Happy New Year, everyone! Today is the first Sunday of Advent, and the beginning of a new year in the Christian calendar. It is a day of new beginnings. In practical terms, the season of Advent encompasses the four weeks prior to Christmas, and the word “advent” means “to come.” You might call this the time of “that-which-is-to-come.” Spiritually, this season draws out a mood of anticipation, a feeling of “not yet”, a yearning for what might be, a waiting and a hoping, as we sense an arrival on the horizon.

The three scriptures we have heard are all common Advent readings, because each serves to stir up a desire for things that are “to come.” Each one, in its own way, points to a world we would like to inhabit, but don’t—and these texts create in us a desire for just such a place. Start with Psalm 122, which we read and sang together. The Psalmist imagines all the tribes of Israel redeemed from oppression and reunited from the exile, worshiping in one place in the temple in Jerusalem. The conflicting factions and scattered clans begin praising God with one voice, and with their united prayers to God they build peace in the holy city of Jerusalem.

The Magnificat, which Tadd read for us from the Gospel of Luke, comes from the mouth of Mary, her response upon hearing of the child she will bear. She couples her praise and adoration for God with a description of social revolution. She foresees the empires of brutality and the kingdoms of corruption crumbling in disgrace. The lowly and the downtrodden become the exalted and the honored. She envisions the proud and the smug who rule the land standing before God in judgment. Stripped of their self-righteousness, they shrink and scatter before the power of the Almighty. She dreams that those who toil in vain and those who go hungry finally reap, and they eat from the prosperity of the land, while the rich who grew fat off the labor of others are deprived of their spoils. Mary anticipates the mercy of God ruling for generation upon generation, creating justice and peace for all people.

And my personal favorite, Isaiah. Isaiah imagines a global gathering on a high mountain, with people of every nation assembling at the house of God. Each one arrives clutching weapons of war, their swords and their spears firmly in hand. But before the judgment of God, always loving and merciful, their anger dissolves and violent passions disappear. With conflicts erased, they look upon those weapons in their hands with disgust, and begin to pound them against the ground. With mallets and with fire, they beat them again and again, slowly refashioning tools of death and destruction into tools of life and sustenance. They transform their swords of slaughter into plows to till the ground for seeds to grow. They ply the sharpness of their spears into pruning hooks to reap the bounty of the harvest. And then, Isaiah says, “neither shall they learn war any more.” Once they practice the art of cultivation instead of the art of war, the people forget all about their hatreds and their battles, and their children and their children’s children never learn how to make wars at all.

I don’t know about you, but these three scriptural visions speak to the stuff of my dreams too—the kind of world I want for us, and for our children and for our children’s children. Each one of these Advent texts paints a portrait of a popular image this time of year—world peace. But the peace these scriptures portray is not just the absence of violence, but an all-encompassing vision. It is the Hebrew concept of shalom. While often translated as peace, as in the Psalmist’s “pray for the peace of Jerusalem,” shalom is bigger than the removal of conflict. Shalom means peace and health and prosperity and well-being and wholeness and justice and reconciliation and friendship and safety and happiness and welfare. Shalom isn’t shades or glimpses of each of those things, it’s all of them, in their fullness, all together—peace in our hearts, peace in our homes, peace in the world. Each of the readings today is trying to imagine such a world of shalom. That is the common thread connecting them—their imagination.

I suspect that the very imaginative nature of the words and images in these passages will cause far too many people to overlook their power. Some will trivialize these texts as just pretty poetry, perhaps even swooning with delight at their beauty, but outright refusing to take them seriously. On the opposite end of the spectrum, other more serious-minded types simply dismiss these scriptures as unrealistic and impractical, even calling them fantasies or fairy tales. How can you fancifully proclaim these utopian visions, they will ask, when we all know that the peoples and nations of the world are not going to just put down their weapons, give up their wealth and live happily ever after? Get real! That’s just not the way it is in “the real world.”

Which begs the question: what are these imaginings to us? Why do we read them every Advent? What is the point of imagining shalom, when the harsh realities of our world cry out for honest recognition? Why waste time on fantasies rather than dealing with what is? Because imagining shalom is the first and most essential ingredient in creating shalom. Imagining shalom is the first and most essential ingredient in creating shalom.

Contrary to our culture’s obsessive attention to pragmatic outlooks, imaginative visions and dreams of peace do not actually blind us to the harsh realities of the world. Let me show you how, using a contemporary example—John Lennon’s song, “Imagine.” Putting aside its overtly anti-religious content, his song bears a striking resemblance to the biblical texts we share today—a vision of shalom. There is a new band out called A Perfect Circle, which has recently re-recorded Lennon’s song. For those of you who are aficionados of the alternative rock scene, the band contains former members of Tool, Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins. For those of who found the last sentence utterly meaningless, or those of you thinking to yourselves, “I know what those words mean, but I don’t understand how she just used them,” I’ll just say that these bands have a reputation for their depressing lyrics and dark and haunting sound, quite a contrast to Lennon’s normally bright music. But far more disturbing than the sound of the band is the video that A Perfect Circle has produced for “Imagine.” The five-minute video simply runs news footage of global violence, starvation and environmental destruction against the band’s rendition of Lennon’s peaceful vision. Lennon’s line, “imagine there’s no heaven,” is combined with images of fighter jets exploding bombs in the night sky. “Imagine all the people, living for today” goes with images of bombed-out buildings and wounded children. “Imagine there’s no countries…nothing to kill or die for” is overlaid with images of marching troops, street riots, and military graves. “Imagine no possessions…no need for greed or hunger” is paired with contrasting images of starving children and an American hotdog eating contest. If you’re curious, you can watch the video yourself at their website, www.aperfectcircle.com. But these images show clearly that imagining shalom does not gloss over the problems of the world, but it thrusts them into stark relief, by emphasizing the gap between what is and what might be. Rather than hiding reality, an active imagination of shalom exposes it.

Which returns us to the work of the biblical texts for today. These imaginative visions of shalom from the Psalmist, Isaiah and Mary also expose the gap between God’s mercy, justice and peace, and the realities of the world. Remember what I said before about the season of Advent? Advent points us to a world we would like to inhabit, but don’t—and creates in us a desire for just such a place. It is, after all, the season of that which is to come, a time of yearning and hope.

But imagining shalom does far more than emphasize the yawning gap between harsh reality and the peace of shalom or alert us to how far removed we are from God’s vision. The imagination of shalom also opens a way out. By envisioning an alternative reality, imagination tells us the world doesn’t have to be like this, there is another way of doing things. Imagination liberates us from the prison of “things as they are.”

Theologian Walter Brueggemann talks about the holy power of imagining alternative realities in his book The Prophetic Imagination. He warns that the worlds of war and destruction and the powers of kings and empires, whether in biblical times or in our own, triumph by imposing their imagination and curtailing all alternatives. They maintain their power by convincing us that theirs is the only way to see the world, that no other way is practical or viable. We who desire shalom must respond by practicing what he calls a “ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one. Indeed, poetic imagination is the last way left in which to challenge and conflict the dominant reality.” (Brueggemann, 40) We must keep alive the imagination of shalom, challenging “presumed, taken-for-granted worlds” with alternative, “futuring fantasy” of mercy, justice and peace. The building of shalom depends upon our ability to imagine it.

Brueggemann points to the work of William Cavanaugh, a priest who writes about the critical power of imagination in Chile under the brutal regime of Pinochet. In the midst of state-sponsored torture, murderous disappearances and military totalitarianism, the church came to realize that the vision of unity and shalom at the communion table offered the most powerful antidote to their violent reality. Week in and week out, they gathered at Christ’s table and remembered themselves as the Body of Christ, re-membered themselves with a different imagination. The weekly practice of communion kept hope alive in the hearts and minds of the people, by glimpsing an alternative reality of justice and peace. Cavanaugh writes, “We have to believe in the power of imagination because it is all we have, and ours is stronger than theirs.” They knew the truth in that place—that the brutal and bloody reality of the state was only one way of imagining themselves and their lives. “To participate in the Eucharist,” Cavanaugh writes, “is to live inside God’s imagination. It is to be caught up into what is really real, the body of Christ.”

If we want to create a world of shalom for our children and our children’s children, we too must get caught up in God’s imagination. And the scriptures we read today from Mary, Isaiah and the Psalmist help us do just that—get transported into God’s imagination of shalom.

Imagining shalom is the necessary first step in creating shalom. As the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright put it when he spoke from our pulpit earlier this month, “you can’t be what you can’t see.” If you can’t see it, you can’t be it. So every Advent we begin the Christian year with the work of seeing, entering into God’s imagination and cultivating the kind of muscular, prophetic imagination of shalom that can undo torture and overcome oppression, can melt down weapons and topple empires.

But before I close, let me share some thoughts with you about the “being it” part, living into our imagination of shalom. How do we implement our dreams and visions of peace? What does it mean and what does it look like to live out our imaginings of shalom? I hope you’ll permit me another response drawn from the realm of imagination, this time drawing on a work of fiction to get at those questions.

Zora Neale Hurston, a novelist and folklorist out of the Harlem Renaissance, is best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. The opening lines of that book capture for me more powerfully than anything else what it means to actually live into the world of our imagination. Listen carefully to the story she tells. She says, “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.” Set aside Hurston’s gendered construction of male and female dreamers, and just think of two kinds of people—those who wait and watch for a dream forever on the horizon, and those who put their dreams to work, acting and doing accordingly. One sits back in doubt, while the other builds on the truth of shalom.

The most important concept for living into our imagination is that shortest little line: “The dream is the truth. Act and do accordingly. The dream is the truth.” It is as simple and as impossibly intricate as that. Be the change you want to see in this world. Like Mary and Isaiah and the Psalmist, imagine the world of your dreams and believe it. Like those Chilean Christians, remember what is really real, the truth and power of God’s imagination, which will prevail over the harsh and brutal imagination of the world. Let us all exercise our imaginations to build worlds of shalom, with peace, justice, mercy, welfare, prosperity, health and friendship for all. This is the season of Advent, remember? Advent does not mean “impossible dreams” or “fanciful wishes” or “that which might or might not come to pass.” Advent is the season of that which is to come, so we know that the dream is the truth. Our imaginations of shalom are the reality God has promised us. This Advent season, let us imagine shalom, and live and act accordingly. Amen.