I want to congratulate those of you who are being ordained here this morning. It’s an exciting time for ministry, both lay and clergy. I actually mean that! I am more passionate about the ministry of the church today than I was 22 years ago when I was ordained. This, despite some sobering realities – like the fact that our numbers are in decline. And yes, we may have More Franchises Than Tim Hortons, (just over 3400 churches to 2200 franchises for you trivia fanatics) but we’re losing ground every year. Add to these realities that we are under siege by a “loud” atheism that equates all religion with fundamentalism. There are challenges, but also great opportunities.
 

The vocation of the church, lay, commissioned, and ordained remains a high and holy calling – to proclaim and embody the good news of Jesus, the Christ, in our age. The bonus is that those who are still left in our congregations are there for the most part because they want to be, not because they should be. There is more of a stigma attached these days to going to church than not going to church. We’re a holy remnant friends, full of passion and commitment. We have every reason to be hopeful!
 

I saw a beautiful film recently called The Visitor at the 5^th Avenue cinema in Vancouver. The protagonist is an aging economics professor, Walter, who has been a widower for some years. He is still in grief, and basically faking being alive. His uniform is a suit and a tie; Walter follows the same daily ritual, day in and day out. He hasn’t written anything original forever, and lost interest in his field many years ago. He’s putting in time until his pension kicks in. Walter died a long time ago. He just forgot to stop breathing.
 

He is required by his department head to travel to New York to give a lecture that he plagiarized and doesn’t care about. He walks into his pied-a-terre in Manhattan and is attacked by a man who has been squatting in his apartment with his girlfriend, as an undocumented couple. The two men wrestle until Walter is able to convince the intruder that the apartment really does belong to him. The couple leaves for fear that they will be reported to the immigration services. But Walter surprises himself by going after them and inviting them to stay the night.
 

He strikes up a relationship with the young the man, Tarek, a Syrian. Tarek plays the jambe, and Walter becomes fascinated by the instrument. Tarek teaches him to play. Walter removes his tie every once in awhile as his awkward hands learn to tap out a beat. When nobody is around Walter even plays in his underwear. Walter slowly, painfully starts to come back to life, as the two men become the most unlikely of friends. Then one day, the authorities arrest Tarek, and Walter is his only hope. By day Walter becomes Tarek’s visitor and sole advocate. By night, he becomes a jambe freak, playing in drum circles in Central Park, and listening to World Music on the stereo. It’s a beautiful thing to witness the resurrection of Walter.
 

I walked out of the theatre and I swear the first words out of my mouth were: “Walter is the church.” Walter is the part of our institution that is going through the motions. Some of us are still in grief for what life in the church used to be like – the Sunday schools of 300 children; two services that were filled to overflowing; back then we had the ear of our politicians because of our sheer numbers. And sometimes I wonder if we, like Walter, are faking it. Our sanctuaries and worship services acted as our own private pied a terres, buffer zones against the threat of change. And we too were jumped by a couple of unwelcome intruders. And if they don’t kill us, we might just find new life.
 

These intruders were not people. They were worldviews that challenged our status quo in fundamental ways, just as Walter’s status quo was challenged. I’m talking about modernism and postmodernism. There’s a parable you may be familiar with that helps distinguish between traditionalism, modernism, and postmodernism. Imagine that life is like a baseball game, and there are three different umpires assigned to call the balls and strikes. When asked how he distinguishes between balls and strikes, the traditionalist umpire simply says: I call ‘em as they are!” (He knows. He is in possession of infallible judgment and Truth). The modernist umpire says: “I call ‘em as I see them”. (And how he sees them is likely to be aided by technology, like the Hawkeye in professional tennis. This is objective, measurable, scientific truth.) The postmodernist umpire says: “They ain’t nothin’ till I call ‘em.” (Here everything is context and perspective. There is no truth, only interpretations that are shaped by our cultural contexts and perspectives).
 

Starting around 500 years ago, the first invader, Modernism, stripped the church of absolute authority. Truth became scientific truth, and reducible to what was measurable, repeatable, and located in the physical realm. The church and her clergy, Scripture, and revealed Truth were deposed. The recent spate of vitriol from Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, is the voice of modernism attempting to put the final nails in the coffin of religion. Modernism snuck into our churches, grabbed us by the throat, and issued a fundamental challenge: Stripped of  myth, superstition and authority, what’s left in the church that’s of any use to the world?
 

Postmodernism caused us to be suspicious of all forms of power. Power was associated with hierarchical domination, and in a postmodern worldview equality and pluralism attained sacred status. This is a good thing in and of itself. But too often, especially in the church, this suspicion of power translated into a profound distrust of leadership, any form of leadership, corporate, political, and ecclesiastical. Leadership was for those bad corporations, not for us. Leaders hold too much power. While we were at it we flattened the pursuit of excellence as well. We wouldn’t want anybody to stand out. We are all equal.
 

Once postmodernism established that power is bad, then it became our job in the church to spot and to speak out against the misuse of power everywhere we saw it. We call it speaking truth to power. Is anybody else tiring of this phrase? I know it comes from our prophetic tradition, and yes, we need to show courage in the face of unjust systems. And certainly a commitment to social justice is at the core of our identity.
 

But implicit in this phrase is the assumption that we have the truth, and those bad guys over there – the corporations, the government officials, “Empire” – they have all the power. Both sides of this assumption are questionable. The church desperately needs to discover its own power – disciples of Christ are not victims – and we need to credit corporations and political leaders when they do speak the truth. But our postmodern eye is not trained to look for, let alone celebrate, corporate leadership. Our eyes are trained to exclusively focus the misuse of power, and so we literally don’t see or celebrate examples of responsible use of corporate power – and there are many. I can tell you, those members of our congregations who are industry leaders, government leaders, or small business owners – the ones we haven’t driven away – feel that our arrow of “truth” is directed at them as exemplars of the power system. What if we don’t have the market on truth, and “they” don’t have the market on power? What if we have more power than we can ever imagine, in fact, like Chief Bobby Joseph was trying to help us realize yesterday? “The possibilities are endless”, he told the court.
 

So, here we are at the beginning of the 21^st century as a church. We have no authority as an institution; we have no right to make any claims about truth; we recognize that it’s possible to be good without God; our story is just one possible narrative among many others; and we have a bias against the kind of leadership, lay and clergy, that could lead us out of the wilderness. Modernism and Postmodernism came like thieves in the night. It will not be enough to simply brush off our suits and straighten our ties. Like Walter, we need desperately to follow the beat of a different drum and connect with the dormant life within that is waiting to be aroused.
 

Behold, I Am Doing a New Thing
 

I was pleased to discover the Scripture that had been selected for this morning’s service. Both of them make my top ten list of Scripture readings. For some time now my own theology has been focusing on God as Creator – not simply the One who created way back at the beginning, but the One who is eternally bringing forth new worlds – who is always in the process of doing a new thing. The scientific name for this kind of creative activity is cosmogenesis. But I like the poet Isaiah’s way of putting it better:

 

“Behold, I am about to do a new thing: Now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it?”
 

The language is so dynamic. In this passage, God declares that She is about to do a new thing, and then before you can say “cosmogenesis”, it’s already happening. Now it springs forth. It’s as though the Holy One is so pregnant with new life that the birthing process just keeps on keeping on. Do you not perceive it?
 

Fifteen years ago now, I was on a silent retreat in Narragansett, Rhode Island. I went to the library of the convent I was staying at, and a slim book called The Universe Is a Green Dragon, by mathematical physicist, Brian Swimme, caught my attention. I read it in one sitting, and by the time I had finished it, I had been reconciled and made new, to use the theme of this conference. It was a conversion every bit as powerful as the day I gave my life to Christ. But this time I was reconciled with the cosmos and the planet earth that was my home. And I knew that for me that the entire universe was a mode of sacred presence. I don’t know who I thought I was before this moment, but when I put the book down, I understood at a cellular level that I was the presence of this 13.7 year-old universe in human form. I also knew that I didn’t just live on a planet. I was the planet earth thinking about itself. I came home to the cosmos – after living as an alien – for most of my life.
 

I had an experience of what I imagined that every indigenous person simply knew intuitively: The separation between humans and the planet along with the rest of creation is a contrivance of scientific materialism. I understood the symbolism of the sacred poles, depicting the bodies of animals with human heads. We emerged from our animal kin and were given our shape and sensibility by them. I knew myself to be kin with all living beings. This was more than just a romantic ideal. It was a geological, biological, chemical and I would add, a spiritual truth. I knew as well why modern humanity was in the midst of destroying the planet that gave it life. Modernism so dissociated us from the planet that we began to see it as an inert, soulless object that we could exploit with impunity for what we called “wealth”, but the devastation we were enacting was a poverty beyond imagination. 
 

We have heard many stories this weekend about the need for reconciliation. Powerful stories. Heart-breaking stories. And I would add one more story: The story of our urgent need to be reconciled and made new in our relationship with the planet. Deep reconciliation requires that we identify with the earth and her creatures. We are kin, and we dwell within the kin-dom of God. We share 98% of our genetic material with chimps, and 65% with poplar trees and bananas. When the fish disappear, which may happen within the next 50 years, if we don’t change our ways, we will have lost family. When the songbirds are gone, we will have lost the soprano section of our One Earth Choir. When our rivers carry chemicals to the sea, our own veins are toxic. The ecological crisis must be placed right alongside our mission agenda with justice and peace. They are inextricably related.
 

I was moved by an interview on CBC’s The Current this past Wednesday with Lawrence Anthony. When the second invasion of Iraq took place, Mr. Anthony, an animal lover himself, knew the history of the impact of war on zoo animals. In Germany, Kosovo, Kabul the helpless animals in their prisoner cages were destroyed. So he naively flew to Iraq, rented a car and headed for Baghdad, as the bombs were exploding all around him. Miraculously he found the zoo. Of the 670 animals, only 35 were alive. They were the big animals, the elephants and lions. He found the Baghdad zookeeper and together they saved those 35 animals. Now, I don’t know if Mr. Anthony is Christian, but I do know that in saving those animals he was acting as the reconciling presence of the Christ who reconciles all things – human and other than human.
 

For me, gaining this kind of compassion came from an unlikely source: the scientific discovery of evolution. I finally understood that there is no disconnection anywhere in the universe. We are derived from common stock; we share a common origin; all of creation came from a supernova that seeded the cosmos with the heavy elements necessary for life on this planet. The universe evolves. It is developing. It has direction – biased towards increased complexity, consciousness, and compassion. We can trace the arc of this development over the past 14 billion years. And I am deeply persuaded that those same evolutionary processes that brought us to this moment, here this morning, are sacred – infused with the presence of the non-coercive Spirit of God. You want a new thing that God is doing? This insight is just now dawning upon human awareness.
 

Behold, says God, I am doing a new thing. Do you not perceive it? We haven’t perceived it in the story of the evolutionary unfolding of the universe because we bought into the assumptions of neo-Darwinism model that it was a godless process. How does God do a new thing in the universe? Well, take two distinct molecules, say oxygen and hydrogen. They get attracted to each other. From that attraction, there emerges a mysterious new thing we call water. Nobody could have predicted water from the qualities and characteristics of oxygen and hydrogen. Even the Spirit would have been surprised and delighted!
 

Now, this doesn’t just happen on a biological level. It happens at Conferences like this one, where a deep sacred intelligence emerges when you throw four hundred distinct beings together, ask them to be real with each other, and by the end you find that individually and collectively, you are a new creation.
 

Scientists call this “novelty” and it practically brings scientists to their knees. Life just seems to know how to wind itself up in the direction of increased novelty, complexity, consciousness and compassion. It comes standard with the universe: it’s included in the sticker price. Dirt got up and started writing Shakespeare – and scientists have all kinds of fancy names for it – self-organization, autopoiesis, novelty. But we can call it Spirit or Sacred Wisdom or the Cosmic Christ. When asked to define God, process philosopher A.N.Whitehead said, “God is the creative advance into novelty.”
 

In my book I call it creative emergence. It doesn’t really matter what you call it. What’s important is for us to realize that we are centers of this evolutionary, Spirit-infused power. Now, whenever I read this particular Scripture, “Behold, I am doing a new thing. Do you not perceive it?” I get why it’s so difficult to perceive. It’s difficult because we forgot that we are the new thing God is doing. We’ve been too close to it to see it – like fish in water. We’ve been looking for signs of this “new thing” everywhere, except within ourselves, and within our congregations. We’ve been looking for the new thing in the next great newcomers program, or small group ministry, or a new governance model – all of which have their place. And all the while God’s been trying to get the message through to us that we are the new thing that is emerging! Our congregations are meant to be domains of creative emergence. Where is the universe evolving? Where is this sacred story of the evolving universe happening? In you and you and you. And in your congregations.

All the powers of this evolutionary universe are coursing through you, right now this morning. We don’t like to think about it, because we can’t even imagine how much creativity and how much potential exists within our congregations. The sun burns 4 million tons of hydrogen every second of its life, so that the evolutionary story of the universe can continue through you! You are the presence of this evolutionary power and you are so full of power that it scares you. Well, it scares me at least. New worlds are being birthed through us! Do you not perceive it?
 

What we need to be reconciled with more than anything as a church is our own potential. “Do not consider the former things. Do not even remember the things of old”, says our God. That’s a fairly radical statement. It’s future-oriented, to say the least. Jesus had this future orientation as well. “Anybody who puts her hand to the plough and looks back is not fit for the Kingdom of God”. What does that mean? It means God just does what is the nature of God to do – create. There is a time to reconcile, of course. There is a time to deal with the past. But there is also a time to move on. God is doing a new thing. And what matters is that we feel this creative energy as the Pentecostal presence of the Spirit. He told his peasant followers that it was their vision, not Rome’s oppression, that  defined them. They had the power to move mountains, to heal the sick, to do greater things than he ever did and to bring forth the new world he called the realm of God.
 

Can you believe it? My experience is that it’s possible to develop this culture of creative emergence in our congregations. Most of our significant ministry initiatives in the congregation I serve comes from the members of the congregation. For example, all of our faith formation programs in the coming year are being led by lay people – from a course on the mystics to Bible study to workshops on sacred poetry to meditation groups to book studies. And lay people initiated our outreach program: in South Africa; in the downtown Eastside; with youth in downtown Vancouver; and in ecological ministry. It’s taken almost 12 years, but we’ve created a culture of ministry anywhere, anytime, by anybody. People wouldn’t dare suggesting an idea for ministry that they weren’t prepared to take on themselves. They know that the new thing God is doing is emerging through them. When our people get that they are the new thing God is doing, the creativity that emerges in congregations is an experience of what Jesus called “abundant life”.  |
 

But it’s going to take leadership. I encourage you leaders of leaders out there today to be bold and innovative  – be the creative presence of the universe.  Embody the wild Spirit of creation. Forget the experts, try new things, shape shift, be radical, fail, and start over. Spend your legacy fund. Start a house church. Make mistakes. Adapt. Innovate. Listen to the people on the edges especially. This is where God is doing a new thing. Keep evolving. Don’t worry about getting it wrong. God couldn’t care less about us getting it wrong. How do you think that universe got to where it is, but through trial and error? You be the new thing God is doing. You go back and tell your people to stop waiting around for God to do something. God is doing something, and that something is you! Get your congregations to feel the beat of the Holy One reaching down into the very core of our being where there is a well of abundant life.
 

Remember Walter, the economics professor who was basically faking being alive? I said he was the church. I also believe, wholeheartedly, that the church has the potential to be raised from the dead, like Walter.
 

The Visitor closes with a scene in which a tieless Walter bounces into the New York subway station, with his jambe slung over his shoulder. He finds himself a bench, sets up his instrument, and starts to play. He settles into a rhythm that transports him into reverie. He’s in the flow. The trains come and go, some passersby disapprove; others smile and begin to move. some think it’s curious that such an old man should carry on in public this way. But Walter couldn’t care less about what other people think. He’s seen a new heaven and a new earth, and there is no looking back. Walter found the beat. Can you feel it? Can we step into the rhythm of this God-infused universe, and bring forth the new world that needs us in order to be born?