Bob Kaylor

The God Who Comes - A Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent

The God Who Comes
Isaiah 64:1-9

A few weeks back I saw an article from Great Britain about a new campaign that’s being advertised on the sides of those double decker buses you see tooling around London. While people in Great Britain are used to seeing church and religious signs and symbols on buses and in other public places, this campaign goes the other direction. The signs say, “There probably is no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

The campaign is sponsored by the British Humanist Association, an atheist group. Richard Dawkins, the atheist professor who wrote the bestseller The God Delusion, is helping to fund the project. Says Dawkins, “Religion is accustomed to getting a free ride - automatic tax breaks, unearned respect and the right not to be offended, the right to brainwash children. Even on the buses, nobody thinks twice when they see a religious slogan plastered across the side. This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think - and thinking is anathema to religion."

Dawkins, along with Christopher Hitchens and several others, have formed a kind of loose association of what we might call neo-atheists: intelligentsia who are determined to convince everyone that religion is the cause of much if not most of the pain and suffering in the world and that we’d all be better off without it. Take away peoples’ irrational belief in God, they seem to be saying, then you’ll solve many of the world’s problems.

Now, I’ve seen a rash of books out lately that are designed to deflate the arguments of Dawkins and Hitchens, written by Christian authors mostly who want to argue ontologically for the existence of God. It’s actually not a new debate, though, it’s just gaining more press.

You’d think that Christian churches and other religious institutions would be offended by this kind of stuff. Recently in our own country, comedian Bill Maher brought us the film “Religulous” that is a caustic attack on religion and religious people as fools or charlatans. You can almost hear the cries of protest from religious people.

But I found it interesting that our brothers and sisters in the British Methodist Church, who have to look at these busses every day, took a different tack on the whole issue. Rev Jenny Ellis, Spirituality and Discipleship Officer for the British Methodist Church, said, “We are grateful to Richard for his continued interest in God and for encouraging people to think about these issues. This campaign will be a good thing if it gets people to engage with the deepest questions of life. As Christians, we respond to Jesus’ call to love God with our minds as well as our hearts, souls and strength. Christianity is for people who aren’t afraid to think about life and meaning. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, believed that no one should be saved from the trouble of thinking because that is the path to understanding God.”

In other words, “Bring it on.”

The bottom line issue here is, I think, the desire for people to have proof of God. To know about God empirically, ontologically, in a corporate way. The question comes to me as a pastor in several ways, most prominently when people ask, “Why doesn’t God break open the heavens and reveal himself, removing all doubt?” Many people in the world do, in fact, go on about their lives without any thought of God.

Many religious people will want to turn to the Bible for proof of God’s existence, but it’s a biased document that makes it hard to use as primary source material. See, the Bible isn’t focused on proving God’s existence or on encouraging people to think about God. Instead, the Bible is always focused on the experience of God. It’s the story of a particular peoples’ journey and wrestling and experiential engagement with God. The biblical writers were not philosophers—they were pilgrims on a journey with God. It’s easy to deny God’s existence when all you’ve done is thought about God. It’s harder to do so when you have a personal experience.

The Bible characterizes that experience, however, in terms of both worship and doubt. Sometimes it seems like there probably is no God, even to those who follow him. That’s the emotion and thought that the prophet Isaiah is portraying in this passage.

“Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down,” cries the prophet. Wouldn’t it be best is God made an awesome display of power and might evident to all the “nations” (Isaiah 64:1-2). The writer saw God as living in the “holy and glorious habitation” of heaven, but lamented that God seemed to be so distant, withholding God’s “heart” and “compassion” from the writer and his people (63:15). God had previously been present with his people in power, delivering them out of Egypt, leading them by a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire, revealing God’s glory in giving the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai, dwelling with Israel in the wilderness tabernacle, inhabiting the Temple built by Solomon, going before Israel in battle and doing more “awesome deeds” that God’s people had not expected. They were relying on experience, not thought. No one in history had ever heard of or seen a God so powerfully present and active on behalf of his people (64:3-4). Now, though, as the people suffered from the sting of defeat and exile at the hand of the Babylonians it was clear to them that God had closed up the clouds and turned off the fireworks on their behalf.

People seem to always want signs from God, but tend to ignore them when they’re present. Even while God was making the “mountains quake” at Sinai in Exodus 32, talking with Moses in the cloud and giving him the Law, the people of Israel were at the bottom of the mountain that very moment complaining against God and Moses and crafting their own god in the form of a golden calf. No matter how spectacular the sign or evidence, humans are easily blinded to God’s presence and power because of sin—the serious human drive for self-interest and self-indulgence. Sin has a way of blocking our view of God by putting up a mirror that causes us to fall in love with our own reflection.    

Israel had continued that long history of neglecting God and going after other pagan gods and for that, as the prophets had continually pointed out, there would be consequences. Exile was one of those consequences, but the greater problem was God’s apparent retreat into hiding. The writer seems to have been conflicted about all this, even implying that God’s hiding may have been the cause of Israel’s sin in the first place. Did God hide from God’s people because they had sinned, or had the people sinned because God had hidden from them? 

The writer and his people felt the pain of God’s absence. They had become “unclean” and any “righteous deeds” they had done could not purify them. The “filthy cloth” here refers to a garment stained with menstrual blood, which was considered to be ritually unclean (Leviticus 15:19-24). Sin had caused the nation to dry up like a fallen leaf driven by the wind (Isaiah 64:6). No one prayed anymore or attempted to cling to God because God had “hidden [God’s] face” from them and had given them over to the consequences of their sin (64:7).

To revisit the bus slogan, the people began to feel like there probably was no God. But because of their past experience, this was definitely not good news and they couldn’t simply “stop worrying” and enjoy their lives.

I once saw a quote—maybe it was on a bumper sticker—that went something like this: “If you feel distant from God just ask yourself, ‘Who moved?’” If God seems hidden to us, maybe it’s because we’ve stopped looking for God in the midst of our daily lives. We’ve acted like there’s probably not a God, and our thoughts and actions become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if we’re paying attention, if we’re looking for God, we don’t have to go far.

In the scriptures, heaven is not a far away place “way beyond the blue” as the old song says, but rather it is God’s realm, God’s dwelling, and it is quite near to us. All we need do is put down the mirror and open a window into the relationship God wants to share with us. Rather than a booming shout from the clouds, God more often is revealed in the “still small voice” we can hear if we’re focused enough to listen. Advent reminds us, too, that if we want to see the face of the hidden God we don’t do so by looking up for a heavenly sound and light spectacular, but rather by looking into the dark recesses of a stable and into the eyes of a humble, helpless child.

Folks like Dawkins tend to lump all religions together, but that’s not unique. Everyday people do it. I’ve heard this saying said to me in some form or another over and over again: “Well, all religions are just different paths toward finding God. They’re all the same, really.” The assumption is that God is really unknowable, too mysterious—that is, if God exists at all.”

My response to that, however, is both intellectual and experiential. It’s intellectual because I understand what Christians have thought for 2,000 years. Christianity is not about people looking for God—it’s about God coming to us in the person of Jesus Christ. Christians make the radical claim that God is, indeed, knowable—that God has a human face. That God has walked among us, taught us, lived with us, suffers with us, even dies for us. Christian theology is all about incarnation—about Immanuel, “God with us.” That doesn’t prove in itself that Christianity is true, but it does prove that it is radically different.

But I also respond experientially. God is not merely an abstract concept that we can neutrally accept or reject. Instead, to believe in God calls for a response and the following of a particular model. That model is Jesus, and if we experience life as Jesus did, live as he did, act as he did, then the world changes. It’s not the absence of faith that will save the world, it is the full embrace of the ethics, life, and worldview of Jesus that will do so. That’s why he taught so much about the Kingdom and called people to “follow me.” Note that it wasn’t “think about me” or “muse about me.” The call to Christian faith is a call to experience by doing.

Blaise Pascal, the great mathematician, combined both the intellectual and experiential when he reasoned his way into belief in God. Pascal, in fact, stated his belief in God in terms of probability and outcome, calling it a “wager.” He reasoned that if one believes and lives as though God exists, and it turns out to be true, one would have gained everything—a life of earthly integrity and heavenly reward. If one believes and lives in God and, in the end, it turns out to be true, they lose nothing—one has still lived a good life and contributed to the world.

On the other hand, if one does not believe in God, yet it turns out that God is real, one could lose everything. Even if one does not believe and it turns out not to be true, at best they have gained nothing.

Pascal’s conclusion: Believe in God and live out that belief and you have everything to gain and nothing to lose!

Rather than convince people like Dawkins that we’re right about God, maybe we should stop arguing and start reflecting God’s presence in positive, world-changing ways. Like the people of Israel, though, our sin and self-interest can get in the way, blocking our vision of God’s true nature and call upon us. God becomes distant and we ignore him, or, worse, we hijack God for our own agendas. I think in that sense Dawkins is right—we don’t often reflect the truth of God.

“We are the clay,” said the writer of Isaiah, and God is the “potter” (64:8). We must not give into the temptation of sin to make gods in our own image. Instead, we submit ourselves to the potter, who can mold us into his own spitting image.

Advent calls us to deep reflection, to not only think about God but to experience God by experiencing and living into a relationship with Jesus Christ. We are not arguing for an unknowable God, but waiting upon the God who comes—who came to the ancient Israelites in pillar and cloud, who came to the people in exile in the form of return and restoration, who came to people in person in Jesus, who comes to us in the midst of our joy and suffering, and who will come again to set the world to rights.

Interestingly, in one of the articles I read about Dawkins there’s a picture of him standing next to a Christmas tree. Apparently, it’s still OK to celebrate a birthday!

Let us celebrate Jesus this season—not by thinking about him, but by following him. He is the God who comes.

It's Not Your Birthday

Matthew 25:14-30

I went back a few weeks in the lectionary to pick up this week’s text, which normally comes around about the time we’re doing a stewardship campaign. It’s a familiar story, a timeless parable, one that speaks about investment and trust.

But even though we’ve completed most of our church stewardship campaign for the year, the issue of stewardship as it applies to our whole lives is a year-round proposition. In fact, I think we need to hear that message especially on the cusp of another Christmas season. This time of year we’re always faced with the same question: where, with whom, and how much are we going to invest in gift-giving?

It’s an especially poignant question giving the rough economic times we’re facing. Everyone seems to be cutting back which increases the pressure on many families about what to do with Christmas. Retailers are sweating bullets right about now with Black Friday looming at the end of this week (called Black Friday because it’s supposed to be the time of year when their financial books move from red to black numbers). Some long-established store chains have simply given up and gone out of business—Circuit City, for example, announced that it was closing 155 stores as people have slowed their buying of luxury and entertainment items. The economic crisis is forcing everyone to think differently, to retool, to adjust and, sometimes, to make decisions about survival. A lot of folks, like the last servant in the parable, simply want to dig a hole and bury their money in an attempt to salvage a particular kind of lifestyle.

But times like this, I think, are also full of opportunity. Old, established patterns are changing and while sometimes those changes are forced upon us they still offer an alternative way of looking at money and, this time of year, at Christmas. They say that in a down market, one of the best things you can do is invest—lay out money when others are afraid to do so. The question that Jesus asks is where we’re going to be making that investment and whether we’ll take different kinds of risks than we used to.

A 2006 Gallup survey showed that regular church attenders spend an average of $800 a year on Christmas. People who don’t go to church, on the other hand, spend an average of $853 on Christmas gifts. Interesting—church attendance, a life of faith, only makes $53 of difference in people’s lives. Traditionally, both Christians and non-Christians have treated Christmas about the same—as an opportunity for spending and, often, for overspending. It seems that church attendance doesn’t insulate one from the shock of the January credit card bill.

But what’s most interesting to me is that all this spending is done ostensibly in the name of Jesus. As I heard one woman telling a small child while I was in line at Costco—“It’s Jesus’ birthday. That’s why we give gifts to each other.”

That’s the assumption that drives many people to spend all that money on gifts. We do it because, well, we’re supposed to. But think about that—it’s Jesus’ birthday, yet we give all the gifts to each other. That’s kind of like you having a birthday party but when it comes time to open the gifts you sit by while everybody else opens gifts they brought for the other people at the party while you get nothing. Try selling that scenario to an 8 year old birthday boy or girl!

Yet, that’s what we seem to do every year with Jesus. Christmas celebrates the birth of the Savior of the World, who is a gift in and of himself, yet we celebrate that birth by largely ignoring him in favor of an orgy of spending on stuff for each other. We act as if it’s everyone’s birthday but Jesus’ and the party goes on unabated. I wonder what the birthday boy thinks about all that?

It’s supposed to be a time of joy and reflection, but every year it seems like people are more and more stressed by Christmas. And maybe that’s because we’ve forgotten whose birthday it really is.

There’s a story of a woman who was Christmas shopping with her two children. After many hours of looking at row after row of toys and hearing both her children asking for everything they saw on those many shelves and other things in the store, she finally made it to the elevator with her two kids.

She was feeling what so many of us feel during the holiday season time of the year: overwhelming pressure to go to every party, every housewarming, taste all the holiday food and treats, getting that perfect gift for every single person on our shopping list, making sure we don’t forget anyone on our card list, and the pressure of making sure we respond to everyone who sent us a card.

Finally the elevator doors opened and there was already a crowd in the car. She pushed her way into the car and dragged her two kids in with her and all her purchases. When the doors closed, she couldn’t take it anymore and stated, “Whoever started this whole Christmas thing should be found, strung up and shot.”

From the back of the car everyone heard a quiet calm voice respond, “Don’t worry, we already crucified him.” For the rest of the trip down the elevator it was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop.

We need a new vision of Christmas and a radical change in approach.

I was at a conference recently where Mike Slaughter, who’s the pastor at Ginghamsburg United Methdodist Church outside Dayton, Ohio, was talking about this whole idea. I’m paraphrasing, but every year he tells his congregation at Christmas time to remember that “it’s not your birthday; it’s Jesus’ birthday.” A few years back he began challenging his congregation to take whatever amount they spent on Christmas presents for friends and family and give an equal amount to a church-wide mission project — in his church’s case, a vital mission to bring clean water and education to refugees in Darfur. The results were incredible. They raised more than a million dollars in a very short period of time in a very blue collar area of the country.

Do we need to be even more comfortable and entertained while one-sixth of the world does not have access to clean drinking water? What’s more beneficial to our children’s development: another flashing, chirping, battery- eating Toy-of-the-Month, or the knowledge that Christianity involves the sacrifice of forgoing some of our desires on behalf of others’ needs?

See, if Christmas is the celebration of Jesus’ birthday, then doesn’t it make sense that we should be giving him most of our gifts, those things that he really wants and needs from us? Shouldn’t we be invested in the things in which Jesus himself invested his whole life: care for the poor and needy, justice and peace, a better world in preparation for the coming Kingdom of God which he talked so much about?

I was reading an article recently about a group of churches who banded together to form something called “The Advent Conspiracy.” The Advent Conspiracy is an international, inter-church movement that is “restoring the scandal of Christmas by substituting compassion for consumption.” The idea is to combine first-century Advent orthodoxy (what the church believes about Jesus) with 21st-century Advent orthopraxy (what we do as a result of our belief). The movement encourages partnering churches to embrace four themes during the Advent season:

• Worship More — Worshiping Christ can become the greatest and most enjoyed focus of the season.

• Give More — God gave his Son as a relational gift; Christians can try to give more meaningful, relational and experiential gifts instead of just expensive ones.

• Spend Less — Decrease the volume of purchasing and receiving costly Christmas gifts.

• Love All — In the Advent, Jesus enters our poverty so we will no longer be poor. With the money saved by giving relationally and resisting consumerism, people can redistribute that money to the “least of these” in their communities and the world.

We live in a time of crushing need. Our local food banks are in desperate need to supplies to help feed people who are living on the edge. Crossroads Urban Center has issued an urgent plea for clothing as people slip deeper into poverty without jobs or prospects. The list of people who have been made homeless and helpless by the increasing disparity between rich and poor is growing more every day. And that’s just in our country. In Africa, we’ve already talked about the lack of clean drinking water but did you know also that every 30 seconds a child somewhere on that continent dies from the preventable disease of malaria? People are hungry, homeless, and dying. As Christians, we can’t simply watch these stories on our new flat screen TVs and do nothing.

So, I want to propose to you this morning an Advent campaign that I’m calling “It’s Not Your Birthday.” Now, I’m not suggesting that you absolutely forgo buying any presents for your family. Everyone likes to give and receive presents and there’s nothing wrong with that. What I would like to challenge you with, however, is to think about taking whatever you’re going to spend on Christmas presents for family and friends and spend an equal amount on a cause that honors Christ. Jesus, in other words, should get at least half of our Christmas presents!

We have several opportunities for you to do that through the church during Advent and Christmas. In your bulletin this morning is information about the needs at Crossroads Urban Center, the Peace House Basket of Basics project, and the Christian Center. These are local projects that help local people. When we serve the poor, we’re serving Jesus, giving him the gift of faithfulness.

But we don’t stop within our own community. This summer, I challenged our congregation to raise $1000 for the Nothing But Nets campaign, which supplies insecticide-treated mosquito nets to families in Africa for malaria prevention. We raised that $1000 in one Sunday. This Christmas, we want to challenge our congregation and all those people who will come to join us for worship on Christmas Eve to send 1,000 nets to Africa—that’s $10,000. For just $10 you can send a gift that will save lives. We’re going to be using this in our Christmas advertising, encouraging people to come ready to give Jesus a gift.

We’re doing this in our own home. We’ve asked our extended family to skip sending us another Hershey chocolate sampler and send the money they would have spent on us to Nothing But Nets or to a local food bank in their hometown. We’ll do the same. Now, normally that means we’re spending about $20 to $30 on those gifts to family and we send out about ten or so packages every year. Translate that into Nets and we’ll be able to help save the lives of at least 20 people, probably more, just through altering our gift giving with extended family. If we all do that, we’ll far exceed that 1000 number of nets by Christmas Eve.

There are lots and lots of ways we can take what we’ve been given and invest in ways that please the birthday boy Jesus. Let’s not skimp or hoard—let’s think extravagance in our investing in Jesus’ birthday.

This year we really have an opportunity to celebrate Jesus’ birth and not ourselves. Let’s take the chance, make the investment, and watch the return!

Toward a Theology of Leisure

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a summit on ministry in resort communities that was put together by the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado. As far as I know, this meeting was the first of its kind, getting together pastors and leaders of churches that are located in places where people come to play. The magnetic question that drew us all there (about 30 people) was, “How do you do the work of ministry in a place where play is the dominant goal?”

It’s a good question, and one that I’ve been wrestling with over the last five-plus years we’ve been together. Coming out of a blue collar Western Pennsylvania with its requisite and fully functional Protestant work ethic, I must admit that I’ve struggled to understand the culture here in Park City—sometimes even resented the culture of leisure and recreation as competition for the “real” work of the church. I grit my teeth every time it snows on Saturday night, for example, knowing that our worship space will be more empty come Sunday morning. I’ve wrestled with the problem of trying to train and retain leaders to do the work of the church in the midst of a culture where everyone travels and aren’t always available. In other churches I’ve served, I’ve taught Bible study classes of 34 weeks with 40 people who were there every week. Here, because of people’s schedules, travel, and seasonal residency, that’s virtually impossible. Doing church in the traditional way in a place like this is a tough nut to crack.

But I also know that there’s a lot of upside. Even in the midst of this beautiful place with its myriad opportunities, you still chose to come here on Sunday morning to be in worship. We have visitors every week from all over the country who take time during their vacation to be with us. On Christmas Eve, we’ll host some 1800 people, two thirds of which are people from out of town who come here to worship Christ and hear the story again. When tragedy hits a segment of our town, when a loved one dies, usually suddenly, people who may not have any other religious connection call us looking for comfort and for a place to grieve. Everywhere I go in this town and meet people, tell them what I do, they know this church. Many people in our town consider this to be their church even if they rarely if ever attend. We are truly the community’s church. That’s not to diminish in any way our sister churches, who have their own niches in ministry. I just think that our niche is our community connection.

I got to thinking about this during my first round of doctoral classes in August and after a lot of prayer and thought I came to the conclusion that I needed to really focus my study on the particular challenges and opportunities present in a community like ours. We’re a unique place to do church, but I’ve also come to realize that we’ve got a tremendous opportunity in front of us for which I believe God has uniquely placed us. This morning I want to share with you just a taste of what I’m learning.

Being trained as a historian and theologian, my first approach to any issue is always to think about it historically and theologically. How did we get here? What does the Scripture say about it? Where is God in the midst of it? We live in a community whose economy and social patterns are driven by recreation, so it makes sense to begin by moving toward a theological understanding of leisure.

Lots of books have been written about theologies of vocation, finding meaning in the midst of the daily rhythms of work. Little has been done on developing a solid biblical theology of leisure which, like work, is a gift from God. From the beginning of time, according to Genesis, God has built leisure as well as work into the created order. After six days of creation, the writer of Genesis tells us that God “rested,” establishing a model of Sabbath—a time of rest, reflection, and renewal that was designed for our benefit and enjoyment, but even more so as time to enjoy our relationship with God. Sabbath was a way of bringing life into balance between work and leisure. We need both.

But humanity has historically had problems with balance, tipping the scales one way or another in excess. We either work ourselves to exhaustion, trying to validate our lives by what we produce, or we engage in excessive pleasure-seeking, seeking to validate ourselves by indulging in every self-serving whim. The Bible sees both approaches as being destructive to humans and their relationship with God.

There’s not a lot about leisure as we know it in the Bible. Remember that it was written in a pre-industrial, agrarian age where people worked from sun-up to sundown. There was no such thing as “vacation” for the vast majority of people. Only the super-wealthy could afford any kind of leisure and, for them, it was a full-time occupation. In prosperous Roman society, for example, work was distasteful for most citizens who called it “non-leisure.” Slaves did all the real work. A life of leisure was what one aspired to.

But move forward a couple of millennia and things have changed. The industrial age ushered in the whole concept of a “weekend” and “vacation” for workers. Post-World War II America, with its new interstate highway system and increasingly more affordable air travel, perfected the idea and opened new avenues for people to travel and use their discretionary time and money in pursuit of pleasurable experiences. Suddenly, Americans had more leisure time, but did they know what to do with it?

In 1962, CBS TV was conducting one of those year-end round-up programs with a panel of newsmen who were asked, “What is the gravest crisis facing the American people in the year ahead?” (1963). Some said it would be the cold war, maybe Berlin, or Latin America. But when the question came around to Eric Sevareid, a CBS reporter whom many of you remember, he said something very interesting, particularly for that time. He said that the most dangerous threat to American society would be the rise of leisure and the fact that those who have the most leisure are the least equipped to use it.

Was Sevareid a prophet? Well, let’s look around at 21st century America. We have an abundance of things and an abundance of free time. The evolution of our economy from the industrial age to the information age has sparked a revolution in leisure. Not only have computers made our lives more flexible and mobile (your office is wherever you are, even on a golf course or a ski lift), but they also provide a form of leisure in themselves. With a computer, the whole world is at your fingertips for instant virtual enjoyment. I can shop, travel, build relationships, and work all without leaving my chair. We’ve all accepted that as a new reality, but have we reflected on what it means for us as humans? This, I think, was Sevareid’s fear—that we’d change from becoming slaves to work to being slaves to leisure.

We live in a place where people actually come to actively pursue leisure. We have working folks who come here for brief vacations, trying to cram in as much fun as possible before time and money run out (I see these people, exhausted, on the lifts). We have wealthier visitors who spend a couple of weeks at a time sequestered in large homes. We have retirees who came here to enjoy the time and money they earned over a lifetime of work. We have young people who are willing to work for peanuts just so they have access to the leisure culture. Our community’s economy is driven and maintained by all these folks, all seeking the holy grail of leisure time. But is anyone asking what it means? Is anyone working at helping all these people find meaning in the midst of leisure time or, more importantly, to experience the God who created leisure for our renewal?

One of the problems I see in our leisure culture is that it is often devoid of meaning. It’s one thing, for example, to enjoy skiing or any other leisure activity as renewing and re-creating part of one’s life. It’s quite another, however, to use it as an escape from reality. Like alcohol or other addictions, the excessive pursuit of leisure can become a mask for one’s deeper issues. Recreation thus becomes a form of medication. I often wonder about the person who brags that they skied 70 or more days in a row, or played 36 holes of golf every day. I understand that it’s fun, but deep down I often wonder what it is inside themselves that they’re trying to avoid. Leisure was never meant to be a mindless escape.

The passage from Ecclesiastes we read this morning describes this tension. The Teacher (Solomon?) decides to do an experiment, to see if he can find meaning in the excessive pursuit of pleasurable leisure. He acquires “everything his eye sees,” he indulges his every appetite. He does it all and has it all. But in the end, he

See, theologically speaking, leisure must always have a thoughtful and spiritual component. In Greek, the term for leisure is skole—the same word from which we get our word “school.” Leisure, in other words, is part of our human educational and learning process. This was the whole idea behind Sabbath—creating a climate for our growth as human beings in relationship with God.

Josef Pieper, who was one of the first to write about a theology of leisure, said that leisure is really more of a mental and spiritual attitude than it is the result of external factors like spare time, a holiday, or a weekend vacation. Instead he says, “It is in the first place an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul…Leisure implies an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence…the occasion and capacity of steeping oneself in the whole of creation.” Leisure, in other words, is really an occasion for mindfulness, reflection, engagement, paying attention to what is really going on in our bodies, minds, and spirits.

Children know how to do this. When a child is at play, he is learning about the world and about the nature of reality. Children use play to try on different ideas and personas, they imagine different worlds and their place in them, and they reduce the complexities of the world into categories they can understand. Play, in other words, is an opportunity for intellectual, spiritual, and emotional growth.

See, I don’t know if anyone who rides our lifts or rides our trails or eats in our restaurants knows it, but they’re in a prime place for an encounter with God. I now believe that. And if we can understand that as a church I think we’ll begin to make a deeper impact on our community and its culture. We need to no longer look at leisure as our competition, but rather as our greatest opportunity to bring the grace of God to people who are searching for meaning in their lives.

So often, we equate church with work, obligation. We use the word “liturgy” to describe what we do in worship—liturgy meaning “work of the people.” But what if, instead, we saw the church as a kind of arena for play? What if, instead of wanting people to disengage from their leisure time to come to church, we instead invited people to come to church as part of their leisure experience—to learn what it means to have true Sabbath, to be equipped for the kinds of life-giving reflection and spiritual rest that leaves them feeling filled with God’s Spirit instead of drained from the pursuit of some elusive pleasure? Or, even better, we decided to use our “community” presence to be in a ministry with those in the midst of leisure, not expecting them to come to us but being where they are? These are the questions I’m now engaging. And I’m getting some ideas.

Good theology is always practical theology, so I’ve been thinking about how this works on the ground—how we can help people in our community, be they residents, seasonals, or visitors, “play with a purpose.” I have to tell you that the Holy Spirit has been opening my eyes to the opportunities that have been here all along but that only now I begin to see. So I played with my imagination and thought about engaging people like:

•    Visitors: We need to be marketing our church worship and activities, but what if we also put something out there that invited people to come over to the church for some quiet time when they need it? Vacations can be chaotic, after all. And what if we offered a Saturday night worship service with some hors deuvres, like around 5:30PM, for those who would like a church experience but are trying to get in as much skiing as possible on a short weekend? Would that be a lot of work? Yeah, but it’s what a missionary church would do.
•    Seasonal workers: One church I talked with from Jackson Hole understands that people who work in town don’t usually have Sundays off and, even if they did, they don’t normally come to church. Yet, they’re interested in spiritual things. They do a program called “Theology on Tap” where one afternoon a week they hold a discussion group in a bar. People can come and ask questions, discuss books or movies with spiritual themes, explore religious topics, all in a neutral environment. Would we be willing to try something like that? We would if we were thinking like missionaries.
•    Liftees: What would happen if, say, everyone in our congregation who skis decided one week that we were going to deliver a couple dozen cookies to every lift station at each of the three resorts with a note that says, “Compliments of Park City Community Church,” with our phone number and info. I wouldn’t expect them to show up at church, but it would let them know that someone in the community knows they’re here and cares about them. That’s a missionary thing to do.
•    Film Fanatics: Just this week I met with a man named John Priddy, who runs the Windrider Film Festival that happens concurrent with Sundance. Windrider is a festival that is designed for Christian college and seminary students who are making and studying films. They gather here for a week, going to Sundance films and discussion them from a Christian perspective, they show their own films, they attend classes and they engage in small group discussions. These are young people who could have a tremendous impact on the film industry. I got very excited about this (this will be their sixth year). In order to keep the costs down, they try to house the students in local homes. Could we be hosts for some young people who might someday make films that are uplifting and life-affirming over and against the nihilism of most of Hollywood? We can, if we’re a missionary church.
•    For our own residents, be they part or full-time. We’re starting to offer some one session seminars on spiritual topics. Next week we’ll have one on “Getting to the Know the Bible.” We need to be letting our community know about these things. That’s missional.
•    We also have started serving great food on Sunday morning, which has been revolutionary in my opinion. We’re extending hospitality like we’ve never done it before. People are meeting people and visitors are telling me how great this church is. That’s awesome, but we need more help. Is baking fresh coffee cake a missionary task? Yes, it is! Do we have some missionaries out there?
•    My imagination runs wild. What if we built a huge prayer labyrinth out on the lawn in back of the church and invited the community to come and use it for prayer and reflection? What if we took a Sunday during the ski season and held our services slope side at each of the resorts, with our people inviting others to come as they ride the lifts? I could go on…

Bottom line is, we’ve got a tremendous opportunity here. The people we impact, be they residents or people who are just here on vacation, are looking for meaning. You never know what your act of hospitality or that conversation on a lift is going to bear. We have an opportunity to engage our leisure culture with a life-giving message