October 9, 2011 – “Joy of Consequence”
Phil Blackwell
“Joy of Consequence”
Philippian 4:1-9, Matthew 22:1-14
“Joy of consequence,” the title of the sermon. By this I do not mean that the joy Paul writes about to the Christians in Philippi is the result of something like good fortune. That would be a joy dependent on things always working out right for us, and we know that is not true about life. Rather, it is an unconditional joy that has consequences, a joy that matters, that makes a difference in our lives.
Don Saliers was a professor of mine back in my seminary days. That was at Yale Divinity School in the late 1960’s. He recently retired from teaching at Candler School of Theology in Atlanta. He is the father of Emily Saliers, one of the Indigo Girls; the two of them co-authored a book about faith, a dialogue between two generations and angles of approach to religion.
The book I return to from years much earlier is entitled Soul in Paraphrase, where he writes about Christian affections. Not emotions, passions, and feelings, but ways in which we frame the human experience, how we understand life. Joy is one of those affections. He writes, “The peculiar character of this joy is not that it is a mood, but that it is a persistent way of assessing one’s life in the light of what God is doing.” (p.67) He suggests that the focus of our joy is God, not us, what God is accomplishing through us over time, not what happened to us today.
Well, that is a very different kind of joy than when we say, “It is such a joy to be able to walk around in the warm sunshine this late in the year.” “It is such a delight to be with the grandchildren.” “I was so happy that our team won yesterday” Or conversely, “There is no joy in Mudville; mighty Casey has struck out.” That is a consequential joy which depends on favorable outcomes.
The joy that is always ours because of God’s dependability is just the reverse; it is a joy that leads to favorable consequences. Like what?
Huston Smith, the grand old man of comparative religions, the son of Methodist missionaries in China and a university professor who opened the eyes and minds of millions of students to the nature of the world’s faith traditions, wrote about this in an article entitled “The Soul of Christianity” in The Christian Century magazine six years ago (10/4/05). Why should Christians always rejoice? Because, he writes, three intolerable burdens have been lifted suddenly and dramatically from our shoulders. Paul and his generation experienced it first, but it is true for all successive generations right down to our own time.
The three burdens? The fear of death, guilt, and self-centeredness. The whole narrative of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ is to be told and retold because it tells of this liberation of the human soul.
We rejoice always because we have been freed from the fear of death. Not of death; we know that for sure. We all die, and there is no escaping it. But it is the fear of death before death itself occurs, that kills us prematurely.
Last month Sally had a childhood friend come to visit us from Seattle so that the two of them could drive together to Ohio for their 50th high school reunion. Mary Kaye was working on some sort of project and asked, “Phil, you wrote something on humor and faith years ago at the University of Chicago, didn’t you? Do you have a copy of it that I might see?”
Well, it was not exactly about humor but about comedy, “The Comic as a Theological Concept,” it said on the title page. It was more a look at the contrast between comic and tragic forms of literature than telling that “a funny thing happened on the way to the pulpit.” A comedy is a comedy not because it necessarily has a happy ending, but because the plot ends by pointing to some sort of redemptive future. The story points beyond itself to a possible continuation.
When “King Lear” ends with the stage littered with corpses, there is nothing left to say. Ring down the curtain and head home with the heavy burden of the tragic consequences of human fallibility. But when “As You Like It” ends with the sorting out of who is who and leads to a wedding, it may not be the case that everyone will live “happily ever after,” but here is a promise of a future beyond the present. There is a comedic door left open.
Well, the Christian story of Jesus the Christ is comic, not tragic. There is suffering, to be sure; the cross is front and center in the story. It just is not the end of the story. There is the open tomb, the open door, that points beyond death to something more. That is the frame of reference for Christians, that death is not the final and ultimate definition of life. Life is more than just avoiding death; it is enjoying life while we have it.
There is an old sports axiom that if you play not to lose instead of to win, you will lose. We have seen that where teams are so afraid of losing that they play it safe, and by playing it safe, do not fully engage the challenge.
In golf, if the goal off the tee is never to hit the ball out-of-bounds, you might succeed, but your distance will always be stunted. Instead of your epitaph being, “He loved the game and played it with joy,” it will be, “His game was boring, but he never lost a golf ball.”
No, because God has shown us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ that there is more to life than meets the eye, then we are set free to enjoy today, this day, to its fullest, no matter what it holds for us. Rejoice always, not because everything will go perfectly but because the peace of God goes with us at all times, good and bad.
Released from guilt. We can rejoice always because a terribly heavy burden has been lifted from us. Imagine if guilt were cumulative, if every sin we committed just sat squarely on our backs without relief. It would be crushing. It is to us when we feel that way that Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” I will take the collar of guilt from off your necks.
T.S. Eliot writes about the times when we lie awake sleepless at night, recounting all that we had done wrong that day. “ . . . the rending pain of re-enactment/ Of all that you have done, and/ been; the shame/ Of motives late revealed, and the/ awareness/ of things ill done and done to/ others’ harm/ Which once you took for exercise of/ virtue” (Little Gidding).
Of course, that relies upon people having a sense of shame. So much of our American life is shameless. People say and do the most extraordinarily obnoxious things, and never apologize. Or, they make it conditional. “If I have offended someone, then I am sorry.” So, Hank Williams, Jr., says, “If my comparison of President Obama to Adolf Hitler offended someone, then I apologize.” No, confessing our sins is not conditional, “if . . . then;” even ESPN knows that much. Confessing guilt in order to have the burden lifted by God’s forgiveness is placing it straight out there on the top of table, or on the altar, without qualifications or self-serving footnotes.
Someone asked me if I thought that our usual process of a prayer of confession, followed by silent prayer, and then a statement of God’s absolution, made it too easy for us, that it cheapened forgiveness. After all, just do whatever you feel like and then go to church on Sunday and say, “I’m sorry,” and the minister will say, “That’s okay; God forgives you.” And then you have a clear conscience to start sinning all over again. I do not think we make it that easy, though our language these days does not rise to the level of previous generations.
A few years ago a good friend of mine, Jerry Forshey, was dying from cancer. Some of you knew and loved Jerry, too. He was a long-time minster in the Northern Illinois Conference, spending most of his years teaching in the community college system. Jerry gave us the sculpture of Jesus hanging on the cross and asked us to display it prominently because it tells the story of our salvation and also the history of our denomination.
A day before Jerry died I took him the bread and cup of Holy Communion. I knew that he could hear me even though he was unable to speak. As I stood at his bedside in his home, with his wife, Florence, and dear friend, Martin Deppe, standing near, I returned to the liturgical formulation of a few generations ago that I knew Jerry knew by heart.
The invitation: “Ye that do truly and earnestly repent of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbors, and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God, and walking from henceforth in his holy ways: draw near with faith and take this Holy Sacrament to your comfort, and make your humble confession to almighty God.”
There it is laid out for us, the earnest desire for forgiveness. And then, the beginning of the prayer: “Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, maker of all things, judge of all people: We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed, by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine majesty. We do earnestly repent, and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; the remembrance of them is grievous unto us . . .”
Guilt is a serious business, and forgiveness is a timeless joy.
The third burden lifted from us by God which gives us an unalloyed perspective of joy – self-centeredness. We are set from being absorbed by concern for our own wellbeing so that we can love others. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” Jesus proclaims is at the heart of a faithful life, a joyful life.
Not everyone has said that throughout history; certainly, not everyone says that today. The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins, puts forth an age-old opinion with newly developed justification that we basically are self-centered, violent, greedy, power-grasping animals, and anything that looks like love for neighbor is just a ruse to get more for oneself. John Hobbs, writing in the midst of dreadful civil conflict in Europe characterized us as ruthless egoists contending for riches, honor, and power.
But the argument has not been one-sided. Jean-Jacques Rousseau persisted in arguing that caring for others is what makes us fully human. And even Charles Darwin posited in The Descent of Man that sympathy and cooperation where inherent to human life and the key to evolutionary success.
I had dinner in a restaurant in Colorado Springs the other night where I was attending a conference, and I glanced across the room at the bar where behind the bartender read a sign, “It’s all about me!” Nothing else, just that declaration. I remember that my brother had a cartoon framed and hanging on his office wall depicting hundreds and hundreds of penguins standing together, all looking identical, and one in the middle of the crowd is singing, “I got to be me!”
We know the desire to be unique, to stand out in a crowd, to be an individual of note. Our culture thrives on that, on celebrity and notoriety. But, selfishness leads to joylessness, and the love of God made known to us in Jesus Christ lifts that burden from us so that we can love one another, and be loved by others. And in that is joy, joy undiminished by the set-backs of the day, by misfortune and ill health.
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.” Joy not as the result of the events of the day, joy as a consequence of good fortune. But, joy that has consequences. A joy that makes a difference, that overcomes the fear of death, that unshackles us from the burden of guilt, and that frees us from isolation so that we might love and be loved. It is this joy which convinces us that the God of peace is with us. Amen.\
Philip L. Blackwell
The Chicago Temple
October 9, 2011