Preached on June 22, 2014. My first official sermon preached as pastor of the Riverside Presbyterian Church of Desert Aire, Washington.
Scripture readings: Zephaniah 3:9-17; Luke 10:1-3, 17-24.
I remember the summer when I was
nineteen. I had just finished my studies at the local community college, and I
was gearing up for going away to a state college.
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| My faith garden; May/June 2014 |
I was nervous all summer long,
knowing that school would be different. I knew it might be a lot harder. And I
would be put together with a lot of new people. And I knew that I needed money
(a lot more money) than I had in the past. I was worried about money.
My Baci (“babcia”), my Polish
grandmother, was spending that summer with us. One morning, she was in the
kitchen cooking, as usual. And I went out to get the mail, and brought it in,
and was sorting through it on the kitchen table, and there was an official
looking letter for me.
I opened it. It was the announcement
of a scholarship that had been awarded to me. All of a sudden Baci was on top
of me. She had me in her arms, and she was hugging me and kissing me, and she
was spinning me around the kitchen, and saying, “Oh Denny! That’s so
wonderful!”
My Baci was very good at joy; much
better than I have ever been, or probably ever will be.
The joy of my Baci is a good picture
of the joy of the Lord. As I studied the scriptures for these verses, I was
reminded that there are several Hebrew words for joy.
Where Zephaniah tells us that the
Lord will rejoice over his people with singing, the word rejoice describes what
my Baci did that summer day when there was something to celebrate.
That particular word for joy and
rejoicing is “gil” or “yagil”. It means to circle, or to make a circle: like
Baci when she was making circles with me around our kitchen. Sometimes “gil” is
a dancing word.
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| More of faith garden |
Or it’s what a football player does
in the end zone when he makes a touchdown, if he’s still on his feet. It’s what
a winning team does on the field or the court, at the end of the game.
It’s what young kids do when they’re
happy. They start running in circles and jumping up and down. It is like
Snoopy’s happy dance.
Zephaniah tells us that this is the
joy that the Lord wants with his people. It’s what the Lord wants to do with
us. Deep in the heart of God is a fountain of joy that sweeps around, and
around, and around.
Jesus is God in the flesh and he shows
the same kind of joy. When the seventy-two disciples came back from their
mission journey, they shared their joy with Jesus and he shared it right back
at them. Then, in verse twenty-one, Luke tells us that Jesus was “full of joy
in the Holy Spirit”. The Greeks also had several words for joy. And this one
(agalliaomai) is the Greek match for the Hebrew-dancing-joy.
So picture Jesus among that crowd of
seventy-two, doing an ancient Hebrew dance around them, or grabbing them at
random and swinging them in circles. It isn’t a far reach to say that.
The ancient Bible joy is a physical
joy. It’s completely un-cool. Jesus has a dancing joy. In Jesus, God has real
feet like our own feet for dancing out that dancing joy.
Now I will tell you why this is
important to me. Sometimes the secret of joy is not a feeling or an emotion you
have within yourself. The secret of joy comes from knowing that you are the
light of someone else’s joy. You know that there is someone, someone who wants
to hold you and swing you around in circles.
This is the secret of a happy
church. God doesn’t only want to swing us around individually. Well, he may
want to do that as well. But his joy is for us as a whole; as a body, as a
family, as a community, as a congregation.
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| More of said garden |
I was embarrassed by being the focus
of someone else’s joy. And my moping around and worrying about money, and about
my future, looked stupid and foolish in the light of the loving joy of a person
who was much better than me.
A church or a congregation must
learn not to mope. A church must learn not to carry a burden of responsibility
too heavily; not to worry, not to be embarrassed, and maybe not to apologize
for what it doesn’t have or what it hasn’t done.
At the same time, learning to accept
the joyful love of God does not put an end to ambition. If you are convinced
that you are joyfully loved, you have more hope and ambition than ever.
The proof of being the people of God
and people of faith is to live a life that is changed because you know that you
are joyfully loved. But the proof is in knowing that your bragging rights are
not found in your own power and your own accomplishments. Your bragging rights
are found in the grace and the mercy that claim you.
That is real grace. God wants to
bring you joy, and he does it in many ways: through many reminders of his
beauty, his love, and his strength.
The strongest way God has of sharing
his joy with you is by reaching out to you from his cross.
In the letter to the Hebrews (12:2)
we are told that Jesus, “for the joy that was set before him, endured the
cross, despising the shame” that is treating the shame and pain of it as if it
were nothing, nothing at all, compared with the joy that was set before him.
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| A view from the cucumbers |
And what was the joy that Jesus saw
before him, that made it all worth while? It was the people he was going to
claim through the cross. It was you. You were the strange unspeakable joy in
Jesus’ eyes when he died on the cross.
Now in all the Greek words for joy,
the joy of the cross was not a dancing joy. It was graceful joy. There is a
word for joy that is related to grace. The word for that joy is “chara”. The
word for that grace is “charis”: “chara” and “charis”. It is the joy of the Lord to give you his
grace. It is the grace of the Lord to open your heart to his joy.
What more can we see about the
secret of joy? When the seventy-two returned with joy, they said, “Lord, even
the demons submit to us in your name.” (Luke 10:17)
Do you know what those devils like
to do to people like you and me? They like to fill us with the fear that
paralyzes us: to give us the fear that curdles our stomach; to give us the fear
that makes us run in such a panic that we lose our way. More secretly those
devils like to fill us with the fear that saddens us, depresses us, and beats down
our ability to live thankfully and hopefully.
The disciples, in their mission for
Jesus, found that speaking and working in their master’s name had the power to
make the most frightening powers of darkness run and despair. Jesus is stronger
than any devil, and you can take Jesus with you, into your greatest fears, into
your greatest paralysis, and into your greatest sadness.
You can rely upon Jesus. You can
call upon Jesus, and he will deliver you. He will be at home with you and make
you at home with him.
Jesus will overcome. He will share
his strength with you. Your circumstances may not change but what will change
is your not being alone without someone who gets joy from loving you.
The joy comes afterwards, when you
have lived to tell the tale, as we all will. It becomes part of the good news
that you can tell others about.
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| I would say that this belongs in the garden |
What else can we see about the great
secret of joy? When the disciple shared their joy at the amazing things they
were a part of, Jesus said, “I saw Satan fall like lightening from heaven.”
(Luke 10:18) That’s what Jesus saw.
But what did most other people see?
Most people only saw a bunch of untalented and untrained amateurs, spreading
out along dirt roads through little villages, who didn’t know what to expect,
or what to say or do, and most of the people who saw them were really
surprised.
The disciples were surprised too.
They were so joyful, because they were so amazed. They could represent Jesus.
They could work and speak in Jesus’ name.
The name of Jesus, here, could mean
his authority; but what is that? What is authority? When I was a kid, we would
play cops and robbers, and the cops could say, “Stop, in the name of the law.”
But those were the days of TV
westerns, and we knew that we could say that because we were the law. We were
“Lawman”. Doing something in Jesus’ name doesn’t work except to the degree that
we are committed to being Jesus, and trusting that he will always be with us
and in us. We must be Jesus-men, and Jesus-woman, and Jesus-kids, with Jesus in
us. Together, we must be the Jesus-church. We are his and he is ours. What more
can we want?
This is what those disciples had.
They were surprised, but they were learning.
They were still normal people, just
like us. And Jesus would have more than enough opportunities, in the future, to
ask them, “Where is your faith?”
“Where is your faith?” But something
great was going on here, something that truly defeated and frustrated the
Devil.
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| Standing in a better garden than my own |
It was not the power, or the
ability, or the competence, or the skill of the disciples. It was the gracious
power of Jesus in ordinary people.
You don’t know what to expect. You
don’t know what to say or do. But you are on a mission. You are someone who has
been sent here to do a job: to do lots, and lots, and lots of jobs.
And there is the power of Jesus.
There is a saying that life is what
happens to you while you are busy making other plans. I am certain that if I
have ever done any good at all in my life, it has had nothing to do with my
plans.
In a strange way, whatever good I
have done doesn’t even have anything to do with my job: because there are jobs
and jobs. There are jobs you get paid for. There are jobs that are roles in
life that you think you have, in terms of your gifts, and your abilities, and
your understanding of life.
But there are other jobs that belong
to you (to each one of us), and you and I know very little about these secret,
God-given jobs. If we are lucky, people will tell us later what we really did,
once upon a time, without our knowing it.
This is what I know. I have a job in
life that I don’t know anything about. I don’t know what I will do or say, or
what it will look like when I get to it, tomorrow, or next week, or next year.
Whatever it is, I will do it as a human being who belongs to Jesus, and who
loves Jesus, but who also needs a lot of help following Jesus. Our help comes
from others and it comes from Jesus himself.
Jesus will come through, and one way
or another, that will defeat the Devil. And that is where our joy will come
from.
Jesus says, “Do not rejoice that the
spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”
(Luke 10:20)
Now here Jesus does not say, “Wipe
that smile off your face.” He is saying, “Yes! You have a lot of things to be
joyful for. Now, let me tell you the greatest thing to give you joy. You belong
to the family that has its home place in heaven. You belong to me and my Father .”
Heaven is about so much more than
living forever. It means belonging forever, and being rejoiced over for ever.
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| It's my neighbor's garden, to which I was a contributor |
Remember that Jesus is celebrating
along with his disciples. They are right to be joyful, and so are we. Jesus
wants to celebrate with us. He wants us to be joyful.
So Jesus points to a deeper joy. The
disciples of Jesus were celebrating success and power. Jesus told them to
celebrate something much better and much more important. He said, “Celebrate
that you are written in heaven, in my book.”
Jesus’ book in heaven is about love,
and mercy, and belonging, and everlasting life. Christians who celebrate the
power of God without celebrating the mercy of God are in danger of forgetting
the secret of that power.
The power is all about mercy.
Otherwise we would never know anything about it. The people who remember the
mercy will be better at giving mercy to others: which is what the good news is
about.
The people in the villages may not
have known who Jesus was before he came to them. They still would not have
known who Jesus was if the disciples had only come through and talked about him
by name. The people in the villages knew all about Jesus because they disciples
did what Jesus did among them.
The healing and the deliverance that
the disciples brought were not only acts of power. They were acts of grace,
mercy and love. The disciples of Jesus were grace-people, mercy-people, and
love-people.
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| Neighbor Ottis, my farming partner, and his sunflowers |
When Jesus followed his disciples
into the villages where they had gone, and met the people who had met his
people, he was no stranger to them. They were not afraid of Jesus unless they
were set against him. When they saw Jesus, they received him as the master of
grace, mercy, and love.
The kingdom of God kingdom
of God
There is a great ambition in
reaching out for this. The end of moping is not the end of a great ambition.
Now that they knew the joy of Jesus, the disciples wanted to do more than ever.
It will be like the joy of my Baci,
who didn’t have one proud bone in her body. Her authority in my life had
nothing to do with power. It was only love.
Her dancing me around the kitchen
floor embarrassed me in all my teenage pride and it showed me what I was
missing. Let’s remember the joy of being rejoiced over by somebody else who
happens to be named Jesus, who is (in his very being) all the fullness of God.
Then people will see the simple dancing joy of God reaching out to them through
us.
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