In 1979, Masaru Ibuka, the co-founder of Sony, asked the company’s engineers to make him a portable stereo cassette player so that he could take the music that he wanted with him on a plane. Within a few days, the engineers had delivered a prototype. The headphones were gigantic, and the device required special batteries, but it worked, and when Akio Morita, Sony’s C.E.O., saw it, he realized that the massive potential for this device. Morita saw a way in which the music could travel with the person instead of the person having to go to the music. This revolution in portable music changed the music industry.
When I was in college, I did a summer internship at a company that provided equipment to Disneyworld and Disneyland. I had an opportunity to meet with the engineering staff of Disneyworld, and I remember that they called their engineers, imagineers. I loved that title. It was so freeing. Instead of thinking of engineers as nerdy people who walked around with pocket protectors and calculators, I thought of imagineers as creative geniuses. Imagineers are innovators, people who are always looking at the next frontier of technology and asking the big questions of what if and what next. What if we can make music portable or phones portable?
I think that the concepts of innovation and imagineering are just as appropriate in theology. Maybe we should call theologians imagilogians or theovators. Like imagineers, we are always addressing the big questions, what if, what next. The only difference is that we ask the questions from a faith perspective instead of a technological perspective
Imagineers and innovators take what is already there, and they envision it in a radically different way. Sony introduced a change in music listening habits by allowing people to carry music with them.
The apostle Paul was a great imagineer. He was a great innovator who was willing to do whatever it took to get the Gospel to as many people as possible. Paul looked at scripture, and instead of seeing it as a testament that spoke only to the Jewish nation, he read the same words and recognized that God made room for all people. In his letter to the Romans Paul states that God shows no partiality.
In his letter to the Ephesians, a community with a large number of non-Jews, Paul writes, The Lord destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. Paul further writes to the people that in Christ you have also obtained an inheritance… , you were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit. The innovative Paul is showing us a way to read our sacred text that is inclusive of everyone.
Paul was not just an imagineer, he was a change agent. His re-interpretation of scripture called for the people of his time to reorder their thought processes to see the same thing in a new way.
Like Paul, Jesus was an imagineer. Unlike the people in power in his time, Jesus invited in the lepers, the tax collector, the prostitutes, the sick and the dying. Jesus opened his arms to the women and the children. The people had read the sacred text, but the message that the Messiah would suffer and serve and live in poverty and humility was unthinkable for the Jewish people. They would never have imagined that the Messiah would be born in obscurity, would reach out to the least and the lost, and would die by crucifixion like a common criminal.
Paul and Jesus lived lives asking what if. They both rebuked those who stood in the way of innovation:
All of us are invited to be imagineers. As believers, God claims us and converts us into a new people in Christ. Nothing can remain the same in God’s presence, and God is always full of wonderful surprises. As we are remade into the Lord’s image, we are given a new ability to reshape life and the world into a thing of beauty that reflects God’s own nature. We can repair and innovate and renovate, we can make things like new, but only God can make things new. Scripture tells us; The Lord made everything beautiful in its time’ (Eccles. 3:11).
I have come to believe that imagineering is an integral part of the faith journey. There are so many of us who feel that we are unworthy; that feel that we somehow slipped out of the vast net that Jesus cast. Paul tells us of God’s plan, a plan which has been unfolding from the beginning of time. God’s plan is not concerned with kings or rulers or only those in power. God’s plan is not concerned with those who are in good health or have good speaking voices or those who are a particular color or ethnicity or with a particular sexual orientation.
God’s plan is concerned with all Christians, with everyone who has heard the gospel and believed in Jesus. The NT reinforces this message in a variety of ways -- the sparrow's fall, the lilies of the field, even Paul’s journey on the road to Damascus. That you and I are that important to God is worth spending a few moments thinking about.
I ask you to ponder, what if you really did not slip away. What if you are in God’s embrace?
We are all in the process of becoming the people God meant us to be, and imagineering inspires us to be that new creation in Christ. Imagineering gives us the tools to push away the fear of change; because we know that without change, growth is impossible. And we know that often it is our experiences of fear and pain that shape us and aid the transformation process.
God invites us to become imagineers for Christ , and Christ promises us that He will be on the other end of it. He will receive us and welcome us to a place beyond our wildest imagination, not a future life, this life. May we strive to imagine and to innovate and to promote our part of the divine plan. Amen
Queen Anne 
