Rev. Rachel Lewis Cooley
“Creativity”
Kensington Community Church UCC, San Diego CA
November 12, 2023
Acts 17:22-28
Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.
From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we, too. are his offspring”
Good morning all. Will you pray with me?
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on us. Here and now under the Good Shepherd window. We would seek to move and groove with you, as the family of God. We wish to co-create with you and each other. May this time ground us in relationship with you, God and with this community. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be faithful to you and to the needs of your creation.
Hello KCC. I’m normally up with the youth or helping with the children during this time, and we attempt to make comic books, or we act out a bible story like David & Goliath or Jonah and the Whale, which I think y’all acted out a few weeks ago too! it’s truly a joy for me to care for these youth- to see their personalities and jokes and what creativity and leadership emerge when we feel safe & seen in relationship and we flow with both KCC tradition and Spirit to games & goofiness or mentoring younger ones or- soon- putting on the Live Nativity play in this neighborhood and with some animals of God’s good creation.
Thank you for doing this sermon with me together this morning. Andi do mean with me, not only because I hope you always feel engaged in this moment of service, but also because there will be some pauses for you to reflect and maybe even some interaction with your pew mates. This may be different for y’all! But thank you for going with me. And thank you for welcoming me as a sister and pastor in the Disciples of Christ tradition to your pulpit. Our denominations are both similar and different, but it’s surely expression of unity that we can be in family together.
We continue our journey through stories of the early church in the book of Acts today, as we consider what it is to be the family of God. what brings the family of God together? How are we connected innately, and how do we foster and actively choose that connection?
I feel incredibly lucky to be part of communities that value and practice creativity as a good in itself. One of these communities in my life is you all. Another is Bethany Fellows, a ministry for clergy under 40 in their first five years of congregational ministry. We travel to retreat centers around the country two times a year to share about joys and challenges on our journeys, worship and pray together during a day of stillness/sabbath/silence, and sit at the feet of wise leaders. One of our guests for Wise Practice day this September was Rev. Lisle Gwynn Garrity, artist and leader of A Sanctified Art, which support faith communities like ours to integrate art and creativity into our spiritual practices. You may remember A Sanctified Art from the content KCC used for Advent last year, and will use this year too.
Rev. Lisle invited us to consider a cautionary tale about the creative journey for many of us. As children, we are bursting with desire to create- sand castles, finger paintings, play doh creatures: all visible expressions, but also elaborate stories of heroes and parents, princesses and warriors, and so much more. What memory jumps up for you? Linger on it a moment. PAUSE As children, we are unabashed about creating, just for the fun of it.
During adolescence, maybe creativity became part of structured activities at school or extracurriculars: in art class, during choir rehearsal, for creative writing prompts preparing us for standardized tests. We’re asked to share it with parents, teachers, peers, siblings, and maybe there’s more judgement about it now. Some judgements shun or disparage or tease what we've created. So many of us can remember and feel in our bodies again the flush of red hot shame as someone called us out in front of others. If something is jumping up for you right now, please take a few deep breaths to move it through. PAUSE Positive affirmation too can start to limit our creating- now we’re doing it for someone else, for social approval, or a grade, or praise.
Fast forward to adulthood, and adult responsibilities. Do you know where this is going? Creativity seems to be the opposite of productivity, which is often seen as the highest good in our capitalist society. Maybe creating is something cute and fluffy, left for the extra space in our lives, if we have any, or something commodified either by how we spend on so many supplies at Michael’s or the next creation-in-a-box we're sold at Target. Or commodified when we start to sell our creativity as our jobs and vocations. Now, many of us - including pastors like me- are lucky to bring our creative joy to our work. And yet, we can start to see creativity and work as one in the same, where all our ideas and spark need to be offered to a customer, organization, or cause. Do you ever make something just for the fun of it? Where has that child-like sense of wonder at creating just to create gone? Do we even have energy to make something fun? If you’re truly scraping the bottom of the barrel of energy, creativity can seem like it’s nowhere to be found. And you certainly don’t want another thing on your do-list, or a thing to feel guilty about. There may be another sermon on rest and balance in our lives here, but that’s not my topic today. I hope and pray you’ve got some rest and spaciousness in your life, and if not, please talk with a KCC or other friend or me about how you can get some.
But creativity can flow in so many different things- it’s in the way you navigate your family relationships, the responses you give to your kids questions, the org chart you helped design for work. AND it’s the singing along in the car, the Halloween costume you designed and accessorized, the doodle while you listened to a sermon, the joking banter with friends. Maybe we are still bursting with creativity! It comes in abundance, it’s not just in the box we think we’ve put it in. Thanks be! Can you bring to mind a random moment of creativity bursting through in you lately? PAUSE Maybe creativity is our primary calling. And our primary way of yearning after God, of asking the Spirit to show up.
The people of Athens were yearning and wondering and creating too. Paul finds this statue “to an unknown God” in the midst of this bustling ancient city, where history books say they couldn’t get enough of philosophical debate and theological wondering. Maybe this statue was because they were just trying to cover their bases, check all the gods off the list. Or maybe it was someone’s attempt to remind that there is always mystery when it comes to God. in any case, Paul meets their creativity by celebrating it, building on it, and bringing some of his own.
He says, yes, I know the God you’re yearning after. A God who is reflected in your poems even, and in the poems of other cultures. This is the one God, in whom we all “live and move and have our being.” this is the God of all people, the unifying God, the ground of all being. The creator of all creation. The God who is creative just like your poets, Athenians, and just like the Spirit who co-creates this speech with me. An abundantly creative, ever-present God, who is in and among all of us.
All our yearning and our creative expression find a place with God, are inspired by and with this God. Paul does bring his power with words to share his own perspective on God. he is making choices with how to use that power, and trying to stay faithful to a liberating and abundant God. he, like all us humans though, said some things in all his writings- or things were written in his name- that have done harm and been used to keep people down. We could discuss at length our own perspective on his influence- and isn’t that an awesome thing that we can converse, isn’t that why we need community to help us discern and stay faithful?
I personally don’t even love all of what he says here, emphasizing God’s power and saying God is not “served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.” I’m more intrigued by another theology that has emerged around us. Will you go with me there?
Who has seen the Barbie movie? I promise after this weekend I’ll chill out about it a bit, though I’Il still be drawing on it for our youth group, I’m pretty sure. Now I know no movie is perfect and you may take some issue with this one. But at the end, Barbie has a conversation with her Creator, Ruth Handler - inventor of Barbie. Barbie expresses that although she previously wanted to say “no no no” to the “real world” where you and | live, and being human, now she’s intrigued, and she can’t go back to perfect life in Barbieland. She wants to be a creator, she wants to help write and tell the stories like the ones girls and women and siblings of all gender expressions tell with Barbies and dolls and really any other toy or tool or expression you could get your hands on. Barbie tells her creator, “I want to be the one imagining, not the idea.”
Well her Creator, Ruth, responds: “l always knew Barbie would surprise me, but I never expected this.”
What if we can even surprise God, our Creator, with our wonderings, our creativity? What if God needs us, to flow with Spirit, yes, but also to bring our gifts and choices, yes, but also to simply spend time in the creative process, and experimenting and just being creatively human. Saying yes to creating. Saying yes to community.
You are invited to share with others. To create for yourself. To celebrate the abundance of beauty and joy in creation- in Gad’s creativity in which you share. In which you live, and move, and have your being.
I have found KCC to be a place where creativity is celebrated and shared. How might you continue to say yes to that even, no specially, in times of uncertainty. Let’s flow with spirit in this place, let’s consider what creativity you might bring to this space, whether it all amounts to something grand or lasting or not, whether we even know what it will be when we start, or not. Flex those creative muscles.
Researcher, speaker, and author Brene Brown has learned and teaches us that unused creativity is not benign. It doesnt just go away. It can instead become resentment, and I’d add maybe cynicism, and egoism, and just plain struggle.
It’s on all of us - on our own and with support in community- to find outlets for our creativity. Be they here in this church space, in our vocations, in our hobbies, or in our random creating just because we want to. In fact, we might argue we need allllll of those things, all of those spaces to be creative. It is our primary calling. Wholeness with our creativity is calling us.
How do you respond?
Amen