“Joyful,
Joyful, We Adore Thee”
First
Presbyterian
Series Text: “I
(Jesus) have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that
your joy may be complete.”
Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth
century artist, mystic, and theologian was fond of exclaiming that “the
entire world has been embraced by the Creator’s Kiss.”
Mary Oliver says something similar in her poem entitled Humpbacks. (It is kind of a lengthy poem, but, if you stick with it, it will, as they say in the Black preaching tradition, land the airplane on the runway…)
There is, all around us,
this country
of original fire.
You know what I mean.
The sky, after all, stops at nothing, so something
has to be holding
our bodies
in its rich and timeless stables or else
we would fly away.
Off Stellwegen
off the
the humpbacks rise. Carrying their tonnage
of barnacles and joy
they leap through the water, they nuzzle under it
like children
at play.
They sing, too.
And not for any reason
you can’t imagine.
Three of them
rise to the surface near the bow of the boat,
then dive
deeply, their huge scarred flukes
tipped to the air.
We wait, not knowing
just where it will happen; suddenly
they smash through the surface, someone begins
shouting for joy and you realize
it is yourself as they surge
upward and you see for the first time
how huge they are, as they breach,
and dive, and breach again
through the shining blue flowers
of the split water and you see them
for some unbelievable
part of a moment against the sky -
like nothing you’ve ever imagined –
like the myth of the fifth morning galloping
out of darkness, pouring
heavenward, spinning; then
they crash back under those black silks
and we all fall back
together into that wet fire, you
know what I mean.
I know a captain who has seen them
playing with seaweed, swimming
through the green islands, tossing
the slippery branches into the air.
I know a whale that will come to the boat whenever
she can, and nudge it gently along the bow
with her long flipper.
I know several lives worth living.
Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,
its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones
toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire
where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song. (italics mine)
(Mary Oliver, American Primitive.
Etty Hillesum was a young Jewish
girl born in the
Hildegard, Mary Oliver, and Etty
Hillesum all were writing, I think, about joy.
Walter Brueggemann, in my opinion the pre-eminent Old Testament
theologian of our day, says that joy “is the assurance that all of the
incongruities of life someday will be resolved.”
Better, the Islamic poet, Jalal al-Din Rumi, wrote that “God’s
joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell.
As rainwater, down into flowerbed. As
rose, up from the ground. Now it
looks like a plate of rice and fish, now a cliff covered with vines, now a horse
being saddled. It hides within
these, till one day it cracks them open.”
I take that to mean that it is through joy that we are able to see
the truth and essence of things…seeing an Afghan soldier, for instance, not as
an enemy but as some parent’s child. “The
joy of God,” Ross Mackenzie wrote in the last sermon he preached at
Chautauqua before retiring, “the joy of God hides within all (things),
cracking them open, letting the glory pop up like a jack-in-the-box.
Our friend, Angus Watkins, has a poem demonstrating joy cracking open a life beset by a tired and tiring relationship with the surprising and serendipitous inbreaking of a new or renewing love.
Song in Late Summer
I tremble to think late summer –
that period many spend resigned
to sagging bellies and the rest
shrivels like old zucchini;
that time usually assigned
to shore up what little is left,
or like squirrels fixed on their fall,
store more acorns than are needed –
I tremble to think late summer
we are finding each other
and you love to wade with me
into Shakespeare and music.
I dread to think of late summers
when couples no longer hold hands
nor stroke the hair on each other’s arm;
when one walks ahead, indifferent
to the other who trails in regret;
that time there is no more music
found in their regard for each other,
only short, empty glances. That’s why
I tremble to think late summer
we are finding each other
and you love to run with me
through lightning and hard rain.
(Angus Watkins, Gathered at the River.
Joy is the delight in the
journey toward becoming fully and truly alive and living in harmony with the
dream and heart and love of God. During
the last week of his life, Jesus gathered his disciples and said to them, “Everything
I have said to you is so that my joy may be in you, and so that your joy may be
full.” What
was the purpose of everything that Jesus did and taught the disciples?
Joy. The deep-in-the-soul
sense that life is, as Etty Hillesum said, “beautiful,” and that it
all coheres and ultimately makes sense and at its core is good and that we are
welcomed participants in it.
How do we get joy into our
lives? Well, we don’t.
“The world has been embraced by
the Creator’s Kiss,” remember. Joy
is not a commodity that can be bought or sold.
It is not a quality that can be conjured up or worked up or manufactured.
It is not even the result of favorable circumstances in our lives.
Joy is embedded in the fabric of life itself awaiting our awaking to it,
our discovery of it, our trust in it.
The Bible portrays wisdom as the key and pathway to joy. In the Proverbs passage we read today we find that Wisdom, personified in the Bible as a woman, as Sophia, as Lady Wisdom, was present with God, was a partner with God, in the creating of the world. Lady Wisdom exclaims to us,
Now, my children, listen to me: those who keep my ways
will find joy. Hear my
instruction and be wise, and do not
neglect it. The one who
listens to me will be filled with joy…
for whoever finds me finds life… (Proverbs 8:32-35)
The apostle Paul, having been
during his ministry on behalf of the gospel ridiculed, persecuted, questioned,
undermined, imprisoned, flogged, and shipwrecked, nevertheless, when in the
evening of his life he looked back through the years, said, movingly, “I
count it all joy.” Oh, if only
that could be the epitaph of all of our lives.
While seeming to be a feeling,
joy is actually a deep down inside awakening to the mystery and marvel of life
that permeates the whole creation, that is embedded in the texture and
architecture of life. It is the
sense that, as Julian of Norwich put it, “All shall be well and all shall
be well and all manner of things shall be well.”
Not because the situations and events of our lives necessarily are
favorable to us because they will not always be so, but, because we know we
belong to life and love and God in a way that will not, not ever, never, let us
go. We may not always be safe in
this life, but we are, always and finally, secure.
And thus, we, too, may count it all joy.
Amen.
Copyright © First Presbyterian
Church 2010