John 3:1-17
“Nicodemus Visiting Jesus” (1899)- Henry Ossawa Tanner
I spent last week in the Outer Banks. While I was there, I visited the Wright Brothers National Memorial, one of the Outer Banks national parks. What an inspiring place!
Back in the early 1900’s, Wilbur and Orville Wright, two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, were fascinated with the idea of human flight. Although many had experimented with gliders, and Samuel Langley had created powered model gliders, no one had ever figured out how to fly in a manned, heavier than air machine that could leave the ground under its own power, one that could move forward without losing speed and land on a point as high as that from which it started.
The Wright brothers began to explore all that had already been done regarding human flight. Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian. After studying the information they received from that institution, the brothers realized that they had as good a chance as anyone to be the ones to make human flight possible.
So they got busy, and for the next four years, they tested current theories about aerodynamics, many of which didn’t work. They developed their own theories, and devoted themselves to the goal of human flight, determined to be the ones who would turn the dream of human flight into reality.
The Wrights imagined success at what until then had been an unreachable goal. They had faith in themselves. And they worked hard to make what they imagined become reality.
As they got closer to realizing their dream, the two searched for an isolated spot with unrelenting wind, high dunes and lots of sand for soft landings where they could try out their ideas about flight.
On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur lifted off for the first time in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, in their invention, The Flyer. That day was the first time that anyone had ever flown in a manned, heavier than air machine that could leave the ground under its own power, move forward without losing speed and land on a point as high from which it had started.
The Wright brothers’ dreams had become reality. But even these two dreamers probably could not have imagined that only sixty-six years later, people would take what the Wright brothers had accomplished, would add their own dreams and hard work, and would fly all the way to the moon. Incredible! Only sixty-six years—from the windy, white sandy dunes on the coast of North Carolina, to the charcoal gray dusty surface of the moon, thanks to incredible imagination and the hard work by so many to make the dream of people walking on the moon a reality.
One thing I really appreciated about the museum exhibit at the Wright Brother’s memorial was the emphasis on imagination, for imagination is the source of all creativity. God imagined the universe into being, from the farthest galaxies to the tiniest living microscopic life on our planet. “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the things thy hands hath made…..” Not only the universe, but we ourselves have been brought to life from God’s imagination.
The whole Bible is the story of what God imagines for creation and the reality of what really happens—God’s imagination distorted by our own desires, and we can use the word “sin” as shorthand for that corruption that continually threatens to destroy us and our planet.
Which brings me to Jesus, the ultimate imaginative act of God. Nothing else having gotten through to us, God imagines God’s self in human form, and as we Christians believe, Jesus is born as one of us, lives as one of us, and dies as one of us.
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