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.