A healthy-enough community of faith is one where everyone is welcome and free to be as we are, to be as we need to be, in this sanctuary, in this community, with God, with ourselves, with each other. Through a healthy-enough community of faith, with healthy-enough worship and fellowship and the invitation is to bring more and more of our full selves, as we feel comfortable, into the light of God’s Love and Mercy. This includes our grief, this includes our sadness, our vulnerability, our yearnings, our messiness, our regrets, our hopes, our inspirations …
And, in a healthy-enough community of faith, I hope this also includes our playfulness, our delight, our joy, our creativity, our imperfect improvisations. This world can be so hard, life can be so tough, that sometimes the sabbath we need, needs to include play.
Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” – Matthew 11:28-30
What do we do when we rest, what do we do when we find sweet relief from our burdens? We play. We bring a ball to be beach, we bring a frisbee to the park, we pull out a deck of cards, a board game, a guitar. We joke and tease.
Playfulness is essential to our humanity. We are built to play, to create, to experiment, to tinker. Humans live by our wits and inventiveness and imagination. What’s any of that without play, without creative experimentation with what is yet possible? Anything new under the sun has been played into being.
We ourselves have been played into being.
As Genesis tells it the creator shaped humans out of clay, and breathed life into us.
Play is a dimension of our Holy Creator, the Creator of the Universe.
In the Book of Proverbs, we are told that God creates through Wisdom, and that Wisdom herself delights in the act of creation, Wisdom rejoices in the things of the universe that Holy One brings forth.
In Genesis, we are told that after the Holy One created the universe and everything in it, They paused and breathed and took it all in and said, “Wow! This is great!” Often this is translated as “God looked at all that he had made said it was Good.” But the Hebrew is much more of an enraptured exclamation. It is not “Well, it could have turned out lousy … but it looks acceptable.” No! It’s much more like “Whoa! Awesome! Look at it go!”
The God of Creation is like a kid who just made something really cool.
You don’t need to look too far into the lifeforms that make up the biological world to see that life itself is clearly a series of outrageously colorful and strange improvisations.
So, if you wonder what it may mean that we are made in the image of God, just watch a kid at play, with clay, with paint, with just the sticks and leaves and dirt that we adults so often ignore and trample underfoot.
Jesus’ disciples were often bickering about which of them was the best. On one occasion they asked Jesus to tell them who was the greatest in the realm of heaven.
Jesus responded by inviting a child to come over. He said, “I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will not enter the realm of heaven at all. Therefore, anyone who will humble themselves like this child – that person will be the greatest in the realm of heaven.”
What’s one thing kids do naturally that adults can think themselves too important for? They play. Play is one way we can become like little children and open our souls again to the realm of heaven.
Creative play requires a kind of humility and innocence. We must be willing to be curious, willing to make mistakes, willing to let go of self-importance and self-consciousness. This all helps us to be receptive, responsive, adaptive, creative participants in the realm of heaven on earth.
What are the barriers to this for us? What forces or what factors in the world would make us over-serious? I’m saying all this as someone who is often afflicted with seriousness. This is worth reflecting on: what forces in ourselves and in our world can block us from a more open and free attitude of playfulness in our lives? What’s the story there?
In the gospel story Jesus had some very pointed words for those people who would actively sabotage another person’s pure and open-hearted state of humble trust and play. He basically says, they will themselves suffer for it. And the way he illustrates their suffering is important. Their yoke is not easy; their burden is not light. They are yoked with a millstone, a stone for grinding, that will sink them further down into the mire until they drown. Jesus is naming the spiritual affliction at work in someone trampling over the innocence of a child or of the inner child: being burdened by such grinding weight that someone tries to grind others under it.
What Jesus offers is liberation from that. “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
I recently listened to the audiobook of Cole Arthur Riley reading her wonderful book called “This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us.” I didn’t manage to get the quote I want to use before I had to return the audiobook (this would be a great book for a book group here if you like) but she had a very moving passage about how having to cope with trauma can sometimes block someone from feeling free to be delighted and playful. And she made a very moving statement about how then recovering delightedness and play, even just a little, here and there where one feels safe to do it, can be an act of resistance against the forces of violence that would deny that of someone.
Parker Palmer wrote a version of the Lords’ Prayer where instead of “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” he says “Lead us to holy innocence, beyond the evil of our days.”
“Lead us to holy innocence, beyond the evil of our days.”
How do we recover some of that holy innocence? How do we taste that again and delight in it?
Creative play can be for us an important spiritual practice. I very much want to welcome and invite and celebrate a spirit of playfulness in how we do church, how we be church. This does not at all mean being blithe or disrespectful or shallow. Not at all. Play done in a sacred way can be a way to help us share our grief, and our fears, it can help us express our deep yearnings and wide hopes … and bring forth our truest joy, our fullest inspiration, our heartfelt prayers.
Thanks be to God.
(Delivered Sunday, September 11, 2022, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge)
The Dandelion Way 