UNFOLDING THE MAP Sermon preached by the Rev. Barbara E ...

UNFOLDING THE MAP
Sermon preached by the Rev. Barbara E. Senecal-Davis

Sunday, May 18, 2014
Scripture: Ephesians 2:17-22; Mark 6:34-44

Religious Educator Maria Harris begins her book Teaching and Religious Imagination1
with this story:

In his poem “Brief Thoughts about Maps,”Miroslav Holub describes how a young Hungarian
officer sends a detachment of his men into the Alps. No sooner have they left than heavy snow
begins to fall. The landscape is blotted out. The men do not return. Frantic and guilt-ridden, the
officer reproaches himself. His orders have condemned his men to death.

Three days later, however, the men come back. How can this be? How could they possibly find
their way? Well, they admit, they did give up for a bit. Then, one of them, reaching into a pocket,
found a map. And so they waited out the storm. Then, using the map, they found their way back.

The officer borrowed this remarkable map and had a good look at it. To his surprise, he found it
was not a map of the Alps, but of the Pyrenees! Because his troops had imagined the power to
return home, because they had believed they had the capacity to survive, they made the
impossible possible.

When I read this story, I couldn’t help but also think about how our expectations of the
map we are using are often drastically different from where the map in front us takes us.
Teaching, and particularly teaching confirmation is bit like this story in several different ways.

First of all, like the officer who sends his men into the Alps only to be happened upon by
a snowstorm, any teacher embraces content with their students, but one never knows where that
content might take the individuals in the group once they leave that contained learning space. A
teacher can only provide tools for the journey, one cannot anticipate or often even predict how
those tools may be used and to what extent the power of creativity may lead to possibilities
beyond the wildest imaginations. Harris asserts that “the heart of teaching is imagination” and
Paul Ricoeur’s words “in imagining possibilities, human beings act as prophets of their own
existence” (3). Our confirmation process has a lot to do with teaching religious imagination.

Second of all, teaching confirmation is a little like being given a map of the Pyrenees to
transverse the Alps. Rarely is the curriculum more than a very imaginative framework of what
will unfold along the way. But then, most of life is like that anyway, isn’t it?

The idea that “the heart of teaching is imagination” is exemplified in Jesus’s teachings,
and the story that Mark read for us today about Jesus feeding the five thousand. This miracle is a
familiar story in the life of Jesus, and actually it is so familiar because it is so common in the
gospels because it occurs in all four gospels and in some of them more than once. It is a teaching
that captures the imagination - our religious imagination.

When we hear the first verses of this passage, the compassion of Jesus is striking: the
people he sees gathering around him are like “sheep without a shepherd” and when it grew late

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and his disciples came to him to send the people away so they could eat, he suggested a different
idea, an idea that involved a way of keeping them together.

This simple command to his disciples, “you give them something to eat” turns this story
away from being about a miracle “performed” by a great teacher and into a story that is much
more about our ability to imagine. Consider the command. YOU give them something to eat, is
not Jesus putting himself in the center, but rather he is entering into the heart of teaching in that
moment by asking his disciples to imagine how they can solve this problem in a different way
that what they have suggested - sending all the people home. They respond in good practical
fashion, “where will we get the money to do this?”, and again he challenges them to imagine a
different possibility, “how many loaves do the people have?” In the moment when the disciples
come back to him and tell him, “five loaves and two fish” he is stepping fully into his role as
teacher in helping his disciples imagine possibilities. And they are realizing the map for where
they thought they were going is unfolding to be of a completely different landscape.

Jesus is doing what Ricoeur and Harris are describing as the redemptive work of
imagination. Harris says, “we can alter our existence by changing our imaginations. The
Pyrenees become the Alps; death can give way to life; we can find our way home.” (4). In this
same way, bread for a few becomes bread for many, and the existence of all those gathered,
including the disciples is transformed by their imagining different possibilities. Yet, the teaching
is so much more than a simplistic understanding of imagining what is possible, for this
imaginative moment also becomes pregnant with possibility of the holy when Jesus looks up to
heaven and blesses the loaves and breaks them, and gives them to his disciples to give to the
people. The sacramental imagination is now opened to us in this story.

The confirmation class and I talked about this connection between these people being fed
and the sacrament of communion when we studied this passage; in fact, this was the bible story
we read on the day that we discussed the meaning of communion. The youth talked about their
ideas that this story reminded them of our celebrating communion because it reminds us to give
thanks, and of the importance of eating and sharing together and remembering traditions. They
recognized how this story ties our practice of communion to the story of Jesus’ life. They also
were thoughtful in questioning, and some admitted that part of their preparation for communion
is wondering, “is this church I have always known the right place for me?” There is no doubt
these kinds of thoughts and questions were part of the conversations among the people being fed
that day with the loaves and fishes. The map that they had been using was turned upside down in
that moment.

If the confirmation process is successful, it also turns the map upside down and unfolds
more possibilities in the religious imagination as well. It is always interesting to see how the
curriculum map of the confirmation process unfolds over the course of our meeting time
together. As I mentioned earlier, the pathway of the confirmation process does not always
emerge as clearly as the confirmation schedule would suggest.

Confirmation begins in early January, and today marks the culmination of a journey of
gathering at least two Sundays a month, sometimes three, after worship to share a meal and study
the foundations of our faith tradition. We begin with an exercise where the youth create a
timeline of their faith journey. It includes a variety of topics. Where they have lived, who are the
people who have been important in their lives, what significant events do they remember in their

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city and the world. What has been their experience of faith? Do they attend church school? Read
the Bible? Do they feel that they worship only at church or by themselves? Do they pray at
mealtimes or before they go to sleep? That same day, we also talk about their image of God.
Their image of God when they were younger and their image of God now. We look at those
images together and then ask, “Is there any difference?” If so, what has changed and what do you
think that means for how you understand God? We discuss what this exercise helps us imagine
about how our image of God may change over time.

From this first session, we build on the ideas of our faith journey and our image of God
toward a variety of other foundational topic, such as reading the Bible, Images of Jesus, the
meaning of baptism, communion; and grace. We discuss the history of Presbyterianism and the
history of our own First Church. We discuss worship and prayer and the confirmands prepare
and lead a worship service for the session. Many of our confirmands went uptown to the Harlem
Success Garden a few weeks ago to help clean and plant and learn about the amazing farming
techniques in creating that urban garden. Yesterday, three of these eleven youth were with me
and church school teacher Richard Marmet on a bike ride from the Christopher Street pier to just
north of the Seventy Second street boat basin. We worked as a team to make our way uptown
among the other bikers and runners and roller bladers and pedestrians. We had a picnic, and we
talked about some of the struggles we all experience, and what we are learning from them. We
prayed for each other and for everyone who is in various kinds of transitions. Our process this
year has been a process of teamwork and community building.

Throughout this process we made adjustments to the “map” of what we’re learning
together. One major adjustment we made was in journaling. I have shared with the session that
this year’s confirmation class has been a quiet group. It became clear early on that we needed to
consider other ways to communicate together. During the confirmation process, we always read
a series of passages from the beginning of the gospel of Mark and journal on questions
concerning those passages. When I was at the Religious Education Association meeting last fall,
I had heard a presentation by a religion teacher who discussed research he was conducting about
the positive impact of journaling with his students about their questions relating to spiritual and
religious issues. Given the success of the journals on the gospel of Mark with the confirmation
class, I decided I would ask the confirmands to journal on the questions about which I would
have normally led a discussion. We began our classes with lunch and quiet writing based on
either new questions or responding to the previous week’s journal entries and responses. In the
week between our meetings, I read all the confirmands’ journal entries and responded to them,
and between us we created an extended conversation throughout the process. Through this
method, we got to know each other much better than we may have otherwise.

Through these journals and through our meals together, alternating pizza and Chinese
food, through our study together, our biking, our teamwork completing the timeline of the
history of this church, our parts in the reader theatre about the history of Christianity, ripping
the map of Europe to represent the Great Schism in 1054, and the effort it took to actually nail
Luther’s words of the core Reformation values - faith alone, grace alone, scripture alone - to a
two by four, we learned far more together than what words can capture. I can tell you with
confidence today, these youth have heard the proclamation of peace articulated in Ephesians,
so that they are no longer strangers or aliens, but are members now of the household of God.

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And not only the larger household of God, but the household of this community also. These
confirmands are part of this community, they are part of you in new ways that are unfolding even
as we worship together. All of you are built together spiritually on the foundation of living our
traditions today, with Jesus as the cornerstone. Many of these youth are in the midst of
transitions, transitions to high school, transitions to summer, transitions in their responsibilities at
home, and school and here at church. They have a myriad of strengths to offer and they need you
to share your strengths with them as well. The maps they are using to shape their faith is not
necessarily the same map we used, but the hope that the map provides is what has brought them
this far, and it links them now with us. One of the last sessions we had is a long timeline of the
church’s history based on the brief history of First Presbyterian Church that we filed in dates and
names, beginning at the very start of things with Francis McKemee. The last part of this time is a
list of names - names of all the recent confirmation classes. Leon, Claire, Olivia, Isabella,
Jackson, Sonya, Sam, Ben, Cade, Leona, Eva, Drew, Lily, Jihae, William, Web, Sophia, Eric,
Lydia, Malcolm, Isabella, Verona, Sinead...and now Sophia, Jiwon, Christian, Juliana, Serena,
Diana, Sam, Ginger, Vivian, Mia, and Natalie are included in the history and foundation of this
community, of which Jesus is the cornerstone. Where this community goes, what you build, is
not beyond your wildest imagination, it is your wildest imagination. For whatever you can
imagine is what binds you together and gives you hope in the possibilities to weather the storm,
to feed the multitudes. This hope is your map, unfold it and know that whatever you encounter,
it is there to guide you home.

1Harris, Maria. 1991. Teaching and the Religious Imagination: An Essay in the Theology of Teaching.
(Harper: San Francisco, CA).

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