You can listen to the sermon here.
There will be no gloom for those who were
in anguish… The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light . . . You
have multiplied the nation, you have increased its joy.
The first dog John and
I had together was a rescue from the Washington, DC animal shelter. His name was Cuthbert. Cuthbert was a good size black and white
mutt—probably a mix of black lab and border collie. In our 12 years together, Cuthbert taught me
many things.
One warm, sunny day in
Maryland, I had taken Cuthbert to work with me as I did almost every day. I let him loose to run in the chapel
cemetery, which was, I think, his favorite place in the whole world. There were plenty of squirrels and rabbits to
chase. Thank God he never caught any of
them. Of course, I never thought there was any danger that he would.
I went in the parish
hall to check my messages and make a couple phone calls. Then I went back out to get him. I stood near
the edge of the cemetery and called his name.
No response. I figured he must
have wandered across the street to the post office. The chapel was on a short dead-end street on
one side of the road, and the post office was the only thing on the other
side. Cuthbert was welcome there and
known by most of the patrons. But he
wasn’t there.
I called again.
Nothing. I called again with my “Dad is
annoyed” voice. Ah, there he was on the
far end of the cemetery bounding towards me.
He’s got something in his mouth.
It looks like a rock. Why is the
fool running around with a rock in his mouth?
He reached me and
dumped the rock at my feet and looked up at me with great anticipation. Only it wasn’t a rock. Cuthbert had caught
himself a turtle. I picked it up and the
turtle looked way more annoyed than I had been.
And then I looked back
at Cuthbert and he was shaking with pure joy.
It was alive and he had caught it and Dad was pleased. It was like the moment when his whole dog
life had been fulfilled.
So Cuthbert taught me
that what is important in life is taking joy in whatever it is you can
accomplish.
The great Orthodox
theologian of the 20th century, Alexander Schmemann once wrote,
“From its very beginning Christianity has been the proclamation of joy.” He went on to say
Without the proclamation of this joy
Christianity is incomprehensible. It is
only as joy that the Church was victorious in the world, and it lost the world
when it lost that joy, and ceased to be a credible witness to it. Of all the
accusations against Christians, the most terrible one was uttered by Nietzsche
when he said that Christians had no joy.[1]
I’ve enjoyed having
four weeks in a row to preach. We began
with the journey of the magi to the Christ child, and I spoke of how their
journey is our journey, trying to find some star to follow, having it take us
to a place we were not expecting, finding there a strange scene, but one in
which we could see ourselves in a new way and know to go home by a different
road.
The next Sunday we told
the story of Jesus’ baptism and we discovered just what it was the magi saw in
that strange place, the thing that changed them. The thing was love, a love that was God’s
gift. That they hadn’t earned and that
we haven’t earned, yet it is the great truth:
we are Gods’ beloved daughters and sons.
Last week Martin Luther
King, Jr. helped us see that it is not enough that we are God’s beloved. There
is more. We are called to build the beloved community, not wait for it to come
in some heaven, but build it here on earth, where we live and where our
neighbors live, including those who are so different from us we can barely
understand them, and probably have been taught not to.
And all along this way,
the prophet Isaiah has been singing a song in the background, a song about our
calling. “I have given you as a light to
the nations.” “I will give you as a
light to the nations.” “The people who
walked in darkness have seen a great light.”
We are called to be
God’s beloved . . . to build God’s beloved community . . . to follow Jesus . .
. and in the words of this morning’s gospel, to fish for people. And the bait on our hook? The light we bring in the darkness, the joy
we bring in the brokenness.
What is this joy? Joy
is the confidence that we are God’s beloved, that, in the words of St. Paul,
“Nothing can separate us from the love of God,”[2] or
in the words of our baptismal rite, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in
Baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever.”[3]
Schmemann calls the
Eucharist, “the sacrament of joy.” What we do here week by week is returning to
our true joy again and again. We have to
do it so often because life over and over shakes our confidence in God’s
unconditional love. Our joy is
constantly tested, constantly under fire.
But here, together, we can find it again. And the important word is together.
Sometimes as an
individual, when I’m having a bad time of it, I can’t get that confidence back.
Joy is not easily found. It’s going to take longer than a single Sunday to get
it back. But I have the next best thing,
I have the comfort and hope that your return to joy gives away.
The one thing above all
others that we cannot let go of is our joy, our delight in God, our delight in
the gift of life, our delight in the gift of one another, our delight in God’s
call to do justice in the world.
The Annual Meeting is
next week, and it will no doubt bring up worries about the future, worries that
are entirely justified. As the rector of
two parishes over twenty-five years, I always wanted to be able to stand up at
the Annual Meeting and announce, “No worries.
We do not have to worry about our future anymore.”
I never got to make
that pronouncement. But despite the
challenges we faced in those parishes, and despite the challenges we face at
St. Thomas’, I believe that if we keep returning to our joy, we will still be
around to meet those challenges. If we
ever are infected with despair as a community, it will mean our end.
We have been given a
vision of God’s beloved people living in beloved community. People of hope. People of faith. People of
love. People of joy.
Amidst our worries, let
us pray to become more and more light and more and more joy. Let people experience in us a community that
knows it is beloved and wants other to know that as well, that wants to build a
beloved community not just inside the safety of these walls, but out there in
the world, a community that lives by the light and joy of the good news of
Jesus that can never be taken away from us.
Let it not be said of
us that those people know no joy.
[1]
“The Proclamation of Joy: An Orthodox View,” in The Living Pulpit, October-December 1996, p. 8. The article is an
excerpt from Schmemann’s book For the
Life of the World.
[2]
Romans 8:39.
[3]
BCP, p. 308.
No comments:
Post a Comment