Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information. Really encouraging to see the community beginning to open up and doing that cautiously and carefully as we do.

Now one of the reasons that we are moving to multiple services now ahead of the fall is to help ensure that everyone has the space that they need to feel safe. Some of us are still online right now. A lot of us are here in the room. But we don't want anyone to feel like you're being rushed faster than you're comfortable with or that you have less space than you need when you arrive at church. So, we're trying to listen and watch and be proactive as much as we can to help.

Ensure that. But just a reminder that we do have a 9AM service now, and there is a bit more room there if that makes you feel more comfortable. So you can get up early next week with me and do that. That said, we are also in the last series of season seven at Commons. In just a few short weeks, the season eight journals will be here, and we will be off and running into our new chapter together.

Now, it will be different than years past, I'm sure. No doubt about that. But we are still hoping to kick off the fall with at least a little bit of a celebration and some fun. And so hopefully, we'll have more information about that coming soon. You can mark September 12 in your calendar.

That will be the start of season eight together. Today though is what makes you happy part two. And this is kind of a fun series. We were hoping to finish off the year on a bit of an upswing as we hit the fall. And the idea was just to give each of our teaching team the chance to talk about something that brought us joy.

Yelena kicked us off last week talking about friendship. Scott is gonna talk about wild spaces. Bobby is gonna be talking about place and geography, and all of those just sounded really interesting to me. I was excited to hear those sermons, and I realized a couple weeks ago that I had not put my stake in the ground. And I had no idea what I was gonna talk about today.

So I thought to myself, well, what makes me happy? And like most of us, so many different things came to mind. I have two kids, both adopted, and they have brought incredible joy into our lives. We have a daughter who had a rough start in this world, but has used this past year to grow and get strong and become honestly the happiest baby I have ever seen in my life. I have a partner that I've been married to for twenty years now.

That's right. We had our twentieth anniversary this year in COVID, and we did, get ready for it, absolutely nothing for that. I mean, come on. It's not my fault. There was not many options out there.

That said, we are going away for two days this week, sans kids, and that is French for sexy times, if you don't know what that means. But by the way, don't know if my wife is here right now. If you see her, don't tell her I said that. It will spoil the mood. Anyway, that makes me happy.

I have a dog and that makes me happy. A dog I walk twice a day, every day, the same four kilometer loop, every morning when I get up, every night after the kids go to bed. And if you know anything about me, you know I love a good routine. So that makes me happy. In fact, if we're being honest here, those moments, particularly in the evening where I walk along the ridge on Crescent Heights, walking my dog, reflecting on the day, those are some of those grateful moments in my life as I take the time every day to absorb some of the goodness that surrounds me.

So that makes me happy. F one makes me happy. I know some of you were waiting for this, but I watched Drive to Survive on Netflix last year, and then I convinced my wife Rachel to watch the show, and now we are both hooked on f one together, and that makes me happy. Having something to talk about that's not your kids, that's a marriage tip for all of you. You should put that in your journal.

But we have talked more about Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton than we have about Justin Trudeau and Aaron O'Toole this year, and that makes me really happy. But in the end, a sermon about fast cars and dog walks didn't really feel right, so I kept thinking about this. And I thought about what it was that I've added to my life this year during COVID, a year when like a lot of us, we've had to give up a lot. I spent a portion of the year trying to master fried rice. I watched every video on YouTube.

I bought a huge bag of MSG. I bought a carbon steel wok, I seasoned it. And I made rice and more rice and more rice. I iterated, I experimented, and I perfected fried rice. It's spectacular.

Then I moved on to pizza. I mixed dough, experimented with different yeast. I made lemon rind, garlic, parsley toppings, and I made my own mozzarella from scratch. I took a carton of milk and I turned that into cheese, and I put it on top of my cast iron skillet pizza, and I mastered it. Right now I'm working on dal makhani.

This is my favorite Indian dish, and I'm getting close. I'm not there yet. But my last batch, I made some ghee, and I toasted cumin seeds, coriander pods, a bit of cinnamon bark, fresh chilies, kashmiri chili, black pepper, salt, garlic, and ginger. Roasted that all in the ghee before I added my onions and tomatoes, and then I brought in my cooked lentils to let it all stew together. Getting very close to the flavors that I want, but I've not quite mastered this one yet.

And at this point, I'll forgive you if you're thinking that a, I'm getting hungry, and b, assuming this is a sermon about food, but it's actually neither of those. You see, like a lot of us, I've had more home time this year than normal. And so cooking was this good outlet for me to just experiment with something. And what I really love about this was the chance to play, to dive in, to try something and learn something new. Learn something to master something that had no real life benefit to me at all, just something purely for me to play with.

I have a friend that coined the term chronic connoisseur for me. I I think that's what I'm talking about here. That freedom to get into something, to really play with it, to get in there and learn absolutely everything that I can, that's what makes me happy. Trust me, if you want to know about the new regulations for the next gen cars that are coming to f one this season, do talk to me about it. I drive a 2006 Hyundai Accent with 89 horses under the hood.

I am not a car guy at all, But I've spent a lot of time researching f one and all the ways that the new aerodynamic rules are going to make it 53% easier for the car following to maintain their downforce and enable better racing. I know you're not as excited as I am, but that's okay. The point is, I love just getting into things. And there exists for me the space between work, where I get to pour my energy and creativity into my contribution to the world, carve out a space where I can leave things better than I found them, And rest, where I can pull back and recharge and remind myself that my identity and my value are rooted in my belovedness, not my productivity. But there exists this space in between work and rest that one might call chronic connoisseurship.

Totally fair. But I would call it at least for me the space to play with something. The space where I get to let my personality and all of my fascinations run wild without purpose, and that at least for today is what makes me happy. So let's pray and then today we're going to talk about play. Our God who made each and every living being ready to experience joy.

You trust that there is fun and there is whimsy to be discovered around us and in you. We know that we can't always explain playfulness, what it is for us, how we express it, the way that children say the most embarrassingly accurate things at the best possible times, or the way we feel in our bones that you've designed us not just to run, but to skip. To speak in ways that dissolve into uncontrollable laughter. We know that you have built us for fascination, gifted us the ability to lose ourselves in learning. And so surely you had something fun in mind for all of us.

You were joyful and playful when you created. So Lord, pray that you might begin to open our eyes to see the moments of happiness and joy and playfulness all around us even today. To take part in the beauty that surrounds us always to enjoy this breath that you have placed within us. All so that we might deeply experience what makes us and what makes you happy. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray.

Amen. Okay. Today, we're going to talk about cerebral cortex quarterly, playful creation, fan fiction, and good eyes. By the way though, at one point I told the team a couple weeks ago that I was gonna do this sermon on work today because that would have been hilariously on brand for me. But no, I'm committed to growing as a human being.

So here we are, we're on something else. That said, I tend to take things pretty seriously. See my commitment to fried rice. And one of the best things to happen to me in my life has been my kids. It's a very strange thing to go, in our case, 12 of marriage before ever dipping your toes into what will completely change your life.

By the time Rachel and I adopted our son, it was like throwing a pretty big cog into a fairly well oiled machine. And if you don't think that's a romantic way to talk about your marriage, then I don't know what is. But having this child in our home and now two kids in our family has been this wonderful injection of play for all of us. Granted, Rachel has always been better at this than I am. But for me, returning to playing LEGO, even if I am a little competitive with my son, and pulling out my transformers from storage, and yes, I do have a collection of Optimus Primes that go back to the 1980s that I've kept in a box ready, waiting for a kid to move in with us.

But even this summer, going for bike rides with my son who's just learned the freedom of a bicycle and watching my daughter splash in a kiddie pool in the backyard, all of this has been a really good exercise in helping me remember myself or parts of myself with these last few years. After all, Jesus tells us that our spirituality is bound up in some way in our child likeness. There there was an article that I came across a few years ago claiming that scientists at Columbia and Yale University had found the neurobiological seat of spirituality. It was a study published in Cerebral Cortex Quarterly, which is a real journal apparently. But it claimed that experiences of transcendence or spirituality activated distinctive patterns in the parietal cortex of our brains.

Now, if you don't know about your parietal cortex, it's a part of your brain responsible for processing sensation and spatial orientation and language. We also think it influences our ability to focus our attention on something. What's really interesting though is that they also found that these spiritual experiences reduced activity in the left inferior parietal lobe, a specific part of your cortex that contributes to processing self other representations. Now what this means is that what participants described as spiritual moments actually broke down or set aside for a moment, and quoting the study here, are experiences of the barrier between our self and others. That's what spirituality does for us.

Another quote from the article, Analytical thinking and spiritual empathic thinking rely on different neural pathways and processes. They don't happen simultaneously in the brain. Like breathing in and breathing out, you can't do both at the same time, but you need both in order to stay healthy. Even more fascinating though, is that what they called experiences of transcendence or spiritual moments were triggered in the study in all kinds of surprising ways. Everything from a church service to be surrounded by a forest to cheering with a stadium of fans at a sporting event, all the way down to playing with a child.

All of these types of experiences triggered the same moment in our parietal cortex. Now, that's fascinating because while I might like to think that we, meaning church, have a monopoly on transcendence and that my sermons can make you see God, science actually tells us that everything can be just as profound a moment. And what that tells me is that like breathing in and out, you and I, if we want to be full spiritual beings, need to search out and cultivate ways through which we become more fully human. Now, often talk about work. It's what I do.

I love it. Sometimes I talk about rest, but this year I found myself spending more time thinking about spending time with my hobbies or for me what I would call play. Exploring those spaces that are both fascinating and inconsequential spaces for me like F1 and fried rice. And what's beautiful is that for all of us those spaces abound around us all the time. Think about creation stories in the Bible.

Certainly God had purpose in mind when God set out to create a world. There was a space to be shaped and there were plants and animals to grow. Eventually humans were placed in the story to give direction to the narrative. But when you sit down and you actually read it, so much of the creation story feels fanciful. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the waters.

In Genesis, it's not really creation out of nothing ex nihilo. It's more like God pulls out this blob of Play Doh and begins to shape it, to play with it, to mold it. God said, let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good and separated the light from the darkness. There's a sense of discovery, playfulness here.

God said, let there be light, and there was light, and God was amazed by how cool light was. So God wondered, would it be neat to not have light? Maybe we could have night. Let's see what find out. I mean, there's work.

No, get creation. There's certainly purpose and intention in this story, and yet there's also this sense of playful discovery that's shaping and moving the story along. A playfulness that expresses itself without the weight of necessity. It's just joy. One of my favorite writers, Robert Farrar Capon, imagines the story of creation this way.

He says, one afternoon before anything was made, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit sat around in the unity of their Godhead discussing one of the Father's fixations. From all eternity it seems, He had had this thing about being, and He would keep thinking up all kinds of us necessary things, new ways of being, and new kinds of beings to be. And as they talked, God the Son suddenly said, really, this is just great stuff. Why don't I go out and mix us up a batch? And so God the Holy Spirit said, terrific, I'll help.

And so they all pitched in, and after supper that night, the Son and the Spirit put on this tremendous show of being for the Father. It was full of water and light and frogs, and pine cones kept dropping all over the place, and crazy fish started swamming around in their wine glasses. There were mushrooms and mastodons, grapes and geese and tornadoes and tigers and men and women everywhere to juggle them and join them and play with them. And God the father looked at the whole wild party and said, wonderful. This is just what I had in mind.

Tov, Tov, Tov. And all that God the son and God the spirit could think to say was more of the same, Tov, and so they shouted together, Tov Meod, very good. And so they laughed and they laughed for ages and ages saying things like how great it was for beings to be. How clever of the father to think of the idea. How kind of the son to go to all the trouble to put it together.

How considerate of spirit to spend so much time directing and choreographing it all. And forever and ever they told old jokes and the father and the son drank their wine and unites spiritus sancti and they threw ripe olives and pickled mushrooms at each other per omnula secula seculorum for centuries and centuries. Amen. Now, I love the playfulness of Capon's writings. He also has some recipe books by the way.

They're also excellent. But only the most unobservant among us could ever look around this world and not see the playfulness of the divine that lights up your parietal cortex. I mean, you ever seen a flamingo? Those things are just ridiculous. I've been to the zoo with my son.

I know this. So I've always imagined God is playful. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of scriptural examples of Jesus at play. We do have some fan fiction though. There's this ancient text that dates to the late second century called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

Now Hippolytus calls it a fake and Origen dismisses it in a homily that he writes. Eusebius even refers to it as a fiction in his church histories, but nevertheless it's very interesting to me that one of the first things that we wanted to do as a church was imagine what Jesus was like as a kid at play. Now in this text, he is as childish as any kid you've ever met. At one point, another kid bumps into him and Jesus kills the kid with a stern look. Now I've seen my son glare at me when he's upset, so I get it here.

But thing is the neighbors come and they complain, so Jesus strikes them blind. And Mary and Joseph have to teach him to use his powers a little more graciously. He resurrects the child and heals the parents after a stern talking to but you can see why this text was never taken all that seriously even in the early days of the church. Still, some really nice moments of play. There's a time when Jesus makes a pigeon out of clay and he breathes life into it and it flies off.

There's this scene where Jesus extends a board that his father has cut a little bit too short for the bed that he's making. That's really in there. There's even the time he picks up a single grain of wheat and makes an entire feast for all the neighborhood kids to eat together. It was all kind of silly. I mean, it's just someone's imagination of Jesus after all, but I think the very fact that we wanted to imagine Jesus at play is meaningful in its own right.

We know all of us that play is important. We see it around us in the world. We instinctively know it must have been part of Jesus' life when he was growing up. And sure, even if our storytelling is a little suspect, I mean, we assume it must have been there somewhere, right? I think we can see hints of this reflected in his teaching as well.

Now, it's not a very playful section I'm going to read, so stick with me here. In Matthew six, Jesus says, the eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, how your whole body will be full of darkness. If the light then within you is dark, how great is that darkness?

Great. Not very playful sounding, but let's look at this. The key here is in understanding why Jesus is talking about our eyes in this section. It isn't really about what we look at. It's not a point.

It's actually a well known Hebrew metaphor or idiom for generosity. See in Hebrew, good eyes were a way of saying someone was generous. A bad eye or an evil eye is a way of talking about stinginess or greed. You can see this in the Proverbs. The stingy are eager to get rich, but they are unaware of the poverty that awaits them.

That's from Proverbs 28. But if you go and you read that in Hebrew, literally what it says is those with bad eyes are eager to be wealthy, but they do not see the poverty ahead. On the other side, Proverbs 22 says, the generous will be blessed themselves for they share their food with the poor. But again, literally in Hebrew what you read is a good eye is blessed because he gives food to the poor. Now, part of the problem here is that Greek doesn't have this idiom.

And since Jesus is likely speaking in Aramaic or Hebrew, which then gets translated into Greek by the writer and then gets translated into English for us, we kinda miss the point when we translate it so literally. He's not talking about our eyes. He's talking about our hearts. He's talking about what we choose to take in and what that enables us to then give away. When your eye is good and generous, when it looks for opportunity and assumes the best about people, when it broadens its focus to take in all of the beauty around it all of the time, That actually changes the way you move through the world.

This phrase, the eye is the lamp of the body, that's a callback to Psalm 119, your word is a lamp unto my feet. Jesus is saying that a generous view of the world will direct your path in the world. It will lead you the same way that the scriptures can lead you. Generosity lights up new paths. It shows you new ways to be.

It teaches you to see the world with a brighter, more generous, better eye, which then starts that virtuous cycle all over again, guiding your path in the world. On the other hand, if your eye is bad, if you become stingy or greedy, if you've been trained to look only at the things that can serve you or the things that you can monetize, if your focus in life is so narrow that you can only view the world through the lens of productivity or return on investment, what happens then is that that slowly begins to cloud your ability to see the world for all the beauty that exists within it. Where a good eye grows your ability to see beauty and playfulness and opportunity and creativity, a bad eye forces you to start only seeing scarcity and necessity and competition behind every corner. And sooner or later, one of those becomes your path in the world. Now, Jesus is talking about money here.

I get it. This is a section talking about how we need to be generous with our resources. Sure. But one of the ways that we can encourage the left inferior lobe of our parietal cortex to soften the barrier between us and them, that's what generosity is after all, one of the ways that we can encourage a good eye that shapes and informs how we see and move the world is to pour ourselves into unproductive moments of bliss. Moments that are purely generous for us.

When you're generous with yourself when it comes to your play, whatever that is. When you're generous with yourself, it comes to where you find joy, all of this changes how you see the world, how you perceive the paths that are available to you in the world and slowly that shapes you into a more generous person in the world. And call that silly if you want, but I'm convinced that fried rice and f one are part of how I train myself to be fascinated by you. Every time I let myself play, every time I let myself dive into something that has no discernible benefit or value back to me, it's just there for my enjoyment. Every time I do that, I expand my vision.

I broaden my eye, and I fall in love with the playfulness of a God who invites me to be good in a thousand different ways. Most of them, I haven't even noticed yet. Because when God looked at the whole wild party, God said, wonderful, this is just what I had in mind. And all that God the Son and God the Spirit could even think to say was more of the same, so they all shouted together, Tov Tov Mayod, very, very good. That's what makes me happy.

The freedom, the generosity to be fascinated at play, all of that that makes me more generous toward the world. I just happen to like working really hard at it. Let's pray. God, for all those spaces where your generosity, your playfulness abounds in the world around us. Your creativity popping up in spaces that we did not expect.

Would your spirit be near and guiding us, opening our eyes to be good and healthy to see that everywhere. And when that joy takes root somewhere deep inside of us, might it help us to see the world even more broadly, to celebrate even more enthusiastically, to give ourselves away even more generously. May that virtuous cycle open up new paths, new care, new extensions of graciousness to those near us. And in that might we recognize that our joy is an expression of your joy. That when we learn to be generous with ourselves and give ourselves over to it, we find ourselves drawn up and near to you.

May that turn into the path of Christ in our lives this week in the ways that we give ourselves to each other. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.