The Need for Play

March 29, 1992

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In the first place, I’m not sure “play” is exactly the right word. You can see the title---THE NEED FOR PLAY.  I’m not sure “play” is quite the word I want. Maybe a better word would be humor, or laughter, or “joke” even, or comedy. Dante, after all, called his masterpiece “The Divine Comedy”, didn’t he, by which he meant, I think, the opposite of tragedy, so there’s good precedent for that. Maybe comedy would be the better word.

Then, too, maybe PLAY is out of place for Lent, anyway, an inappropriate theme entirely for this season of the year.  It does strike a kind of discordant tone---Lent is serious business, solemn business....

Lent is ashes and sackcloth, Lent is repentance and introspection...self-searching.

We wear purple during Lent, a heavy color, reminding us of the gravity of all that led up to the explosion of the Easter turnaround.

How does play fit into that mood of somberness? Or can it? Doesn’t it represent a fundamental contradiction?

PLAY? Lent?  The very concept of play seems to connote, or can connote frivolity, idle, pointless activity, an absence of seriousness....EVERYTHING LENT IS NOT.

How can we have the gall, the effrontery to talk about the need for play against the backdrop of a looming cross? Which leads, then, to the even larger question, one still “up for grabs” among some of us---IS THERE A ROLE AT ALL, any place in religion, appropriately, for laughter, for humor, for comedy, for play, or are these usurpers of true spiritual maturity, who need to be escorted to the door and dispatched as rapidly and un-ceremoniously as possible?

We’ve seen people, in fact, we know people who would vote for that right now. Some are Methodists. Some are United Methodists.  They have long, dour faces for the most part, and wear expressions of constant disapproval.  They’re the people H.L. Mencken characterized savagely as “lying awake at night brooding morosely over the possibility that somebody, somewhere, might be having a good time.”

We recognize that as a caricature and reject it as an extreme.  But extreme or not, DO THEY HAVE A POINT?  If you take your religion seriously, if you think it is important, if you believe life is not a joke, then does it leave any room for the playful spirit for levity, for the irrepressible expression of joy and abandonment, simply as an end in itself?

Are those things compatible with true belief? If so, where do they fit in?  Are play, and fun, and humor the enemies, or can they be the allies and companions of a mature faith?

I’m being serious about play, if I may say it that way. I think it’s worth spending some time on. If I had only one more sermon to preach in my life, and knew it, I might not pick this topic as a final will and testament, and yet in a sense it does relate very directly to matters of ultimate gravity. AND IT’S NOT OUT OF PLACE AS A LENTEN TOPIC.

Of course play can be frivolous.... it can be irresponsible, callous, unfeeling.... Just to “play around” while a world burns is to display about as immature a spirit as one can possess. No one is shallower, and in the end, more pitiable, than the person who devotes himself or herself to the pursuit of nothing more substantive than pure play. We don’t need to debate that. The aging, worn-out, overindulged pleasure seeker, who has seen it all and done it all, and now has nothing left but to keep on trying to re-stimulate exhausted senses, is perhaps the saddest of all human beings. That condition may be more hellish than deprivation.

But play itself is not the culprit there.... only the misuse of it. Where life is balanced and whole, where life is focused and fulfilled, where life is religiously oriented and conscious, gratefully, of being related to a Heavenly Father, play is not only a spicy diversion, it’s a necessary ingredient of spiritual completeness.

The more serious life becomes, the more crucial some form of play. The greater the gravity, the more need for levity. As G.K. Chesterton has said, “Life is serious all the time, but living can not be. You may have all the seriousness you wish in your neckties, but in anything important (such as sex, death and religion) you must have mirth or you will have madness.”

The need to play is our theme.  Doesn’t the Bible itself encourage it?  We miss this too often, I’m afraid, especially those of us who wear Protestant stripes on our Christian uniform. NO BOOK IS MORE SERIOUS THAN THE BIBLE. And yet, the Bible is brim full, saturated, overflowing with a kind of playful spirit, with humor, even a kind of earthy comedy.

The whole point of the Book of Esther is a joke, a wonderful, pie-in-your-face joke about a man who devised an elaborate scheme to get rid of his enemies---the Jews---and then has the tables turned on him so that he himself gets the punishment he planned to give out.

The triumph of justice! The Book of Esther is the only book in the Bible that doesn’t even mention God. Nowhere in it will you find even the name of God. But the Hebrew people, who so often in history, have been on the receiving end of bias and suffering, won one in that story.....

Mordecai, the villain, had it coming to him. It served him right, hung on his own gallows. Strangely humorous, maybe, but wonderfully satisfying. So they laughed and  celebrated...still do, in fact, every year at the Feast of Purim. And they stuck the story in the canon so they could relive the humor of it over and over.

You miss so much of the richness of the Biblical treasure when you close your eyes to the play that’s in it. Why we ever got into the habit of printing Bibles in heavy black binding is a mystery----Respect, I suppose.... the Special Book, the austere Book. We place it on a pedestal and honor it. But that very veneration so often has kept us from reading it, and especially from reading it on its own terms. That’s a mistake.

The Bible shouldn’t be treated as ponderous. Because it’s not. It’s full of play--David’s dancing before the Lord in celebration of victory....Isaiah’s description of the Messianic age.... where the mountains and hills break into singing, and the trees of the field clap their hands. That’s playful language.... the sheer ecstasy of redemption.

IT’S FULL OF HUMOR, TOO, if we don’t let out stiffness keep us from detecting it....The priceless story, funny story of Jacob and his father-in-law, Laban---competing, trying to outwit each other, take advantage of each other.... Back and forth they go....Jacob agrees to work 7 years for the hand of Rachel, the beautiful daughter.... 7 years, but they seem to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.... It’s lovely.

THEN THE PAYOFF! The 7 years are up and the wedding feast is prepared. Jacob goes to the wedding tent, tense with anticipation, to meet his betrothed. But Laban has pulled a switch and substituted the older sister, the scrawny, weak-eyed Leah for the younger, voluptuous Rachel.

Hah! The darkness hides the truth for a while, even through the night, but as Genesis records it with devastating understatement and barely stifled glee, “In the morning, behold, it was Leah!”

Sure it’s locker room humor, out of a male dominated society. It’s blatantly chauvinistic, but can’t you picture the boys telling it around the campfire, adding touches as they go, roaring with hysterics. Poor ol’ Jacob. What a  wonderful practical joke.

The Bible’s full of that sort of thing..... THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF GOD TO ABRAHAM AND SARAH THAT A CHILD IS TO COME TO THEM.... not by adoption, not through a surrogate.... in the natural way, though he is 100 years old, and she is 90. What kind of joke is this?

When Abraham hears it, he falls on his face with laughter. God has him rolling in the aisles. When Sarah hears it, standing behind the tent flap, eavesdropping, she giggles.

Well, my stars. What else? The very absurdity of it strikes your funny bone. BUT IT HAPPENS! It couldn’t, but it does. And we read it, shaking our heads and chuckling.... 2 old cronies, with one foot in the grave and the other in the maternity ward. The writer of the story comments laconically, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”

And what name is given the child, the child of promise, the child who will become the link in God’s unfolding plan, the child without whom there is no continuing story, the child who represents the future in all its bright hope for generations to come? What is he called? Ah, he is called ISAAC....which name in Hebrew means LAUGHTER....God’s unquenchable humor breaking out in new life, where we were certain none could be.

Be open when you read the Bible, Bring your imagination with you, Be ready for anything. It was written that way, with the stops pulled out. Don’t allow your familiarity with it, or even your respect for it to block you off from its surprises. It’s full of play.

Now, we could stay there for several more weeks. Let’s move on. I suspect our view of Jesus would be more sharply etched, and more alive and meaningful for us if we could be more alert to the elements of play and humor that are in the Gospel accounts.

Elton Trueblood, the noted Quaker scholar, wrote a book a few years back entitled “The Humor of Christ”, and called that, his humor, one of the most neglected aspects of the Christian understanding of the life of Jesus.

Not that he was a joke teller, or a stand-up raconteur. Trueblood wasn’t saying anything like that. Nobody with sensitivity would.

But there is humor in the record that has come down to us ....and playfulness. There is a sense of the richness of life in his words and stories, a sense of conviviality in his manner.

As Harry Emerson Fosdick observed, “He never jests, as Socrates does, but he often lets the ripple of a happy breeze play over the surface of his mighty deep.”  That’s a good sentence. AUTHENTIC RELIGION ALWAYS LETS THAT HAPPEN.

Can’t we see at least rudiments of the playfulness of Jesus in the vivid, exaggerated language he used? Is there a sharper image anywhere than the word picture he painted of a man with a 2X4 sticking out of his own eye trying to extract a tiny splinter out of somebody else’s eye? Once you heard that and visualized that contrast, would you ever again fail to recognize the absurdity of hypocrisy?

Or how about the illustration he used about the rich, the wealthy of his society? Can they get to heaven? Is there a place in the Kingdom for those laden down with an abundance of material possessions?

Yes, he said, It’s not impossible.  It can happen, about as easily as a camel can pass through the eye of a needle. That’s such an unlikely juxtaposition of concepts....camels and needles.  Once you’ve heard it, how can you forget it?

Can we discern an element of play, humor, in the nicknames Jesus bestowed? At Caesarea Philippi, Jesus re-named Simon, the fisherman, called him Peter, the rock, and did so a few scant seconds before he had to rebuke him vigorously for trying to talk him out of making the trip to Jerusalem. Didn’t he know how unrocklike Peter was at that point of the story? Maybe that’s just the point.

Carl Michalson has suggested that someday New Testament scholarship is going to dis-cover that Jesus really first thought of calling Simon the Rock not at Caesarea Philippi at all, but on that day when he got out of the boat and tried to walk to him on the Sea of Galilee. Says Michalson, maybe what Jesus really had in mind when he called his disciple the rock was not so much his foundational qualities as his sinking qualities. You strike while the irony is hot.

There’s humor in his stories, too, those incomparable parables---the needling, nagging, bothersome widow who keeps nibbling away at the Judge, keeps pestering him, worrying him to death, until he finally gives in to her request---NOT BECAUSE IT’S WORTHY—we don’t even know what it was...but simply to get her out of this hair.  It’s a funny story. Keep praying with that same kind of persistence, he was saying.

There’s that strange, amusing story of the unjust steward, a man who was a crook, un-abashed and self-confessed, who when caught, wrangled a deal for his boss to save his own skin. Jesus praised him, not for his virtue, but for his resourcefulness. The whole thing pulls you up short, exactly the way a good joke does.

The unexpected, the sudden twist, the exaggerated, the ironic and comical....all of these show Jesus at play, the farthest thing in the world from a dull dispenser of platitudes. He was alive, that’s the point, the most alive person who ever walked on the face of the earth.

Do you think for a minute little children would have swarmed around him as the Gospels say they did if He had been without a sense of play and lightness in his spirit?

Do you think he would have gotten the response from fisherman, and tax collectors, and common people he did with no sense of humor?

I know of no place specifically in the written account where it says Jesus laughed, but I bet He did, and I bet his laughter was robust and contagious. No one could spin the tales he did, employ the images he did, excite the enthusiasm he did, lift the loads he did, explode the chains he did, and launch the dreams he did without both producing healthy laughter and sharing in it himself.

That he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief is unquestioned. Of course he was. His “mighty deep”, as Fosdick called it is clearly there. To get anywhere within hailing distance of it is to feel it.... YOU CAN FEEL IT FROM HERE, 2000 years away.

His laughter, his humor, his play is never a flippant thing.  IT SIMPLY REFLECTS THE FULLNESS, the wholeness of his character.  Though he was utterly serious, Lenten serious, Cross-bound serious,....though he knew in intimate detail the tragic nature of life, he was not at heart a person of tragedy. He was imbued with the certainty that life is ultimately good because God is ultimately good, and he could play because He knew that no matter what might happen, the good would ultimately triumph.

To play, in the right sense and at the right time is no slap at God, nor is it an act of irresponsibility. It is, in fact, at its best, an act of FAITH, something one does when, having worked, and spent, and contributed, and given, one then TRUSTS, in confidence, and CELEBRATES.

To play, without work, is escapist, but to work, without play, is defeatist.

To play, without work, is to run away, but to work, without play, is to run down.

To play, without work, is dereliction, but to work, without play, is drudgery.

To play, without work, is to lack accountability, but to work, without play, is to lack faith.

To play, without work, is to have no roots, but to work, without play, is to have nothing but roots.

To play, without work, is to be flighty, but to work, without play, is to be flabby.

To play, without work, is to be unattached, but to work, without play, is to be chained.

To play, without work, kills time, but to work, without play, kills the spirit.

To play, without work, puts too much strain on everybody else, but to work without play, puts too much strain on yourself.

Nobody ever kept a better balance here than Jesus of Nazareth.

If I were preaching to myself today, which I am, and which I usually do, finding myself the person I know most in need of the Gospel, I would say to myself, and perhaps, it applies to some of you, LEARN FROM THE MASTER THE ART OF PROPER PLAY.

Ease up a little when you need to, and don’t take yourself too seriously.....THERE ARE SOME THINGS THE CHRISTIAN OUGHT TO TAKE SERIOUSLY, NEEDS TO TAKE SERIOUSLY, BETTER TAKE SERIOUSLY...but himself, or herself, is not one of them. When we take ourselves too seriously, we clog up the center with our own agendas, and leave no room for God to move around and have his way.

It’s no accident that humility and humor come from the same root. There’s a kinship there. A sense of play is a pre-condition to holiness, as it were, just as humility is. Holiness is about self-discovery, and God-discovery. For these discoveries to happen, you have to get out of the way, you have to loosen your grip, you have to surrender your need to control, you have to let God be God....for YOU. A sense of play helps the sanctification process,  because it encourages us to be light enough to turn loose, so that something BIGGER can come in and occupy the center.

AND ANOTHER THING... One more thing. I’m still preaching to myself....It, also, a sense of play, helps us to accept the incongruities of life. I don’t need to tell you, do I, that life doesn’t always follow a neat pattern. You don’t have to live very long to learn that.

Things don’t always happen as they should, or as you think they should. About the only thing predictable is the unpredictable....As Heraclitus said, about the only thing constant is change.

No one can control everything that happens and a sense of play can help you come to grips with that. SOMETIMES THE ONLY THING YOU CAN DO IS LAUGH....OR CRY....and yet, even those can help you hold your sanity.

For life is full of incongruity, so is the FAITH. A sense of play helps us remember: It’s the weak who inherit the earth, the foolish who teach wisdom. It’s in the giving that we receive, and in dying that we live. Incongruity? Nobody but God could have designed it that way.

And maybe the biggest incongruity of all, is this “impossibility” we’re moving toward during the Lenten season. They killed his Son... hung him from a Cross, but THEY COULDN’T STOP HIM. He rose in triumph, when it couldn’t happen, to proclaim that the incongruities of life do not need to vanquish us. Victory overpowers that seem insurmountable IS possible.

You see, the funny thing about the Gospel, the real joke, is that when all is said and done, it’s God who has the last laugh. THAT IS THE GOSPEL.

Play in the Scriptures, levity in the stories of Jesus, songs on the lips of Christian martyrs in Roman prisons, a symphony of praise from a persecuted First Century Church.... inappropriate, unseemly, not serious enough, out of place? NOT AT ALL. Those people knew. They were part of the Divine Comedy. They might be living in darkness for the moment, but they knew the Son was coming. So they danced...and played, for what did they have to fear?

I have read of a curious custom in the Greek Orthodox Church. Maybe not so curious. On Easter Monday morning, the day following the resurrection, believers gather for the purpose  of trading jokes.

It’s a time of release and celebration. Since the most extravagant joke of all took place on Easter, the victory, against all odds, of Jesus over death, the community of the faithful enters into the spirit of the season by sharing stories with unexpected endings, surprise flourishes, and a sense of humor.

The Lord God Omnipotent reigneth. He who sits in the heavens laughs. Serious business. Let’s play.