Asbury First United
Caves
Plato, 500 years before Christ, described the world as a great cave, in which dim reflections of an external light sent figures and shadows dancing upon the dank cavernous walls of life.
You do not have to be greek or a philosopher or a greek philosopher to appreciate his thought. We have our own spelunking experiences, our own caves. I think we come to church, Sunday, sometimes just hoping that somehow, someone will light a birchbark torch for us, to put a little more warmth and brightness into our cave.
Do you remember the end of Tom Sawyer, when Huck and Tom disappear into such a cave? A child of ours dies, a neighbor is raped, a friend falls ill, a job falls through, a limb gives way, a theological certainty cracks and crumbles, a relationship rolls downhill faster than a barrel over Niagara, and we sit among the stalagtites and stalagmites, listening to water drip below or behind, shivering in the near dark.
Not long ago I attended a meeting, in which people I knew well and loved deeply, for some reason became--not themselves, ghosts really of their real persons. They were reticent, somber, afraid, defensive, touchy. I cannot say why. As a newcomer to that circle, I wondered, though, whether there were memories long-toothed but not forgotten that returned with the rejoining of that meeting. Memories of past things—hurts, angers, betrayals—that still hung like mold and mildew on the wet walls of that cave. It felt like we had all gone down into the earth, into a cave.
My childhood friend's father ran a slaughter house. Though we didn't go when the cutting was done, you could feel and sense the past brutality there—it hung in the air, it flew through the spirit like a bat through a cave.
Life can become one long stint of hard time in the calaboose.
Prision
St. Paul is writing to the Philippians, and so to us, from a cave. He is to be heard today, from the heart of the Roman prison, where he evidently awaits execution. The Bible records loving, wise and faithful responses to pain, hurt and failure, to exile, and to execution. Its remarkable trait is honesty about pain. Paul writes from inside a cave, Jonah in the belly of the provincial whale.
How stunning his word.
Paul, in Philippians, writes largely about joy.
Spirit
All of the New Testament, but particularly the letters of Paul and especially the Gospel of John, bear witness to the earliest church's experience of Spirit. "Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom", wrote Paul. And the Epistle of John, in a clear warning to those living in times like ours says, "test the spirits, to see whether they are of God." It is not enough to be full of spirit. Rather, the question is, which spirit? Which spirit?
Here again, the Scripture guides us. As we know people by their deeds, their fruits, so we are to recognize the footprints of the Spirit in the fruit she bestows, ripe in this spiritual season. The Spirit gives…joy.
Scripture
The good news of Jesus Christ, toward which we are summoned today, is throughout a glorious expression of joy. We trust the Bible as it records this open secret. Joy is truly native to God alone, and in God's word this joy enters our life.
Wise men from the east at last find a star and a child and they rejoice with great joy.
Common shepherds hear tidings of great joy, meant for all people, and are shaken to their boots.
Some seed falls on good ground and…you and you and you…receive the word with great joy.
A servant is faithful over a little, and is set over much, and enters…the joy of the master.
There is more joy in heaven over one who repents than over 99 who lack nothing.
Even the evening of his death, Jesus sings with joy his affection for his disciples.
And early women go to the tomb, and finding it empty are turned upside down and leave with fear and great, great joy.
Jesus Christ
Furthermore, in this passage, St Paul reminds us that the Lord is at hand. Nearby. At hand but not in hand. Absent, yet close. It is the risen Lord whom we worship, in this and every age.
You are Christians, those for whom the pattern of struggle and rest, pain and glory known in Christ Jesus forms the basis of life. You are Christians, attentive to the Spirit who bestows such ripe fruit upon us. And we are in a season of spiritual harvest.
Where I run much of the summer there are apple trees. Most years, in summer, I have only been able to enjoy their sight. This summer, though, the fragrance of ripening fruit has been covering the dirt path along the lake for some weeks. The fruit is ripe, and surprisingly early. The fruit is ripe, and surprisingly ample.
The Spirit bears this fruit, of joy, into our common life, like a baby born into an expectant family. Yours is the family of Christ.
Which is, to put it less gently, to be reminded that we are Christians, not Jesusites. That is, we are Christians, not Jesusites. We worship Christ, the risen Lord, incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. We are not enslaved, but freed. We are not Jesusites. We do not live in Palestine, nor do we feel we must. We do not wear robes and sandals (except at bedtime), nor do we feel inclined to do so. We do not travel by donkey or chariot. We do not, most of us, speak Aramaic. We do not read Hebrew. We are not in the synagogue on Saturday. We do not think that David wrote all of the Psalms, or that the world is flat, or that the Rock of Gibraltar is the end of civilization. And some of us are not celibate. We are not Jesusites.
The millennial question is not "What would Jesus do?" Rather, the question is "What does the Lord want me to do?" Where do I taste the fruit of the spirit? And blessed as we are with a mission to fulfill, it is the sun of vision, not the moon of mission, that awakens us to real life. God is giving us a vision of joy!
Surprised by Joy: Worship
Sunday can bring joy. Yes, there is routine and there is attention required. Someone asked my son a couple of years ago about worship in Rochester and he said: "Church is church." Well, yes. Surprisingly, though, joy can overtake us here. In fact, this is an hour meant for joy. In prayer, or worship, or devotion of any real kind we enter the presence of what is given us and leave behind the cloying grasp of what we make. Joy finds us here—freedom in fellowship, through all our silliness and sanctimoniousness.
Do you remember David's dance? King David had won battles, slain foes, built a kingdom, defeated both Goliath and Saul (fightings without and fears within), yet, perhaps due to his many achievements, he could reckon with their limitation. In his older age he searched for joy. Way up north, in the hill country, he found an old ark, a box, mysterious and potent. Last fall, we heard about the ark and its landlord, Obededom the Gittite. The ark still brings joy! And when David found the ark—the Presence of the Holy—he danced! He made merry! He worshipped with song and lyre and harp and tambourine and castanet and cymbal, clad only in an ephod, which lies somewhere between a napkin and a handkerchief. Since God is present, joy is in the air. Worship is the one time in the week when we don't have to celebrate ourselves.
Remember the tides of the sea that swell up along the east coast. And the twinkling stars that stand mute, seemingly motionless, light years away. The great brown fields of upstate New York. Another hand has given us our home and guided our history. Another heart speaks to yours in worship. We can say with Jeremiah, "O Lord, your word was unto me a joy!"
Surprised by Joy: Judgement
The invasion of worship by joy is nowhere near as surprising as the next invasive step in joy's march. For after worship, according to Scripture, joy inhabits judgment. Down under the happy word of joy, caused by God, is the awareness that sometime we will need to give an account for our living. Christians have never questioned this. Scripture and Life, to sides of one truth, conspire to remind us. We have exactly one life to live, one string of days, one complex of history and hope, one chance. Sometime, someday we will give an account of how we have lived.
Paul's letter points to the day of Christ toward which we run, and not in vain. You can approach any and all accounting with joy. All that is good will have its just reward. Nothing is ever as good now as it will be later, and nothing is ever as bad now as it seems. Or as Barbara Brown Taylor said this summer, "The bad news is that we do not get what we deserve. And the good news is that we do not get what we deserve. God is more than just. God is gracious." We can approach the border, every border, with a joyful anticipation.
Let us be honest that we are all equally in the dark as we approach ultimate borders.
For some years I traveled across the northern border of our nation almost every week day. I never lost completely a sense of anticipation and even dread at the border. One very cold morning, near 5am, down in the dark beyond Huntingdon Quebec, I stopped in the snow alongside a lost trucker. I lowered the window to catch his question "Ou est le frontiere?". When I had finally translated the simple sentence, "where is the border", I leaned back and haltingly replied in French, but before I could say anymore he caught my accent, or maybe it was my abysmal grammar. Sensing a common soul, and jumping for joy he said, "You speak English!" There is a surprising joyful anticipation, in faith, as we approach the border. At the border, the same language we have used for a lifetime is in use, the language of grace. We cross the same border with every confession of sin and every acceptance of pardon. We cross the same border with every awareness of idolatry and every word of forgiveness. We have crossed over before in the daylight, so that when night falls, we need not fear. We know what the Psalmist meant, we can hear it on the lips of Martin Luther King Sr at his son's burial, "Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning."
Surprised by Joy: Persecution
More surprising still, even than joy's eruption in worship and Judgment, is the presence of joy in the hearts of people persecuted. Joy abounds in the fellowship of worship, in the prospect of accounting and a s promise for the persecuted. Mt 5:11 "Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad.
This seems at first a hard word for us, partly because we do not think we know much about persecution, and partly because we doubt it as an occasion of joy. We sense masochism and recoil.
Yet, I think some of you have known more persecution than you think. Some have learned the hard way that real virtue is not always rewarded on this earth. Some have paid dearly for speaking and living a less than popular truth. Some have seen the cost of accepting a calling in life: a life with purpose is not necessarily one free of pain. Some have been exposed to the difficulty of having to choose between home and work, between friendship and honesty, between the short term and the long haul. Look back. I bet you are heartened most by the running you did with unfairly added leg weights. In the long run, there is sweet, sweet joy in choosing the narrow gate and the straight path. The altar of this church and its cross are signs of promise that when persecution comes it will also carry a kind of joy. You can read about it in Philippians, or in CS Lewis' book, Surprised by Joy, or, probably, by getting to know well the person sitting next to you in the pew.
Vision
One day, in the fullness of time, Joy will reign.
One day, in the fullness of time, says the Old Testament, the joy of the Lord will be our strength.
One day, in the fullness of time, says the New Testament, they that sow in tears shall reap in joy.
One day—and why not begin here and why not start now?—we will count it all joy when various trials beset us.
I tell you truly—and base your struggles upon it---"weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning!"
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