28 June 2009: David Tatem's farewell sermon

Final Address given by Revd David Tatem at the Church of Christ the Cornerstone, Milton Keynes on Sunday June 28th at the conclusion of his ministry there.

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My text is taken not from either the old or new testament readings for today but from Lewis Carroll's Alice through the looking glass and in particular the rhyme of the Walrus and the Carpenter; 'the time has come the walrus said, to talk of many things..... I was going to leave it there but the verse goes on...of shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and Kings and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.'

This seems like a very appropriate quote for a 21st century church. After all, it has everything. There is something about the manufacturing industry and transport about agriculture and climate change and I suggest, change management too! Anyone who has tried to work with change in a church setting and especially in ecumenism will be familiar with the concept of the flying pig! In an 'ancient' manuscript of Cornerstone's I found when I was clearing out my office I found language which spoke of moves towards organic unity in the church and made some hopeful references to the year 2000, well, by the year 2000 there was certainly plenty of organic pork but none of it was flying!

It was though, the first part of the verse I was really thinking of. 'The time has come....to talk of many things. It's tempting in a sermon like tis to want to say all the things I've left unsaid, to pack them all in together but I need to focus down onto something which I hope you will remember and which may be helpful. To do that I want to tell you a story which come from a clip of an address given by Sir Ken Robinson, the education expert, at a conference in the U.S. [http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html]

He tells the story of an eight year old girl in the 1930's who was being extremely disruptive because she wouldn't sit still and couldn't concentrate. Today she would be diagnosed as having ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyper-activity Disorder) but in the 1930's people didn't know this was something they could have. Her school wrote to her parents saying that there was obviously something wrong with her and that they should get treatment to help her. Her mother took her to a specialist and they sat and talked for 20 minutes while the girl sat on her hands next to her mother. Eventually the specialist came and sat next to the girl and told her that he now needed to speak to her mother privately for a few minutes and that they would go to another room. As they left the room he switched on the radio and the girl immediately began to dance around the room to the music. They were looking in through a window and the specialist turned to the girl's mother and said, “she isn't sick, she's a dancer! Take her to a dance school". Her mother did just that, and the girl, Gillian Lynn, eventually went on to become a famous dance choreographer who worked with Andrew Lloyd Webber to create Cats and The Phantom of the Opera.

The point that Ken Robinson was making was that the specialist could have gone along with the 'popular' diagnosis of the school, that there was something wrong, and her creativity would have stifled. Thankfully he didn't but that is what so often happens in education, that creativity is educated out and not encouraged.

I want to pick up the thought and transfer it to the church to argue that one of the roles of faith and therefore the church, is to encourage and bring out creativity and not to stifle it by the demands of conformity to this or that.

We can be creative in art (and Cornerstone has many good examples of just that) but we can creative in liturgy in the way we respond to pastoral needs and in the way in which we reach out to the community and enable the wider community to be creative too. We can become a ferment of creativity. That should always be one of our core characteristics.

I'm not going to ignore our two bible readings, the story of Moses striking the rock to produce water for the people to drink and Jesus turning water into wine because they belong in a sequence together and they are relevant to provide a theological basis for what I have said. Moses demonstrated the creative use of a walking stick! Jesus takes the ordinariness of water, essential as it is especially to a people in desert conditions and turning it to wine makes it extraordinary. They both do it for the community, not just for themselves.

This is the challenge that the church goes on facing, to find ever new ways to be creative and to do it not in an inward looking way but outward looking, in ways which albeit slowly, build the Kingdom of God for the whole community.

We may be impatient for change or to see the visions we have had become a reality but perhaps our problem is with timescale and generations in the far future may look back on our time and be surprised as to how quickly things moved but they may say, “It went really very fast, it only took 200 years!”. We need to learn to be satisfied with the thought that the beat our butterflies wings here at Cornerstone may just cause a hurricane in Canterbury, or Rome or at the Methodist Conference or the Baptist and URC assemblies.

While we wait, the challenge is for us not to get impatient but to get creative. That's my challenge to you to get even more creative than you've been in the past and let it be to the benefit of the community. Let it become constantly better than it has been in the past.

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