Resurrection and Recreation

Mark 2.15-28

Acts 4.32-35

Preached Canberra Baptist Church, 23 rd April 206

Christ is risen! Says the church at Easter. And the faithful around the world respond: He is risen indeed! … but what does it mean? Is Resurrection just an affirmation of a mystery or can it touch us now? How does resurrection touch us (become real for us)?

In John Brack’s Australian painting The Bar a sallow, middle-aged barmaid in a brown cardigan and an ironic grin stands at her post hands on the counter. Behind her at the bar stand a throng of expressionless, brown-faced office workers in dark suits and hats. The painting captures something peculiarly Australian but there is a deeper level, in which the painting captures something of the ecology, the grim interconnection, of work and ‘recreation’.

Recreation is close to the Australian heart. Years ago I was associate pastor in a church which hosted a large group of visiting Americans. We had a slide night to show each other something of life in Australian and the USA. Every American set of slides was about work, about the industries and productive capacity of their Texas town, about education and farming and investment. Some even had graphs! Every Australian slide set was about holidays, leisure activities and sport! We Australians are more into recreation than work. Recreation covers a bewildering array of human activities – from stamp collecting to skydiving, Summernats to the Folk Festival! What on earth has it got to do with resurrection?

Recreations comes from a Latin word recreo - meaning to restore, refresh, invigorate, revive. This of course implies some prior process of depletion, exhaustion or destruction. There is an ecology implicit in the idea of recreation, a set of realities which are intrinsically inter-related – work and rest, depletion and restoration, action and leisure. This structure of recreation means it is intimately connected with other activities, other values: activities which deplete us, sap energy, or lead to lifelessness. To understand recreation it must be seen in the context of its relationships with other human activities – with work, with the responsibilities of citizenship and with the maintenance of domestic life.

Recreation is an intimate and powerful part of modern life. It is closely tied in with our work. But capitalist economies have turned recreation itself into a huge industry. Like the Roman Coliseum of old, there are today many temples to entertainment and recreation– gyms and theatres, ‘venues’ and - the greatest modern temples of all - sports stadiums! Whether your taste is football matches or art galleries, racing cars or sipping lattes, at some point in life the reality of recreation touches all of us.

Recreation in all its forms is related to other actions and processes. It is constructed through social interaction. In other words, it is ecological and cultural in its nature. We cycle between work and toil on the one hand, and relaxation and recreation on the other. Sometimes the transition is clear-cut, at others it is hidden or difficult to discern. This transition between work and recreation was glaringly obvious in the steel works near my home when I was young. There were two very different worlds. Around 4pm the steam whistles sounded and thousands of men streamed out of the factories into the pubs. Today, recreation itself can become work: it certainly is increasingly incorporated into the capitalist economy. It can be hard to tell where work or duty stops and recreation begins. As the ironic instructor in the fitness boot-camp says to his sweating, straining, panting charges, “Are we having fun yet?”

In Mark chapter 2, Jesus enters into a range of social activities that are intimately involved in the ecology of recreation in his day: he goes to a dinner party, argues about feasting and fasting and enters into disputes about the Sabbath, about the boundaries between ‘work’ and ‘rest’. These stories seem to have been collected around the theme of eating and holiness, but ‘eating’ as it relates to first social life, then religious expectation and fasting and finally, the framing of work (the picking and eating of grain).

In all these fields – social etiquette, religious expectations, and what constitutes work - Jesus and his followers broke the rules. He confronted the social mores of his day by eating with tax collectors and sinners. His followers didn’t fast, if anything they did the opposite. They followed the Master in daring to glean food on the Sabbath and compromising the rigid separation of work from Sabbath rest. Jesus reshaped the boundaries around work and rest, social holiness and religious observance. The ecology of recreation is fundamentally altered. This is summarized powerfully in the maxim that The Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath!

If the kingdom was present anywhere in Jesus’ ministry, it was in the freedom that he shared with his friends, the meals they enjoyed as much in the urban dining rooms of the publicans as in the miraculous meals in the desert. There was new ecology at work, a new framing of social and economic life which overturned the rigid framing of workdays and Sabbath rest, the economic realities of rich and poor, the clear distinction of holy and ‘sinful’.

In the Crucifixion, the old ecology of life was powerfully reasserted. If Jesus reframed social and religious and even economic life, the powers that supported the existing order, who wanted the fasts kept and all the distinctions of holiness and the rhythms and rituals of social life maintained, moved against him and crucified him. This new order wasn’t going anywhere. That this was the outcome of the Crucifixion is revealed in John 21, the story of Jesus coming to the disciples while they were fishing.

Fishing was not a recreational activity, it was their livelihood. When Peter says, I’m going fishing! (Jn 21.3) the tense of the Greek makes it very clear this is not just a decision to take a day out on the end of a fishing line. It is a return to his old life, his former occupation. It is a re-engagement with ‘the economy’. Peter is acknowledging that the new order of Jesus, in which old divisions of work and leisure, the socially enacted codes that determined who could eat with who, all that had ended in the Crucifixion. The other disciples said “We’ll go with you”. But in the morning Jesus came to them on the beach and said put your nets down on the other side for a catch! They had laboured all night for nothing, but in response to Jesus’ command they caught so many fish they couldn’t pull the net in! The old economy of human effort, of daily work, in which Peter had re-invested himself, was shown to be deficient. The risen Jesus re-invigorates the disciples engagement with grace and the mystery of the kingdom.

In Acts, the impact of resurrection is to smash the Christian community’s dependence on the old economy totally – the former structures of owning, working, retaining, completely gone. In Acts 2 and 4 we a community sharing with all, eating and being together in worship in a new reality grounded in the risen Christ! It was not just an economic reality – there was goodwill towards all, a sense of ‘being together in heart and soul’, of ‘sharing together with glad and generous hearts’. As much as a new economy there was a new, life-giving social reality. Restoration, renewal and reinvigoration is no longer a cycle of work and accumulate, then chill out and recover. Resurrection has so reframed the world that the distinctions have been swept away. All of life is now lived under the sign of the empty Tomb. All the powers of the old order, including the power to define work and leisure, to stigmatise some groups of people and some types of social engagements as undesirable, all of this fades within the light of Resurrection and its promise of the kingdom coming in power.

Jesus was tried and crucified because of his actions like this: breaking the rules of polite social behaviour, breaking the rules about foods, about the proper relationship of work and non-work. In the resurrection Jesus reasserts the new freedom of the Kingdom of God. The stranglehold of economy on our lives is broken. Resurrection faith liberates us from both paralyzing work that saps our energy and liveliness (let us work as if for the Lord not so as to please our bosses, says Paul) and our need for shallow entertainment that feebly puts back what has been taken out by life.

Recreation now has a kingdom quality to it! The ecology of work and leisure is transformed through the risen Christ. There is in the Christian community a quality of social life, of acceptance, of being of one heart and mind, that all our relations and activities are touched by this new quality of life. Liesure becomes truly subversive. It frees us from the economy! By stepping outside the structure of ‘work’ and recreation, by refusing to allow the cycle of depletion and restoration to govern our lives, by finding in Resurrection an energy that renews and re-invogorates both work and recreation we enter into a new kind of world.

That kind of social harmony is needed in another sphere as well. If ‘the economy’ our systems of production deplete the quality of human life we are finding now that it depletes the very fabric of a sustainable planet. There is another ecology desperately in need of effective re-creation. That is the physical ecology of the planet. The impact of resurrection on the human ecology of work and recreation might give us a model for sustainable economic activity on the earth. Resurrection and recreation is a reality that has enormous transformative potential for a just and sustainable ecology for our world.

I opened this sermon with the description of a painting. I want to close with a description of another. The Filipino artist Emmanuel Garibay has painted a scene of a group of three men and a woman sharing a joke as they sit around a table drinking beer. The woman wears a red dress. All are laughing and animated, relaxed and free. There is an equality, even a purity in their manner and their laughter It’s only when you look clearly at the picture that you see there are nailprints in the hands of the woman. She is the Christ figure here! Filipino bars are full of women and men, but in this painting the alienation that attends so many of those little groups is completely overcome. It is a picture of life that is full and deep. Yes, the marks of past suffering have left their imprint but the old ecology of women and men, of bar-girl and customers, of work and debased leisure, has been left behind in a feast of glad, warm, human community. When you see such a party, such communion, such joy, something within us whispers Christ is risen! And the world seems to answer: He is risen indeed!