Of these two things you can be certain—nay, three: death, taxes, and a raging debate among preachers at the release of each new season of “The Chosen.” The issue at hand? Whether or not it’s right for the show’s creators to participate in creative imagining.
Funny thing is, I suspect every preacher taking part in the lively debate does exactly what they’re so concerned about—employ creative liberty even if they do it sparingly.
I know I do.
Most of us have come to the conclusion that it isn’t just admissible—it’s essential. But we also hold tightly this conviction: Our imaginative telling of the biblical stories must always be explicitly subservient to actual revelation.
It took me a while to reach this conclusion. I left my college and seminary education carrying a metaphorical suitcase crammed with convictions, many of which were of an exegetical nature. One conviction in particular was that the biblical stories and their truths should be kept hallowed as they were held up in my sermons.
And to be clear, I thank God for that old suitcase and all that it holds. But in those early days of ministry, each time I crossed the bridge from biblical studies to sermon-writing, I was haunted by the lack of certainty for how to incorporate extrabiblical material into my preaching—by which I mean those story-telling flourishes at the edges of a biblical narrative that every good preacher knows are needed for a sermon to be engaging and applicable.
I can’t recall any classroom discussions about it, but my colleagues and classmates could all recall having heard good and godly preachers use their sanctified imaginations.
I pushed myself to consider the matter more deeply, and I found a path forward with this as a central axiom: When preaching a biblical narrative, any creative imagining must always be subservient to the actual revelation, serving it and the congregation for purposes of education and application.
This guiding principle has served me well, even just a few Advents ago when telling the story of those lowly shepherds from the night of Jesus’ birth.
As always, it demanded I first do my homework—contextual analysis, historical and cultural research, linguistic studies, and so on—and then I began to get a bit creative. I wondered if at the edges of my biblical narrative in Luke 2, I could winsomely educate my audience on the social and spiritual plights of an ancient shepherd by imagining aloud a backstory for one of them. And would an additional imagining of that shepherd’s life after his encounter with the Child help my listeners find their way into application? And could I do all this while keeping the biblical narrative front and center—not adding to it, but drawing from it, to lead into and out of it? I found I could.
I knew it would require that clarifying note my axiom calls for—a brief word to set apart the imagined from the revealed for the audience—but that was easy enough to write: “Can I draw from my study of this story to imagine with each of you what life might have been like for one of these guys?”
