Preaching: Brian Keepers

Text: Psalm 126

It had been seven years since it happened, still the wounds remained.  I could see it in his eyes.  The eyes always give it away.  And I could hear it in his voice.  The church had gone through a season of explosive growth, and then conflict came.  It hit a point of escalation, and he couldn’t take any more, so he resigned his position as the lead pastor.

“Was there a moment when you knew that you were done?”  I asked him.

He stared down into his cup of coffee, the steam rising in graceful swirls.  Then he looked up.  “I think it was the night at the dinner table when my daughter said to me, ‘Dad, you don’t laugh anymore.’   That’s when I knew something had to change.”

How long has it been since you laughed?  I mean really laughed, deep laughter, laughter flowing over from a glad heart?  Few things are more frightening than the absence of laughter.  When the laughter stops, we would be wise to take notice.  It could mean that all the joy has leaked out.
It’s ironic isn’t it, that in a world that tries to sell us happiness at every turn, how much it seems like joy is in short supply?  One of the most frequent comments I hear from people is this:  “I just want to be happy.”  Or “I just want my kids to be happy.”  But what is happiness?  And how do you know if you’ve found it?  And when you do finally find it, how do you hold on to it?  Happiness is one of those guests who never stay long enough, even though we try with all our might to persuade it otherwise.  The famous German philosopher Arther Schopenhauer once made the point that “Man is never happy, but spends his whole life striving for something to make him so.”

It is striking, then, that in Psalm 126 God’s people claim to have found happiness.  All the more astounding given, as we talked about last Sunday, that they had a history of being kicked around and enduring all kinds of hardship (see Psalm 129).  The centerpiece of Psalm 126 is this line right here: “God was wonderful to us; we are one happy people!” (The Message)

We’ve been exploring several of these Psalms of Ascents as a way to guide us in faithful discipleship—living a life of radical obedience to God.  We’ve talked about how the life of discipleship involves repentance, providence, and perseverance.  Psalm 126 gives us another word to add to our Christian vocabulary: joy.  Christian discipleship is characterized by joy.

Psalm 126 not only tells us that we can experience joy, but it shows us how we might nurture a sense of joy in the present.  And one of the first lessons we must learn is that joy is not a feeling we strive for.  It is not to be the object of our pursuits.  When we make it such, we are soon exasperated by how it turns out to be an endless pursuit, like a dog chasing its tail.  The most miserable people I know are those who are trying the hardest to be happy.   

Here’s what Psalm 126 says, and this is key to understanding joy: Joy is a byproduct of obedience to God.  It is a result of making Christ the center of our lives and following him with whole-hearted commitment.  In the words of Eugene Peterson, Joy “is not what we have to acquire in order to experience life in Christ; it is what comes to us when we are walking in the way of faith and obedience.”

In other words, if you want to experience joy, stop trying to be happy and focus instead on loving God and loving your neighbor.  The apostle Paul tells us that as we are “in Christ”, the Holy Spirit produces in us the fruit of joy.

But the kind of deep joy that is ours in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, is not simply an emotion, nor is it a kind of joy that brims with intensity (at least not all the time).  It is not even a joy that suddenly means all of our trouble and heartache instantly goes away.  Again, listen to Eugene Peterson on this key point:

“One of the most interesting and remarkable things Christians learn is that laughter does not exclude weeping.  Christian joy is not an escape from sorrow.  Pain and hardship still come, but they are unable to drive out the happiness of the redeemed….The joy comes because God knows how to wipe away tears, and in his resurrection work, create the smile of new life.  Joy is what God gives, not what we work up.  Laughter is the delight that things are working together for the good to those who love God.” 

John Calvin would whole-heartedly agree with Peterson on this point that joy does not exclude weeping. Calvin describes the joy of the Christian life this way:”This joy will be solid and full; not that believers will be entirely free from sadness, but that the ground for joy will be far greater, so that no dread, no anxiety, no grief, will swallow them up; for those to whom it has been given to glory in Christ will not be prevented, either by life, or by death, or by any distresses, from bidding defiance to sadness.”

I love those words.  In Christ, we find a ground for joy is that is far deeper and greater than any adversity we face so that even while we have moments of sadness and heartache, we also bid that sadness defiance because we know that all things are working together for our good according to God’s purposes.  Calvin goes on to say that God, by his Spirit, “drives away dread and anxiety in our hearts, and then arises that calm cheerfulness.”

Psalm 126 testifies to the “calm cheerfulness” that arises in a heart that seeks to follow God.  And it also tells us something about how we, too, may experience that “calm cheerfulness” in the present, even as we deal with hard things.  Present joy has a past and a future. 

We nurture joy in the present by remembering God’s faithfulness in the past.  This is what the psalmist is doing by recalling God’s rescue from exile.  The psalmist is not giving way to dreams of nostalga (longing for a return to “the good old days”) but remembering God’s mighty acts in Israel’s history.

Here we see a pattern common to so many of the psalms of Ascents.  We saw it in Psalm 129 last Sunday.  A life of faithful discipleship is nurtured by remembering God’s faithfulness in the past.  We are called to fill our minds with the stories of God’s past faithfulness-- the stories of Scripture and our own personal stories.  Such stories nurture a memory in us that generates hope—for we know that the God who has rescued his people in the past will not abandon us now in our time of need.

Joy builds on the past.  And joy borrows from the future.  The second half of the psalm is a prayer for God to “do it again”—to work in the future to be faithful to his promises.  Joy is nurtured by anticipation.  It expects certain things to happen. 

Two images in the psalm shape our imaginations about this future hope.  The first is “bring rain to our drought-stricken lives” (The Message).  The Negeb is the vast desert terrain that makes up the southern part of Israel.  The watercourses of the Negeb are a network of ditches carved into the soil by wind and rain erosion.   For most of the year they are empty, baked dry under the scorching sun.  But then a sudden rain comes and floods the watercourses and sets the desert ablaze with new life and blossoms.  Our lives are like that—drought stricken—and then suddenly, the long years of waiting and persevering are interrupted by a downpour of grace.

The second image is “So those who planted their crops in despair will shout hurrahs at the harvest/ so those who went off with heavy hearts will come home laughing, with armloads of blessing”(The Message).  The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like empty earth has, as every farmer knows, a time of harvest.  All suffering, all pain, all emptiness, all disappointment is seed.  So the Psalmist tells us to plant that seed in God’s promises.  Sow it in God, and he will eventually bring a crop of joy from it.

In his book, The Life You’ve Always Wanted, John Ortberg tells a story about a woman named Mabel.  Mabel was 89 years old and had been a resident at a state-run convalescent hospital for twenty-five years.  She was blind and nearly deaf, one whole side of her face discoloured and deformed because it was being eaten by cancer. 

A young seminary student named Tom Schmidt met Mabel for the first time one day when he was calling on some of the residents as a seminary assignment.  Tom took the time to learn Mabel’s story—how she had grown up on a small farm that she managed with only her mother until her mother died.  She then ran the farm alone until 1950 when her blindness and sickness sent her to a convalescent hospital.  For twenty-five years she got weaker and sicker, with constant headaches and chronic back pain.  And if that weren’t enough, then came cancer.

Tom and Mabel became good friends, and Tom visited her once a week for the next three years.  Some days he would read to her from the Bible.  On other days he would take a hymnal and sing with her, and she would know all the words of the old songs.  Often she would stop in mid-hymn and make a brief comment about lyrics she considered particularly relevant to her own situation. 

One day the question occurred to Tom, “What does Mabel have to think about—hour after hour, day after day, week after week, not even able to know if it’s day or night?”  So he asked her during one of his visits: “Mabel, what do you think about when you lay here?”

She said, “I think about my Jesus.”

Tom sat there, and thought for a moment about his own difficulty of thinking about Jesus for even five minutes.  He asked, “What do you think about Jesus?”  She replied slowly and deliberately: “I think about how good he’s been to me.  He’s been awfully good to me in my life, you know….I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied….Lots of folks wouldn’t care much for what I think.  Lots of folks would think I’m kind of old-fashioned.  But I don’t care.  I’d rather have Jesus.  He’s all the world to me.”  And then Mabel began to sing an old hymn:

Jesus is all the world to me,
My life, my joy, my all.
He is my strength from day to day,
Without him I would fall.
When I am sad, to him I go,
No other one can cheer me so.
When I am sad He makes me glad.
He’s my friend.

Lying there in that bed hour after hour, day after day, unable to move, unable to see, unable to hear, unable to talk to anyone, Mabel had received an incredible power.  She had the joy of the LORD.  That quite cheerfulness John Calvin spoke of that could not be choked out or smothered by any kind of adversity. 

In Christ, God wants to give you that joy, too.  Today, in the midst of your fear or disappointment, boredom or heartache.  By God’s grace, you can laugh again.  For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your prosperity and not for your harm, to give you a future with hope (Jer. 29).

So we join our voices with the psalmist:  And now, do it again God!  Bring rains to our drought-stricken lives / so those who planted their crops in despair / will shout hurrahs at the harvest / So those who went off with heavy hearts / will come home laughing, with armloads of blessing!

Yes, do it again, God!  Fill our mouths with laughter and our tongues with shouts of joy!

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.