Peals of delight
permeated the air around the pavilion at Brackenridge Park this Friday
afternoon, as I and my dog stumbled upon a full-blown water balloon fight among
the graduating senior class of Thomas Jefferson High School.
They were really into
it! Not a single person stayed dry. The jocks, the nerds, the teacher’s pets.
It didn’t matter who you were. If you were a senior, you were soaked! And when
they ran out of actual balloons
filled with water they moved on to water bottles. And water fountains. And
water buckets! They found any way they could to just flat out pummel each other with water, in their
senior picnic bliss.
I was jealous. I wanted
in on the fun. And so did my dog. She was jumping from one puddle to the next,
lapping up the remnants and wagging her tail with joy the entire time. So we
strolled up next to one of the teachers, who was chaperoning the crowd, to see
if we could pass for teenagers.
[We couldn’t.]
Partly, the teacher was
laughing. And partly, she was sighing. “Four years of stressing over lesson
plans to prepare them for the global economy,” she said, with a smirk on her
face and a shake of her head. “Four years of writing stellar exams and grading
papers well into the night. And all I have taught them boils down to this?!”
It really was a sight to
behold. All that water. All that laughter. All those tax dollars and teacher
training hours running down the drain . . .
And yet, if you think
about it, isn’t wading in the whooping laughter of a water balloon fight what
we would all rather be doing on a
late Friday afternoon? Instead of rushing through traffic, frantic and frenetic
from one more work-week of too much stress and not enough substance?
And—don’t tell your
pastor—but isn’t wading in the whooping laughter of a water balloon fight what
we might all rather be doing today?
Instead of slumping out of this sanctuary into what management consultants call
“the Sunday afternoon blues,” when we start stressing about the hectic workweek
ahead of us and maybe even hit the email to get a head start on the craziness
to come?
What if, in spite of
that dreadful “Protestant work ethic” that has been driving our culture so fast
and for so long, our “work” could be something more like what those graduating
seniors of Thomas Jefferson high were doing with their water balloons and their
peals of laughter?
What if our “work” is
actually supposed to be something
more like what those seniors were doing, with their water balloons and their
peals of laughter?
What if our true
vocation—as the people of God—really
is “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as the real Thomas Jefferson
literally wrote? Not just as a Friday afternoon senior picnic but as the way of life we are called to live in “the new creation” we have become in
Christ?
It is, as we say in this
country, an unalienable right.
“Endowed by [our] Creator.” Enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. So
you could say this water balloon fight on Friday was actually a good
use of our tax dollars at work. You could even call it “citizenship
education”!
But would you believe
“the pursuit of happiness” is also enshrined in the
Protestant—Presbyterian—conviction of what it means to be human? That, according to our tradition, joy and laughter and
frolicking in God’s good creation are the
entire point of human existence?
We Presbyterians used to
require our children to memorize what we call “The Westminster Catechism,” a
long set of questions written in the 17th century about the Bible and
the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. The Westminster Catechism was
designed to teach the essentials of the faith for generations to come.
We don’t memorize these
questions anymore, but maybe we should. At least the first one, which goes like
this:
“What is the chief end
of man?”
Or, in 21st
century gender-inclusive language, “what is the primary purpose of human
existence?”
And the answer is: “To
glorify God . . . and enjoy God forever!”
Does that sound like drudgery?!
[This question is not
for the teenagers in the room.]
It all goes back to the
book of Genesis, as just about everything in our tradition does. In the garden.
Of the good creation. Where humanity was formed, from the earth, to join our
“creator” God as a “co-creator” in Paradise. To make life flourish, so that joy and beauty might bless the world. Our common
creativity. Our common joy. This is
the whole point of our existence!
And it stands in direct
contrast with the creation stories of other cultures in the ancient near east
that compete with the Genesis story of creation. The Sumerians, for example,
believed humanity was created as “grunt
labor” for the gods. That the lot of the human race really was to work ourselves into oblivion.
But in Genesis we are
simply created for joy. For
companionship. For continued creativity. For life in full abundance. Cultivated
for the common good.
It is the kind of life
that Jesus calls us back to, even on the other side of what we call “The Fall.”
And our job as human
beings—our truest and most honest vocation—is
simply to say “thank you” to God. For this gift of life. For this gift of
creativity. And to live in a spirit of gratitude all the days of our life,
tending the garden we have been given as our home.
That is what it means
“to glorify God . . . and enjoy God forever.”
But what does that have
to do with our actual work? Meaning
the thing we do to pay the bills? Or the ways in which we tend the house? Or
raise the kids? Or even—God help us—to maintain the church?
We only have to look
right back to the “real” Thomas Jefferson for a reminder of what can go wrong
when “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” applies only to people whose
wealth and leisure rely on the exploited labor of others. Or when we are so far
in debt that no amount of work will ever free us from our burden. Or when the
job we have depended on just evaporates into thin air. Or when our “pursuit of
happiness” in the form of inexpensive blue jeans leads to factory conditions in
Bangladesh that literally burn workers alive when they cannot escape a fire.
We really have fallen
far from the garden of our creation, where there was always already enough for
everyone. And it really is scary when we see how far we have come from where
God intended us to be, in the beginning.
And that is where God’s job description comes in,
according to Psalm 46.
Because we who are human
have not yet figured out how to pursue a life of happiness for every one in God’s good creation, the
psalmist says, God is working overtime to figure it out for us! The vocation of
our God is to execute justice for the oppressed, to give food to the hungry, to
set prisoners free, to open the eyes of the blind, to lift up those who are
bowed down, to love the righteous, to watch over strangers, and to uphold the
orphan and the widow.
And our truest pursuit of happiness, our truest joy, our truest glory, is when we join
God in that work! It is our common
vocation in Christ, sealed in the covenant of our baptism, where there is no more slave or free or Jew or Greek
or male and female. Where we have somehow, someway, found our way back into
that Paradise of abundant life, with the chance to try again. And maybe get it
right this time . . .
The great Protestant
reformer John Calvin, who founded the tradition that would eventually become
the Presbyterian Church in this country, put it this way: as human beings we
are social creatures. We simply cannot exist in isolation. And our social
nature as human beings renders us mutually dependent on one another, bonded
together as the Body of Christ, in our common vocation to “transform the world
through coordinated human effort,” as a community that has already been
forgiven—and freed—for new life in
our baptism.
Which is why I think
those graduating seniors from Thomas Jefferson High really were on to something when they celebrated the commencement of their
vocational life by dousing one another with wave after wave after wave of water. They were literally binding
themselves back together as the Beloved Community, one precious drop at a time,
where the fate of one is bound up with the fate of all. Which is what God is
trying to do for every one of us in our baptism.
And that is our
invitation today, as we celebrate our graduating seniors and commission them to
a vocation that reflects the goodness of who God created them to be, in pursuit
of the common good.
