“Counting
It All Joy”
5.
Is This Proverb True?
Proverbs 14:13
First Presbyterian
I know that many of us come to church
on Sunday mornings to be lifted up, to find comfort for our lives, to hear a
hopeful word as we anticipate the week ahead.
Raise your hands or nod your heads if that describes at least a part of
why you are here. (Pause.) I
thought so, which is why I am a little afraid to announce our sermon text today
because it does not quite comply, at least at first, with those expectations.
But I offer it anyway because our sermon series this summer is seeking to
explore the full gamut of joy. Before
telling you what it is, though, let me say that I saw Ross Mackenzie in the
middle of the week and when I showed him our text for the morning, he looked at
it and said, “Well, that is a stunner.”
And then he paused a while, and when he spoke again he said, “But
it is true.” Okay, enough
delay. Here is today’s text on
joy:
Even
in laughter, the heart is sad,
and the end of joy is grief.
-Proverbs 14:13
It is, that text, I admit, a bit
of a downer, at least on first hearing. But
I think the text is true, too, and that is why I want to talk about it with you
for a while. At the outset, I want
to read to you two poems by that marvelous British-American poet, Denise
Levertov, to help to shed some light. The
first poem is called, simply, Web.
Intricate and untraceable
weaving and interweaving,
dark strand with light:
designed, beyond
all…contrivance,
to link, not to entrap:
elation, grief, joy, contrition, entwined;
shaking, changing,
forever
forming
transforming:
all
praise,
all praise to the
great web.
The
other Levertov poem, one of my favorites, is called Beginners:
Beginners
But we have only begun
to love the earth.
We have only begun
to imagine the fullness of life.
How could we tire of hope?
-so much is in bud.
How can desire fail?
-we have only begun
to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision
how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.
Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?
Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?
Not yet, not yet-
there is too much broken
that must be mended,
too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.
We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.
So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,
so much is in bud.
Did
you hear? We have only begun to love
the earth, only begun to imagine the fullness of life, only begun to imagine
justice and mercy, only begun to envision how it might be to live as siblings
with beast and flower, not as oppressors. There
is too much broken that must be mended, too much hurt we have done to each
other…
Even in laughter, the heart is sad,
and the end of joy is grief.
Again,
Levertov insists that life ultimately is a communal rather than a solitary
venture, and the community in question is as wide as the world.
So, even in laughter, we are cognizant of a larger reality than our own
individual experience, a reality in which there is sadness as well as laughter.
And the purpose of joy is to lead us beyond ourselves to grieve that
which must yet be mended, the breaches that must still be repaired, the world
that does not yet work for some of us any of the time and not for any of us all
of the time. Joy is no private
happiness, but our invitation into a deeper participation in the world where we
only begin to know our power “when we join our solitudes in the communion
of struggle, and where so much is in bud.”
So
our text is not, despite its first impression, a text of despair.
As I have insisted before, the insight of Walter Brueggemann, the eminent
Old Testament theologian, is a key to understanding life, our lives, and joy.
He says adamantly that “only grief permits newness,” for
grieving, when it truly is engaged, is a way of moving life forward.
Grieving does not allow us long to wallow in self-pity or paralysis.
Grieving dispels any illusions that life ever again can be what it was.
Whatever is being grieved is finished and gone and cannot ever be brought
back in the same way or form it once assumed.
Grieving is what enables us to move on to a new place or to a new way of
relating and thinking, acting and believing.
Good grieving never diminishes us but over time makes experience of life
larger, our compassion greater, our hope firmer, our hospitality warmer, our
love fuller.
Something
else that Ross said to me this week is that he no longer puts a period at the
end of his theological sentences, but a comma, and he says that, I think,
because there always is more to say, more to discover, more to experience, and
because everything is connected to everything else within the great web of life.
That surely is true with our text today.
“Even in laughter, the heart is sad, and the end of joy is grief, (comma)”…
grief, being wholly embraced and worked through, yielding new depth and wisdom
to our lives and life, gain amid the loss.
In
our laughter lies concealed the seeds of sadness.
And any commitment deep enough to lead us to joy also has within it the
capacity to cause us to grieve. Last
week we read the story of Jesus weeping at the tomb of his dear friend, Lazarus.
Lazarus and Jesus many times had shared deep laughter and their
relationship brought joy to them both. It
is why Jesus grieved when Lazarus died. Jesus
often told of the great joy he found in his relationship through the Spirit with
God, but the ministry into which the Spirit led him sometimes broke his heart
when he saw the way that people lived and the way they treated one another and
their willingness too often to settle for a shallow and superficial life.
In
our own lives, we know that the more deeply we love and the more fully we enter
into joy, the greater the potential for grief.
Through the years, I have been in the presence of couples whose laughter
turned to sadness at the news of an unfavorable diagnosis. I
have accompanied many people to the side of a grave where their joy turned into
sorrow. I have been with people who
found great joy in their work but whose job was downsized out of existence
without any warning. I have been
with people who have loved their lives but whose plaintive cry in the nursing
home is, “Why can’t I die?”
Even in laughter, the heart is sad,
and the end of joy is grief.
One of our members who knew of
today’s text sent me an email last night that read:
“I have taken to listening instead of thinking or
conversing...listening to creation/God...simply listening...today I stopped the
car and sat by the side of the road in a field of tall grass and listened to the
fields and bugs and birds and trees and air and clouds and butterflies...I saw
crickets and grasshoppers and butterflies mating and dragonflies mating...I saw
goodness and joy...the butterflies drinking nectar from the flowers, the clouds
floating on the air, the grasses dancing in the breeze, the trees seeming to
laugh...I saw tragedy, a spider attacking and eating a bug, a hawk swooping
to get a mouse. The mouse cried in surprise and fright and fight.
God is about balance apparently...sadness and grief and joy and
happiness...The Proverbs verse has set my soul to sighing...it is a gloriously
sad happy grieving beautiful awful awesome day.”
The lesson of our text, it seems
to me, is that life is one. It is
all mixed together and we all are mixed together and life is all mixed
together…and all of it is in God. That
ultimately is, I think, the joy about which Jesus was talking when he told his
disciples that most of all he wanted them to experience joy…that everything he
was telling and teaching them was so that they may know joy in their lives and
therein contribute joy to the world. Joy
finally is not a feeling of elation for which we strive, but the sense of
fulfillment that comes with living life deeply, all of it.
It is living our lives with a comma at the end of all of our sentences,
all of our days, knowing that our lives are journeys in which we constantly are
leaving and arriving, arriving and leaving, our only true home being God.
Even in
laughter, the heart is sad,
and
the end of joy is grief.
That
is life, and it is good.
Amen.
© Copyright 2007 First Presbyterian Church