The Lord be with you. So Holy Spirit, we ask that you would open our eyes so that we can see. Open our ears so that we can hear. Open our mind and our heart so that we can understand. So that we would turn to you and finally live. Amen. This morning we're reading Paul's words to the Ephesians in Ephesians chapter 1. I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints. And for this reason, I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers. I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know Him, so that with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which He has called you. What are the riches of His glorious inheritance among the saints? And what is the immeasurable greatness of His power for us who believe? According to the working of His great power. God put this power to work in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age, but in the age to come. And he has put all things under His feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all. The word of the Lord. So Paul's writing under house arrest, and he is under the thumb of the Roman Empire. His life is threatened, his future is threatened, but more the future of the entire fledgling community of Jesus. It's all at risk. The God who had been revealed in the crucified, resurrected Jesus. That story which literally knocked Paul sideways on the road to Damascus, that made him abandon everything, everything about his life, everything he understood about the world, and follow after this Jesus. It all seemed pretty ludicrous now. Most people assumed that little spark of a message was now just the ramblings of fanatics and kooks. Because military power, that's what dominated. The empire was the story. Glittering palaces and greed, and much of it wrapped in cultural and religious trappings, that was the overwhelming story. Everyone could see it, everyone knew it, that's what was real. But the way of Jesus, this revelation of divine world remaking love that was bound to humility and sacrifice, where the weak are raised up and the oppressors are brought low, where everything that's shattered and ruined is promised to be redeemed. That was ludicrous now. And look around today, your life, your world. Is it any less ludicrous? Is this just a story for fools? And Paul says, precisely into this place, he prays. He prays for the people of Ephesus who are feeling this weight with him. He prays for all the people of God across all time and history, and this prayer is being offered from Paul even into our reality. Paul prays that the eyes of our heart would be enlightened so that we could know the hope to which God has called us. The very power that God exerted when he raised Christ from the dead. Paul prays that we will be able to see with the eyes of our heart. He prays that we won't see only with the eyes of our head, but that we'll have bigger eyes and larger eyes and deeper eyes that we'll see with the eyes of our heart. Paul prays we'll be able to see what we can't see very well right now with our narrow vision. Now, this word heart, especially in the Old Testament, and it gets carried over into the new, Ellen Davis reminds us that this word heart actually is very similar to the concept that we have of imagination. Paul is praying that we would have a Christ-awakened imagination. I'm curious when I say the word imagination, what kind of images come to your mind? Some of us here probably like the word, some of us are not so sure. What kind of images come to mind? Maybe your favorite piece of art, maybe Van Gogh's Starry Night. Maybe Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, maybe Lewis and Narnia. Maybe uh Supergirl, which I hear is talk this weekend. Those might all be expressions of the imagination, but that's not what imagination is. Imagination does not mean making things up. It's not only fairy tales. That's one way we express our imagination, and we need it. But that's not what an imagination is. Our imagination isn't even just in our head, it's so much more. There's an entire philosophical tradition trying to explain to us what the human imagination is, and they're like working around it and they stub their toes and they're not quite sure, but it's it's it's a complex, comprehensive human reality. It's our gut instincts, it's our response, it's how we make sense of the world. And some people say, well, I'm not a very imaginative person, and by that they mean maybe they don't do art or something. But if you're here this morning and you're breathing, and I'm assuming if you're here, you are. If you are conscious, you are an imaginative person. To be human is to have an imagination. We don't know things like love. We can't arrive at any kind of conviction about the world. We don't see any reality without an imagination because imagination is all of us brought together to make sense of things. Ceslaw Miwash, the poet, said imagination can fashion the world into a homeland as well as into a prison or a place of battle. It is the invisibles that determine how you view the world. Nobody lives in the objective world, only in a world filtered through the imagination. So when we say imagination, we're coming up with a word, and maybe later we'll come up with a better one, but it's our attempt to describe in a world where we have constructed false divisions between the physical reality and the spiritual reality, where we're trying to describe what for most centuries before ours would have been assumed, that there is a natural, integrated part of reality, that there is more happening, there is more truth than only what we see in this one moment. The imagination helps to reveal more, to help us to hear and understand more. The imagination allows us to become more active with our full self, to connect to our deeper longings to know what is true and what is real and what is beautiful and what is good. And this is why we do need our poets and our sculptors and our photographers and our novelists and our mathematicians, not because they're the only ones doing imagination, but because they're attuned to realities that we would miss without their help. My friend John Blaze, he's a poet. And uh he one of his poems I just return to all the time. It's called My Father's Coffee. My father's coffee is instant. Boil some water, add the crystals, stir, and there you have it. For years now, I have been the imperialist prodigal, returning to my father's house with my own wife and children and coffee. I imported Costa Rica peabry and major dickison's, and once some chicory blend, dark as the inside of a whale. My father would yield each time, making allowances for my far counting due to his great love. I would leave and he would find again his foliers, like water returning to a low spot. I may have broadened his horizon, but I never changed his mind. But now with him at his age and me at mine, I would much rather be his son than sophisticated. So from now on until then, when in my father's house, I will drink as my father drinks. In his house there is instant coffee. If it were not so, I would have told you. So we could take the next half hour and we could talk about the complexities of a son's or a daughter's relationship with her father. And we could unpack and explore differentiation and coming to our own sense, and then also recognizing gifts that we had missed. Or we could read a poem about a son and his dad's instant coffee, and all of a sudden, something inside us deeper begins to open up. We get another kind of language. We begin to recognize things within ourself that are true. Eugene Peterson said, the great masters of the imagination do not make things out of thin air. They direct our attention to what is right before our eyes. Imagination is the capacity to make connections between the visible and the invisible, between heaven and earth, between present and future. For Christians whose largest investment is in the invisible, the imagination is indispensable, for it is only by means of the imagination that we can see reality whole and in context. Most of the Christians before us would have simply called this the eyes of faith. A Christ-awakened imagination is actually tuning us in to the widest scope of reality. Sometimes we get the sense that to speak of something like a Christ's imagination is talking about, so there's the real world, and then there's this little part that Christ is cordoning off and calling it our imagination, and we're going to try to pay a lot of extra attention here and not be distracted by the things that are real. But the story of the gospel, the story of Jesus is exactly the opposite. A Christian imagination doesn't give us what's fanciful, it doesn't give us a pipe dream, it gives us what's really real. His brother Pat at his funeral was describing his brother John's sense of imagination, and he described it as John's capacity to see the mountains behind the mist. This is what Jesus does in the story of Christ: to see what's really real. Whenever we're reading the Bible, Scripture is not seeking to bring spiritual wisdom into the real world. Just the opposite. Scripture is describing for us, welcoming us into the real world. What we often think of as the real world turns out to be the distortions, the degrading, the wasting away. It's not the solid world of God's creation. It's not the world of cross and transfiguration and resurrection. It's not the world of spirit and fire. The world that is held forever, even this very moment, in the strong arms of God. Despair is a potent power. Cynicism is immensely corrosive and prevalent and destructive. And these are the things that happen whenever our heart is not being awakened and enlivened to what's real. But whenever the eyes of our heart are enlightened, something new begins to happen. And it's not just Ephesians, it's the entire Bible from start to finish. It is constantly unearthing, digging, welcoming, expanding our imagination, enlarging our understanding, our awareness, our capacity to see what's real. What about the parables? Jesus, the kingdom of heaven, it's uh, imagine this. It's like a mustard seed. It's like a hidden treasure, it's like an expensive pearl. It's like yeast. How about a fisherman's net? It's like that. Can you imagine? And what about the prayer that we pray regularly, the Lord's prayer that Jesus taught us to pray? God, please make your kingdom come right here, in this nightmare, in this place, in this moment, in this day, in this hour, make your kingdom come as it already is real and true and alive and well and unfettered in heaven? What about the prophets and the histories and the gospels with their arranging and their imagery and their metaphors and their symbols? And what is prayer if it is not the encounter of having our imagination expanded? Shaping our imagination, putting us in contact with those realities that we know to be true because of Jesus and what Jesus has done in history, and yet we can't quite articulate what's happening. And what about this moment right now? Worship. Why are we here this moment? Sometimes the way we talk about worship, it's it's uh it's as if we're here for certain kinds of slightly attached spiritual benefits. Good friendships, maybe to have someone like me try to explain something interesting or novel from our sacred book. But you know, there's actually better places to make friends. I don't know if some of you might know that. It's actually true, it's a secret we don't like to tell very often. You can have somebody talk to you about the Bible on YouTube. The reason fundamentally that we're here is because we are entering into the truest story of reality, which is God. With our whole selves and our bodies and our mind, and something is happening to us that you can't actually articulate or quantify. And what about this table? What about this table that we're gonna be coming to in just a moment? I mean, what we say is happening here is crazy. Unless it's true. Now you remember that we said the word for heart is close in biblical language to what we mean by imagination. And do you know that opening line? Well, it's actually a prayer. A prayer that we pray, it's in the traditional liturgy. Uh we pray it every Sunday over at the chapel. I don't think it's we pray it here very often, but it's that opening prayer for purity. We say, Almighty God, to you. All hearts are open. And from you, no secrets are hid. Cleanse, renew, remake the thoughts of our hearts. We begin with that prayer because we know that we're about to step into uh an unbelievable story. And our imaginations are small and need to be remade. And then we come to the table, and at least in the traditional form of the liturgy, you might remember how it begins. We're gonna say it in just a minute. The one leading asks, lift up your lift up your heart. And then we say, We do. We lift them up to the Lord. And what are we saying there? And we say that we lift up our hearts to the Lord, we lift up everything about us, our full imagination, our our questions. Some of us come today with like heavy, heavy questions. We don't know what to make of our life, and we don't know what to make of the story. And we are invited to lift that up to God. And some of us today are heartbroken by our marriage. We're heartbroken by the trouble our kids are in. Some of us are already, because of some very dire news we've had, we're counting the months we have to live. Some of us look at the world and we just can't bear it. What is happening to us? And in this one story, God invites us to lift up our hearts, to lift it all up to God. And what's crazy is that Jesus Christ says, and I am there in that very moment, and I will feed you. My grace, my very presence will land on your tongue. My love, you may not believe it completely, you may not know what to make of it, you may not understand it, but my grace is going to fill you. And that's true, and that's the real story. And that's what God is making possible. And so, as Jesus' people, we come to God, we come with all that we are, and all that we lack, and our profound dilemmas, and our heartache, and our immense hopes, and we bring it to God and we say, God, welcome us, make us new, expand our capacity to see. And God says, yes. That is exactly what I'm doing. In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.