"I went down to the rich man's house, and I took back what he stole from me." Daniel can't get that protest song out of his head, but his relationship with imagination is complicated. He once prayed for hours in a lodge set up to block a pipeline across Native land in Minnesota, then watched the pipeline get finished anyway. When the system keeps winning, dreaming of something better can feel absurd.
Continuing Dangerous Imaginations, Daniel reads Luke 18:1–8, the widow who keeps coming back to an unjust judge until he gives in. The judge's word for what she might do to him, hypopiazo, comes from boxing: to give someone a black eye. With June Jordan's poem "I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies," bell hooks on the margin as a place of radical openness, and the visionary fiction of Octavia's Brood, Daniel reads the parable as a lesson in prayer: when we pray, we refuse to accept the world as it is and start imagining another one. He ends at Mount Vernon, where a small group marked July 4, 2026 as day one of a new history.
Where are you going down to, and what are you taking back?
About two minutes in the middle of this sermon were lost when the livestream dropped.
