I’ve been looking forward to preaching this sermon for a long time. I know better than to ask if you have been looking forward to this sermon! Here is why I’ve been eager to preach it: because this is my last sermon for a few weeks. And, because it’s a sermon about one of my favorite topics: summer vacation. I know that schools around here are still in session for a couple of weeks, but I grew up in a place where June was summertime and my biological vacation clock is still set on that time. Actually, I want to talk about something much larger than just summer vacation. We’ve been talking about the real things of life such as education, work, politics, and all sorts of other major elements of the lives that you and I are living. And one part of life that deserves some attention is the part about time off, rest, play, recreation, vacation. Last week we talked about retirement, which is a special form of rest. The good news is that—for those of us not yet ready for retirement—God has built rest and play into the software that is meant to govern our lives.

So let’s start by taking a mini-vacation right now! We’ll do that with a technique called “visualization.” Vacation and rest and play are all about enjoying something, so we’ll do a bit of vicarious enjoying. Close your eyes and focus your minds for a few seconds on the taste of a fresh spoonful of homemade ice cream—you pick the flavor. Focus your minds on the smell and feel of the sea breeze as it hits your face as you stand on the bow of a sailboat cutting through the water. Focus your minds on a few notes of music as your heart is filled with sound—you pick the music. Focus your minds on the feeling of freedom and flight as you jump off a hundred-foot tower with a bungee cord tied around your feet…oh, wait…maybe that wouldn’t be so fun for you! It would terrify me! I just did that so I could get you back from your mental vacation and start listening to me again!

The reason we played this little game is because the business of rest and play and vacation is essentially about enjoyment, or at least that is a large part of it. When we think of taking a break we think of doing something we enjoy, even if that just means taking a nap. We can enjoy other things, too, like our work and our study and such, but there is a form of pure enjoyment that is associated with rest and play that is unlike anything else. And that kind of joy can break into our lives at any time and nearly any way. There is a wonderful little conversation from the novel The Color Purple. If you haven’t read the book you probably saw the movie. It is about a poor, homely black woman in the Deep South in the early part of the 1900’s who suffers many terrible things in her life, including incest, beatings, and losing her children. It is not a story for the faint of heart. Celie is the woman’s name. She is befriended by a beautiful and vivacious woman named Shug Avery, who is something of what I think back then would be called a “floozy.” Shug and Celie are walking in a field of flowers one day, and Shug says to Celie, “More than anything God love admiration.” Celie said, “You saying God is vain?” And Shug said, “No, not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. It think it [makes God mad] when you walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it.” Celie asked, “You saying it just wanna be loved like it say in the Bible?” And Shug said, “Yeah, Celie. Everything wanna be loved. Us sing and dance, and holla just wanting to be loved. Look at them trees. Notice how the trees do everything people do to get attention…except walk? Oh yeah, this field feels like singing!”

God just wants to share a good thing…like the color purple. Or the taste of ice cream. Or the sound of music. Ecclesiastes says, “There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink, and find enjoyment in their toil. This…is from the hand of God.” And Jesus said don’t worry about what you’ll eat or drink or wear. God knows you need these things. You’ll have them, just like the birds of the air or the flowers of the field. Let me say this another way: God created summer vacations!

The good preacher who wrote Ecclesiastes—perhaps King Solomon himself—was trying to find the meaning of his life, how to have purpose and peace and fulfillment in it. He was rich and powerful and so he could try everything life had to offer. One of his conclusions was that part of the purpose of life was simply to enjoy it: whether work or play, we are meant to take joy from the experience of life. And he saw that enjoyment is a gift from God. Some people think that religion is all about denying yourself any of the pleasures of life. And that could not be further from the truth. True enough, Jesus taught us about enjoying the pleasures of life within their God-designed boundaries and contexts, but that’s the best way, really the only way, truly to enjoy them. Truly to enjoy anything in life is to enjoy them in the context of our relationship with God. Apart from God, who can enjoy, Ecclesiastes asks. God is the giver of enjoyable things. And only when we are right in our relationship with God can we know how to enjoy. In fact, I think we can go so far as to say that when we are enjoying something, we are having an experience of God himself. We often think of “spiritual” experiences as being something that happen in church, or happen with thunder and lightening or deep moments of insight. But I think enjoyment—understood and appreciated as a gift of a good God—is also a spiritual experience. If you don’t believe me, then you need the experience of eating a green chili cheeseburger at the Owl Bar and Café in San Antonio, New Mexico.

Jesus took the thought even deeper. Our ability to experience joy as God designed it is completely dependent on our understanding and trust that God is the source of it all and that God will provide for us even when we are not working and fretting and straining to provide for ourselves. The sparrows flitting about in the sky and the lilies decorating the fields know nothing of worry or stress. They just do what they do and are what they are as God made them to be. Do you remember how much fun things used to be when you were a little child? There was nothing like a long summer day when you played from sunup to sundown and never gave a thought to what troubles would come with tomorrow. True trust in God is trust like that. Even when we know what kind of trouble will come—or is already here—Jesus says we can live with that same sense of enjoyment in life because the final word about life is not the trouble and the pain, it is God’s love, God’s provision, God’s will that in the midst of a broken and tragic life like Celie’s, we can and will still enjoy the good things that he shares, like the color purple.

But most of us aren’t children anymore. We’ve forgotten how to trust God enough. We need to re-learn that lesson. The May issue of Ranch & Coast Magazine has a great little essay by Jerry Zezima entitled, “If I Had A Hammock.” If I had seen this piece earlier I would have titled this sermon the same way! He writes, “If I had a hammock, I’d hammock in the morning, I’d hammock in the evening, all over my land. I sang this song so often that my wife, who threatened to hit me over the head with the tool referred to in the original lyrics, finally gave in and bought me one. For a lazy man, a hammock is like an outdoor La-Z-Boy, except that it’s not so easy to get into.” The rest of the essay tells about how hard it is to get into a hammock without falling on your derriere, what Jerry defines as “French for what you will land on when you try to get into a hammock.” He said that getting into a hammock is “like trying to slow-dance with a greased pig.” And he relearned Newton’s Law of Gravity, “which states, ‘If a person tries to get into a hammock with some Fig Newtons, gravity will cause the cookies to fall to the ground, followed closely by the person.’” The Larger Catechism teaches us that “the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” But we have to learn that all over again, and it can be harder than learning how to enjoy a hammock. We learn it as we learn to trust God to provide and trust God that it is ok for us to experience joy.

One of my childhood friends used to say all the time that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” (Why do they always pick on “Jack?”?) That’s a simple way of declaring a profound truth: We are not who we are meant to be and we do not live as we are meant to live and we do not honor God as we are meant to honor God unless we learn how to play, how to take joy from the hand of God. The last line of one of my favorite hymns has a fascinating question in it for me. The hymn is about how every new day is like a re-creation, of the first morning, the first bird, the first dewfall on the first grass. Morning has broken, and the last line says it is “God’s re-creation of the new day.” But I think you can also read that line a bit differently: Morning has broken, “God’s recreation of the new day.” I believe that recreation is about re-creation. For God, re-creation and recreation are the same thing. When we enjoy the good things that God shares we find that we are re-created, re-newed, re-freshed, re-made. And God takes great joy in the joy we take from him.

Amen.

ⁱ From the book Einstein, by Walter Isaacson, as quoted in Time magazine, April 16, 2007, p. 46-47.
ⁱⁱ John Leith
ⁱⁱⁱ George Washington Carver, as quoted by Paul G. Humber, GodCreatedThat.com, p. 5, as retold by Max Lucado in Cure for the Common Life, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee, 2005, p. 11-12.