"Mercy more than Life:" Keeping the Dream Alive

 Sermon preached at the Church of the Redeemer, Addison, NY on the 7th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 9B): Mark 6:1-13.

          In this morning’s Collect of the Day we pray:

 O God, you have taught us to keep all your commandments by loving you and our neighbor: Grant us the grace of your Holy Spirit, that we may be devoted to you with our whole heart, and united to one another with pure affection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Sprit, One God, for ever and ever. Amen.

           “And united to one another with pure affection.”

           Now there’s a prayer that, as a nation, we need right now.  The prayer is, of course, aspirational.  It is a dream.  We know we are far from being united to each other in pure affection, or, for that matter, any affection at all.

           We can admit that this has always been so.  America has always been, first of all, a dream.  Ever since these first words were penned:

 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

           It is said that Thomas Jefferson penned these words in the room of the boarding house at which he was staying in Philadelphia.  He wasn’t alone. His slave Richard Hemings was with him.

           Those words “all men are created equal” were aspirational. They expressed the dream. Maybe that was not Jefferson’s intent. Maybe he meant a limited definition of “all men.”  Probably that’s true, but I also think he was smart enough to know they were also a dream not yet fulfilled.

           We Americans are at our best as dreamers.  Certainly, Christians are at their best as dreamers, striving to know and share in the dream of God, but also aware that God has yet more dream to be revealed.  That is what the Collect says is “the grace of the Holy Spirit.”

           Our final hymn today knows about the dream, in the third verse

 O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears!

           Our villages and cities have never been undimmed by human tears, but that is our dream, as long as we remember it and are constantly asking, “How can we get there?”

           We have a history in this country, and, really, it’s true in most countries, that we are most united when we have a common enemy. Think 9-11-2001.  How much better off we would be if we were most united by a common dream.

           How do we get to that place?  There is a clue in the same him, in the second line:

 O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life!

           “And mercy more than life.”  That’s an odd phrase, isn’t it?  To love mercy more than life.  Life is one of our inalienable rights, the Declaration of Independence says, so how can we love something more than life itself?

           Katherine Lee Bates, the writer, knew.  For us all to be free—for all people to be created equal—we each must be willing to give at least a little. We each must be willing to sacrifice a bit of our own life in what she calls mercy, compassion for others.

          The great truth of the American Dream, and the only way to truly fulfill it, is through the generosity of spirit and substance that makes for the common good.

           We heard it last week from St. Paul, put very simply. He was asking for donations to assist those stricken by famine in and around Jerusalem. He said,

 I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of fair balance between your present abundance and their need . . . As it is written, “The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.”

           Paul was quoting the book of Exodus (16:18), part of the story of the people of God receiving manna, the miraculous bread that kept them alive in the wilderness.  Again, the sentiment is simple: “They gathered as much as each of them needed.”

           That is the spirit of mercy. We usually think of mercy as having to do with forgiveness.  But it is much more than that, because you cannot be merciful if you are not open to another, willing to share life with them at least on a basic level.

           Mercy requires empathy.  And in times of great conflict and division such as what we are in, empathy wanes, even dies.  I see bumper stickers that say “F*#& your feelings.”  In that way of relating to the world, empathy dies, so mercy dies, and any way to the common good dies, and the dream dies.

           One of the things we who are left in the Christian Church must be about these days is keeping mercy, empathy, the common good, the dream, alive.  That is simply what it means to be faithful.  We cannot follow the course of some Christians who not only have bought into the politics of division but believe that it is the only way ordained by God.

           I generally don’t like to say these words quite so bald-faced, but they are wrong. Division is not the way of God.

           You may read today’s Gospel and think otherwise.  Jesus sends out the disciples and instruct them that if they are not welcomed somewhere, if folk refuse to listen to them, then “as you leave, shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.”

           If you think about it, it is a very feeble way of making a protest.  And the protest comes due to two things:  a lack of hospitality and an inability to listen.  Both of those are acts that keep the division alive.

           Sometimes people will not welcome our message and refuse to listen to it. All that we can do is move on to the next one, with sadness and heaviness of heart.

           The bottom-line is this:  God keeps dreaming the world into existence and calling the world to do better, to live with generosity and hospitality toward others, as much as we can, and to love empathy, compassion, and mercy for they are the only way either the dream of America or the dream of God can thrive.

The Problem of the Hidden God

 Sermon preached at The Church of the Redeemer, Addison NY on Sunday, June 23, the 5th Sunday after Pentecost:  Mark 4:35-41.

          The heart of this Gospel story is not the miracle of Jesus ordering the wind and the sea to be at peace. The heart of this story is not the miracle. It is the question,

 Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?

 Hey, wake up and do something! We’re going to die!

           Here is a fundamental problem for the believer:  A storm is raging in our lives, and God seems to be asleep.

           It is a problem as old as the Scriptures. There is an interesting passage in the prophet Isaiah, chapter 45.  Isaiah delivers a speech on behalf of God that ends with a very strong statement about God’s presence:

 They pray to you, saying, “God is with you and there is no other; there is no god besides our God.”

 And the very next verse is this statement:

  Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.

 And there is our frequent dilemma:  God is real.  God is hidden.

 Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?

           The psalms are full of this question.

 Psalm 42:  I will say to the God of my strength, “Why have you forgotten me?

 Psalm 22, the question that Jesus cries from the cross:  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

 And the devastating Psalm 88: But as for me, O Lord, I cry to you for help . . . Lord, why have you rejected me? Why have you hidden your face from me?

           It is true that every psalm that asks God, “why are you sleeping,” resolves in the end to a firm belief in God’s presence. Every psalm, that is, except Psalm 88, whose final words are, “Darkness is my only companion.”

           So, the believer’s dilemma. God is real. God is hidden. God acts sometimes, we are sure of it, and God, like Jesus in the boat, sometimes seems to be asleep.

 Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?

           There are three things we can do with this problem.

           One, we can reject God, or reject even the idea of God.  St Teresa of Avila, in the midst of a time of trial, railed against God:  “If this is how you treat your friends, it is no wonder that you have so few of them.”  Now this did not cause Teresa to reject God, but her insight is that it does cause many to do so.

           Second, we can go in the opposite direction and deny that God is in any way hidden, asleep, or forgetful. We say very well-meaning things like, “God has a plan and everything happens for a reason.” I know for some of you that is a very real expression of belief and I have no desire to take it away from you.

           But I do think that it can be taken too far, to attribute to God things that are much more the fault of human beings and to deny other people’s experience of God’s absence.

           There is a third way, a kind of middle ground. We can live with the mystery. We can accept that many things in life are beyond our control and beyond the control of God.  I know that sounds like blasphemy. But if human free will is indeed a gift from God, that means that God has given up control of everything.  It is why at the end of the book of Job, after Job questioning God and railing against what seems to be an uncaring attitude, the only answer God can give is,

 Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?

           To live with the mystery of life, not as an act of ultimate despair, but as an act of ultimate hope.

           Jesus may seem asleep, but he is in the boat with us, and we are able to call out to him, and if he does not still the storm around us, he can still the storm within us.  This is the message of the 23^rd psalm:

 Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you are with me. Your rod and staff they comfort me.

 Or, in the words of our final hymn today, we keep singing,

 When the storms of life are raging, stand by me; in the midst of tribulation, stand by me; in the midst of faults and failures, stand by me; in the midst of persecution, stand by me; when I’m going old and feeble, stand by me.

 The hymn never pretends to speak for God. It does not promise that everything will be all right.  It just offers that stubborn hope in the face of life’s mystery and call on God to stand by us.  Some days that is all we can do. But it is enough.

The Love of Christ Urges Us On

 Sermon preached at Church of the Redeemer, Addison on June 16, 2024, the 4th Sunday after Pentecost:  2 Corinthians 5:6-17

For the love of Christ urges us on . . . From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view . . . If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.

 It is an early morning and although 20 or so 7th grade boys are standing together in a clump they are quiet.  It is too early and too cold; their feet are wet from the heavy dew on the grass.

           A boy stands at the edge of the group and shivers.  He’s wearing only gym shorts and a t-shirt, but the shivering comes as much from embarrassment as from the cold.

           The gym teacher barks orders to choose up sides.  He names the two captains.  At first the competition between them is fierce as they pick the best players.  First, second, third round.

           Then the competition shifts and the struggle becomes not to get stuck with the worst players.  The boy stands there through all this knowing his humiliation is upon him once again.  But maybe it won’t be like last week when the teacher had to force the captains to choose between the last few at all.

           A true story, of course.  But also mythic, because it describes our human insecurity:  the fear of standing there in our gym shorts, looking awkward, and not being chosen.

           What does Paul mean when he says that “in Christ” we are “a new creation?”

           Sometimes to answer a question like that it is easier to start with an image of what the opposite is.  This is what being a new creation does not look like. It does not look like the fear of not being chosen, of not belonging.

           For St Paul, being “in Christ” is a very key phrase. He uses it 87 times in his letters.  It is his simple way of describing the unity of Christ and the believer, the unity between Christ and each one of us.  When he says “in Christ” he is saying that the union between Christ and a believer is so deep and so strong that it becomes part of our identity.  I cannot understand who I am other than my relationship with Jesus.

           Which means when it comes to Jesus I always am chosen, I always belong, so much so that life is different, so different Paul uses the metaphor of “a new creation.”

           The boy in that gym class did not know this about himself.  He may have only been 12 years old, but he was experiencing the old creation.  In the old creation he depended on his sense of belonging by how he was treated by others, which seemed to be about a competition that he could not win.  In the old creation he was destined to be forever, not good enough.

           Again, this is not just about an awkward seventh grader, it is about all of us, it is about, to use Paul’s word, “anyone.” Anyone who has ever experienced what it is like to be on the outside with no clear way to the inside.

           The old creation divides the world into winners and losers, defined in such a way that for most people there is no clear path to being a winner. The only chance you have in the old creation is to learn how to act like a winner, often by attaching yourself to a winner, a hero through whom you can get some semblance of belonging.  Or you can play the game of winning by acquisition, summed up by the old, sad bumper sticker, “He who dies with the most toys wins.”

           There is only one way to truly belong, to be a new creation independent of the need to be a winner, and that is to be “in Christ,” to know the love of God for you completely unearned or undeserved, no winning anything, required.

           That is what it means to be a new creation.  To know one’s self to be loved in an indissoluble bond with the Creator of the universe, with something outside myself that I do not need to create on my own.

           And to know that love does something to us.  It is found in the phrase “The love of Christ urges us on . . .”

 When it seems like we will never fit in . . . the love of Christ urges us on.

 When doubt or grief or despair seem to take hold of us and will not let us go . . . the love of Christ urges us on.

 When the world seems so stacked against us, confusing, something we never seem to get right . . . the love of Christ urges us on.

 When we are gripped by death itself, which we know will one day have its way with us . . . the love of Christ urges us on.

 In spite of everything we cannot control . . . the love of Christ urges us on.

 The love of Christ urges us on into the new creation, where we can let go of the old ways of not belonging into the new ways of being chosen and loved for ever.

           This is the message we need to get clear about not only for our own sakes, but for the sakes of the world around us, the “anyones” out there in need of good news.

           If the church is ever to grow again, this is the message we need to proclaim.  The message is not come and belong to the church, it is come and experience the new creation.  Come and experience the love that never dies, the belonging that no one can take away from you.

Life in a Trinary World

 Sermon preached at the Church of the Redeemer, Addison, NY, on Trinity Sunday, May 26, 2024:  John 3:1-17

          It is often said that this Sunday when we celebrate God as Trinity is the
only Sunday that is primarily about a doctrine rather than a story.

           I don’t think that is correct.  My suspicion has always been that the notion of God as Trinity does have something fundamental to say about life in God’s world. “Trinity,” in essence, is how we experience life in its fullness.

           We human beings live in a world that we believe works in dualities—binaries.  Good and evil, male and female, people like us and people not like us, Americans and foreigners, conservative and liberal, the righteous and sinners, straight and gay, black and white, Jew and Gentile, rhubarb lovers and rhubarb haters. You know I could go on and on and on and . . .

           This seems to be how the world works.  It keeps things simple.  But does it really work that way? Is it really that simple?

           I think knowing God as Trinity tells us no. It is not that simple. There is almost always more complexity to life than we care to admit.  And complexity, the Trinity tells us, is actually divine.

           It is, if you think about it, our dualities that are always getting us into trouble.  For example, because we could only imagine there being two kinds of people, we divided the world up by skin color—black and white we call it, when actually skin color is an a continuous spectrum, and there are very few people who are actually colored black or white.

           Those categories became so entrenched that culture grew up around them and soon “black” and “white” became cultural identities. That’s happened with almost all our binaries.  They have become so hard and fast that they are now more about cultural identity than they are about physical or geographic or sexual realities.

           And that’s fine. The way we figure our identities may not change much. On the other hand, they may.  Our younger generations live in a far more fluid world than we baby boomers or even gen x-ers. Some of them are even pushing at perhaps what we thought were our most had and fast binaries:  male and female.

           It turns out they may actually be teaching us about God and the world God has made.  Binary is not the truth in God’s world. Trinary—at least—is the truth.

          So the world God has made is not either/or.  It is not even simply both/and.  It is both/and . . . and something more.

           This has many ramifications but let me say a few words about just one aspect of it.  On my left forearm I have tattooed in Old French, Que scay-je?  It means “What do I know?”

           I learned the importance of this phrase from the man considered to be the father of the personal essay. Michel De Montaigne was a Frenchman in the 16^th century.  He wrote about himself and his experiences in the world. He was a man of deeply held beliefs and opinions.  This might mean he was a colossal bore, but he was and is not.

           He wasn’t a bore because he had the habit of constantly questioning those beliefs and opinions. There was always something more to learn, some new way to be surprised by life.  So in addition to his strongly held views, he lived by the motto: “What do I know?”

           What knowing God as Trinity should mean for us at the very least is that Montaigne was right, there is always something more. Our binaries are convenient and simple but they betray a world that is complex and in that complexity is beauty and joy and hope.

           So often when my own opinions have hardened into something that is easy for me to live with, I am brought up short by something more, and that is God the Holy Trinity at work in me, exposing me to more truth, truth that sets me free from my own capacity to think I understand exactly how things ought to be.

           We see this happening as Jesus speaks with Nicodemus.  You must be born a different way than you have already been more.  There is something more, Jesus says. There is the life of the Spirit, but watch out. When you become companions with the Holy Spirit, you’ll get blown about, many things will not be as you imagined they were, but that is the only way to enter the kingdom of God.

           You enter the kingdom of God not by what you know, but by that something other that come when you are able to see the binaries for what they are—idols.  And let the mystery of God lead you into all truth, truth that is more trinitarian than binary, truth that is something ore than we can imagine on our own.

The Stand By Me God

 Sermon preached on the Day of Pentecost, May 19, 2024 at Church of the Redeemer, Addison

           Who or what is the Holy Spirit?

           Jesus’ word for the Spirit was parakletos, “the Paraclete.”  It literally means “one who stands alongside of.”  Over the centuries, Bible translators have used a variety of different words to try to translate parakletos: “Comforter,” “Counselor,” and, what we heard this morning, “Advocate.”

           They’re all good words, but I like to say something like “The Stand By Me God.”  The Holy Spirit is the Stand By Me God, the God who never leaves my side or yours, or ours together.  We are never abandoned. We are never alone.

           This Stand By Me God, Jesus says, is “the Spirit of truth” who will guide us “into all the truth.”  That’s important!  The Stand By Me God is the true God.  It is not as we have feared. God is not the “my way or the highway” God, behave yourselves or suffer the consequences, the angry, judgmental God of our fears.  That is not the true God, the God who is revealed by Jesus.  Jesus reveals the God of Solidarity with us, Emmanuel, meaning God with us, God for us.  This is the truth.

           Which means, Jesus says, the world is wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment.  He seems to speak in riddles here, but what he means is, I think, quite simple.

           First, he says, the world is wrong about sin.

           The popular conception is that sin is hated by God and righteousness is loved by God, because God is, above all, a God of judgment.  Sinners are in trouble with God and ultimately go to hell in God’s great act of judgment.

           Wrong, Jesus says.  The world is wrong about sin, Jesus says, “because they do not believe in me.”  All along Jesus has been teaching not that God hates sinners, but that God loves them.  Jesus is the embodiment of a God who cannot be separated from humankind, even by its own sin.  If you can conceive of God and me being one, Jesus is saying, than you can conceive of God and sinners being one.

           Which is not to say that Jesus was a sinner, but it is to say that Jesus was fully human, and in him humanity is fully united to God. And if Jesus unites humanity to God, then he unites sinful humanity to God, because there isn’t any other kind of humanity.

           Jesus told a story (John 8:1-11) about a woman who was caught in adultery, a very bad thing, a violation of one of the Ten Commandments.  Her punishment under the Law was death by stoning, and when Jesus came upon her a crowd was getting ready to do just that.  Being a noted teacher, they asked him for his judgment in the case, assuming that he would agree with the Law.  Instead he said, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”  They all went away and the woman was spared be the Stand By Me God.

           Second, Jesus says, the world is not only wrong about sin. It is also wrong about righteousness.

           The world is wrong about righteousness, he says, “because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer.”  Huh?  What does he mean by that?

           He means, I think, that because he is being eternally united to God, righteousness is now about relationship with him, not about your or my ability to be good.  Does Jesus want us to be good? Of course he does. Is being good a qualification for being in relationship with Jesus? No, it is not.

           A Pharisee named Nicodemus once came to Jesus under the cover of darkness (John 3:1-17).  He was strangely drawn to him even though most of his friends were at best suspicious and at worst outright rejecting of Jesus’ teaching.  Jesus sensed his fear and gave him a challenge: “you must be born from above.”  Which is to say you must have a different way of relating to the world, the way of the Spirit, which blows where it wills.   You must relate to the world through Jesus, who has come, he says, not to condemn the world but to save it.

           Third, Jesus says, the world is wrong about judgment.

           The world is wrong about judgment, he says, “because the ruler of this world has [already] been condemned.”  Judgment has already happened.  Satan, the Accuser of humankind, has already fallen as Jesus has been lifted up and drawn all people to himself as humankind’s not Accuser, but Advocate.

           Among his final words to his disciples, Jesus says, Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  And he says, you are my friends.  We are no longer the accused, we are the advocated for by the Stand By Me God.

           This is all hugely good news.  How sad it is that the world still, by and large, does not know it, certainly does not understand it.  This largely lies on our shoulders. We have not testified to the truth!  We have not sufficiently accepted the Stand By Me God, to allow the truth of this good news to form our words and deeds.  The world sees us as accusers of our fellow women and men, not as advocates.

           The church—you and I—continue to allow the world to be wrong about God, because we keep getting it wrong ourselves.  We keep believing that God is primarily a God of angry judgment, the great Accuser in the sky.  And if we believe that then certainly the world around us isn’t going to argue with us.

           Our challenge is to believe the truth, to live into the truth, that our God is the Stand By Me God.  The “ruler of this world” is already condemned and both sin and righteousness alike are drowned in the overwhelming flood of God’s love.

           The truth is that God loves us.  Period. Full stop. No ifs, ands, ors, buts or maybes.  No fine print.  God is head over heals, puppy dog, ga-ga in love with us.  That is the message. There is no other.  Any other message is a lie, and we ought not to be afraid to call it a lie whenever we hear it.

           God loves you, Jesus says. Lift up that love and the world will be drawn to it.  Proclaim the Stand By Me God so that the world will be proved wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment.  Proclaim the Stand By Me God so that the world will know the truth and the truth will set it free.

           Let us be people of the Spirit.  Let us be loved people today. Let us be free people today. Let us give thanks for and lift up the Stand By Me God.

Easter 7B: The Prayer of Mother Jesus

 Sermon preached on the Seventh Sunday of Easter, May 12, 2024 at Church of the Redeemer, Addison, NY:  John 17

          It was my first Sunday at my first parish “in charge,” the Vicar of a longstanding mission church called St. George’s in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC.  At the 8 am Service six people were gathered with me.  All was well.

           Then we got to the Nicene Creed and the strangest thing happened.  I started, “We believe . . .” but from the back of the chapel in a rather loud voice came the word, “I.” And every time the creed used the word “we,” the voice would say, “I.”  The same thing happened when we got to the Confession. Instead of “we” came “I.”

           This continued and after a few weeks I got up the nerve to take the parishioner aside and ask what was going on.  He said that he was opposed to the change in the creed from “I” to “We.”  I refuse to speak for what other people believe or confess. I can only speak for myself.

           Just a little background: the old Book of Common Prayer used “I” for the Nicene Creed, although the Confession in our Prayer Books has always used “we.”  The current Prayer Book changing to “we” in the Creed was not a newfangled innovation. It was a return to the original form of the Creed in Greek, which began “we.”  The “I” had crept in when in the Middle Ages, the priest alone said most of the Service.

           Another aside, our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers say “I” in their confession, and continue to say “I” in the Nicene Creed.

           So why “we?”

           It is simple, really, in the Eucharist we pray not as individuals or a collection of individuals, but as a body.  We are one voice speaking with God.  We are the body of Christ in praise, thanksgiving, and prayer.

           The Nicene Creed, in particular, is a statement of the belief of the church as a whole.  And so we say it as the whole church, in union with Christians in all times and in all places.

           It seems to me that one way of describing this way of praying—praying as “we”—is fitting to the secular celebration on this day.  To pray as “we” is to pray as a mother.

           Who else better knows the power of the “we,” than a mother who has carried a child, whose body for nine months is quite literally a “we.” And mothers never quite lose this bond.  There’s a part of a mother that is always a “we” when it comes to her children.

           Jesus prays like this in the 17^th chapter of John’s Gospel, often called “the high priestly prayer,” but which I think could also be called “the mother’s prayer.”  He prays that “they (we) may be one, as we are one.” It is in that oneness for which Jesus prays that we pray whenever two or three are gathered.

 All mine are yours and yours are mine . .  protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one.

           I’m not making up on my own this understanding of Jesus praying as a mother.  One of the great saints of the English Church is the 14^th century woman, Julian of Norwich. In her writings she often refers to Jesus as “mother.”  “Our mothers,” she writes, “bear us for pain and for death; our true mother, Jesus, bears us for joy and endless life.”

           This is part of the upside-down world that the Book of Acts speaks about. The early Christians were known as “those people who turn the world upside down.” (Acts 17:6)

          Here’s the upside down world that our use of the word “we” in our prayer.  The world—especially western culture—understands that I am an individual first and then members of society.  Jesus turns that world on his head.  In Jesus we are a “we” before we are an “I.”

          In southern African culture this is called “Ubuntu,” which means that I am an I only because we are a we.

          Let us join Jesus in his motherly prayer as we profess our faith, confess our sins, and renew our oneness with him and one another in the Eucharist, including, as we pray as Jesus taught us to pray,

          Our Father . . .

Advent 3: What is Joy? (John the Baptist, Prophet of Joy)

 Sermon preached on the 3rd Sunday of Advent, 2023, at Church of the Redeemer, Addison:  Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; John 1:6-8, 19-28

          Today we light the candle of joy.  Long before there was anything like an Advent wreathe with its one pink candle, “joy” was what characterized this Sunday.  It began with the appointed introit for the Latin Mass, so the first word heard on this Sunday for centuries was Gaudate.

 Gaudate in Domino semper: iterum dico gaudate.

 Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice.

                  The words are from the Letter to the Philippians, but the opening of the First Thessalonians’ reading this morning is much the same.

           So, this Advent we have asked: “What is hope?” and “What is peace?” And today we ask, “What is joy?”

           When I spoke of “hope” and “peace,” I said we have to go deeper to get at their true meaning for the Christian.  Hope is not simply optimism. Peace is not simply the absence of conflict.

           So joy is not simply happiness. It is something deeper.

           To get at this deeper sense of joy, I turn to Orthodox Theologian Alexander Schmemann, who wrote

 From its very beginning Christianity has been the proclamation of joy, of the only possible joy on earth. . . . Without the proclamation of this joy Christianity is incomprehensible. . . . Of all accusations against Christians, the most terrible one was uttered by Neitzche when he said that Christians had no joy.

            Christians proclaim, “The only possible joy on earth.”  But what is this joy we proclaim. What is this joy that we are enabled to live?

            I think the answer is in John the Baptist.  Now, no one ever accused John of preaching joy, at least not joy as happiness.  John’s message was a tough one; Repent. End your delusions about yourself. Get right with God.

            But ending our delusions about ourselves may just be the key to the experience of Joy.  We can see this in John’s own understanding of himself.

            John was very clear about who he was not.  And to do that he had to say “no” to other people’s expectations.  No, I am not the Messiah. No, I am not the return of the great prophet Elijah. No, I am not the unnamed prophet who it was believed would inaugurate a new messianic age.

            No, John says, I am not anything you expect me to be.

            I have found my purpose, John says, in words from the prophet Isaiah:  The voice of one crying in the wilderness to make straight the way of the Lord.

        I have found my purpose, John says, in words from the prophet Isaiah:  The voice of one crying in the wilderness to make straight the way of the Lord.

           There’s a lot going on in the Greek word translated “straight.”  It has the sense of removing all the obstacles, and John knew this meant not only removing the physical obstacles. It meant removing all the internal ones.  Hence the need for repentance.

            Repentance is the translation of another Greek word that has a lot going on.  Metanoia is the word, and its simplest meaning is “a turning,” or “changing direction.”

            John knew in his own life that his internal sense of direction was critical.  He spent a lot of time telling people to get clear about who they were and where they were headed, because he himself had spent a great deal of time getting clear about who he was and in what direction he was heading.

            So I’ll submit to you the improbable statement:  John the Baptism was and is the prophet of joy.  So here is what John has to teach us about joy.

            Joy comes from a clear sense of self. Joy comes from removing all the obstacles—most of them internal.  Joy comes from knowing who you are and where you are headed.  And by “where you are headed,” I mean “to whom you are headed.”

            Just like in our grasp of what hope means, and what peace means, what joy means is first of all grounded in reality.  I can’t know true joy until I know who I truly am, not divorced from reality, but in the muddy middle of it.

            The Isaiah reading helps us understand this a little better. Isaiah says,

 God has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners . . . to comfort all who mourn . . . to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness, instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.

            There a great deal of good news in there.  But the good news starts with reality. You cannot, for instance, experience the healing of one’s broken heart if you have not been honest about being broken-hearted in the first place.

            A firm grasp of reality is what is needed to be hopeful, to find the way to peace, or to experience true joy.  The only way to hope, peace, and joy is through reality.

            Which means that joy, like hope and peace, is something to struggle for, and it looks far more like a journey than a destination.

            So back to Schmemann’s rather outlandish claim that Christians proclaim the only joy that is possible on earth. Is that just another exclusivist claim, that if you are not a Christian you cannot experience joy?

            No, I don’t think so.  Schmemann is saying that the joy we proclaim, the way we find joy, is the way Jesus found life.  The only way to life for Jesus was death. He had to go through death in order to find true life.  So the joy we proclaim can only be found when we are willing to go through everything and anything that seems the opposite of joy:  anxiety, doubt, depression, grief, sorrow, the lack of a sense of purpose.

            The Christian proclamation is the only way out is through.

            We can do things that make us happy. We can earn enough money to live well. We can be loved by someone. We can feel we have some control, even power, over our circumstances.  But all those things are ephemeral, they all can so easily change.

            But true joy never changes, because it rests not in what I am able to accomplish, but who I am in the eyes of the One who made me.  It is that sense of the simple but deep confidence of who I am in the midst of the muddle of life, that gives me the chance to, as Paul invites us to do this morning,  rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances.

            “Why?” Paul asks. Not because of anything we have done, not because of any success we have made of ourselves, but because that is what God wants for us, that is what is God’s gift to us.  Joy that is dependent on nothing but the love of God.