Kevin Derksen
Scripture: Romans 12:1-2, Mark 8:14-25
In my early days as a pastor here I was given a book that has since become one of my favorites. It’s a collection of stories and reflections on congregational ministry called This Odd and Wondrous Calling (Martin Copenhaver and Lillian Daniel, Eerdmans, 2009). This is where I go whenever I’m feeling the need for inspiration or a reminder of why we do what we do. In it, Martin Copenhaver tells the story of his last Sunday at one of the churches he served. He wanted to leave this beloved congregation with a more personal message in his final sermon, and so he simply talked about what Jesus meant to him. How his life had been shaped and changed by his years as a follower of Christ. He expressed for himself what it’s all about.
Well, after the service Martin was in the foyer greeting people when he noticed a dear parishioner approach him clearly overcome with emotion. Farewells are hard, of course, and he figured she was feeling the weight of the goodbye. But when she finally composed herself enough to speak, she looked at Martin still with tears in her eyes and said: “Your sermon – why didn’t you tell us this before??”
A sobering question for Martin, as for anyone who gets to speak to a congregation on a regular basis. And a good reminder that you don’t need to wait until the very end to share what it’s all about! Now, I have my doubts that what Martin shared that morning was actually new. I’m sure he’d said it a hundred times before in different ways, but perhaps never quite so clearly or honestly or in a way that connected with the experience of this dear sister in Christ.
In any case, this story has been ringing in my head as I’ve thought about what to share on my own final Sunday as a pastor here at St. Jacobs. Because I also want to tell you what’s been important to me as I come to the end of this season of our lives together. But surely I should have been doing that all along!
Now in truth, I suspect that for most pastors who have spent many years with a congregation, surprising their people at the end with a fresh and profound expression of the gospel is not the problem they’re most trying to avoid. If after years of getting up to speak there’s still something fresh and profound in there to draw on, that’s pretty good. The line I’ve heard is that most pastors really only have about four sermons in their repertoire. There are all kinds of different texts and stories and themes that get put around them, sure, but really only four messages they end up coming back to again and again. So more likely whatever one says on a final Sunday sounds pretty familiar to whoever is listening. And that’s probably just fine.
So, what’s been important to me? To return once more to our theme of this spring, what has nourished me as a pastor and as a follower of Jesus over these years? Well, the word that came to me, as we’ve talked about already this morning, is imagination. And what I mean by that is how we think and perceive and make sense of the world as people of faith in the God who has come to us in Jesus. I do think that Christians see things in a particular way. We look through the lens of Christ – in scripture, in experience, in prayer, in the Spirit – and the landscape that we see as we do is different from what we might see through other lenses. And so the kinds of things that it makes sense for us to be and do within this landscape are different too. And all of this – the way we see and perceive the world, the way we make sense of life, how we know and experience God within it – all of this has to do with imagination. A specifically Christian imagination, one shaped by our experience of knowing Jesus.
As a pastor, recognizing the importance of nurturing imagination in a community of faith has been a great comfort to me. Because truly, I’m not sure what else I have to offer. The called and gifted collection of disciples that are gathered here are the ones truly doing the important work. You are the ones living out the gospel of Jesus in your homes and neighbourhoods and workplaces. You are the ones going out into the world. You are the ones serving and loving and caring and sharing. You are the ones making all of this stuff real as you live your lives of faith day to day.
But in worship and in ritual, in practices of care for each other, in forming faith in old and young, in fellowship and in relationship-building, in reading scripture together, in listening for God, in praying and in learning to live as the first-fruits of God’s good news for the world – in all of these things we are building up an imagination strong and vibrant enough to sustain our witness in a broken and complicated world. That we might not be conformed to this world, but transformed by this renewal of our minds. And one of our jobs as pastors is to nurture and feed this critical imagination in all of us together.
I think Jesus worked in the realm of imagination a lot too. And we see this especially in the gospel of Mark, which has continued to come back for me this year since we worked through it a bit more intentionally in worship this winter. One of the things Jesus repeats a few times is this expression: “Let anyone with ears to hear, listen!” (Mark 4:23). In Mark, there is a theme of hidden-ness and mystery. Important things are going on, but not all are able to see or recognize it. You need eyes to see and ears to hear the good news. And plenty of times, whether it’s the crowds or Jesus’ own disciples, those around Jesus don’t have eyes to see or ears to hear. They lack the imagination to make sense of what’s happening. And they miss what Jesus is trying to open up for them.
This plays out so clearly in the passage from Mark 8 that Shirley read for us. Jesus has just had a kind of frustrating interaction with some of the religious leaders, and he’s processing this out loud with his disciples. He says to them: “Beware the yeast of the Pharisees and of Herod.” He’s using a metaphor here, and so understanding him does truly take a bit of imagination. We can imagine what the yeast might mean in this case, spreading something that Jesus has concerns about into the dough, so that it just grows and expands.
But Jesus’ disciples show themselves in this moment to be more literal thinkers. They hear this thing about yeast and figure he must be talking about bread. Ah, they say, Jesus is upset that we didn’t bring any bread along! But this is not Jesus’ concern at all. And he wonders how they can still worry about food after he had just shown them the feeding of thousands with just a few loaves. “Won’t you ever learn or understand,” he says to them – feeling a little annoyed by now – “Are your hearts too hard to take it in? You have eyes – can’t you see? You have ears – can’t you hear? Don’t you remember anything at all??”
They have ears, but they can’t hear. They have eyes, but they can’t see. They’re missing an imagination that will make the connections for them.
And I think these themes are still in the air as Jesus meets someone who is actually blind in the very next verses of Mark. This person can’t see either, but at least they’ve got an excuse! The really interesting part of this little story is that the healing of this man comes in two stages. Jesus puts his hands on his eyes, and asks if he can see anything. Yes, the man says – I can see people, but not very clearly. They look like trees walking around. So Jesus puts his hands over his eyes again – and now when he opens them again his sight is completely restored. He can see everything clearly.
What if eyes that work are not the only thing we need? What if the second time Jesus places his hands on the man’s eyes, the gift he shares is imagination? The capacity not only to see, but to make sense of what he’s seeing. To see the world as Jesus reveals it – as it really is in its truest form.
Is that reading of this healing story a stretch? Maybe. The text doesn’t say anything about imagination as Jesus places his hands on the man’s eyes a second time. But I think it is a gospel stretch. And it’s the way that I’ve come to approach scripture as well. As the fertile ground of a Christian imagination, as the well we return to in order to rekindle our creativity for what is and what could be.
I suspect the Bible often gets cast in the role of a rule-book or as a set of limitations on what we think and how we behave. If we claim this faith, then we are bound to this book and its understandings. Only here and no farther. Here are the answers to the questions, the boundaries and the limits. And there surely are some healthy boundaries in our scriptures. There are plenty of “thou shalls” and “thou shalt nots”. But in my experience, scripture is not a limitation to imagination. It’s not a space that constrains or cuts off. It’s rather been a place of inspiration, a place of living breath, of possibility, of opening up into more than we have understood or considered before.
And this has particularly been my experience as a pastor, given the opportunity to read and study and explore scripture on a regular basis for worship and other occasions. My image for scripture over these years has been something like a playground. Scripture is where I come to interact with my faith, to explore, to make meaning, to try things out, to meet new friends, to play with the God of the cosmos. If you come to scripture with a ready imagination, you discover all kinds of interesting connections – new each time, even when returning to a familiar passage again and again. This text speaks to that text. This image comes up again over here. If I bring this experience that I’ve just had into the conversation, scripture refracts that light in a whole new direction and into an array of beautiful colours – like a prism or a glass.
A scriptural imagination is not a stunted imagination. It’s a rich and creative space where the God of the impossible makes regular and surprising appearances. Where bread falls from heaven, donkeys speak and water turns to wine. This book is alive with possibility! And always standing ready to remind us that there is more going on than we can see with our eyes and hear with our ears. So I commend to you this book. And I trust you will continue to engage it with imagination and creativity. That you will see it as your playground of faith, and enjoy the grand adventure that it sets us on.
But I think I can extend this encouragement beyond the context of scripture too. What I mean by imagination is in part this sense of vision or perception that I’ve been talking about, this way of making sense of the world through scripture and in the light of Christ. But imagination is also about fun. You know as well as I do who always wins when it comes to the best imaginations – children, right? Kids know how to play, to make believe, to create whole worlds with whatever is at hand. And kids know how to have fun, how to delight in the good things that come their way.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I find myself wanting to talk about imagination at the end of my time at St. Jacobs. Because these have also been our years of living with young and growing children. Now, I don’t think I’ve been blessed with a particularly sensitive or active imagination. In fact, my reputation is, if anything, for being a little straight-laced and by the book. But I’ve learned and grown a lot from my children and the other kids in my life. I’ve learned to play, to let go a bit, to think more creatively and to more fully enjoy the good things around me.
Imagination also nourishes us as an opening to enjoyment and delight. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the narrow road, the hard truth, a movement through the realities of death that’s as difficult as passing a camel through the eye of a needle. But it’s also and everywhere good news. Grace upon grace, life bursting forth to surprise and delight. Our faith is about beauty and wonder, about a God who loves us beyond our understanding, about that love taking human form and building new pathways of relationship with our Creator.
If our faith is to be sustained and shared we need to feel this good news. Not just know it or believe it, but feel it in our hearts and in our bodies. We need to live in the world of this gospel vision, where the blind see and the lame walk, where captives are set free and good news is given to the poor.
It’s easy enough to look around and see a very different-looking world crowding in to snuff this vision out. The realities of pain and suffering, abuse, injustice, degradation, destruction, loss, violence, neglect are all too real in our own communities and wherever else we might think to look. And what I find so beautiful about the Christian story is that it doesn’t ask us to turn away from these realities or pretend they are any less devastating and deadly than they are. In fact, the story of Jesus invites us to lean in right at these points, to hurt with those in pain and weep with those who mourn. To embrace what a messy and complicated and painful and impossible thing it is to be human – and then also to be surprised over and over again as we glimpse the very face of God within the chaos. The face of a God who has been there in Jesus. Who is still there with tenacious love, revealing a mystery of good news that will not be overcome.
But all of this takes a bit of imagination. Eyes to see and ears to hear. It takes a spirit of openness and hospitality, a releasing of our grip on results and outcomes. It takes the heart of a child at play, coming to Jesus with wonder and delight, ready to live in the world he opens for us.
I’m curious how you would describe this congregation at St. Jacobs when it comes to imagination. On the one hand, this is a long-standing community of faith. Well-established, with deep roots and perhaps some ruts just about as deep. There are some patterns and traditions that tend to get followed pretty closely. Some realities that we just couldn’t imagine otherwise, and things that we hold onto. This isn’t generally a place for faddishness or novelty for its own sake. When our long, formal pews were taken out during the sanctuary renovation a few years ago, they weren’t just put back again – they were refinished to shine for the next 100 years!
But I have also known this congregation to be a place rich in the kind of freedom and trust that allows the creative imagination of faith to flourish. Folks here don’t tend to get too uptight if things don’t happen in exactly the way they think they should. The level of trust that has been built over many years between pastors and leadership and congregation has allowed for lots of freedom and flexibility without a whole lot of anxiety. New ideas or initiatives don’t tend to get shot down right away. If you made the suggestion, you’ll probably be invited to take significant leadership in making it happen, but you’ll probably also be blessed and supported to give it a try. And when there is disagreement about direction, it’s usually a pretty honest conversation without a lot of defensiveness getting in the way. The whole process becomes an exercise in imagination, giving space to take the building blocks of our faith and explore how they might take shape in a particular time. I have found St. Jacobs Mennonite Church to be fertile ground for the imagination, and you have nourished mine over these years. Keep dreaming together about who and what you can be.
I’m also pretty sure that much of the fertile ground here has been tilled by the children who have been part of the congregation over the years. Children who know how to imagine, how to play, how to welcome, how to love. I’m glad that kids can and do feel welcome and at home in this building and in this congregation’s life. That they can be themselves and know that they are valued and appreciated for their gifts. We have sought to be an inter-generational community at St. Jacobs, where relationships and faith-formation happen across ages together. And this has probably worked better at some points than at others. Keep finding ways to show up where kids and youth are. Make space, but also join that space. Let these gifted imaginations inspire and invite you into the presence of Jesus.
And keep having fun along the way. This has been a real gift of this congregation. Most of the time, you don’t take yourselves too seriously – and that’s good! Last weekend’s farewell is a great example, even if Pam and I ended up crying through most of it… So laugh together, play together, dream together, create together, sing together, love together, delight together and imagine together. Seek God together and enjoy the gifts of grace that come to us every day.
Let anyone with ears to hear, listen. Let anyone with eyes to see, look. The gospel is taking shape right here, among us and around us. Imagine that.
Amen.