“Dangerous Imagination and Other Keys to Healthy Living”

“Dangerous Imagination and Other Keys to Healthy Living”


Date: September 25, 2016

DANGEROUS IMAGINATION
AND OTHER KEYS TO HEALTHY LIVING
SCRIPTURE: AMOS 6a, 4
7; LUKE 16: 19
31
GRACE COVENANT PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ASHEVILLE, NC
September 25, 2016
The Rev. Dr. Marcia Mount Shoop, Pastor
No one thought he had a prayer of winning the Olympics
except for him. Billy Mills
made a decision to believe.
The first race he ever ran as a young boy from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in
South Dakota, he ran in blue jeans and basketball shoes and
came in dead last. But
he felt something spiritual when his legs moved and his feet landed over and over
o
n the firm ground
.
He set his sights on the
Olympics because of words
his father read to him in a book
from a Jesuit priest
“Olympians are chosen b
y the gods.”
Billy Mills wanted to be an Olympian. If the gods chose Olympians maybe those gods
could let him see his mom again. She died when Billy was young.
At age 12, his father
died and Billy’s broken soul took another blow.
His dad told him
: “P
ursuing a dream can heal broken wings.
You can have wings of
an eagle.
” And so he dreamed of being an Olympic champion in the 10,000 meters.
He wrote it down on a piece of paper: 10, 000 meter Olympic champion. Believe,
believe, believe.
“My #1 objecti
ve was not the g
old medal or the world record, it was to heal a broken
soul.”
It was the early 1960s in
the US and Mills struggled to find his place in American
society. “Society was breaking me. I thought a lot of suicide.”
As a N
ative American in a
country divided by race,
he had a hard time finding where
he fit.
3 years in a row he earned All
Am
erican status at University of Kansas
. And
three years in a row a photographer asked him to step out of the picture
of All
Americans
so that he could take pi
ctures of
just the white athletes. Mills
went back
to his room and thought of jumping out the window.
But he felt a
voice that clearly
said
,
“don’t.”
To set a world record in the Olympics
h
e would have to take 2 minutes off of his best
time
a virtually
impossible task by rational standards. But he saw himself doing it.
He believed. He gave himself to a Holy imagination
that he would heal his broken
soul.
On the last turn he is in third place and he knows he has
to go. The time is now. I will
never
be this cl
ose again. As he makes his move
he sees an eagle on a
r
unner’s
singlet
as he passes him
. H
is dad’s words loud and clear
:
The wings of
an eagle.
Mills flies
through the finish line tape to set a new world record and become the first
and only
American ever to win the 10,000 meters in the Olympics.
H
e goes
to find the runner with
the eagle on his sin
glet to say
thank you and t
here i
s
no eagle on his singlet.
Holy Imagination
imagination put to a sacred purpose, a healing purpose, gave
birth to a moment that changed the world. Billy Mills’ Olympic championship didn’t
just heal his broken soul, it wok
e up a country, a world
who had
tried to erase his
people from the face of the
earth.
The Prophet
Amos
gave birth to a new kind of prophecy in his day
he was the first
to say “look out world” God will not abide in your twisted ways much longer and
those who live a life of ease, will be the first to be disrupted. Amos calls out
with a
passionate concern for the oppressed to those who have built their comfort on the
backs of those who suffer. “God is doing a new thing,” Amos says. And the whole
landscape
of Israelite theology changes just like that
.
The Prophet Amos had a dang
erous imagination
dangerous to the comfortable,
disruptive of the powerful. He was not calling for reform. He was heralding the
death of Israel’s whole way of life. Amos is most troubled, most mournful about
those who think they have nothing to worry abo
ut.
His disdain for
complacency,
comfort saturation, for existential satiation is echoed in
the story we hear in Luke’s gospel.
The wages of
spiritual laziness,
of a life of comfort lived at the expense of others are
extreme
for Amos, the destructio
n of a nation, for Luke, eternal torture for a man
who ignored the suffering of Lazarus.
Luke’s story generates an imaginary intended to scare the you
know
what out of
those who feel they have no worries, those who feel like they don’t need to pay any
at
tention to the suffering of other
s, or to the prophets of justice
. Luke’s is a clear
message: If you just let others suffer, y
ou will rot in hell
imagine that
!
The threat of eternal punishment is an imag
inary people of
faith unleashed into the
world
lo
ng ago, a world
that just doesn’t seem to want to listen. It is a strangely
hopeful imaginary
that somehow, someone is keeping track of all this madness
and the good people win, and the bad people lose. The people who have been

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