“Counting It All Joy”

1. Embedded Joy

Proverbs 8:22-36

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

June 24, 2007

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 a lengthy poem, but, if you stick with it, it will, as they say in the Black preaching tradition, help to 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 Cape ,

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. Boston : Little, Brown, and Company, 1978, p. 61.)

Etty Hillesum was a young Jewish girl born in the Netherlands who died at the extermination camp at Auschwitz during World War II at the age of twenty-nine. She kept a detailed diary of her experiences during the dark days of the war and of her resulting thoughts about God, life, and the world. That amazing diary and some equally astonishing letters have been published under the title, An Interrupted Life, and it is one of the most moving books I ever have read. Hildegard talked about the Creator’s Kiss and Mary Oliver about everything throbbing with song. Etty Hillesum put the same thing this way in the midst of her experience of the holocaust atrocities: “I believe in God. And I want to be right in the thick of what people call ‘horror’ and still be able to say: Life is beautiful.”

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 Iraqi soldier, for instance, not as an enemy but as some parent’s child. 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 advent of a new and quickening 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. Oregon : White Wolf Editions, 1993, p. 68)

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? Actually, we don’t. Joy is not a commodity that can be bought or sold. It is not a quality that can be conjured up. 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)

There have been thirty or so of us who have been meeting on Thursdays at noon here at the church for the last year for what we call “Aging and Saging.” Using as our guide and text a translation of the ancient Chinese scripture called the Tao Te Ching, the second most published book in the world behind only The Bible, we have been seeking to listen to Lady Wisdom, called the Tao in this Chinese tradition, making applications to our lives and sharing personal experiences with one another toward growing wiser and more fully human. It is no coincidence that most of the participants, and I include myself, have considered the “Aging and Saging” group one of richest and most joyous experiences of their lives in the church. It is because joy is embedded in the ways of wisdom, wisdom meaning “right relationship”… being rightly related to God, each other, the world, ourselves.

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.

For joy, you see, while seeming to be a feeling, 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. Joy 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.

Amen.

Return to the Sermons and Articles Page

Return to the Sermon Archives Page