A Sermon on Imagining Possibilities in Church Leadership

This sermon was delivered originally on May 22, 2022. It has been edited for a more general audience. It references the following scriptures: Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5; John 5:1-9

    You ever see a toddler running along in the grass and just wipe out? Like, full-body, faceplant… all that forward momentum they’d built up just fully transferred to crashing into the ground. How do they react? I mean, it depends a bit on the temperament of the kid, but usually there’s some mix of perplexity, not knowing what the heck just happened, because as far as they can tell, they were just running along and suddenly they’ve got grass sticking up their nose, probably some embarrassment… they were so proud of themselves for all this independent movement and now suddenly they’re not doing so well… probably a little bit of sadness and pain… falling on your face doesn’t feel good… but usually one of their first moves is to look around and find their grown up. Instinctively, we know when we’re children that we don’t have this world figured out, and at that age, the whole world is new and confusing, and we need our grown ups to tell us how to figure out what’s going on. So if your grown up says, “Uh oh! You fell down! Come on, let’s get up and keep going!” You know that, yeah, I fell down, and that wasn’t fun, but it’s okay, I can get up and go. If your grown up says, “Oh no! Sweetheart, are you hurt? Here, let me get you up and give you kisses so you’ll be all better!” You know that, oh, I’ve hurt myself and need help to not be hurt. If your grown up starts panicking and fussing, you’re going to start panicking and fussing, because clearly this is a Big Deal.
    As we get more experience in life, especially in cultures that value individualism, we tend to stop purposefully looking around for input to help us figure out how to process things and mostly rely upon the habitual responses we’ve developed as kids. If we’ve been wired up to be anxious, we’re going to be anxious. If we’ve been wired up to be confident, we’re going to be confident. If we’ve been wired up to be sad, we’re going to be sad, and so on and so forth. None of those are binary, mutually exclusive categories… most people fall somewhere in a spectrum.
    Regardless, it can be pretty easy to get bogged down by all the big and little factors which complicate and impede our lives… to get stuck. The man at Beth-zatha is clearly a case of someone who has just gotten bogged down. Now I want to be clear, this man isn’t some hypochondriac who has convinced himself he’s sick because he wants to be… he has very real barriers to his healing. We don’t have a ton of context, but it doesn’t seem that this is “all in his head.” He needs healing. He’s there, by the pool, because he believes that if he can just get into that pool, he can be healed. So he has spent almost four decades trying to get into that pool. But every time he has tried to bootstrap himself into the pool, someone has gotten in his way… and he doesn’t have anybody who can pick him up and put him in the pool. It’s not that he doesn’t want to be made well… he’s tried everything he can think of and just hasn’t been able to pull it off. He’s just stuck.
    The Church is at a place right now where it’s not hard to feel like we’re just stuck. We look back and we remember times when every pew was full, Sunday schools were teeming with kids, and our communities had momentum. But things have changed, not just inside the four walls of our churches, but out there, in the world. Folks used to have some hope that if they worked hard, paid their dues, trusted the system, they’d get by just fine. There’d be some modicum of prosperity. So if you didn’t have prosperity, well, that was on you. The truth is that that myth of the American Dream was always a myth for a whole lot of people. There have always been people in our society who were going to have their prosperity stymied, at one point or another, for reasons beyond their control. Much of the reckoning we’re facing as a Church is founded in the reality that we built up our institutions under the assumption that the prosperity of the midcentury would never end. We built big, beautiful churches to hold lots of people with heavy wooden pews because we assumed if we needed to use our spaces in different ways, we would just build different spaces. We developed age segregated formation models that assume there will be full classrooms of students and plenty of adults who are having their spiritual needs met at other times, so they can take the time to volunteer and offer tutelage to the kids. We further assumed that most people would have weekends off from work, so getting up on a Sunday morning wouldn’t impede the rest one needs to recover from a week of work, and that folks would have the transportation necessary to get to church. I can’t think of many places where most of these assumptions have borne out. Shy of a few very wealthy communities, every parish I’ve encountered has some degree of structural barrier to growth and vitality. Like the man at Beth-zatha, we may feel like we’ve done everything we can and we just can’t get where we want to go. This is where we need some of what theologian Walter Brueggeman calls, “Prophetic Imagination.”
    I have a friend who hates the Book of Revelation. He will get up in the middle of the readings and go for a walk around the block before he will tolerate hearing part of this book read in church. As far as he is concerned, the whole book contains nothing but the hallucinatory ramblings of a madman. I disagree with his conclusions, though I’ll just as readily admit that I don’t always appreciate some of the imagery used… metaphor and analogy often reflect the values of the culture that informs them, and most of the cultures represented in the Bible had a tendency towards misogyny that just makes my skin crawl. The reason why I can still approach Revelation with an open heart, appreciate it, and glean some wisdom is because I understand it as being an example of Prophetic Imagination.
    Prophecy isn’t meant to “predict the future,” so much as it is meant to invite one into imagining possibilities for the future. A great modern example for this is Star Trek. Folks nowadays credit Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, for predicting cell phone technology, among many other modern technologies and perspectives, but most folks who pay close attention to the people and industries that drive innovation would say that, actually, fans of the show who happened to also go into technology fields, were inspired by what they encountered in Gene’s fictional future to go ahead and create those technologies. He didn’t predict the future. He inspired it. He provided a vision of possibilities that was so well articulated that folks went out and made it happen. That is prophetic imagination.
    When we encounter the Book of Revelation, the grand scheme of the text is that, out of all the death and destruction and hardship of the old way of things passing away, a new and amazing thing would happen: That God would come and dwell among us, that there would be no hardship. That all things would be new and good and joyful. But even the prophet needed help imagining this. In our excerpt from Revelation today, the prophet reports that the spirit “carried [him] away to a great, high mountain,” to show him the fullness of the possibilities in Christ Jesus. Even those gifted with this ability to imagine all kinds of possibilities can’t fully grasp everything God is capable of without outside help.
    So when we return to the man at Beth-zatha encountering Jesus, we see someone so bogged down in nearly forty years of trying everything he can think of to be healed, and what Jesus says is, essentially, “Dude, you don’t even need that pool to be healed. Just get up and walk.” He isn’t healed by the getting up and walking. He’s healed by encountering a new way of thinking about his healing. And then, he gets up and does it. When we’re praying to God “your will be done,” we’re praying for God’s vision, not our own, to be accomplished. God’s perspective is so wildly different from ours. We might not be able to see the forest for the trees, but God sees how the forests and the plains and the deserts and the oceans and the tundra all come together to make a world.
    The good news is that we don’t need God to strike us with hallucinatory visions to engage in our own forms of prophetic imagination. We have scripture to invite us into our own practice of imagining, and we have one another to bounce ideas off of and to help keep ourselves grounded in a perspective of Christian hope.
    My prayer for you is that you encounter someone who is able to offer some outside perspective to help you discern the possibilities God might be offering you, and then to walk with you, to equip and empower you to make those dreams realities. I’m not saying they ought to do the work for you or have some kind of silver bullet that will remove all your impediments… because the reality is that nobody knows your context like you do, and every single person and community has their own unique blend of factors to take into account. What works in one place will not work out exactly the same in another.  I’d encourage you, though, to think beyond butts in pews In person Sunday attendance is an incredibly narrow snapshot of the life of a parish. Getting into the pool is not the only way that healing can happen. So I invite you, look to God, in one another and in Scripture, and consider how you might be being called to do something new, maybe even something you’d never imagined before. Because if there’s anything we know about God, it’s that God is always making something new, and in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we’re invited to come along for that ride.