“Created In and For Joy”    

Date: December 6, 2009

Script:  Luke 1:39-55

Revd William F. Meier    ~   First United Methodist Church, Saint Cloud, Minnesota

__________________________________________________________________

A while back I read Frederick Buechner’s account of going to Sea World in Orlando, Florida.  I would like to dig it up once again for our purposes today:

The way the show began was that at a given signal they released into the tank five or six killer whales, as we call them (it would be interesting to know what they call us), and no creatures under heaven could have looked less killerlike as they went racing around and around in circles.  What with the dazzle of the sky and sun, the beautiful young people on the platform, the soft Southern air, and the crowds all around us watching the performance with a delight matched only by what seemed the delight of the performing whales, it was as if the whole creation—men and women and beasts and sun and water and earth and sky and, for all I know, God himself—was caught up in one great, jubilant dance of unimaginable beauty.  And then, right in the midst of it, I was astonished to find that my eyes were filled with tears…

“We shed tears because we had caught a glimpse of the Peaceable Kingdom, and it had almost broken our hearts.  For a few moments we had seen Eden and been a part of the great dance that goes on at the heart of creation.  We shed tears because we were given a glimpse of the way life was created to be and is not…at the heart of darkness— there is joy unimaginable… I believe that what we saw was that joy is what we belong to.  Joy is our home, and I believe the tears that came to our eyes were more than anything else homesick tears.  God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy…we have God’s joy in our blood.”^[1]

Today we think about joy.  It is present in our Christmas Carols, our candles, our stories.  Joy was present to the point of leaping in the womb of Elizabeth, in our Gospel today.  Joy is a peculiar thing—we often think about it as happiness but they are not to be equated.  Happiness is dependent upon things going your way.  When things go well you are happy.  But the dark side to that is that things will eventually go away from you—the winds will shift…things will not go your way, and then you are unhappy. 

In contrast, joy is not dependent upon things going your way…not dependent upon circumstances…joy is not dependent upon desired outcomes.  Joy lives underneath these things.  Joy rises simply out of being alive…even in the terror and the darker moments we can experience joy.

Jesus at his last meal with his friends was not bound by that dark time to see it so.  Jesus wasn’t happy in any sense of the word.  He didn’t offer happiness to his friends anymore than he offers it to you and me.  What he offers is better than happiness.  At that meal he told them things so that, as he put it, “…my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete” (John 15:11).  Joy…genuine joy, at your last meal!  Seems like a strange reality that is reserved only for the Jesus’ of this world—the spiritual elite.  I don’t believe so.

I was with my family a few summers ago doing vigil at my father’s bedside in the Grand Marais hospital as he approached his death.  I had a phone call during those days from my friend Fr. John Husband who offered to me the phrase “thin time” to describe what we were going through.  A “thin place” is a location where the line between this world and the other or heaven is not all that clear.  Most of the time we are so busy and “grounded” in this reality that we aren’t open to the sacredness that embraces us always, yet in thin places there seem to be cracks that let through something of what is on the other side.  So a thin time was a way to think about this quiet waiting for death to come.

What he said made me begin to see the whole experience in a new light.  As a family we were so fortunate to have that time together, wrapping our heads and hearts around the reality of what we were doing, saying goodbye to him, and to be there with my father as he peacefully made it.  Even though there was an incredible sadness that weight down upon my spirit—a grief and a darkness—I was amazed to find a sustaining joy in those moments too.  Energized by other’s prayers, or simply open to the mystery of life and death, I was able not to pull back but to enter into the experience and find that I could float in it…trust it…find genuine joy in love given, gratitude to and for him…in surrender.   Joy despite the circumstances is available to us all.

I think of Mary being open to God’s plans, pondering them, and wondering & praising God for this wonderful justice-filled life coming into the world.  She had circumstances that didn’t lend themselves to happiness—an unwed teen, probably shamed by her community, indications that this new baby was going to break her heart—yet she had joy.  A joy underneath all life, seeking to dance in celebration of God’s love and grace.

Joy is remembering that we are, above all things, loved by God, and trusting that God holds it all—the sinful, the dark, the broken, the sad—and the wonderful and precious—and will love it to completion in God’s eternal will, where it joins in God’s great dance of beauty.  In this Advent, this Coming of Christ, may we find such joy and live into it, and out of it.  Amen.