Can you imagine a world without games? How boring that would be! When I was younger, I loved to play games and played much more frequently than I do now. I had my favorites: Candyland, Monopoly, Clue, Scattergories, Pictionary, and with a few of my friends, certain card games. Even though I don’t play games very often these days, when I’m with the right group of people, I’m all in for a game of charades or especially a word game. Here are a few things that we can say about games, whether for children or for adults:
Unless it’s a video game or solitaire, games are meant to be played with other people, not alone.
Games assume that everyone will play by the rules.
Games level the playing field in many ways, because some games are not based on skill or personal acumen but, instead, purely on chance inherent within the game.
Games require more than a little humility from participants. Chances are you will lose a game more than once, so you better get used to it.
And nobody wants to play with sore losers, because they take all the fun out of a game.
There are a lot of good life lessons we can learn from games, not the least of which is being fair to one another. To deal well with what life throws you, it’s helpful to know how to be a good sport. But I’m sure we all remember times when we have been less than fair in a game or been a bad sport. And we all probably know certain people we don’t enjoy playing games with because they don’t like to lose.
A scene of children playing games in the marketplace is an apt image that Jesus offers us when referring to the generation of people around him who seem incapable of receiving his ministry and his words. This generation is comprised of those who have also rejected the ministry of Jesus’ relative John the Baptist. Jesus frequently bemoans the fact that so many people just don’t understand him. Or worse yet, they don’t want to. Their hearts are hardened, their ears are stopped up, and their eyes cannot see who he really is. They’ve already made up their minds about who he is and what they need in their lives. They don’t want to play with Jesus.
We have to admit, Jesus is pretty fantastic at coming up with images to make a point. In the case of our Gospel lesson today, I think he has outdone himself. Imagine these petulant children sitting in two opposing groups in a marketplace. One group is piping joyful music on the flute, hoping that their fellow playmates will dance with them, but to no avail. The pipers then switch to mournful music, thinking that this will surely evoke a response from the other group. But again, nothing.
It seems that one group is adamantly refusing to play fair—in fact, refusing to play at all. Either they are just plain apathetic, bored, and uninterested, or something more sinister is afoot. And I suspect the latter.
Scripture doesn’t help us too much with details here, but let’s reflect a bit on the human condition and reach our own conclusions. I think that the stubborn group doesn’t have a clue about how to play games. They are sitting with arms crossed over their chests, even glaring at the other side. They don’t want to play to begin with. They are not interested in empathizing with the other side.
This might bring back some unpleasant memories of childhood, when you were on the outside of the group that always wanted to call the shots. I remember more than a few instances myself of trying to get people to go along with my idea, to play with me, but with no success.
My guess is that the group of children that is uninterested in playing with others is fickle, as well. They probably take the opposite viewpoint just to be contrary. You want to play happy wedding games, well, we want to play sad funeral ones. Oh, but you want to play funeral games. Well, then we definitely want to play wedding ones.
It might even seem like the lectionary itself is trying to play a tricky game with us this morning. We get three snippets of Scripture, with a gap between two parts. In one breath, Jesus is likening “this generation” to children who don’t play well with others. And in the next breath, he is thanking God for having “hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and [having] revealed them to infants.” So, the question is, are children meant to offer us a lesson in how not to behave, or are they exemplary models of simplicity and obedience?
If we press even further, does it seem as if God is playing some games with us, maybe not even playing fair? Just why would God hide things from anyone? Whatever did the wise and intelligent do for them to deserve this deprivation of knowledge from God? And if God deliberately keeps information from them, it certainly doesn’t seem like God is playing fair. This reeks of an unpleasant theology, where some are arbitrarily chosen, and the rest consigned to an ill fate, all on a whim. If we’re honest with ourselves, we must see that there is something disturbing in this notion of God making whimsical decisions, as if life is just some kind of unfair game.
But let’s step back and Google map out a bit, if you will. Because it seems that Jesus is telling us something else. Jesus is suggesting that the whole human race, from children to adults is sinfully oriented towards not wanting to play well with others, and that’s why the world doesn’t play well with him.
The scene of children in the marketplace acting out their petty grievances could be a page out of today’s newspaper, too. And in the modern example, grown, educated adults sit on opposite sides of rooms and refuse to hear one another out. Far too many adults are not willing to play by the rules, and a disconcerting number are poor losers when they don’t get their way.
On this holiday weekend, it’s tempting to look to the founding principles of liberty and freedom in this nation in order to have some hope in playing fair or playing by the rules. And to some extent, that hope should always remain with us and inspire our future. But in recent days, we have been uncomfortably reminded that America’s game was, in many ways from its inception, set up not to play fair with certain groups of people.
So, we are left turning back to God, because if we as Christians put our trust and hope in anyone to play by the rules and to play fair, it’s God. How, then, do we deal with a God who apparently hides certain things from the wise and intelligent? Is there, indeed, any place to which we can turn where things are fair?
At what point does the light bulb go on for us and do we realize that it’s, in fact, we who have been playing games and trying to set the rules and expecting God to play on our terms. When we finally see this, we might begin to understand that the game was unfairly rigged from the beginning, and this time, we’ve tried to set God up to lose, either unintentionally or intentionally.
Because if there’s one theme we can take from reading Scripture in the light of the Gospel, it’s that God always plays fair. And life is never just a game with God. It’s serious business because human souls are at stake. God lovingly formed and nurtured those beautiful souls, and God doesn’t play games with our souls. God saves them. God is always faithful, always true, always constant. God only seems unfair to us at times because we have been trying to play the game by our own fickle rules, and we usually don’t play well with others.
But hear what Jesus says at the end of our Gospel lesson for today. Jesus tells us one thing we can be sure of, and it’s this: God gives us rest from the arbitrary, unfair rules that we create for our games. But to gain such rest, we must be willing to learn from God. It’s not that God has some laundry list of capricious rules we must follow. It’s that God wants us to play well with others, indeed to play with God, and that means sacrificing our own distorted sense of what’s fair and unfair.
So what do we have to learn from Jesus, who shows us who God is? We have this to learn.
Come to Jesus, you who are weary of the petulance of the world, and he will give you rest.
Come to Jesus, you who are tired of the vacillating whims of the culture around you, and God will give you his stability.
Come to Jesus, you who wail but whom the world ignores, and God will mourn with you.
Come to Jesus, you who rejoice and want to dance with joy but who have no partner. God will dance with you.
Come to Jesus, all you who are tired of carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, and God will ease your burden.
Come to Jesus, all you who have been weighed down with oppression and injustice because this world does not play by the rules, and God will comfort you.
God does not hide things from us in order to play tricks with us. God’s ways, unfathomably fair and just, are hidden from us by our own actions, when we play by our own biased rules instead of learning from God. And the quest to know more than God and control our destiny and to be God, is a wearying exercise in futility.
But there is rest for us if we choose to accept Jesus’ gift. There is delectable rest from all the world’s capriciousness. There is rest from the tiresome petulance of those around us who don’t want to play with us, who want to sabotage the game, and who are sore losers.
Let us be different. May we learn and long to taste the sweet bliss of Jesus’ gentle and lowly presence, for he is ready to teach us how to truly know the Father. So let us go to Jesus, and he will show us by God’s grace how to play well with others.
Preached by Father Kyle Babin
5 July 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia