“Re-Creation”

A Sermon by

Reverend Robert M. Hardies

All Souls Church, Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, 1 June 2008

Morning has broken, like the first morning like the first morning

Black-bird has spoken like the first bird.

Praise for the singing!  Praise for the morning!

Praise for them, springing fresh from the Word!

Mine is the sunlight!  Mine is the morning born of the one light Eden saw play!

Praise with elation, praise every morning,

God’s re-creation of the new day.

This morning I want to talk about a subject that, at first, might seem, I don’t know, somehow unworthy of spiritual reflection, a topic perhaps not serious enough for a pulpit that stands this high off the ground.  This morning, I want to talk about play.  It’s summer, after all, that glorious season of leisure and recreation and I hope that, whether it’s this afternoon or next weekend at the church retreat, or that vacation you’re planning in August, I hope that you will find some time this summer to get away and to rest.  But not only to rest, to play.

Now let’s be honest:  that is strange advice coming from a preacher.  In America, you see, preachers are notorious for telling people not to play but to work.  For years, Protestant clergy in America used their parishioners’ anxiety about the state of their eternal souls to get them to work harder.  “Work hard,” they said, “and you will earn a ticket to heaven.”  We call this the Protestant work ethic.  When I share it with people who didn’t grow up in white, Protestant America they say, “Oh, we have that too in our culture.”  It seems that religious leaders, no matter where you go, capitalism has a way of getting religious leaders to teach the people to be an eager and compliant workforce.

So this is all to say that my argument this morning for the spiritual value of play runs against the grain of much inherited wisdom.  So let me try to begin my argument this morning with a couple of stories from the very beginning.

In the beginning, teach the Shilook people from the Nile region of Africa, in the beginning, Creator shaped human beings from the mud and debris that he found as he wandered across the face of the earth.  Because each race was formed form the clay and the flotsam of a particular area, we all turned out a little different, each people a unique expression of divine creativity.  In China, one creation story goes like this:  In the beginning, the serpent goddess Nu Gua, laboriously formed human beings one by one from the mud, but after a while this work became tedious and time-consuming for her and she decided to speed things up.  So she took a vine and dragged it through the mud and, with a flick of her tail, sent flecks of dirt spraying across the universe, breathing life into each one.  Nu Gua smiled with delight at her clever idea.  By the shores of the Mediterranean, the ancient Israelites told a story that we would one day call “Genesis.”  It’s the story of a god who, in the beginning, literally sits down on the ground and forms Adam, human being from adama, the soil, the dust.

So, one more story.  Just last weekend, I lay on the beach at Rehobeth and watched as a little girl plopped down in the sand by the water’s edge.  With her bare hands, she formed wet piles that she shaped into figures.  With a little plastic shovel, she dug a moat and built crude castle walls and once, with a flick of her wrist, she unwittingly spattered muddy water over my beach towel and magazine.  When she realized what she’d done, she giggled with delight.  Isn’t it striking to you that here we can take a handful of creation stories from all over the world, from many different cultures, and when you consider them together, they resemble nothing so much as a child at play, as if our creator were a little girl making castles in the sand, or a little boy in his sandbox.

The Hindus have a beautiful idea called Leila.  Leila means “divine play.”  Hinduism teaches that the whole world was created in a fit of divine playfulness.  The great god Brahman, you see, was perfect and self-sufficient; he didn’t need to create human beings or the earth.  It’s not as though he were lonely or insufficient on his own.  So one day, for no better reason than joy and whimsy, Brahman sat down to play, like a little girl at the shore, and out came the earth and her creatures.  Leila; divine play.

So I don’t think it’s an accident that there’s similarity between creation and the act of play.  If you think about it, play is at its very core, a creative act.  It took a little imagination, for instance, for those first people to figure out that if you kicked a ball across the field and tried to get it into a little net at one of the field, that you could pass hours of time in joyous abandon.  Or more importantly, those people who discovered that if you take a stick and a little round object and try to hit it as far as you can, that you could create joy for many generations of people.  The recipe for good play is the same as the recipe for any act of creation:  You take raw materials and you add imagination and a little joy and a little whimsy and, just like the gods in the beginning, you end up with something new and wonderful.  Play, as a creative act.

If you pause and think about it for a moment, for me at least this is an awe-inspiring notion, that the same power, the same power that created the world at the very beginning, no matter how you imagine that power, that same power of creativity is present within us, in our own creativity.  We almost take up where the creator left off and, in that sense, can imagine ourselves as co-creators with God of the ongoing game, albeit a serious game, of creation.  Co-creators is what we are of beauty and of justice and of peace.  I find something empowering, very empowering, in this notion that we are co-creators with the divine.  But let’s face it:  sometimes our vaunted powers of creation run a little dry.  Our imagination falters; our joy and creativity shrivel up.  We all know what it feels like when the wells have run dry.  And that is when we need to be re-created.  And that’s where play can come in again. 

It is no accident that another word for play is recreation.  Re-creation, to create anew.  There was once a time when people understood play and sport to be opportunities not just to blow off a little steam but literally to replenish ourselves, to replenish the creative powers within us, to literally reenact our creation, by playing, by using our imagination, by engaging our whimsy and our joy.  Re-creation, recreation, was an opportunity to replenish those powers of creativity so that we might come back to the world, to the work of beauty and of justice and of peace, refreshed and re-energized with new imagination, because, Lord knows, we need imagination and joy to engage in that work.

So I want to invite you, at the beginning of this summer, this week after Memorial Day, to think ahead to your summer and to think about the recreation that you have planned and to imagine how it might be a re-creation for you.  I don’t want you to go home and get all earnest about your play time this summer.  That would be, if what you take away from this is, “Oh, I’ve got to work at my play now,” that is not what I want to accomplish this morning.  That would defeat the whole purpose.  But do something that engages your creativity.  Do something that replenishes your joy, that replenishes your spirit, so that you can come back to the work of this world renewed, and re-created.

This notion of re-creation has been on my mind lately because I feel as though I have been re-created.  Over the last year or so I feel as though I have been renewed and re-energized in my ministry with you all at All Souls Church.  You’ll remember that not long ago, you sent me away on a sabbatical and the whole point of a sabbatical, of course, is re-creation.  And when I returned from sabbatical last August, many of you asked me, quite appropriately, “Rob, now that you’ve had some time away and some time for reflection, tell us, how do you envision our future together as congregation and minister?”  And my answer to you back in August was, “Well, honestly, I don’t really have a new vision for our church.”  My answer had the value of at least being honest, but I sensed your disappointment and, though everyone was too polite to say it, I could hear you saying to yourselves, “Well then why the heck did we send you away for six months and pay you to boot?”  I was feeling inadequate that my own recreation hadn’t borne a re-creation. 

What I’ve learned since then is that sometimes the seed of recreation needs a little time to mature into the fruit of re-creation.  You don’t always just come back from some time away repurposed for a new life.  These things take time.  But I want to say to you today that after a year back among you, I do feel re-created.  I do feel repurposed, and that now I can answer that question that was posed to me back in August about where I see us going from here as church and as minister.  I wouldn’t necessarily call it my vision; I want to reframe it as our vision, because part of what’s helped me come to this vision is hearing you all with new ears this year and seeing you all with new eyes.  And I would also say that rather than a new vision, what this feels like to me is more like a focusing of a vision that’s already been present among us.  You know, I just got new glasses and contact lenses this week, so I’m paying a lot of attention to focus, and I know that new focus can bring clarity and sharpness to vision. 

This morning, I want to share with you, just a little bit, about that sharper focus that I have for our next years together as a community.  I have come to see over the course of this year, that the highest and best calling of All Souls Church is to model the beloved community.  It is to bear witness to our city, our nation and our world the human family, whole and reconciled, by creating a church community where people of all races, all cultures, all ethnicities and sexual orientations and genders, come together in all of our glorious difference, while at the same time affirming our unity, our oneness.  Lots of institutions talk about building diverse communities, but only the church – hear me now – only the church can do so in a way that articulates the fundamental reason for doing so.  Because this is a religious calling. Relgion, the word, comes from the Latin word, religio, which means literally, to bind together again.  The highest purpose of religion is to bind together again the human family with ties of justice and respect and mutuality.  And it’s only the church that can say that and can bear witness to the fullness of that vision.  And there aren’t many churches in the world that have set that as their vision and as their calling, but our church has.  [Applause]  And I believe that that is our highest calling together.

And so I see this work taking on a new centrality and a new focus and sharpness in our work together going forward.  I see it being expressed in new and creative ways in our life together, and I see all of us being challenged and invited to express that commitment in new ways in our personal lives when we leave the walls of this church.  So that’s the first thing.  And there’s one other as well.  And at first, this will seem less lofty than the first one.  At first this one’s going to seem a little, maybe profane or mundane, but the other imperative that has come into sharp focus for me this year and that is vital to our future is that we must make a large investment in our home.  [Applause]  This is truly . . . you know, sometimes people complain in the church world about churches that have an edifice complex [Laughter], and I’m not talking about throwing lots of money into our building just for the sake of having a pretty building.  But let’s face it: How we build our home is a vital expression of our values.  And, to put it bluntly, we cannot welcome now all of the people, all the members of the great family of All Souls who want to come to this church because a great swath of them can’t even get up the front steps of this building.  [Applause]  And a lot more can’t get up to the second floor for a meeting, and so we’ve created sort of second-class members of the family of All Souls.  And furthermore, we will never achieve our goals of being a congregation that lives in right relationship to the earth until we dramatically change the way we live and inhabit and operate our building.  Our building is an expression of our values and it is for that reason that I see an important ministry over the next five years of planning and implementing a major capital renovation of this physical space.

Both of these, both of these, visions are really acts of re-creation, restoring the human family to its wholeness and re-creating this beautiful building that has been given to us, given to us freely, by those who’ve come before us, re-creating it so that we can pass it on, better than it is now, to the next generation.

So those are some of the things that I see focusing our work over the next few years, not to the exclusion of all the other good things that we do, but again, giving a sharpness and a clarity to our work together.  And I invite you all to find ways to participate in that work and to find a way to be leaders in that work. 

But let me just close by saying this.  We are Washingtonians.  And whenever we’ve got a big challenge in front of us as Washingtonians, our first instinct is, what, to go out and create a strategic plan, right?  Form a few committees, maybe start a bureaucracy or two to, you know, achieve that new goal and, no doubt, we will have to do all of those things and our Washingtonian-ness will help us in that work.  But let us not forget as we go forward this Hindu notion of Leila, of divine play.  Let us remember that the good work that we have before us is work that comes from our highest aspirations, our deepest dreams, our fondest hopes and let’s move forward, not just with a sense of purposefulness and work, but also with a joyful sense of play.  Here in this sandbox that is our church, our city, our nation and our world, let us joyfully fashion some new creation together.       Amen         [Applause]