Recent sightings in my life of ministry which give meaning to my balance of work and play: While studying in my "mom cave" I watch robins and bluejays partaking of the cool refreshment of my 3 birdbaths. They perch on the edge to drink their fill in this staggering heat. They look around and then plop their whole bodies down into the water, wriggling and shaking with delight. Then back up onto the ledge to clean and preen. Or - watching our Little Explorers lined up along the playground fence watching our lawnmowers or our roofers or our men cleaning out window wells and asking with fascination, "Whatcha doin?" Or - sitting in my daughter's backyard watching 2 year old Adrianna dance in and out of the sprinkler squealing with delight. I can really resonate with Jesus in Mark 6: 30-34, 53-56 when he calls the disciples away to a deserted place to rest awhile. We all need to find respite from our work, whatever work means to us.
But what does it say about my quality of "play" that I'm merely a spectator in these delights? These observations may be a metaphor for how we worship God. In Ephesians 2: 11-22 Paul describes a world of conflict and sin. We can identify with this as we read of heinous crimes, the elderly dying in the heat, children hungry because they don't have access to free school lunches in the summer, incredible mass killings in Syria, and battleships heading to the Persian Gulf.
Then, Paul switches to the past tense as he describes what Jesus has ALREADY done: broken down dividing walls of hostility, created a new humanity with access to the Holy Spirit, and built us into a holy temple as a dwelling place for God. Really?? Where??
Although I fully believe God is anywhere and everywhere, on most Sunday mornings we enter a specific sanctuary to worship our God who has done all this in Christ. Are we spectators in our worship as we praise God, not fully trusting this picture of peace and reconciliation with the realities outside worship? Using Cindy Rigby's ideas on the theology of play, I suggest that we learn to play and participate more fully in worship - IF play is re-defined from frivolous downtime into "engaging in the work of the sovereign God in such a way that the world is transformed" (Rev Cindy Rigby, "Living the Kingdom: A Theology of Play," Kansas Pastors Conference, Newton, KS, January, 2010). Cindy professes that worship is not only a time to practice for the kingdom, but a time of actively participating in the kingdom as described in the second half of our Ephesians passage. "We must create space for play in worship so that we can begin to imagine and participate in the kingdom - a place where we're free to create through God's grace" (ibid). In worship we can splash and play in the baptismal waters of God's grace, and then having been fed, go out into the world - where we play as mutual partners with sisters and brothers with no dividing walls between us. In play, both in worship and in the world, we can imagine and discover that equality that Christ has already begun in the apostles and saints who have gone before us in God's sandbox of love, where God's love so amazing, so divine demands our all.
Grace and Peace,
Pastor Shelley
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