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On Practicing the Scales of Rejoicing
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis April 10, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Luke 24:36-43 Philippians 4:2-9
“In their joy,” reads the New Revised Standard, “they were disbelieving and still wondering,” when Jesus appeared--like a ghost according to Luke—calling them back to the reality of human existence: “Have you anything to eat?” he asks. They gave him a piece of broiled fish,” says Luke, “and he took it and ate in their presence.” With this detail, Luke means to tell us that Jesus is really alive, yet he invites us to notice so much more. For like the disciples, we are disbelieving and still wondering on the second Sunday of Eastertide; but unlike the disciples, we just may have missed the joy. That is why I want us to return to these inconceivable seconds when a band of confused and fearful men and women “believed not for joy” in the presence of their risen Lord. Theirs is a joy we cannot conjure, though the church has tried for centuries. In fact, one theologian notes that the church’s festivals, the church’s high holy days are “foreseen joys, and are therefore organized.” That was certainly and magnificently the case in the week just past! “Why are we so often glad when everything has passed off without too many damaging and annoying incidents and we can resume our customary way of life?” asks the same theologian, and in asking causes me to imagine the Vatican staff kicking back, uncorking the Chianti Classico and breathing more than a sigh of relief. Why? “Obviously,” he answers “because joy cannot be induced by any labour, however skillful or assiduous, or any organization however careful or elaborate.” Yet if we linger (instead of labor) around this brief Lukan verse which speaks of a joy unrehearsed, and if in our lingering God’s Spirit intercedes in spite of our disbelief, we may find that “our will for joy, our preparedness for it” just may be pried “wide open…in the direction of [Christ’s] unknown and even obscure” appearing. What is it that happens to our minds and hearts and spirits when, not by design but in disbelief, we are surprised through the work of God’s Spirit by joy? Consider the ordinary details of your daily human existence. Most of our lives involve a hurried movement in time toward some goal or intention or plan or desire we have staked out. The older we are, the more the years race toward those things which, when acquired or achieved, we think will make us happy: a grade or graduation; a true love or a wedding ring; a profession and then a promotion; a salary and soon a raise; a child and another and suddenly they are grown and gone; an adventure in the midst of which we anticipate the greater bliss of the next; then rest and retirement and too soon the grave. This is so for us individually and it is so for us as a church intent upon what it has been gathered to do…whereas joy depends on the One in who’s Presence we also have been born, baptized and gathered to be. Joy, says Karl Barth, arrests all this harried movement for a moment in time! The arrest may coincide with the occasion of a goal achieved, a wish fulfilled, a hope confirmed, assuming on that occasion we are more humbled than haughty. But assume, instead, the matter is out of our hands. The true joy that comes to us from outside ourselves is a joy that stops us in our tracks clean contrary to our intentions, our expectations, or our understanding. We say of these moments that “time stands still” and there we abide in a time only the poet is able to articulate…in a silence only the musician is made to fill with resounding praise…in a truth that sets the artist to proclaim in paint…in a space only the dancer can leap to claim. “Well it is,” says Barth again, “for those whose eyes and ears are open to the aesthetic side of existence! We can deepen, develop, educate and train our receptiveness and taste in this field, and if we do we shall never be at a loss for causes and objects of joy.” It is no coincidence that—before sober Protestants came on the scene—the church intuited the deep and dangerously powerful interrelation of the aesthetic and the theological: “both inherently fallible assertions from the unplumbed depths of the spirit,” says George Steiner, “jubilations against despair neither refutable nor irrefutable.” So the fresco and the Gregorian chant, the thunder of the organ and God’s grandeur proclaimed in verse. How else could the Spirit practice in us the scales of rejoicing or tutor our senses for the truth that refuses propositions? “Every day, I see or I hear/something,” the poet Mary Oliver writes, “that more or less/kills me/with delight,/that leaves me/like a needle/in the haystack/of light./It is what I was born for--/to look, to listen,/to lose myself/inside this soft world--/to instruct myself/over and over/in joy,/and acclamation./Nor am I talking/about the exceptional,/the fearful, the dreadful,/the very extravagant--/but of the ordinary,/the common, the very drab,/the daily presentations….” Of course once experienced, we want these moments to last forever: to savor the taste of the season’s first wild blueberry; to play over and over in the mind’s auditorium a cantata angelic, in that the notes bear to us a word from on high; to smell forever the fresh mown grass or the forbidden smoke of fall leaves burning; to hold the sight of sunflowers in a Tuscan field forever alert and alive or a Haitian sunrise. “Why?” asks the theologian again: “Quite simply because joy is gratitude for an effected fulfillment”…gratitude for a moment in which we are fully alive precisely because we have been called out of ourselves to be present to the world we did not earn…called out of ourselves by the God whose living Presence we cannot conjure…called out of ourselves by a moment in time which finds us disbelieving for joy. This is nothing we can effect in ourselves, but is given as a gift by the Spirit who is, even now, practicing his scales of rejoicing among us. But here, in the second place, is the paradox of the joy that is real and not conjured: it cannot be held and almost immediately changes back into anticipation and expectation. We have had a taste, a glimpse, an unrepeatable improvisation, a momentary meeting [as with the disciples on the road to Emmaus or Mary at the tomb or Peter on the beach or Thomas in the upper room] that sends us into time vulnerable and open-hearted toward the gift of joy we may only receive anew. Paul commands us to “rejoice in the Lord always” and so intends us to “hold ourselves in readiness for joy.” We obey his command by a sort of confidence that weeping may tarry for the night but joy will be given in the midst of “the ordinary, the common, the very drab, the daily presentation” of the morning. We obey his command by not merely hurrying on with our own work, but pausing in gratitude for the fleeting gift that life really is. We obey his command as those who, with the poet, may not know how to pray, but who “do know how to pay attention, how to fall down/into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,/how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,/which is what I have been doing all day./Tell me, what else should I have done?/Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?/Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?” Or to put it another way, we obey his command by looking for occasions to be grateful. Can you imagine one wild and precious life so well lived? A community so constituted? A congregation so filled with a people who together look for occasions to be grateful? This is, of course, what we cannot to do except as the Spirit intercedes for us, practicing her scales of rejoicing among us and within us. In the third place, there is the obvious truth we must confess: that we are perfectly free to close ourselves to joy, to harden ourselves against it, to be caught in the rut of life as we hurry on. “We can try to be merely busy and therefore slothful in [our] expectations….We can regard life as such a solemn matter that there is no desire for celebration. We can look upon an icy seriousness as the highest duty and virtue. [We can] on the basis of experienced disappointments [of expected betrayals]…try to establish that our only right is to bitterness.” We can live on the edge of rage and then die. Though finally the kinder and gentler judgment would be that we hurry through our days as creatures that simply seem to be clueless concerning what in the world constitutes our true joy. While we are busy amassing a little fame or a modest fortune or a few well-placed friends or our one true love, God alone knows the joy for which we were made. This is why our will for joy, our eye for occasions to be grateful “must be wide open in the direction of God’s unknown and even obscure” appearing: for he comes to us still in the one who had no form or comeliness that we should desire him; in the one who was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; in the one forsaken by God who was crucified, dead and buried. Here with the disciples we are clueless concerning our true joy, not wide open but closed to God’s obscure appearing. “They were started and terrified,” writes Luke, “and thought that they were seeing a ghost.” Nevertheless through his suffering and pain, through his rejection and death, and only then in his obscure rising do we glimpse the joy for which we were made. It is not as we had intended, but as God has determined. Our life proceeds, the occasions for our gratitude are given, under the shadow of his cross. We must not be “surprised or angry” says Barth, “that we live in this shadow, live where the light breaks forth occasionally, live as those who may only exist in expectation….” In fact “the proof of our joy [is hidden] in the fact that our capacity for [joy] shows itself to be also a capacity for suffering, a readiness to accept with reverence and gratitude and therefore with joy the mystery and wonder of the life given to us by God…”? Accept our one wild and precious life and wait for the time when our joy will be complete and what we have glimpsed or only anticipated will be fulfilled face to face. Until that day, of course, “The time is noon: when the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing/ Without even a hostile audience and the Soul endure/A silence that is neither for nor against her faith/That God’s Will will be done, That in spite of her prayers/God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.” Thanks be to God! |