Well, it is the first Sunday in June, Memorial Day is in our rear view mirror and it is the day of the church picnic.  It is time to be considering in earnest the approaching summer.  The theologian Karl Barth once wisely remarked that theology should be done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.  It is good advice for all of us to live our faith in the midst of our rich tradition while we grapple with the realities of our world today.  But I am going to humbly offer a summer alternative to Barth's statement.  Once in a while we need to put down our Bibles and our newspapers and do our theology with a frisbee in one hand and a hot dog in the other.  What I am suggesting is that our theology and our spirituality will never be complete if they are seen solely as serious endeavors.
 
Today's message is really simple, listen to the following sentence and you can snooze through the rest of the sermon.  God is playful and God is calling us to be playful as well.  That is it.  I have no idea what Barth would make of it.

 I am reminded of an image I have shared with you before that was discovered in some ancient Egyptian writings.  As in our Judeo-Christian creation story the world is set in motion by an utterance by the divine.  In our story we have a solemn opening statement of "Let there be light."  But the Egyptian creation story opens with God's laughter as the very first sound in the universe.  I wish our story opened that way as well.  But actually we have more than enough evidence of the importance of play in our own scriptures.  We have the wonderful stories of Jesus reminding us of the need to be childlike and Jesus turning the water into wine so that the wedding party could continue its celebration.  But even the God of the Old Testament, who we sometimes categorize as a tad cranky, values moments of play.
 
 Frederick Beuchner writes of the value of play in the Old Testament, "When King David's wife berates him for making a fool of himself by leaping and dancing before the ark of the Lord with all his might, he protests by saying that it seemed exactly the right thing to do considering all the Lord had done for him.  'Therefore, I will play before the Lord.' He tells her...When God describes how the divine will rescue Jerusalem from wrath and make it new again...God conveys the glory of it by saying 'And the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets.'"

And this morning we listened to God's marvelous works proclaimed in the one hundred and fourth psalm.  We heard of God's creation of shining faces and glad hearts.  We heard of bounty and variety beyond any practicality.  After all would anyone suggest that the creator of the duck billed platypus, the giraffe, and the kangaroo was serious all the time?  We heard of God creation in the waters, "Yonder is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great.  There go the ships, and Leviathan the whale that you formed to play in it.

"The king, the boys and girls, the whale, they are none of them accomplishing anything.  There is nothing edifying or educational or particularly helpful in what they are doing, nothing you'd be likely to think of as religious.  They haven't a thought in their heads.  They are just playing, that's all.  They are letting themselves go and having a marvelous time at it.
 
David has sweat pouring down his face and his eyes aflame.  The boys and girls are spinning like tops.  The whale has just shot a thirty-foot spout of water into the air and is getting ready to heave his entire one hundred and fifty tons into the air after it."

What is the wind doing in the hayfield?  What is Niagara Falls up to, or the surf along the coast of Maine?  "What about the fire going wild in the belly of the stove, or the rain pounding on the roof like the Hallelujah chorus, or the violet on the windowsill leaning toward the sun?

 What for that matter, is God up to, getting the whole thing started in the first place?  Hurling stars around like rice at a wedding, gathering the waters together into seas like a woman gathering shells, calling forth all the creatures of earth and air like a person calling 'Swing your partner' at a hoedown."   I am choosing Beuchner over Barth this summer.  We have had an awfully long and tiring year since last summer.  Since September we have grieved and mourned, we have been angry and scared, we have been filled with doubt and filled with faith.  Most of all we have struggled.  And I know we will not be able to live through this summer without the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, it is who we are called to be.

But whenever we can let us pick up that frisbee and that hot dog.  Let us play checkers with our grandchildren and swap knock-knock jokes.  Let us sing along to the radios in our cars at the top of our lungs and dust off our badminton rackets.  God has called us to all of this as well.  When we ignore the opportunities for joy God has given us, we are not being appropriately serious, we are missing out on the grand gift of creation.

God is playful and God is calling us to be playful.  I told you that was it.  Amen.