Sermon for September 25, 2011 - A River of Creativity

The Scripture Readings for this Week's Sermon are Matthew 28:1-10 and Revelation 22:1-5

I grew up beside a river, the Humber River in Toronto.  As a kid, I remember going for walks and bike rides along its banks.  Watching fish and other wildlife swim in and around it.  Sometimes we’d go to where it emptied into Lake Ontario to watch people fly kites.  The river had little waterfalls, pools and eddies.  It was great.  I went down there for a run this summer.  It smelt awful.  There was miscellaneous brown foam, making its way towards the lake.  And there was garbage everywhere.  Perhaps I’m idealizing what it was like as kid, but I can tell you, it is disgusting now.  It broke my heart.

There are many problems in the world.  There is a lot of brown foam and garbage in the world.  We have significant environmental challenges.  We live in a world divided by war and by economics.  Security, both financial and physical, have become our greatest concerns.  We watch and read about horrible crimes.  The state of discourse between ideologies has degraded to petty slurs and mudslinging at best.  The noble life is openly equated with a life where you look out for yourself first and foremost.  Ego and extreme individualism have been pandered to so that they have become social addictions.  We have become overwhelmed by our problems.  They haunt us as individuals, and they haunt us as a society.  We have become entombed by them.  Systems and structures of society, that we don’t even notice, that we take for granted have control, and we assume there is no other way to exist.  We are trapped in this way of thinking.  We are trapped in this acquiescence to fear.  We are trapped in a spiral and we don’t know how to get out.

This past week a friend of mine directed me to an online video clip (http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html).  It was of Ken Robinson, an educational theorist, giving a talk at a TED Conference a few years ago.  In his discussion he told a true story about a young girl.  She was disruptive in school, her work was often disjointed and turned in late, it was difficult to keep her attention.  The teachers said that she had a learning disability.  So her mother took her to a doctor who listened to the complaints, then told the little girl, “I’d just like to speak to your mother for a moment.”  He invited the mother to leave the office with him, and as he left, he turned on the radio.  He told the mother “just watch her.”  As soon as the adults had left the room, the girl started to sway and move to the music.  The doctor said to the mother, “Your daughter’s not sick.  She’s a dancer.  Take her to a dance school.”  This girl would grow up to become Andrew Lloyd Weber’s go to choreographer.  Her name is Gillian Lynne.  She has choreographed some of the greatest pieces of theatre, Cats and Phantom of the Opera.  And she is a multi-millionaire.

Jillian’s school was entombed in a certain way of thinking.  Trapped behind beliefs about what was normal, about what was the “proper” way to be, about how things always had been and always would be.  And poor Jillian and her mother were brought into that realm, into that space of rigid thinking.  It was not until the doctor was creative enough to realize that Jillian thought differently than the “norm”, that hope was offered.  He did not say she should shut up and listen.  He said that she herself should exercise her own creativity.

And it is creativity that we need in the world now more than anything.  Robinson says that creativity, that ability to come up with new ideas rather than slotting ourselves into the same old ones, will help us function in the world at its rate of change.  He advocates quite strongly that creativity is just as important as literacy.

I think rivers are the perfect symbol of creativity.  Civilization was created by rivers.  The Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization, exists because of two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates.  Subsequently, human imagination has turned to rivers for creative inspiration.  The Egyptian Empire saw the Nile River as the source of life.  By its seasons of flooding they survived, as it carried in nutrients to fertilize their flood plain fields.  Our own biblical creation story, describes the Garden of Eden as the source of four great rivers that water earth.

Even beyond the human realm, rivers are the source of some of the greatest acts of natural creation we have seen.  Rivers twist and turn, chaotically charting and carving their course across the land.  When they come up against a rock, the go around it, and over time, they wear it down.  When they come to a ledge, they are not afraid to go over it, creating some of the most dramatic natural images we can think of.  And knowing that it is the littlest trickle that can eventually bring down a mountain, that a single river can create Niagara Falls, or carve into the earth a mile deep as in the Grand Canyon is a tremendous source of awe and marvel.

In our scripture from the book of the Revelation today we read about the River of life.  This flow of creative energy that comes out from God is the source of life and peace in the world.  Echoing the book of Genesis, this river is the source of re-creation.  Ezekiel describes this same river, writing “wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be many fish, once these waters reach there.  It will become fresh; and everything will live where the river goes.”  This water will create fruit for food, and leaves for healing.  This is the creative energy of God, and it exists within our own creativity, that great action inspired by the Holy Spirit.

And yet for some reason, in times of trial and tribulation, often it is our river of creativity that we abandon first.  As I spoke about last week, guided by fear, we try to gain control of everything, turning our backs to the creative power of the Holy Spirit.  I don’t know what it is, maybe we just want some sense of stability.  We just want to hold on to something we know and understand, and the Holy Spirit is NOT stable.  Creativity is NOT stable.  Rivers are NOT stable.  They twist, they turn, they carve.  To paraphrase Heraclitus, “You never put your foot in the same river twice.”  It is constantly flowing, it is new water each and every time.  We don’t want to hit a rock, or go over any ledges.  Creativity, the Holy Spirit, riding the River becomes a great risk.  And it is one we often feel we cannot afford to take.  But I would argue, we cannot afford NOT to take it.

In his CBC Radio One show, the Age of Persuasion, Terry O’Reilly describes a man, Hal Wallis, who took a great risk in making a movie.  The script was based on a play, but the screenwriters hired to adapt it left when they were about a third of the way through.  He could not get the director he wanted.  The stars spent their time on set talking about how to get out of making the movie, and found the process of making the film so difficult, they wouldn’t even talk about it with their friends.  Everyone thought the dialogue was unrealistic, and the story itself was not believable.  While filming, the script had no written ending, so they decided to shoot two alternatives, hoping to pick which one they liked.  Unfortunately, they ran out of money after they shot the first ending, and had to wrap production.  The movie was declared a flop when it was previewed.  If Hal Wallis had backed down at any of these points, if he had been afraid of failure, Casablanca would never have been released.  It would never have been nominated for 8 Oscars, winning the big three, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Picture.  It would not be regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made. 

O’Reilly then offers a famous quote, “Ships are safe in the harbour, but that’s not what ships were made for.”  Rivers were made to smash into rocks, to go over ledges.  It is in doing things like this, that they garner their true power.

We were made to be creative.  When the bible says we are made in God’s image, I would argue that in many ways, it is our creativity that resonates with divinity.  Pablo Picasso once said, “All children are artists, the problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” 

It is not a matter of children being quiet so we can teach them.  It is a matter of them laughing, and giggling, and playing, and dancing, and singing, so that they can teach us.  They can remind us what that River of creativity is like, they can direct us to the Holy Spirit.  Robinson, uses another wonderful story to illustrate the free spirit of children, who are not worried about getting things wrong.  A little girl is drawing a picture.  The teacher comes up to her and asks what she’s drawing.  “I’m drawing a picture of God.”  The teacher responds with, “But no one knows what God looks like.”  The girls replies “They will when I’m done.” 

We should not be afraid of being creative, even though we might fail, we should be free to be creative.  We should not be afraid to let the Holy Spirit course through us, hitting obstacles, twisting and turning one way then another, going over ledges from which we cannot see the bottom.  This is the power by which we will remake the world.  We cannot allow ourselves to be stopped up.

In our Gospel reading for today, there was a big rock in the way.  It was forced out with the words, “Be not afraid.”  The vision of hope offered in the book of the Revelation, is creative power flowing from God.  It is the Holy Spirit in action in our world and in our hearts.  It is this creativity innate within us that we must tap in order to irrigate the world, so that something new and wonderful can spring forth.  Thanks be to God, Amen.

 

Our Wilderness Guide

The Reading for this Sermon was Romans 8:18-27

For a few years I was a leader at a summer youth program called FutureQuest.  The part of FutureQuest that the participants seemed to love the most was the three or four day camping trip we’d take.  A lot of the kids had never been camping, many had never been out of their home cities, so it was always an adventure.  But as a leader, I would always lie in my tent at night, terrified about each and every one of the kids I was watching over.  Every rustle of leaves made me think about the size of the bear licking its lips as it approached one of the tents full of youth, all of whom smelled like hot dogs.  Every crack of thunder made me worry about what tent had just been struck.  It was only after we all would be safely at home and I could hear the excitement in the participants voices that I could breathe again and realize what an awesome time we did indeed have.  This is the nature of wilderness.  It is that awareness that we are not in control.

Paul and the people he wrote to were in a wilderness of their own.  In many ways, life in the first century of the Common Era was tough.  The streets were far less safe than they are today, life had less value. With poorer sanitation and less knowledge of medicine, illness and disease were constant threats. Even the image of birthing, which Paul uses in this letter, was not just a time of great excitement, but also of fear, as the infant and maternal mortality rates were much higher than they are today. 

Paul himself, often faced persecution for his beliefs, and even within the Christian community, he faced opposition.  The Christians of Rome in the first century also faced their share of persecution and division.  There was division between the Gentile and Jewish Christians.  The Roman authorities, at least twice came down hard on the Christian community there.  Once Emperor Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome because, to quote a Roman historian, they made “disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus” (probably a misuse of the word Christus or Christ).  And later they were intensely persecuted by Emperor Nero as a scapegoat for a fire that burned Rome.  These were people for whom life, in many ways, was beyond their control.

Times have not changed as much as we like to think they have.  We are a species that cannot admit it lives in the wilderness.  We cannot admit it, because it terrifies us.  Not having control, is frightening.  So we commit vast amounts of energy and resources into maintaining it, or at the very least, maintaining the illusion.

This desire, this longing for control, this denial of wilderness manifests in ways beyond count.  We see this manifest in the clear cutting of our natural wonders, trying to wield them to do our bidding.  We see this manifest itself in the cookie-cutter confines of suburbia.  We see this manifest itself in our refusal to even talk about death, or in our struggles to sit with those who are sick.  We see this manifest in thousands of years of sexual repression, trying to deny those feelings that make us feel out of control.  We see this manifest itself in thousands of years of religious oppression, the idea that we control whether or not we are in God’s good books.  We see this manifest in our violent attempts to maintain some sense of security. We see this manifest in the Gospel of America, that to be honest, we hold very close to our hearts in Canada, the delusion that somehow I am entirely in control of my own destiny.  That a poor person on the street, for some reason deserves it.  That who we are is somehow all a result of worth.  That is why, when bad stuff happens, we ask deep within our hearts, “What did I do to deserve this?”  We ask this, because we want an answer.  But when the answer comes back, “Nothing.”  We are terrified.

We hold onto these messages, we long for these rules and codes, for these opportunities to judge others and judge ourselves based on circumstances; because if they are not true, we see how out of control and how powerless we really are.

We live in the wilderness.

Let me say that again.  We live in the wilderness.  We live in the wilderness, and our guide is fear.  And so we run through the wilderness in a panic, trying to transform it into something that we can control.  Trying to shape it, to landscape it.  To turn it from a desert into Las Vegas, to turn it from a forest into a park.  We long to control the wilderness that we all live in. Until, one day, we forget that we are even in the wilderness.  And when a sandstorm strikes Las Vegas, or wild animals begin appearing in the park, we give our hearts once again to our trusted guide.  Our guide then tells us to tame the lions into kittens, to turn the wolves into puppies.  And when the kittens maul us, and the puppies bite, we give even more of our hearts over to our trusted guide.  Soon, all we have to trust, is fear.

This is why the Way of Christ is such a ridiculous faith.  Because it defies all semblance of logic, it stands in the face of one of our most base emotions, and offers a very different guide through the wilderness.  Hope.  Hope we encounter in the person of Jesus, hope that is embodied within our experience of the wilderness itself.

Truthfully, I find the Way of Christ, the Christian Scriptures to be among the most honest lenses to look at the world through.  Our faith is upfront (or at least it should be) with its admission that we live in the wilderness.  It admits that you can be the most noble being, the literal embodiment of goodness and holiness, you can live and breath God, devoting your life to charity, to justice, and to compassion, and still end up on a cross, rejected by family and friends, and declared a criminal.

What happens to us is not based on worth.  That idea is foundational to our faith.  Jesus said, “It rains on the just and the unjust, alike.”  His life’s ministry constantly showed that because someone was poor, or sick, or an outcast, did not mean they had done something wrong, and just because someone was rich and powerful did not mean that they had done something right.

This resonates still today, along with numerous other messages.  We can live the healthiest life in the world and still die of cancer, or still have a heart attack.  And I remember hearing an interview with the oldest woman in the world at the time, who admitted to being a lifelong smoker.  Economies collapse and affect those who have done tremendous good in their lives; and those who have lived lives of corruption may walk off unscathed.  In times of war it is not just the “bad guys” who die.  In fact , it is far more likely that it is the innocents who do, women and children often bear the brunt of violence.  The people in Somalia are not responsible for the famine that is causing such devastation.

Life is a wilderness.  And we can either deny that, and let fear dictate how we live our lives.  Or we can listen to the words of Paul, Paul who invites us to live lives of Hope.  Hope in something that Paul freely admits he cannot describe. 

Hope that even though the wilderness is beyond our control, we might encounter something unimaginable for ourselves, that we might see sights that take our breath away and resonate within our hearts.  Hope that one day we will learn to not run away from wilderness on our own, but walk through it with one another.  Hope that we see embodied in Christ, who though he saw himself walking towards the cross, would not change his direction out of fear.  Hope that as we walk through the wilderness, as we encounter our struggles, that we come to know we do not walk alone. Hope that it is in the wilderness that we encounter God. Hope that when we surrender our control, when we stop trying to wield this world, one another, and ourselves, that the Holy will be with us.  Hope that it is through the wilderness that God walks with us.  Hope that we come to know God intimately as we join Christ in his walk through the wilderness towards the cross.

We live in the midst of wilderness.  Who will be our guide?

Sermon for September 11, 2011 - Cain's Choice

The Scripture Reading for this sermon came from Genesis 4:1-16

Cain stormed down from the mountain.  His face was bright red and he cursed with each step he took.  His brother called from behind him, but he didn’t answer.  When he reached his field, he grabbed some of the crop that had not been harvested, and pulled it out by its roots.  He flung it at a nearby tree with a yell, and dropped to his knees.  With his head in his hands, he began to cry.

“What’s wrong Cain?”

“It’s not fair.”

“What’s not fair?”

“Why him?  Why do you prefer his sacrifice over mine?”

“Does it matter Cain?”

“Yeah it matters!  What, do you prefer meat more than grain?  Was my offering in someway less perfect than his?”

“No Cain.  It doesn’t matter.  I liked his offering more than yours and there is absolutely nothing you can do to change that.  The only question that matters is, what are you going to do about it?”

Cain opened his eyes and looked up.  “What do you mean by that?”

“What I mean is that, sometimes things happen that are beyond your control.  They can be good, they can be bad.  The only thing that you have control over, is how you respond to them.  You can either respond to them well, with compassion, empathy and with love.  Or you can fall prey to sin, and respond with hatred, with vitriol, fear, and selfishness.  So yeah, if I tell you that I liked Abel’s offering more than yours, what are you going to do about it?  Something bad has happened to you Cain, what kind of person are you going to be?”

Throughout the years people have tried to figure out why God accepted Abel’s offering, but was displeased with Cain’s.  There have been a number of different theories put forward.  They range from Cain’s offering being the dregs of his crop, while Abel offered the best of his flock; to God’s preference for ranchers over farmers.  But there really isn’t too much evidence for any of these within the text.  Because this story is not about what sort of sacrifices God likes.  This story is not about whether Cain did anything wrong that would cause his sacrifice to be unfit. 

Nor is this story a polemic against fratricide or murder in general.  The murder itself takes up only a verse in the chapter.  Following his conversation with God, Cain takes Abel out to the field, and kills him.

“Where is your brother, Cain?”

“So now it’s my job to take care of him?  You love him so much, you find him!”

“What have you done?”

Silence.

“What have you done, Cain?  The earth is crying out with the blood of your brother!  What have you done Cain?”

Cain has made his choice.  Something bad happened to Cain, something beyond his control.  God pointed out the two paths for him, the path of doing well, of doing right, and the path of sin that was waiting for him, calling to him, luring him into its jaws.

Has Cain mastered sin?  Has he controlled himself enough to walk the path of righteousness?  Or has he been lured away, down the other path?

Ten years ago today, I was, somewhat ironically, in an ethics class.  We were given a short break midway through to go to the washroom, or to get a snack.  When class started again, another student came in and informed us that the U.S. was under attack.  The professor, somewhat distracted tried to continue teaching, but eventually he realized he couldn’t concentrate, and neither could any of us, so he let us all go find various tvs throughout campus.

I remember coming home on the bus that day, hearing all sorts of crazy rumors about the number of missing planes, about how many of them were over Canada.  Even watching the news was madness, as none of the stations seemed to have a clue what was going on either.  When the dust settled, numbers, names, and stories could finally be put together.

And though it was the U.S. that was attacked that day, we should never be so smug as to sit safely behind national boundaries.  It was our society that was attacked, the United States just happens to be the greatest symbol of our society.  It was terrifying, it was tragic, and three thousand people lost their lives.

What was our response?  What has happened in the 10 years since September 11, 2001?  How much have we invested into the past ten years?  I don’t just mean dollars and cents.  What has been the cost?  Have we surrendered to anger and fear, rather than mastering them?  Do we control them or have we become their prey, as God warns Cain against?

I was reading in the Observer this month, that today we also celebrate another anniversary.  On September 11, 1906, Mahatma Gandhi, began his campaign of Satyagraha in South Africa.  It was this movement that he would later bring to India, and would influence some of the greatest names of the Twentieth Century, like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.  Though it literally means firmness of truth, Dr. King described this movement in his “I have a Dream” Speech as “confronting physical force with soul force.”

Why is it that we hold up figures like Gandhi, like Mandela, like Martin Luther King, Jr.?  The oppression in colonial India, in Apartheid South Africa, and against blacks in America, was unfair and beyond control. Against the overwhelming nature of the violence committed against them and their people, how did they respond?  Were the oppressed groups controlled by fear and anger, or did they master and wield their emotions?

The story of Cain and Abel is a story about the choices we all face.  When confronted by opposition, when confronted by events outside of our control that are unfair, that are unjust, that hurt us, how do we respond?  The next time violence descends upon our society, the next time our economies collapse, the next time a natural disaster strikes, will we be our brothers’ keepers?  Will we offer the sacrificial love of Christ?  Or will we walk down that ever so tantalizing path of sin, the path of surrendering to anger and fear, the path that will forever brand us with the mark of Cain?

The Awe of the Forest

The scripture reading for this sermon was Acts 17:22-28

I remember as a child, going for long walks in the woods.  I don’t know if I was an especially willing participant in these long walks.  I imagine I kicked up quite the fuss when mom or dad would come into the room to say that we were going for a walk.  I’d roll my eyes, gripe and grumble, and we’d be off.

But forests are whimsical places.  Places where magic, especially for children, still exists.  Once I’d moved through my “struggling to pick up my feet” phase of the constitutional, (I’m guessing that was around the time I’d figure out that my parents weren’t listening to me, and were continuing to go for their walk with or without me) I’d quickly find myself lost within the expanse of it all.  I remember we used to go to the Bruce Trail, a trail that runs through the wilderness of southern Ontario (and I don’t mean Toronto).  And there was a recreated First Nations village, complete with long houses.  I thought it was the coolest, and I would immediately get drawn into that world.

The woods around our cottage were no different.  Me and my buddy James would head out into the trees, playing either Robin Hood, or Lord of the Rings.  A part of me would like to say that ended when I grew up, but deep down inside, I’m glad I can say it didn’t.  This summer I went exploring with my niece and nephew, only for a few minutes, but I found myself drawn back into the magic of it all.  And as I sat under the massive trees of Stanley Park in Vancouver, writing this sermon, I couldn’t help but realize that the same thing which made forests feel magical as a child, continues to exist within them. 

Forests are wonderful.  They are places that can draw us out of ourselves while at the same time drawing us deeper into ourselves. They are places to pause, away from the racket of the world, or the racket of our own minds; to hear a collection of sounds, to see sights, we otherwise wouldn’t.  They remind us of the shear complexity of the biosphere.  How interdependent all of creation is.  Trees and other plants depend on the nutrients from their dead ancestors and from those animals which die and decompose into the soil.  And they are dependant on many of those same animals to pollinate, or to plant their seeds for them.  In return, they offer homes, they offer food, they offer the very air that all of us breathe.  Forests crowd us in, cutting off our sight, and surround us in the mystery of wondering what is just beyond those trees.  And though there probably won’t be orcs, there will always be the possibility of something new and exciting, maybe even terrifying.

Because, more than anything, forests fill us with a sense of awe, a sense of humility, and at times a sense of fear all at once.  They are places that through those very feelings bring us to our knees before the Holy.

Paul had just come from a long walk, and now he was surrounded by the sights and sounds of Athens.  People yelling across crowded streets, smells filling the air, every class from slave to noble, races from across the Roman Empire were gathered together.  Temples and statues to different gods crowded the streets, the markets, and the buzz of activity was in the air.

It was a different pace of life than what he had been used to on the road.  Chased out of Thessalonica, Paul had spent sometime wandering the way to Athens.  Undoubtedly throughout his many travels, he would have passed by any variety of wildlife, he would have passed through groves of olive trees and fields of wildflowers.  He would have seen life completely foreign to the great cities of Greece and the rest of the Roman Empire.

And so when he comes across an altar to “an unknown god”, he immediately starts speaking.  He says, “Do you know why this god is unknown to you?  Do you know why you cannot find this very god you claim to worship?  Because you are looking here!  Here amid human constructs, amid markets, amid temples and religion!  If you want to know this God, you need to experience this God, you need to be filled by the awareness and awe that God is not within your little structures, but is in all things!  God is the union of all things and beyond in which all of us live and move, and have our being.”

We have lost our sense of awe for the world around us. We who have conquered almost every corner of the globe, now see ourselves as standing apart from it, see ourselves as somehow above, distinct from the world around us.  Does anyone else see that as isolating?  Does anyone understand how lonely a worldview that is?  The idea that somehow we are detached from the world? There is something incredibly tragic about that.

This is one of the many reasons forests are so important.  I could list off their scientific and ecological utility, but today we’re talking about their affects on our spiritual side.  On that side of us that long for right relationship, on that side of us that longs for union and wholeness.  That opportunity to stand in the woods, to see, to hear, to feel the utter complexity and interconnectivity around us.  That opportunity to stand back, to look up at the enormity of a tree, and to see it surrounded by countless of its brothers and sisters, fills us with a sense of humility.  A realization that we are not above creation, but we are a part of something far grander than anything we could possibly comprehend.  To go to those places where we cannot continue the illusion that we are entirely in control, we need that!  We need that opportunity to ground us in reality and awe.

Paul understood that.  Paul understood that human creation, whether physical buildings, codified religions, or anthropocentric images of God, that cultures, that social structures, that nations and empires could not contain the eternal, though we perhaps like to think it is so.  Paul understood that all things live and move and have being their being in God.  And so he invites us to stand back and just experience and be awed by the holiness of all that is, rather than trying to construct it for ourselves.  Thanks be to God, Amen.