the faith that the seed has been planted, that something has (already) begun. [Patience] means [being] present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it. A waiting person [a patient person] is someone who is present to the moment, who believes that this moment is the moment.[13]

            Patience is not waiting for the future. It is recognizing, as the poet Rilke has said that “The future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.”[14] Patience is becoming the future, which God has already begun, in us.

            If you have even a hint of the impatience in your soul that so plagues mine, you probably have also heard, “Russ Dean… I have lost my patience with you!” The chances were good, I think, that when my mama said such a thing, she was just then, when her “patience” had run thin, beginning to embody the biblical attitude we need today to learn. Think of her action: Attention to the present moment with recognition of the dangers or risks involved. A righteous indignation that burned into decisive action.  Unwillingness to stand by and simply watch and wait while a child in her keeping continued on a path of disobedience and destruction.