It is a privilege to say that I have had a rock star for a mentor. Not a musical rock star, but an ecumenical church priest kind of rock star. Jerome Berryman is the name most associated with the Godly Play method, a Montessori-based approach to what we usually call Sunday School. Perhaps you are familiar with the method. The core of his gift to the world is that young people learn by playing, and that to invite young people to both know God and about God’s people, we needed to invite children into a setting that is serene and loving, structured and open, and filled with 3-dimensional opportunities to jump into the sacred stories of the Christian traditions. Jerome first got to know each other over a lunch conversation many years ago.
One of the core values of Godly Play is that the materials offered are all natural materials, that they be of fine quality, perfect and, well, expensive. I told him how I had been telling all of the parables using his storytelling scripts, yet I had been doing this with a basket full of children’s toys. The Weeble Wobbles and Little People and Playmobil figurines that inhabit their everyday lives. At some point in our little dialogue, I said something like, ‘if you really believe in the holiness of these stories, you could tell them with potatoes.’ I still believe that the hope and the invitation of the storyteller, and the life-giving potency of the living word, is more important than the materials. The word is holy and precious, but so too is the whole creation, so too are all the plastic toys that children imagine with. We have more than enough materials and hearts to share this good news, we have more than enough without anything being fine or perfect.
Every character in this parable of the Good Samaritan has gifts and talents and treasures. Gifts that they choose to use, or not use, for healing, for shelter, and for compassion. There was enough to care, enough to show mercy, from each of the neighbors. Yet only the despised Samaritan chose to use his gifts, and to use them generously, to rescue an unknown stranger. A stranger who could be Jesus himself.
“If there is any ministering to be imitated in the Good Samaritan's example, it is the ministry to Jesus in his passion, as that passion is to be found in the least of his brethren, namely, in the hungry, the thirsty, the outcast, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned in whom he dwells and through whom he invites us to become his neighbors in death and resurrection.” Robert Farrar Capon
The question of the summer at Camp Cross is: how do we wake the world? The answer is that we go and do likewise. We go love, all, all, all. We go serve, all, all, all. We seek forgiveness, all the time, and everywhere. We do have enough to wake up, to become the reign of God.
Making sacred meaning through play doesn’t end in childhood. We learn to take it inside. When we are sitting in traffic, and coming up with ideas about how to get out of traffic, we are playing. We are manipulating what we have to create a new future, in our minds. So my conversations with Jerome didn’t end with a conversation about potatoes. He was an important advisor for a paper I wrote about how adult faith formation needs to play, and to play outside of our minds. That teens and adults need to be invited to use the materials around us to jump into the story, to make it our story in flesh and blood. This experiment in the first ever Arts Camp is an expression of that proposal. We have leapt into the parable of the Good Samaritan with our hearts and minds. We turned it inside out and upside down and let it speak to our lives and our world and the ideas that surround us. Our campers and volunteers and staff have played with it in amazing new ways that I could not have imagined.
One of our goals for each camper this summer is that they learn this parable well enough to be able to tell it in their own words. I am pretty sure that we have met that goal, and they will be doing that later in their show (MTV Good Sam!). Our friends have leaped into the parable of the Good Samaritan and play with it, and used only the items and talents and passions we have right here at camp to make a play like none other. We had everything we needed right here on camp. The opposite of scarcity is not abundance, the opposite of scarcity is enough. And we have more than enough to proclaim Good News. We had the talent and the materials and the energy and the heart to embody Christ’s call that we are to show mercy, to be a neighbor to all neighbors, that our backyard is as large as the whole universe. So we send you out, to go and do likewise. Jump into the story, play with the story and make it your own, because only when we live it will we will actually, wake the world in Jesus name.
July 9, 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment