(Advent 3) The grace of joy

Joy...while we wait
Advent 3
Isaiah 55:6-13; John 15:10-11; Romans 15:12-13


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I ended my sermon on hope last Sunday

by saying, several times, that we “choose hope.”

I suggested we cultivate hope,

by cultivating a healthy imagination.

So in terms of joy, we might ask,

what do we do to cultivate joy?

Is joy also a choice?

Well, some very wise people have said so.

The likes of the late Joseph Campbell, who wrote,

“We cannot cure the world of sorrow,

but we can choose to live in joy.”

Or the late Henri Nouwen, who is quoted as saying,

“Joy does not simply happen to us.

We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.”

I agree with both of them.  Sort of.

It kind of depends what you are meaning to say.

Nouwen and Campbell are not saying something altogether different

than what I was saying last Sunday.

Choosing joy is like choosing hope,

in that we decide where to look for our orientation.

Like hope, joy also requires some will and some imagination,

some ability to look beyond what is in front of us,

and see something we can’t yet see.

So while I don’t disagree with Nouwen and Campbell,

that’s not exactly what I am meaning to say, today, about joy.

I’m meaning to say that joy, to a large degree,

IS beyond our ability to simply choose it,

or to make it happen,

or to manufacture it out of the hard stuff of life.

In a slight counterpoint to the words of Henri Nouwen,

joy does, in fact, happen to us,

because of where we place ourselves in relationship.

Today I want to explore the concept of joy, as grace.

Grace is really a synonym for gift.

The Greek word charisma means “favor” or “gift,”

from which we get the word charismatic.

Gifts come from someone who loves us.

Receiving gifts from people

result from being in relationship to them.

I want to suggest that joy is a charism, a gift,

and the source of joy is God’s presence.

So if we want to increase the odds of receiving this gift from God,

if we want to put ourselves where the grace of joy is,

then we will want to cultivate our relational connection

to the God who is joy.

I’ll come back to that in a minute,

but let’s first examine the scripture readings from today.

_____________________

Our reading from Isaiah takes us directly

to what I was just trying to say:

“Seek the Lord while he may be found,

call upon him while he is near.”

There is, of course, human choice involved in the seeking.

We aren’t forced to seek.

We have free will not to seek a connection with God.

But the prophet suggests it is to our benefit

to actively seek.

God is accessible, is near, the prophet says,

and to those who seek God,

God is ready and eager to dispense grace.

God wants warm table fellowship with us.

Wants a clear table to sit at across from us.

So if we bring all that we are to the table,

all that we have, all our junk and our baggage,

and plop it down on the table in front of us,

God will happily clear a spot at the table,

sit down with us,

and serve up a huge helping of grace, forgiveness, and joy.

God says to us, through the prophet Isaiah,

beginning in verse 8, and I’m paraphrasing—

I don’t think like you do.

I don’t see what you see.

I understand you are burdened,

you are weighed down with everything you are carrying.

I see your burden, but I also see past it already.

As the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways and thoughts higher than yours.

I already see beyond what you bring to the table.

I see the table cleared of your burden,

and replaced with a feast.

As dependable as the rain and snow that waters the earth,

and produces fruit from the seed,

so can I be counted on to pour out my grace of joy.

You will walk away from this table in joy,

and return to it in peace.

Look around, and you’ll see all nature celebrate with you,

at your newfound freedom.

The mountains and hills will burst into songs of joy.

The trees will clap their hands in delight.

The thorns and briers will shrivel,

and in their place, cypress and myrtle trees will thrive.

That is my free gift to you,

just for showing up at my table.

This is the God of joy speaking to us through the prophet.

The same God who rested on the seventh day of Creation,

and just looked around at everything in the world,

with the giddy delight and pleasure and laugh-out-loud joy,

of someone who just finished making something

so good and so beautiful and so amazing.

I like to think of the God we worship

as being that Seventh-Day God,

the God who overflows with joy.

That is not to deny the God who also experiences grief and anger,

when God’s human creatures rebel against that goodness,

and do things to destroy it.

But at the core of who God is, at the core,

is this Seventh-Day God,

the Sabbath God who is full of joy,

and invites us into that fullness of joy,

which is found sitting at the table of God.

_____________________

Our invitation to a life of faith,

a life in relationship to God,

is not a daunting invitation.

Yes, the road of a life of faith is hard.

But then, the road of life without faith is hard. Or even harder.

No one should ever shy away from approaching God,

out of fear for the demands God is making of them.

If it seems intimidating to anyone,

it means we’ve done a poor job representing faith to them.

No, our invitation to obedience, is an invitation to a party.

At least it is according to Jesus,

in the words of John 15 that we heard today:

“If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love,

just as I have kept my Father’s commandments

and abide in his love.

I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you,

and that your joy may be complete.”

Can we even grasp that—

we who like to emphasize the hard teachings of Jesus,

as well we should?

Can we grasp Jesus’ astounding claim here?

He is saying to his disciples,

“Everything I have told you,

every commandment,

every law I have taught,

every directive to carry your cross and follow,

I have said all these things,

so that my joy may be in you,

and that your joy may be complete.”

It’s all for joy, folks. It’s all for joy.

I wonder if Peter, James, and John,

and the rest of the 12 sitting at the Passover table,

really caught the gist of what he was saying.

The writer of John’s Gospel

has Jesus giving a long discourse at the Last Supper,

giving them all a heads-up about the resistance

they will all face in the world after he leaves them,

the hatred and persecution they will encounter,

and other things that are just too hard

for them to hear right now.

It is in the middle of that long, sobering discourse,

that Jesus says the surprising words we just heard:

“I have said all these things,

so that my joy may be in you,

and that your joy may be complete.”

Wow.

And to think—wealthy Western Christians sit here today,

in comfort and plenty, and a privileged place in the world,

and have the nerve to create a joyless religion,

that gets more mileage out of boundaries and restrictions

and rule-following,

than out of the pure and deep joy being offered freely to us

who approach God’s table.

The Apostle Paul, in today’s Romans reading, ends with this prayer:

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing,

so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

In these two short quotes from Jesus and Paul,

all four themes of Advent—Peace, Hope, Joy, and Love—

get wrapped together in one package.

Here is the God who comes to us in Advent.

Who says to us, “Abide in my love . . .

that your joy may be complete.”

And, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace.”

_____________________

This is the religion I strive for—

one that pulls us, by sheer magnetism, by God’s charisma,

toward the table of the God of joy.

Yes, there is a sense in which we choose joy,

or at least, choose to come to God’s table.

But we are not told to will ourselves into being joyful.

Joy is not created, it is received from the Creator.

And this joy does not blind itself to the harsh realities of life

in a broken and grieving world.

This kind of joy is honest.

Brutally honest.

It names the pain.

It faces the grief.

It acknowledges the injustices, the sins and the shortcomings.

Even so, it moves us toward the table where the God of joy sits,

the God who sees and knows and respects the baggage we bring,

but who gently, in our presence, and with our permission,

clears away a space at the table,

where the grace of joy can be received,

where the feast can be served.

The joy and the pain can both be held, together.

We are called into joy by the God of joy.

Our responsibility, our choice, is to put away our defenses,

and receive it,

as the precious gift that it is.

_____________________

Let us make our confession together.

I invite you to turn to the confession in your bulletin.

And, at the same time,

turn to Voices Together #629 – “Here by the Water,”

a wonderfully appropriate song by Jim Croegart.

I’ll be reading Jim’s words at the end of the confession.

After which, we will sing them.

Confession

one God of joy, Lord of the Dance, we confess that we allow fear 

                to bar the gate that holds us back from entering your joy.

all Forgive us, encourage us, release us from that which binds us.

one We look for joy in the wrong places,

                straining to grasp for that which glitters, 

                yet is fleeting and empty.

all Forgive us, encourage us, release us from that which binds us.

[silence]

one The God of all joy invites us to freedom and fullness of joy,

                here by the water, as we pray and sing . . .

Soft field of clover, moon shining over the valley,

joining the song of the river to the great Giver of the great good.

As it enfolds me somehow it holds me together.

I realize I’ve been singing. 

                Still, it comes ringing clearer than clear.

I think how a yearning kept on returning to move me

down roads I’d never have chosen, half the time frozen, 

                too numb to feel.

I know it was stormy; hope it was for me a learning.

Blood on the road wasn’t mine, though. 

                Someone that I know walked here before.

And here by the water I’ll build an altar to praise you

out of the stones that I’ve found here.

I’ll set them down here, rough as they are,

knowing you can make them holy . . .

—Phil Kniss, December 12, 2021

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(Advent 2) God only knows

Hope...while we wait
Advent 2
Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:17, 22-27; Romans 8:10-12


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Let’s all think about the future for a minute.

First, think about your own foreseeable future,

as in, the next 5-10 years of your life . . . . . .

Now think about the future of our country,

our democratic institutions . . . . . .

Now think about the future of the church . . . . . .

Now think about the future of our planet . . . . . .

So how many of you, when you stop to contemplate the future,

find it a bit challenging, at least sometimes, to feel hopeful?

These days hope seems to be in short supply.

And we can’t blame this on the supply chain.

We can only blame ourselves.

But as soon as I say that, I have to qualify my statement.

Sometimes loss of hope is tied to things entirely beyond our control,

like catastrophic loss,

or extreme injury,

or acute mental illness.

Sometimes people dangling over the precipice of life,

are, in fact, completely devoid of any hope for rescue.

All too often, they are not rescued.

When they fall, we do not need to assign any blame.

These are simply tragic realities to be grieved.

But that’s not the kind of hopelessness I’m talking about right now.

I’m talking about when a person . . . or a community or a country

has the necessary resources for life,

but still suffers from a generalized, widespread, and chronic

inability to imagine a hopeful future,

and act accordingly.

When we lack that kind of hope it is not only sad, it is preventable.

And it’s in our collective hands to do something about it.

Lack of hope stems from lack of imagination.

And our lack of imagination may stem

from looking for hope in the wrong places.

If our hope depends on the likelihood

that a set of unpleasant concrete circumstances

will change in a particular way . . . well,

sometimes it’s so hard to imagine them ever changing,

that we are hard-pressed to muster any hope.

But what if our hope lies in something beyond the circumstances?

Here, perhaps, is one place people of faith have a natural advantage.

Now that might be disputed by some happy, hopeful people,

who claim not to have faith of any kind.

But that argument’s for another time.

I do believe that virtually all faith traditions

orient people to put their hope

in something that transcends circumstances,

that is larger than us,

that is forward-looking . . . and requires imagination.

A healthy faith-filled imagination is the seed-bed for hope.

_____________________

And it took a lot of imagination for Ezekiel

to see and write down this amazing prophetic oracle we have

in Ezekiel 37.

This is a favorite text of mine,

because I like to think of myself as imaginative.

And Ezekiel had a healthy imagination.

If anyone ever tries to tell you to reign in your imagination,

when it comes to matters of faith,

pay them no mind.

Imagination is essential for faith.

Hebrews 11 tells us that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for,

the conviction of things . . . not seen.”

Imagination is drawing a picture of something we can’t see.

And faith is holding on to that imaginative picture,

so that it fills us with a sense of hope,

and has a direct impact on how we live in this world.

Some Christian traditions (and I’m sad for them)

seem to think their faith rises or falls,

on whether we can prove that something did or didn’t happen

the way it is described in the Bible.

That might be an interesting mental exercise.

But it doesn’t build hope.

Good imagination is the seed-bed for biblical hope.

Ezekiel 37 begins with,

“The hand of the Lord came upon me,

and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord

and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.”

Now did the Spirit literally lift up Ezekiel,

and physically transport him, and drop him into a valley of bones?

Or was it a dream in the night?

Or was it some imaginative daytime vision?

I assume it was the latter.

The prophets often say simply, “the word of the Lord came to me.”

I like to think the prophet Ezekiel put himself, intentionally,

into a space of openness and attentiveness to the Spirit.

I imagine that Ezekiel was a practitioner of some kind of

regular spiritual listening and watching.

Maybe it was a daily discipline.

Maybe it was a certain place in his house,

or a favorite tree he liked to sit under.

And probably most of the time, nothing happened.

Be he kept on doing it. Kept opening up his mind and heart.

And occasionally words would come.

Or pictures would come.

And one day, as he let his imagination go,

God gave him this picture.

Only in retrospect, he would say, God took him to this valley,

and God told him to prophecy to the bones,

and he watched God bring life to these bones,

and he listened to God explain what it all meant.

Ezekiel’s imaginative picture was a picture of hope,

in a circumstance where all hope was lost . . . long ago.

This was about the exiled nation of Israel, that in fact,

had ceased to exist.

Ezekiel 37 is a brilliantly composed prophetic oracle.

I would say, not only did Ezekiel have a great imaginative mind.

He was deeply reflective, and when it came to writing it down,

he was a rhetorical genius.

I won’t take apart the whole text right now,

but spend some time in Ezekiel 37 later,

and discover its gems for yourselves.

For instance, how many times did God address Ezekiel as “mortal”

which means literally, someone who is going to die.

“Hey, You-who-are-going-to-die, do you see these dry bones?

You-who-are-going-to-die, can these bones live?

You-who-are-going-to-die, prophesy to these bones.”

In this portrayal of Ezekiel’s imaginative vision,

he gives God a perfect answer to one of God’s questions.

When God asked, “Mortal, can these bones live?”

The obvious answer was, No—

especially given the detail that the bones were not only dry,

but “very dry.”

But rather than challenge God with the obvious,

Ezekiel replied, “O Lord God, you know.”

I think that’s only more evidence of Ezekiel’s healthy imagination.

He had spent enough time listening to the Spirit,

and imagining possibilities beyond the present reality,

that he knew better than to limit God.

I’m guessing he came to the conclusion long before,

that he was not the best judge of what was hopeless.

God only knows what is truly hopeless.

God only knows.

Who else but someone with a healthy prophetic imagination

could see such a fantastic vision

of a valley of bones not only becoming embodied,

but receiving breath and spirit, and living again!

_____________________

A similar scenario unfolded in Jesus’ ministry,

described in the John 11 reading today.

We’ll encounter this story again on March 6 next year,

as we work through the Gospel of John.

But I wanted to highlight just a few verses

to underscore that God only knows what is hopeless.

The two sisters of Lazarus knew their brother’s death

was the end of the story,

and they pointed fingers of blame at Jesus,

who arrived late to the scene.

But Jesus calmly asserted, “I am the resurrection and the life.

Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live.”

And he promptly spoke a word, and Lazarus came out of the tomb.

The apostle Paul was also gifted with a good imagination.

He could see life where there was only death.

In today’s reading from Romans 8, he wrote,

“If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin,

the Spirit is life because of righteousness.”

Over and over in scripture, someone’s imagination gets stirred,

and hope emerges.

Motivated by God’s mission of healing and saving the cosmos,

they are able to see what others cannot see.

They allow themselves to touched, to the core,

by this healing vision of God,

and let that vision shape their way of living in the world-that-is,

rather than giving in to despair.

Attitude shapes reality.

And no, we’re not just playing a psychological game here,

trying to muster up positivity as a coping mechanism.

No, we are making a conscious choice about

what we will allow to shape

our real-life decisions and behavior.

Despair is not something confined just to our head.

Despair will shape how we live and interact and behave,

thus, it will shape the institutions we are part of,

and it will shape our culture and society.

And so will a biblical, prophetic imagination that nurtures hope.

Holding onto and contemplating and believing

God’s healing mission—often, regularly, and intentionally—

will also shape how we live and interact and behave,

thus, it will shape the institutions we are part of,

and it will shape our culture and society.

We get to choose which one we live by.

Today, like Ezekiel, like Jesus, like Paul,

like many who have gone before me,

I choose imaginative hope.

When God is in it, nothing, ultimately, is hope-less.

Imagine God’s future.  And choose hope.

_____________________

Coming to the communion table is one way we choose hope.

These elements are symbolic, yet they are more than that.

They symbolize the broken body and shed blood

of Jesus Christ, our Lord.

But partaking of them is a real act of hope.

When we partake, we say, by our action,

that we choose to ingest, to internalize, to become one with,

the crucified and resurrected Lord Jesus.

We enact our trust that there is more life to come.

We imagine healing and peace and shalom. 

We choose hope.

—Phil Kniss, December 5, 2021

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