Learning How to Play

Of all the images from this week’s summer camp for children, one image stands out in my mind. Four children are huddling together on the driveway outside the Tower doors. Three of the children are looking down at a multi-colored circle drawn with sidewalk chalk. These three children are pushing mounds of chalk dust into the center of the circle. But one child looks up at the photographer, with the hints of a grin on his face, as if the adult has visually intruded on a private game.

Without any backstory, the picture alone warms the heart. The four children were enraptured by their play, which was wholly unprompted and unguided by adults. But the photographer understood the backstory. During the week, children had submitted to a regime of carefully planned stories about saints, songs, games, art projects, and service projects. But by day four, it was clear to the adult supervisors that maybe the campers simply needed some unstructured time to play. And this is how we arrived at sidewalk chalk art.

When we got to the circle drive in front of the church, I had intended to lead yet another structured activity for ten minutes or so before music time, but one by one the children began to leave the circle of my planned lesson to begin their own creative projects. And I let them. Before long, campers had divided into groups, working out of their own artistic inspiration. The group captured in the photograph decided to form their own business, which they called Chalk Industries. And soon, they had selected a CEO of the company, as well as other officers, signing a binding contract to sell colored chalk dust. Squish it between your fingers, they said, and it’s a form of calming therapy. Somehow, we had moved from activities scripted by adults into pure, imaginative delight.

Reflecting on the words from the prophet Isaiah this week, I realized that there was a theological lesson in the children’s play and art. As I’m wont to do, I usually prepare for camp or even Sunday formation classes thinking that it’s my opportunity to enlighten the children, but they usually end up teaching me that planning, rules, and structured time hold no candle to unrestricted delight and play. This week, the children at camp taught me a lesson in keeping the sabbath.

Now, children sketching pictures on concrete and creating a company that sells chalk dust seem a far cry from the prophet Isaiah’s words today, but let’s look at them again. Isaiah says that the sabbath itself should be a delight, and the sabbath is about delighting in the Lord. If we were to press a bit further, we would see that the sabbath is also directly related to Isaiah’s urgings towards social justice. The sabbath is indeed the very foundation of such justice.

When we encounter the prophet Isaiah’s words today, they are announced to a people who have recently come out of exile in Babylon and returned to their homeland in Jerusalem. They are longing for a glorious, promised future of rebuilding the temple and reclaiming a lost past. But this resettled people soon realize upon their return to Jerusalem that things are not as utopian as they had imagined. There are enmities and rivalries among them. There is ethnic tension. There is isolationist thinking. And it takes Isaiah, speaking God’s prophetic word, to announce that nothing can be rebuilt without a shared understanding of sabbath.

Only pure and utter delight, unconstrained by individualism and competition, could lead to the rebuilding of the temple and to the flourishing again of a community emerging from trauma. The hope of the future lay not in heeding moral injunctions but in reclaiming an understanding of sabbath. No one owns the sabbath; it is pure, shared gift from God. The sabbath resists control. The sabbath resists individualism. The sabbath resists the pointing of the finger and mean-spirited judgment. The sabbath resists every attempt to make unrestrained delight into a utilitarian means to an end. The sabbath teaches that each of us can only experience such delight if others experience it, too.        

And yet it often seems that the sabbath is only about what you do and don’t do on a particular day of the week. For some Christians, the sabbath is a day on which you can’t partake of alcohol. It’s a day to avoid fun. It’s a day bound by certain obligations that enable us to keep the peace with God because, at heart, we are scared of him. It has become a day of restrictions. No wonder Jesus had to remind us that the sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the sabbath. It didn’t take long in the grand story of God’s people for the day of rest and delight to become a day full of anxiety about pleasing God. Then it became a day full of anxiety about pleasing others. Before long, it was a day chiefly about pleasing oneself.

See how quickly, too, that anxiety filters into concerns for social justice. There’s always another person to feed. There’s never enough money to temper the excesses of economic injustice. There are never enough hours in the day to accomplish all that we can do. There simply isn’t enough. We aren’t enough, no matter how hard we try. We are so very tired of trying to keep up with what we imagine is demanded of us.

And perhaps this is why God is so frequently associated with anxiety and fear. We are anxious that we are not doing enough to please God. We are anxious that if we don’t check the right box, fulfill that commandment, and do enough good works we will be perpetually out of favor with God.

But on Thursday, as I watched the formation of Chalk Industries right in front of the church, I saw the story of creation happening. Yes, it was much less grand and on a much smaller scale. It didn’t take six days. It took only thirty minutes. And yet I saw God looking upon the darkness and empty void saying, let there be light. I saw God delighting in what he was making. I saw God longing for companions because the creative enterprise could be more than a solo job. I saw God bringing creation into existence not to serve a utilitarian purpose but as nothing more than an unadulterated act of play and creativity.

And then I saw in myself, however well-intentioned it was, the need to control the play of the children before my eyes. I saw how I had become anxious about filling every minute of the morning with activities so that the children wouldn’t get bored. I saw myself worrying about whether the children were enjoying themselves. I saw myself trying to regulate the results of the camp.

But through God’s grace, the children disrupted all this with their unprompted and unstructured play. The children instinctively longed to play with others, not by themselves. They huddled together in circles and created their own business and made their own rules. They shared ideas and ownership of their imaginative enterprise among themselves. The glorious photograph etched in my mind and memorialized in digital form shows the naturally creative and communal impulse of children. It shows sabbath in action, preserved for a moment in digital amber, before adults swoop in with their well-structured plans and need to control.

No matter how much our hearts may and should be set on achieving social justice, eradicating violence, establishing economic equality, and assuaging the needs of the poor and oppressed, we won’t find such justice as individuals. We can’t enact social justice from a place of anxiety. It will emerge when we have found pure delight in the wonder of God’s creation. We will only find the fullness of God’s promised peace, righteousness, and justice when we have embraced the sabbath.

So, I ask you to imagine this. What would happen if we found ourselves scripting our future a bit less and praying a bit more? What if we found ourselves moved by the power of the Holy Spirit from some of our rigid structures and into margins of freedom where we could huddle together and play? What if we pointed fingers less and, instead, used them to grip pieces of colored chalk and draw a new picture of the future on the sidewalk? Instead of thinking that we always know what is best, maybe we should let the children teach us how to play.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
August 21, 2022