Whose Imagination Will You Live Inside?

The first post in our summer series, Dangerous Imaginations: The Parables of Jesus & Afrofuturism.

"Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all."

Those words come from Lauren Olamina, the Black teenage protagonist of Octavia Butler's speculative fiction novel Parable of the Sower. Lauren writes them as the founding verses of a new belief system she calls Earthseed, her attempt to make meaning in a world that is falling apart around her.

And what a world it is. Global warming has brought droughts and rising seawater. The middle class and working poor live in gated neighborhoods, fending off the desperate with guns and walls. Fresh water is as valuable as money. Fires are everywhere. Police services are expensive, and nobody trusts the police anyway. Public schools are being privatized, along with whole towns. Into this chaos strides a presidential candidate who promises to dismantle the government and bring back jobs — followed by a successor who promises, and I quote, "to make America great again."

Butler published this novel in 1993. She set it in the mid-2020s.

I recently talked with a congregant who told me she usually enjoys dystopian fiction but struggles with Butler's world because it feels too real. Too close. I understand. But here's what I can't shake: in response to the grimness of her world, Lauren doesn't numb out or wall herself in. She founds a new way of seeing. She writes a future. And that act — imagining a future from inside a world designed to foreclose one — is exactly where I want us to live this summer.

Imagination Is Not a Hobby

Octavia Butler is considered the mother of Afrofuturism, a genre of art that narrates Black identity and Black liberation by creatively depicting Black futures. Afrofuturism takes seriously Audre Lorde's poetic perception that Black people were never meant to survive in this country, and it marries that clear-eyed honesty to the celebratory impulse of Lucille Clifton: "Come celebrate with me, that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed." It riffs on June Jordan's proclamation that we are the ones we have been waiting for. Afrofuturism insists on writing Black people — along with all marginalized people — into the future, not as passengers but as active creators of it.

Why does this matter for a church? Because this summer we're turning our attention to the parables of Jesus: short stories that set one thing beside another to reveal something true about the Kingdom of God. And the parables position imagination as far more than a hobby or a side project within Christian spirituality. They make imagination central to faith itself.

So the question I posed on Sunday, and the question that will guide our whole series, is this: What can you dare to imagine? And who will guide you? I'm suggesting we spend the summer being guided by the ones who were never meant to survive and yet still dare to imagine. They may be the ones most equipped to help us understand the world of the parables — and the world Jesus dares us to imagine.

A Shockingly Ordinary Story

We started with what was likely Jesus' very first parable. It appears in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and many scholars consider it the interpretive key to all the others. Here's the heart of it, from Mark 4:3–8:

"Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground... and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it... Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold."

Notice how ordinary this is. A farmer scattering seed by hand across a Palestinian field — maybe even cutting a hole in a sack, strapping it to an animal, and letting the seed fall as the animal walked. It's almost boring. There's no religious language in it at all. It's drawn entirely from the everyday life of peasants, a story that assumes the earth and the processes of nature are also our instructors.

Yet Jesus brackets this mundane little story with urgency. "Listen!" at the top. "Let anyone with ears to hear, hear" at the end. He's riffing on the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4 — "Hear, O Israel" — the central confession of Jewish faith. Which is his way of saying: this ordinary story about dirt is central. When the disciples ask what it means, Jesus tells them plainly: if you don't understand this parable, you won't understand any of them (Mark 4:13).

And though we call it the parable of the sower, it's really a story about soil. Some soil is packed hard like a footpath. Some is shallow over rock. Some is crowded with thorns — the cares of the age, the lure of wealth, the fear of looking like a fool. And some soil is soft, deep, and open. Jesus asks his disciples, and asks us, to examine ourselves: When trouble comes, when hostility rises, what kind of soil am I, really? Am I persistent and adaptable, as Lauren Olamina would put it? Am I settled in my fundamental, positive obsession with Jesus and his kingdom?

To envision something outside the dominant imagination is a radical act. To believe that vision with your actions just might be to receive the kingdom.

The Imagination Battle

Here's where this stops being an interesting literary exercise and becomes urgent.

This past weekend our country marked the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and there were many imaginings on offer. The one parading through the streets emerged from an elite white Christian imagination — one that has always suppressed and attempted to erase difference, especially any threat to its own domination from Black and Indigenous people. I was tempted to visit the exhibit truck stationed in DC that presents American slavery as a small bug in an otherwise smoothly operating system. Sometimes you just want to see a bold claim with your own eyes. Instead, I ended up on a bench at the museum reading sociologist Ruha Benjamin's Imagination: A Manifesto.

Benjamin points out something I hadn't fully considered: the impulse isn't only to imagine marginalized people out of America's past — it's to imagine them out of the future. She traces this through the "longtermism" movement popular among tech elites, quoting one advocate who argues that saving lives in poor countries matters less than saving lives in rich ones, because rich countries are more "economically productive." Just below the surface of such talk is a chilling idea: some people deserve to be in the future, and others do not.

Adrienne maree brown names what's really happening: "We are in an imagination battle." She writes that Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Renisha McBride, and so many others are dead because in some white imagination they were dangerous — and that imagination is so respected that those who kill based on it are rarely held accountable. Imagination gives us borders. Imagination gives us superiority. Imagination turns brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Losing our imagination, brown says, is a symptom of trauma; reclaiming the right to dream the future is a revolutionary, decolonizing activity.

The followers of the Jesus of Galilee are called into that battle — called to a radical dream of liberation, to receive the kingdom as if it were present now, to embrace what we cannot yet see and make it real.

What Makes This Parable Extraordinary

Now, here's what I saved for last on Sunday, because it changes everything.

This parable is not a feel-good hope that people will improve because their hearts somehow get better. It's set in the world of poor Palestinian farmers — a world of debt, subsistence farming, day labor, and extreme taxation, where most people lived just below the level of slaves. A typical harvest in that world returned about ten seeds for every one planted. Jesus tells a story where the good soil yields thirty, sixty, a hundredfold.

That's not an agricultural detail. That's an economic earthquake. As the theologian Ched Myers puts it, such a harvest "symbolically represents a dramatic shattering of the vassal relationship between peasant and landlord." With that kind of surplus, a farmer could eat, pay his rent, his tithes, and his debts — and then buy the land itself, ending his servitude forever.

The kingdom of God is not an additional blessing sprinkled on top of an unjust system. It's the end of the system.

The seed sown in good soil doesn't just produce a better crop. By the power of God, the good soil produces freedom. It takes an entire system built to keep peasants poor and puts it out of business. Can you imagine that? That is the gospel hiding inside this ordinary farming story — not decoration, not escape, but a whole different arrangement of who owns the land and who owns the future.

Soil Is Not Destiny

The real reason I went to the museum last week wasn't wisdom, though I'd like to claim it was. I went because I wanted to see whether anything remained of the old Afrofuturism exhibit. Specifically, I wanted to see Trayvon Martin's flight suit — the one he wore as a kid who dreamed of being in the sky, among the stars. Lauren Olamina wrote that the destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars, and Trayvon wore that destiny on his small body. He was already reaching for orbit before somebody else's imagination — thin-soiled, thorn-choked — decided the stars weren't his to reach for.

This is what a compacted imagination does. It doesn't just fail to dream a future for someone; it actively narrows the ground they're allowed to grow in.

But here is the good news buried in the dirt of this parable: soil is not destiny. Soil can change. So change your soil if that's what is needed. Receive prayer. Carve out real solitude this week, because a heart can't soften on the run.

Imagination doesn't arrive on command. It arrives in a quiet room that you intentionally create.

And then look for the good soil already producing fruit around you — a person, a practice, a stubborn seed of the kingdom pushing up through concrete — and when you find it, capture it somehow. Write it down. Photograph it. Tell someone. Understand what you're really doing when you do: you are keeping a record of where the old system is passing away. You are tending the kind of ground that ends servitude.

So, friends, two questions to carry into your week. Whose imagination will you live inside? And what will be your positive obsession?