Drawn In: Dream
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – August 13, 2023
Drawn In: Dream – Luke 4: 14-21
I know I’m biased but I think of sermons as a kind of sacred art. I like writing sermons. I like preaching them, too, usually. Even more, I like hearing a really moving sermon from someone else.
And most of all I am enamored with the experience of sitting in little circles of preachers talking about their preaching and about the nature of preaching itself. It’s super nerdy but it’s one of the things that really makes me feel alive. In affirming, Spirit-infused circles like those, I have seen folks come to profound new insights about their faith, their identity, and their art. For me, these circles have included big laughter, ugly tears, and oh so many goosebumps.
No matter how many formal or informal circles like these I visit, I find there is one question that inevitably rises to the surface: what does it mean to be a good preacher?
Some of you here are preachers. After all, we have an unusual number of ordained ministers per capita around here, and we’re welcoming two more of our membership into the ordained ministry this afternoon. So, maybe the question of what makes a good preacher has crossed many of your minds before.
Others of us may be more familiar with different but related questions like:
What makes a good parent?
What makes a good teacher?
What makes a good employee or organizational leader?
What makes a good sculptor, writer, musician, painter, handy-man, cook, or baseball player?
What makes a good... person?
In the Creation story in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, we find God spoke life into being and then called it good. Regardless of whether you prefer an anthropomorphic, literal understanding of God’s act of Creation or you prefer an interpretation of the Creation myth that is much informed by science, I think you may agree there is a creative impulse at work here. There’s a force that brought life into being and that yet moves through all that makes up the universe. The same creative force that moves in you moves in me.
I would go so far as to call it our birthright to imagine and to create. So many of us though so often deny ourselves a license to create. Or, we deny that what we’re already doing is an act of creation. Are we afraid of whether or not what we will create is good?
What makes a sermon or a song or a parent or a teacher good anyway?
This week I caught an interview with Matthew Lopez who just directed the romantic comedy Red, White, and Royal Blue for Amazon Prime. The movie was originally a well-loved novel, especially in LGBTQ circles as it centers around the romance of two men.
Director Matthew Lopez told interviewer Juana Summers that he felt the pressure of the book’s popularity.
“Every reader of a novel is a film director while they're reading the book,” notes Lopez. “They have control over everything: costume, design, casting. As you're reading a book, it's your little movie in your head. And with a book as popular as this one, you've got millions and millions of people with their own versions of it in their heads. And then there's one person who makes the movie, right?”
Lopez continues, " ‘How do I take a very popular bit of literature and make a movie of it?’ And the answer I really came to was, I have to make the movie that is inside my head. I have to make the movie that is personal to me. I have to make the movie that I'm capable of making — my response to the book, in many ways.”
I’ve never directed a movie but I have had the opportunity to preach in front of some really large groups of people from time to time, and those opportunities have often come with ample lead time to feel the pressure.
I remember asking a friend once, what should I say that everyone would like to hear?
I remember she asked, what could I say that I myself would like to hear? What could I say that meant something important to me? Maybe that’s closer to the word God would like us to hear.
Well, if you have a tendency toward self-consciousness, you don’t love hearing your recorded or amplified self say anything. But you still may be able to discern what matters to you. You still may be able to connect with what makes you feel most alive.
I like to believe that’s where the creative spirit of God beckons us to dwell as often as possible–not in the place of obligation and should and have to and other people’s good opinions–but in the place where our souls are moved in the deepest way. I think that’s the place from which we best connect to God’s unfolding and ongoing dream of a Creation and a creativity that can be called good.
I think that’s what Jesus beckoned us all toward when he picked up the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and read:
“ ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of God’s favor…’ ”
and “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Jesus was the incarnation of God in the flesh. We’re not quite the same but I believe as followers of Jesus and as inheritors of the blessing of Creation, the Spirit of the Lord can fall upon us, too. And when we allow ourselves to be drawn in by the Spirit of the Lord,
I believe we often end up serving not only ourselves but the well-being of the world as well.
In the beginning of the 2020 Disney/Pixar movie Soul, middle school band teacher Joe, who still harbors dreams of making it big as a professional performer, explains to his band students how he fell in love with Jazz music as a young boy when he watched a piano player being carried away by the music. He goes on to explain throughout the movie that he loves Jazz because it’s music that lets the “you” out.
Through a series of unfortunate events, just before Joe gets his unexpected big break to play piano with a well-known saxophonist, his soul is sent to “the great beyond” and then “the great before,” where he meets a soul looking for her spark before getting her pass to go to earth.
Joe assumes that a soul’s spark is their purpose. And as soon as possible he finds a way to get his soul back into his body so that he can fulfill what he believes to be his purpose: getting his big break as a professional performer.
He has an incredible night but finds that once the show is over, he doesn’t feel any different. He doesn’t feel as though he’s fulfilled any prescribed purpose or that life is really much different than before.
The spark that brings souls to earth it turns out is not necessarily some prescribed purpose or achievement. Rather, in the movie, the spark that those yet to be embodied souls in the “great before” are looking for is what lights up inside them when they’re ready to come and be fully alive. When Joe finds his spark, it doesn’t just help him. It also draws his new found friend to find her spark, too, and the two of them bring enormous beauty to the world together.
At the end of the movie, when Joe gets a second chance at life on earth, someone asks what he’s going to do with his life this time. He replies, “I don’t known but I do know I’m going to live every minute of it.”
Rather than being driven to be, do, and create what we think others will call “good,” what would happen if we let ourselves be more deeply drawn-in to what moves us, brings us joy, and sets us free?
I trust that the Creative and still Creating Spirit of God will meet us there and use our spark to serve the dream of a whole Creation twinkling with vitality, well-being, beauty, and joy.
May it be so. Amen.
