Sermon: "Joy"

Fourth in the "Nomads and Pilgrims" Series,
Delivered March 6, 2005 by Rev. John Schmidt.
Other sermons in this series - 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7

Theme: Joy in the present has a past and a future. It looks back to our experience of God in the past, and to God's faithfulness to others in the past. It looks forward to the future in the hope that God will continue to be good and loving to us. This security, being in harmony with what God is doing in the world, gives us a place for joy.

See the study guides that go along with this sermon series.

The audio file of this sermon is available for download and listening in MP3 format.

Click to Download & Listen (2.9MB)

If you think about the images of Christians in movies and in TV shows, it's not often that someone with a secure and abiding sense of joy is the figure that they portray. It's very often instead somebody who is basically a hippocrit who has some kind of superficial appearance, but underneath that, it is some kind of crisis they won't admit. Or maybe it's greed or some kind of immorality that is shocking and totally different than the facade that is presented. That is one of the dominant kinds of figures we see in our media. It is sort of sobering to think that one of the most enduring pictures of what a Christian is, is Ned Flanders. Sixteen years now we have been seeing Christianity modeled by Ned; occasionally well, usually not so well. It comes up in literature as well. Here is a book that was written a number of years ago by author Ellen Glasgow. It's her autobiography and she says this about her father. Her father was an elder in the Presbyterian Church. Any of you elders in a Presbyterian Church? Yeah, a few of you are, I know. Well here is a description of her father. "He was entirely unselfish, and in his long life never committed a pleasure." That's one image of Christians. Unselfish yes, sincere yes, joyful no. Now it's easy for people to think this way because to be honest there are enough people who really live that way that they have some justification for that stereotype. But, I think this stereotype is so deep because joy is very hard to find; real joy, and it's really hard to hold on to and so it's really easy to believe that it doesn't often exist.

We have been talking about being Nomads in our culture. And a Nomad is someone, in this definition, is someone who is going from place to place, from job to job, from experience to experience, from relationship to relationship fully knowing that this next place might not give it all to them. But the present is so uncomfortable that we look for that jolt of joy, that something coming together in the next place that is going to move us forward in life, and then maybe we will tire of that and we will have to move on again. And so, we move through life this way always expecting that the next thing might bring us the satisfaction we are looking for, the sense of purpose we are looking for, and I think one of the reasons we move around is that we are still looking for joy as well. Joy is that sense of abundance that comes welling up inside of us, that life and vitality, that sense that everything is in harmony and we are in the center of it. It's an incredible feeling. We have all felt it in some moment. It's a wonderful feeling, but in and of ourselves we cannot hold on to it very long and so then it disappears.

We know what the feeling is like. It can come sometimes in an experience when you like go camping and you wake up and it happens to be one of those days that the air is absolutely clear and crisp. It's just cold enough that you are kind of in a hurry to make the morning fire, and then you stand there, and you've got a cup of coffee in your hand, you can smell the bacon frying and you are looking out over a vista of mountains just disappearing into the distance and it's an incredible experience. Not a worry on your mind. That feeling is one of the ways that we identify joy. And yet, it is so hard to hold on to that because we are standing there with our coffee cup and just a few moments later the mosquitos come. The bacon burns. Somebody starts up a loud motorcycle just in the next camping area. There are all kinds of things that can shake us out of that joy and even if we hold on to it for the whole weekend, as soon as we get in the car and start returning to life as usual, the problems start coming back on to our shoulders, and anything we might have called joy is gone.

In ourselves, this is not what it takes to hold on to that sort of experience. Now, because of that we manufacture substitutes for joy. We will do whatever we can to simulate it in our life and I think that is a big part of what entertainment is in our culture. We don't have much joy. We feel that sort of personal poverty and so we pay somebody to tell us jokes. We pay somebody to sing a song, to write out some kind of story that will get us inside of somebody else's life so that we can forget who we are for just a little while. So there we sit in our basements watching TV and for a few moments we can forget the worries on our hearts, the realities of the situation that surrounds us and that is as close as we get to joy. But whatever we call it, that experience doesn't last very long, because it does not change us inside. All the issues that surround us, all the things that weigh us down, they are all the same. It is just diverting our attention for a moment to something else.

Now, for some people this problem, this whole feeling about life gets to the point where you desire to do something to deaden the nerve endings that are bringing that signal of pain into your life. Or maybe you want to escape your life altogether, and so we go into substance abuse and so we find ourselves misusing alcohol and drugs; all a part of this escape from who we are. There was an article that came up just last week in the newspaper. It's a book written by a 24-year-old woman named Koren Zailckas. The book is called "Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood" and she talks about her motives for drinking. In "Smashed" she writes:

"most every girl I have known drank as an expression of her unhappiness. I too drank in no small part because I felt shamed, self-conscious and small. When I was drunk I felt comfortable in my skin for a change. I could bond with my girlfriends and could talk to boys".

She also states that sobriety brought her right back to the shy, insecure kid she was at 13 when she took her first sip of Southern Comfort. That child had been literally preserved in alcohol for a decade. She could forget it for a moment. She could break beyond the problems, the insecurities, the self image, all of that for a moment, but the fact is it changed nothing inside, at least not for the better. And so, when she finally dried out after a decade, she finds that she hadn't grown up since 13, that there was no internal change to help make her a different person.

So again, this sort of escape, whether we call it joy or not, it does not last because it does not change us inside. I think the question that we have to ask is - Is this all there is? Is this what life is all about? A life filled with all kinds of grit and crud and then we fill it with events and entertainment and all designed to help make us forget the reality of who we are. And at that moment of forgetfulness is all that we've got, because real joy is going to be too hard to get. It's never going to come or it's only going to come for that fleeting moment and so we have got to manufacture something so patently plastic and superficial. Is that the best that it can be?

Now, I said earlier that I think that Christians get a bad rap on this issue of joy, because if joy is an overflow of abundance inside of us, if joy is being in the center of things sensing that there is a harmony to creation around us and somehow we are in the center of it, then that would mean that if we draw close to the Creator and if we get inside of this purpose, if we walk in the steps of Jesus Christ, then we will have that abundance and we will be in harmony with what God is doing around us. In the scripture it says in the New Testament that the second food of the spirit is joy. God promises that joy is one of the things that he is going to work out in the life of the serious disciple of Jesus Christ. And I think we see the fruit of that. I think one of the things that attracts us, think of somebody you look up to, a Christian that is a little older, somebody who you feel has it right, part of what attracts you to that person most likely in part is their joy. There is a lot of joy in the midst of all the reality that we face, in the midst of all the difficulties and forgetting about the facades, let's talk about only the real ones, even if we eliminate all of that and just focus on the real joy, there is still plenty of it because God is real. We are not playing mind games here. If we draw nearer to God, things will change. And that's going to happen inside of us, so we are starting to talk then about joy that lasts.

Psalm 126 is a song of joy. Let's take a look at it together. Psalm 126:

"When the Lord brought back the captives to Zion, we were like men who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. Then it was said among the nations, "The Lord has done great things for them." The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy. Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like streams in the Negev. Those who sow in tears will weep with songs of joy. He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him."

Let's pray. God we thank you for your word and pray now that by your Holy Spirit working in us today you will show us whatever we need to see and hear for we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.

This Psalm simply breaks down into three parts. Verses 1 and 2 focus on the past. The verbs there are in the past tense. Verse 3 focuses in on the present. And Verses 4 to 6 focus on the future. Past, present and future. Joy has a past tense, a present tense and a future tense. Verses 1 and 2 talk about an incredible event that actually happened in the lives of the people who first wrote this song. Israel had been sent in to exile, they had been sent in to captivity. Because of their unfaithfulness to God serious punishments happened in the life of the nation. They lost their country. Now, think about how rare an event this is. They lost their country and yet after a period of long years God leads them back. What an amazing event. How seldom this happens. After years, God leads them back and it describes their response. As they are walking back in to their native land, they are like people who are in a dream. Don't wake me up, this is too good to be true. They actually experience this. This is part of what their joy is all about. They really saw God work in their lives. And so, part of joy is real experience, real events, events that have dates on them, that are a part of history and part of our own story. So, part of what brings us joy are the real things that God did, and we read about them in the scripture, and we see how God acted towards people, and we accept that, and that becomes a part of our joy. Then we hear the testimony of other people, people that we know that when they describe what God has done that becomes part of our joy, but the most important part is what God actually does in our own life. So joy is not a mindless thing.

Part of our joy is based upon the fact that we have actually experienced something good with God. And so that means that we have to notice it when it happens. We have to note it down somehow so that we will remember it. It might be a great rescue when we were in a tough situation and God rescued us in an absolutely clear way. It might be a special word that came in to our life that changed us and sent us in a new direction. It might be an undeserved blessing that comes our way. It might be a deep sense of power and strength to endure something that was very difficult. There are different ways that God actually works in our lives and we all have a story.

When I look back on my walk with Jesus Christ there are so many stories that I can tell you. Some of them are good ones, happy ones. Some of them are tough ones, but in all of the stories God is there to bless. I think of the incredible experience of knowing that my sins were forgiven as I tore up a list of my sins and dropped them down a drain in front of the Dairy Science Building at LSU, and knew as I looked out that this whole world was created by a God who loved me, and that I would have a purposeful place in that world because of God. It's an amazing feeling. I think about later in my walk with God when I was thinking about celibacy at that point, if you could imagine that. I was thinking about not getting married for the sake of being a missionary and Debbie at the time, I didn't know it, but she was praying that I would ask her out. Now your respect for Debbie just dropped, I know, and I wasn't. I wasn't asking anybody out. And finally she came to a day when she said, "God I have been holding on to this so long, I believe that it might not be your will for me, so if you don't give me encouragement today I will set this aside and know that these feelings that I have for John are not from you". On that day I asked her out on our first date. That day. And something came out of it. We all have these stories and we've got to note them. We've got to notice it. We've got to name it. We've got to remember it because God is at work in our lives and our joy now in part depends on remembering. Joy has a past tense.

Verse 3 is the present tense. We are right now filled with joy. That's what comes out in Verse 3. God has done amazing things for us and so we are filled with joy. Eugene Peterson says that joy builds on the past and borrows from the future. Right now to experience the full joy of what God can give us, we have to have a certain history with God. And so what that means is that as we walk longer with God and take more risks with God and trust God more and experience more, we will have deeper joy and more confidence about the future. Not because of some mindless optimism, but because of experience. We have seen God work. We don't have to invent it. We know how it happened and then we take that expectation and look towards the future and say the same God who loved me this way in the past, the same God that sent Jesus Christ, the same God that loved Israel and accepted them and corrected them and brought them back, that same God is going to work in my tomorrow and so we can have joy.

Joy has a future tense, Verse 4 to 6. The Psalmist looks towards the future and uses two images for the future. The first comes out when he says, "Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like streams in the Negev. The image used here is of a dry streambed, a waddy that is dry for much of the year, but when rains happen all of a sudden it becomes a coursing brook and then because of the water all of sudden there is an explosion of color and life on the sides as plants grow up and flower because of the water coming through the stream. And so what they are saying is that you have brought us back to this land and now as we look to the future knowing that you brought us back miraculously. With joy we anticipate that in the future you are going to actually be restoring to our nation all the wonderful things that we had before We have to depend on you for that God because that is beyond anything that we can imagine and manufacture on our own. So joy expects certain things to happen.

But let me show you something it doesn't expect. It doesn't expect that things are going to be easy, that there won't be difficulty and trouble because that is the second image. The second image is "Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with joy, carrying the sheaves with him." There is no lack of realism here. They are looking to the future. They are filled with joy still knowing that there is a lot of hard work ahead. There is a lot of suffering ahead. There is a lot of heat,, hard work, and setbacks. But God is at work in it and it will bear fruit. And so that's part of our joy, is that confidence that in the difficulties that we face in the future, that God will be there. We might have to face some things that are extremely challenging and that produce sorrow in our lives, that sorrow will come, but what the anticipation of faith says is that we believe that we serve a God that knows how to dry tears. We serve a God that knows how to bring fruit from the difficult times of life. We serve a God that is dependable as we take those steps of following Jesus and staying close and taking risks that God will be there just as he was in the past. He will be there in the future and part of that confidence is that pain will never drive out the joy.

© 2005, Rev. John Schmidt.
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org