Today's Sermon

 

"Creative in Response to Challenge – Who We Are Series"

 

            A couple weeks ago I watched the new Netflix documentary Apollo 13:  Survivalwhich details the dramatic mission to land on the moon that was aborted after an onboard explosion.  It was a journey that only returned the astronauts to earth safely after heroic efforts.  I had previously loved the 1995 drama on the same subject starring Tom Hanks, and I was curious to see how many liberties the feature film had taken.  In the Hanks film, some of the scenes seemed too far-fetched to be true.  For instance, there’s this moment when back at mission control they’re trying to figure out how to fashion a CO2 scrubber with only the limited materials available on the ship.  The inventory is almost comical.  A man walks in and dumps onto a conference table a bunch of seemingly random materials, among them duct tape.  He gathers engineer round and says, we need to make a scrubber out of this.  Sure enough, in the documentary, the scene unfolds just like that.  At one point one of the engineers literally instructs the astronauts to try stuffing a sock in part of the make-shift filter.  A sock. We’re saving astronauts hurling through space on a wounded ship, heading off course, with limited power, and a rapidly depleting breathable environment with…a sock and duct tape. 

            You know the ending.  Against the odds, they make it home.  Creativity is possibility, especially when fueled by cool-headedness, ingenuity, and yes, a little desperation.  These are the ingredients that help us overcome in the midst of challenging circumstances.  Responding to challenge with creativity is our long-planned out topic for today as part our ongoing series on who we are as Christians.  Today, we say we are creative in the face of challenge and hardship. Religion to many probably seems like the domain of the obedient, the unthinking, anything but the creative. We say nothing should be further from the truth.

            Our sacred stories are replete with moments of creativity in the face of incredible hardship, overwhelming odds, and big scary opponents. These are often stories of life and death, the survival of a people.  Take our Older Testament reading for today from Exodus.  In it a woman devises a way to protect her newborn from the authorities, from Pharaoh of Egypt, “the narrow place.”

Exodus 2:1-10
Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. ²The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him for three months. ³When she could hide him no longer she got a papyrus basket for him, and plastered it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. ⁴His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him.

5 The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. ⁶When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him. ‘This must be one of the Hebrews’ children,’ she said. ⁷Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, ‘Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?’ ⁸Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, ‘Yes.’ So the girl went and called the child’s mother. ⁹Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, ‘Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages.’ So the woman took the child and nursed it. ¹⁰When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and she took him as her son. She named him Moses, ‘because’, she said, ‘I drew him out of the water.’

            Moses’ mother does what mothers do—and maybe father’s too—whatever it takes with whatever they have in the face of whatever stands in the way. She doesn’t have the might of Pharaoh, but she can get creative.  She puts Moses, who will one day lead the people to freedom, in a basket and releases him into the stream.  Do you catch the imagery, by the way?  She has built him a mini-ark, just as Noah did, to save her people from being wiped out. What does Alice Walker say?  “Hope is a woman who has lost her fear.”[1]It’s not that Moses’ mother has nothing to fear, but rather nothing could get any scarier for her, so in place of fear, she installs creativity and courage.

            Our second reading features a man named Nicodemus:

John 3:1-8
Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. ²He came to Jesus by night and said to him, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.’ ³Jesus answered him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’ ⁴Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’ ⁵Jesus answered, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. ⁶What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷Do not be astonished that I said to you, “You must be born from above.” ⁸The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’

            Nicodemus comes curious to Jesus.  For the sake of argument, let’s presume that rather than that he is setting out to trap Jesus as some contend.  He seems earnest if only in his denseness.  When Jesus says to see the kingdom of God you have to be born from above or “born again” as we often hear it, Nicodemus seems unable to clear the bar of literal thinking. Jesus is talking about accessing a greater spirit, a higher consciousness, a deeper wisdom, a better way. Again, the image of water—it’s a washing away an old way of being and thinking in preparation for something better, something renewing, something of God.  

            To face this world, and all the challenges it holds for us, we too have to be born from a greater spirit, from above.  We must devise our way out of the narrowness and intractability that this world sometimes presents.  Our creativity will free us and lead us to God’s shalom, God’s peace and justice, which is why we say it is a religious value.  This is who we are as Christians, as people of faith, even as people who still want to say they are spiritual but not religious, maybe because they need to be born out of the narrowness of a form of the tradition they once knew. 

            How are you creative?  These are the five questions I gave you in the worship preview that we put out in advance of each week’s teaching: 

1. How are you creative?  You are, whether you embrace that truth or not.  More on that in a moment.
2. What are some inspiring examples of creativity and creative problem solving you can recall?
3. What happens to you when you face something that’s challenging?  What’s the inner monologue, the self-talk, that takes place in you, as my teacher says in the world famous yoga studio where I go…otherwise known as YouTube.
4. Who do you know that is a particularly good problem-solver?  What can you learn from them?
5. How can one practically cultivate creativity? 

As I said, you are creative, or at least you have the seeds of creativity in you. They were there at some point even if they didn’t get nourished or acknowledged.  The good news is they’re not gone.  They might just be dormant.  I love the quote from author Elizabeth Gilbert that I included on the cover of your bulletin.  It’s from an interview she did with theologian Kate Bowler and as such the wording is consistent with how someone speaks as opposed to how we write, but it’s still a good read:

...every single inch of this planet has been altered by human creativity. We we make things. We change things. We alter things. Every single one of your ancestors was creative. Every single one of them. Every single one. You know, your children show up and you put like colors in front of them. Then, like, I know how to do this. Like they know how to do like they know how to do it instinctively. They want to do it. They want to play with form. They want to play with shape. They want to play with stories. They want to play with songs. They want to play with imagining that there’s something else. Like it’s what we literally do. And one of the great tragedies is that this culture has professionalized it. And the term like there’s a term I hate so much, “a creative”. I’m a creative. It makes like it makes me flinch because it’s like, first of all, who isn’t?[2]

            Every good thing has been made possible or been repaired by the creative spirit.  Some of us just have more work to do to recover it or to cultivate it.  I have a friend who can fix anything.  We had this sliding door that wouldn’t latch anymore. Now, I thought I was accomplishing something quite extraordinary by ordering a replacement handle mechanism and swapping it out.  You have no idea my lack of handiness. I text Jeff Shankle pictures whenever I change a lightbulb.  I changed a bathtub faucet this year.  Oh, the glory!  Alas, after my efforts, my sliding door handle still wouldn’t latch, so I called my friend. He came over and said, “oh, you need a spacer,” which of course I didn’t have.  I mainly stock lightbulbs.  No problem, my friend took a picture frame hanger and bent it with some pliers and voila, the door locks, baby Moses is safe, and we’re all free. 

            Creativity is possibility.  I don’t just mean every technological feat, though certainly that, but every act of service or caring or justice was born of someone’s creativity. When you are trying to do something good, you are usually up against something, whether it’s circumstance or an actual opposition.  The odds are usually stacked against you; otherwise the problem wouldn’t exist. Creativity is your way in, around, and through to the other side. 

            Religious people can be creative people.  Philip Newell tells stories about nuns finding ways to perform the Eucharist, which they’re normally not allowed to do in the Catholic. They would call priests to their community who either couldn’t speak, so the nuns had to (got to) say the words or were two shaky to hold the elements so the nuns had to (got to) perform the sacrament.  While COVID had many traumas, and I mourn its loses, it was also a time that sparked significant creativity and as a result new proficiencies.  We now do business meetings online without a second thought. We have learned to podcast and record video shorts for social media, all while learning anew just how important face-to-face interactions are and thus rededicating to more connecting experiences. 

            The challenges bring out our creativity because they tap into our will to survive.  Do we want to survive?  I didn’t even get into the ways in which those outside the church were innovative in that cramped season.  There was a study through the Paris Brain Institute that found that while people were more stressed during the pandemic, they were also more measurably creative.[3]  We can’t exist in high-stress environments for long periods of time without damage, but when we’re forced to be in them, we can lean into and dare to trust in our ability to be creative as we make our way through them.  As people of faith, we claim the abiding presence of the Spirit to whom we cleave even if we do not understand her.

            Think of the examples in our history here.  When we were renovating and couldn’t find affordable suitable office space, someone had the bright idea to rent the ground level of another church.  A few years before that when our Jewish neighbors renovated their space, they made their home with us.  When Janey Spahr was doing her groundbreaking and against-the-rules ministry as a LGBTQ pastor we ran her compensation through our payroll.  Thanks to Janey’s creativity just this week, now decades later, we celebrated a ministry of religious persons caring for trans persons recovering from their surgery. Creativity is possibility.

            Maybe it is a moment for some assessment.  What are the challenges?  What are your or our resources?  Who is around the table and who else do we need to get in the room?  It’s when you may have the most to be afraid of that you are finally able to lose your fear and get to work.  You may not be in mission control, but it is time to take control of your mission, dump everything out of the table say, “Okay I’ve got to make this…out of this…” and get started.

            Amen.

[1]https://alicewalkersgarden.com/2013/10/hope-of-healing/

[2]https://katebowler.com/podcasts/why-your-creativity-matters/

[3]https://www.news-medical.net/news/20220511/Study-reveals-how-the-creativity-of-people-evolved-during-the-first-COVID-19-lockdown.aspx