Worship as Imaginative Exercise [Waking Into Mystery, Part 4]

Psalm 148

Rev. 21:1-6

Anyone who came of age in the mid 80’s knows the power of the movie, The Karate Kid.  Daniel moves with his mother from New Jersey to California.  In his new school Daniel is bullied by members of the Kobra Kai karate school.  In the midst of these troubles, Daniel is befriended by Mr. Miagi, an unassuming gardener who happens to be a master of martial arts.

 

Instead of instruction in the martial arts, Mr. Miagi assigns Daniel what appear to be meaningless tasks.  He is told to paint a fence and to wax a car.  Even when he is told that the painting and waxing movements are to be just so, he still does not understand why he is wasting his time on these projects.  Only much later, when these motions have become second nature, does it dawn on him that he has unwittingly been training all along.  (Spoiler alert – he wins the martial arts championship against one of the bullies and also takes home the girl.)

The same goes for all of us who have entered into habits of worship.  By participating in the rhythms of worship, you know much more than you think you know.  You have skills that you didn’t even realize.  The practices of worship form us in deep ways, and sneak up on us over the course of our lives.

We exercise our imaginative muscles every time we worship.  If you want to be able to imagine all creatures in their inter-connected smallness before the majesty of God (that's Psalm 148), you'll need the exercise built into habits of worship.  If you want to be able to imagine the full flourishing of a new heaven and a new earth (that's Revelation 21), you'll need the exercise built into habits of worship.

Like all exercise, the routines and rhythms of worship will enable us to imagine new possibilities in almost every area of our lives.  God's grace is breath-takingly free, but it energizes us for a life of "ora et labora" - prayer and work.  To receive God’s free grace just is to get to work with the new energy that God’s Spirit brings.  And so by “imagination” I mean a life of active commitment with others to meaningful projects.

Psalm 148 teaches us that the practice of worship levels the differences between all creatures.  Look at how different kinds of creatures – including the natural world and natural forces – are called to praise God.  Look at how different classes of human beings – princes and commoners, women and men, old and young – are called to praise.  One only gets this sense of togetherness if one sees all creaturely differences as unimportant when compared to the radical difference between creation and our Creator God.

So one goal of our worship should be to cultivate a sense of oneness with all things; a sense of being webbed and integrated together with all other creatures; a sense of solidarity with all other humans (and thus wary of divisive differences). 

So worship helps us notice how silly it is for human beings to compare themselves with one another; how silly it is for human creatures to see themselves as more powerful and important than others kinds of creatures.  We have all witnessed snobbery and cliques based on people with an exaggerated sense of their own status.  This focus on tiny gradations of difference – appearance, clothing, family connections, education, travel, house, possessions - as if they’re of vast importance functions to conceal our fundamental equality.  Getting better at worship will help you laugh at the pretensions of snobs and showboats, and will keep you from that kind of behavior yourself!

Revelation 21

The visionary poem called The Revelation asks us to imagine this stale, creaky world giving way to something new.  To live with faith is to learn to trust God’s promises to renew heaven and earth.  The emphasis here is not on the destruction of the earth, but instead on God’s promise to renew all of creation.  And in that renewal the key feature will be the full arrival of God’s presence in the midst of creation.  The city of Jerusalem descends towards the earth as a sign of God’s promise to make all things new.  This God is no distant overlord, no far away and absent controlling force.  This is the God of Jesus Christ, who is pleased to dwell among creatures.  And we are to look forward in hope to this arrival – a time when God will wipe every tear from our eyes; a life without death or mourning or crying or pain; a life in which Christ’s resurrection glory is shared with us and with all of reality.

Now that’s the vision of the poem.  I don’t pretend that it’s obviously true or easy to believe.  To be honest, this kind of hope requires the alignment of our best energies so that our entire lives become a form of work and prayer aimed at the future realization of this hope.  Perhaps that’s why there’s a long list of unfaithful behaviors that will lead one to miss this newness.  The vision of a new heaven and a new earth calls all of us – right now – to repent of behaviors, habits, and attitudes that do not press forward into the newness that God promises to us.  What is criticized here is not a certain group of people.  What is criticized is our own refusal to be pulled by God’s Spirit into the imagination of something new.

To read this poem and to dream of God-authored newness is to embrace a reality that is not directly in front of you.  Now let me lay out what it looks like when ordinary people like us allow our imaginations to be sharpened by regular habits of worship.

Some of you have met Charles and Melissa Johnson.  They are mission workers serving in a rural area of Zambia.  They visited us two summers ago to share with us about their work.  And their most recent newsletter is out in the narthex.  Their ministry in rural Zambia has been creative from the start.  They work in a seminary that trains Presbyterian pastors to lead congregations and trains them, at the same time, to be productive farmers.  Their most recent projects involve the building of a large agricultural facility to store their soybean crops.  Most Zambian farmers have no storage and are forced to sell all their soybeans at harvest time, when the price dips.  But now they will be able to store their beans and sell when the price is right.  Another new project is a rural health clinic, complete with a new cervical cancer screening program for women that has the potential to make a major difference in women’s health. 

This last project was made possible by an award from the Presbyterian Women Thank Offering Grant.  We gave to that mission fund just last week.  And additionally, part of our congregation’s mission giving goes to the work the Johnsons are doing.  The work they are doing is creative, imaginative work.  And to be honest, I want to commend you all for your generosity to that ministry.  Yes, we have our own community challenges here.  But we are not so absorbed in our own challenges that we can’t support our friends doing good work in other places.

Now let’s turn from far away Zambia to a little plot of unused land just behind us.  A year or so ago a group of you built some raised garden beds on that corner in the hopes that it could benefit our neighborhood.  Our friends at the Nazarene Church noticed that and began a conversation with us about partnering with them for more raised beds.  They have a ministry of helping people without jobs begin to learn responsibility and the value of work by tending to gardens.  They asked if our corner lot could be the new location of that work.  I took that question to our Session and they agreed that this would be a great opportunity to collaborate with another congregation in our community.  To put an unused lot to work, to build gardens where there was only weeds, to partner with another congregation – all these things require the ability to imagine something new. 

Along those lines let me give a plug for our upcoming Sunday Serve work day on June 2.  For some of you, and for some in the community – these work days have become one of the most powerful symbols of our sense of mission as a congregation.  We believe that God’s gracious generosity towards us in Jesus Christ ought to flow through us and become a blessing in our wider community.  We believe that God heals us in order to activate us and energize us as agents of healing for our neighbors.  These work days are sometimes incredibly productive.  Sometimes they’re not.  Regardless, by coming together in teams to serve others, we learn to imagine ourselves as agents who can make a difference.  We repent of our American addiction to a certain kind of religiosity that involves dressing up and coming to a service in a beautiful sanctuary that, in some ways, asks very little of us.  We are not here for ourselves.  Our goal is not simply a flourishing congregation.  Our dream is of a flourishing community of neighbors and friends who help one another. 

We recognized some of our students today.  All of you young people will have to imagine your own future over against the expectations of parents, the community, your peer group, and our wider media culture.  Maybe that means life in a city.  Maybe it doesn’t.  Maybe it means college.  Maybe it means learning a trade.  Maybe it means focusing on life outside of paid work.  Maybe it includes marriage and family and maybe it doesn’t.  Maybe it involves valuing simplicity rather than accumulation and possessions.  All of these choices will take imagination.

For all of us who live in a place like Bourbon County, we need to be able to imagine new possibilities, to work for a hoped for future that isn’t at hand.  We have to be able to get some critical distance from the present moment, so that we can imagine a different way of being together in the future.  Can we imagine small communities like ours with healthy citizens, access to health care, and good jobs for all?  Can we imagine a world where smaller rural places flourish alongside our larger cities?

We need imagination in our public lives.  Can we imagine life without school shootings?  Can we imagine a new kind of politics where the largest corporations and their lobbying groups don’t dominate policy debates? 

We need imagination in our personal lives.  Can we imagine our use of social media as a digital expression of kindness, compassion, curiosity, and neighborliness?  If you are retired or close to retirement, can you imagine a satisfying, productive, joyful life of serving others outside the framework of a paid career?  If you are dealing with the pain of estranged relationships, can you imagine the softening of heart and the peacemaking conversations that will be required if there is any hope of reconciliation?  If you have lost a loved can you imagine a new normal that involves the interplay of grief and loss with joy and friendship?

When we commit ourselves to ancient rituals like singing, praying, reading scripture, caring for others, giving and sharing, we are not guilty of engaging in boring routines nor of escaping from the urgent issues of life.  When we center our lives by old symbols like crucifixion and resurrection or by hope for a new future, we are not avoiding the hard work of making the world a better place.  Rather, we are undergoing the training of our imaginative muscles.  We are learning to see that the world doesn’t have to be the way it is.  It can be changed.  And it can be changed by ordinary people like us who have begun to see ourselves as God’s friends and partners in the work of making a new world.