Joy Is Where We Come From

12 December 2010

Isaiah 35:1-10

Joy Is Where We Come From

A wise old sage who was asked by a novice what it had felt like to be come enlightened. The answer the old man had given at the time was, “A darn fool.” When the young man asked why, he replied, “Well,” he said, “ it was like going to great pains to break into a house by climbing a ladder and smashing a window and realizing later that the front door was open all the time.”

The images of Isaiah’s vision are of impossibilities. It is impossible for flower gardens to suddenly burst forth from the desert wilderness. As far as I know, flowers can’t sing either. There are no streams in the desert. The desert wilderness is a desert wilderness because there is no water there.

Having said that of course there will be someone who will say that there are flowers in the desert. There is even some water out there if you know where to look. Kathleen Norris wrote in her book Dakota: Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, New York, a place on the plains that I love, ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles, she asked, “But what is there to see?” The answer, of course, is nothing.

But of course the answer could just as well have been everything depending on what you are looking for. Deserts are like that too. Some will see nothing, others will see everything there. Never mind. This is not about deserts anyway. Isaiah is a prophet but Isaiah is also a poet. The desert is a metaphor for us, of course. Isaiah doesn’t care whether the desert becomes a flower garden or not. Isaiah doesn’t care if there are streams in the desert. Isaiah wants to see human despair transformed into joy. What words can describe it?

F. Buechner says that joy is what we belong to, it is where we come from in the first place and what we long for until we find it again or more likely it finds us. 

He tells of an experience where he was surprised by joy. He and his wife and daughter who was 20 at the time went to Sea World of all places in Orlando Florida. He describes the main attraction and what happened:

The way the show began was that at a given signal they released into the tank five or six killer whales, as we call them (it would be interesting to know what they call us), and no creatures under heaven could have looked less killerlike as they went racing around and around in circles. What with the dazzle of sky and sun, the beautiful young people on the platform, the soft southern air, and the crowds all around us watching the performance with a delight matched only by what seemed the delight of the performing whales, it was if the whole creation – men and women and beasts and sun and water and earth and sky and, for all I know, God himself- was caught up in one great jubilant dance of unimaginable beauty. And then, tight in the midst of it, I was astonished to find that my eyes were filled with tears. When the show was over and I turned to my wife and daughter beside me to tell them what had happened, Their answer was to say that there had been tears also in their eyes.

This might not seem like such a big deal but years later as Buechner tells it, he was at a Preacher’s Conference in Washington where the Dean of Salisbury Cathedral in England asked him to take a look at part of a sermon he had just preached a few weeks earlier. The sermon was about how he, the Dean of Salisbury, had gone to Sea World, had watched this extraordinary spectacle in the midst of which he had suddenly discovered tears in his eyes. Buechner had never spoken of his own experience.

Buechner explained it this way: I believe there is no mystery about why we shed tears. We shed tears because we had caught a glimpse of the Peaceable Kingdom, and it had almost broken our hearts. For a few moments we had seen Eden and been part of the great dance that goes on at the heart of creation. We shed tears because we were given a glimpse of the way life was created to be and is not. We had seen why it was that “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy” when the world was first made, as the book of Job describes it, and of what it was that made Saint Paul write, even when he was in prison and on his way to execution. “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say rejoice.” Buechner goes on: The world is full of darkness, but what I think we caught sight of in that tourist trap in Orlando, Florida, of all places, was that at the heart of darkness – whoever would have believed it? – there is joy unimaginable. The world does bad thing to us all, and we do bad things to the world and to each other and maybe most of all to ourselves, but in the dazzle of bright water as the glittering whales hurled themselves into the sun, I believe what we saw was that joy is what we belong to. Joy is home . . .

Joy is where we belong but more often than not we are somewhere else. A few years ago, I went to the place where the story tells it joy came to the world at Christmas. It is a place called Bethlehem. It seemed a very sad place. The joy apparently had come and gone. Joy is under arrest in Bethlehem. There is no peace there in Bethlehem. People are imprisoned in their own homes. The whole town is controlled by heavily armed checkpoints. There is much despair.  So much that one hardly dare to even think of joy as a possibility yet this is precisely what Isaiah declares. God will transform the sadness into gladness. All the broken dreams will be made whole again and life will be more than just possible. It will be life again.  It will be joy. How so?                              

When the people of Israel and the people of Palestine (and any other people who are at war with each other for that matter) understand that they need each other and that until they love each other they will never have peace. And when they realize that every time they hurt each other they hurt themselves. Peace will not come by violence, by might or fear. It will only come by love, not only the love that we do to one another but the surprising realization that we really do love each other and we didn’t know it yet. We didn’t know it because we were blinded by everything else that got in the way and made us hate each other. You have heard that an eye for an eye just leaves everyone blind.  Still love is more real than hate. Impossible? Ridiculous? I don’t know but if peace is impossible in Bethlehem then Isaiah doesn’t know what he is talking about. And if love is not possible then nothing is possible but death of course which is always possible, more than possible, is, in fact, just always. How does love overcome hate? How does life overcome death? I do not know the whole answer but I know part of it. Love overcomes hatred every time somebody loves somebody, every time somebody does an act of kindness, every time somebody speaks the truth to the lies, every time somebody admits they were wrong and seeks to make it right, every time somebody gives up his own way and listens to another way, every time somebody keeps hoping and working for something better. Every time that fear is overcome and love is offered and everything is risked again and again. Every time we awake to the eternal love and joy that holds the universe, we rise from death.  The poet e.e. cummings put in words that only a poet could:

i thank You God for most this amazing day

for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth

day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any─lifted from the no

of all nothing─human merely being

doubt unimaginable you?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Joy is a gift that is at home in our tears as in our laughter. Sometimes we don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Joy, unlike happiness, does not depend on circumstances. Joy comes in the least expected places.  It is striking that Paul rejoices in prison waiting for execution and Jesus wants his disciples to know the joy that is in him as he waits in the upper room for the soldiers to come and take him to his terrible death. It could be that somebody is trying to tell us something. (This is more than the words ‘don’t worry, be happy’ could tell us. This is all our happiness and all our sadness together. This is life itself, the life that does not die, the life of eternity, untellable light, lighting the very light, joy. )  Joy is present when our heart is broken and when our heart is healed. Joy is present in the ordinary time of everyday, perhaps the least expected place of all. Joy overwhelms fear and sees what is good and what is possible and what is real. Joy sees what the eye cannot see and hears what the ear cannot hear. Even in Bethlehem where the horror is very real there is another reality. It is the love that was born there and is there and will always be there as long as there is a there there. Joy sustains us through the worst of times. It is a surprising confidence in the midst of tragedy that all is not lost after all that there is an abiding presence that holds us whether we live or whether we die and it is a presence that is love but a love that cannot be described with the overused word love. It is like coming home to a place we had forgotten if we ever knew it yet is instantly recognized for what it is when we find it or more likely it finds us.

It is ironic perhaps that I mention two tourist destinations this morning, one representing the experience of despair and the other an experience of joy. It is a further irony that the experience could easily be reversed. It is not unheard of to experience despair in Orlando or joy in Bethlehem. Between and encompassing them both stretches a great desert wilderness. It is the desert of the human soul crying out for meaning and for salvation. How is it that we have become a world of such sadness and horror? Where is the way back? Where have all the flowers gone? Could Isaiah be right? There is joy for us. The desert will blossom and sing. Maybe the desert was the Garden of Eden all along we just couldn’t see it and maybe the flowers can sing, we just can’t hear them. Maybe there is hope for us when we don’t give up hoping. Maybe love is still possible when we are willing to go on loving. Maybe there really will be peace on earth when we continue to work for peace on earth. Maybe there will be justice when we are just. Maybe there will be forgiveness when we forgive. Maybe the impossible will be possible after all.

Lucy says to Charlie Brown: “Merry Christmas! At this time of year I think we should put aside all our differences and try to be kind.

Charlie Brown asks her, “Why does it have to be for just this time of year? Why can’t it be all year round?

To which, Lucy replies, “What are you, some kind of fanatic or something?

Relax, Lucy. We don’t have to be fanatics. The world has enough of those already. Joy will surprise us wherever we are whether we are successful and highly effective human being or a bumbling failure without a clue about what we are doing here, whether we are doing everything right or can’t seem to get anything right, whether we are feeling good or bad, happy or sad, whether we are cheerful or grouchy, strong or weak, and one day or night when we least expect it a tear will come to our eyes and before we can stop ourselves the joy will come and we will know it and we will know who we are.  (Hey, it could happen.)

There is joy at the heart of God and it is where we are from and where we are going. It is where we belong. The front door is always open. Even the flowers of the desert are singing for joy.  Can you hear them?