this joy knows that God’s love to man and to the world is not cruel; knows it because that love is part of the absolute happiness for which we are all created . . . 36
November 1, 2006
Today is All Saints Day. The Old Testament lesson to be read today is Isaiah 25:6–9, a portion of which reads: “Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces . . . ” (vs.8), an image picked up again in the Revelation of St. John the Divine, “he will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” (Rev 21:4) A strange text to be read on All Saints Day, except that this eschatological vision hints that insofar as saints are those who follow Jesus Christ, their way, while not tearless, will end with One who wipes tears away. Think about what this image is portraying. At the end of all things, we are met not by the “Almighty” or “Sovereign Lord of History,” but the loving parent who stoops to wipe away tears from a child who has hurt herself. What a vision of the end! What a vision of the saints who are gathered around the saint, Jesus Christ, and in whose presence have their tears and sorrows dried and healed.
A great Scottish pastor and hymn writer, George Matheson, wrote the hymn, “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go,” whose words may seem to some old-fashioned and full of nineteenth century piety. Still, the theology of that hymn rings deeply true. In its third verse, it knows that as much as the joy of the gospel is inseparable from the pain we often suffer, the promise of God is not vain, “that morn shall tearless be.” Tearless. Just as there is no crying in baseball, so there will be no crying in heaven. The saints are not sad and long-faced but joyful. May it be so on earth as it is in heaven.
January 20, 2010
Yesterday I got to meet my granddaughter, Corinne, for the first time. She was born the day before. She’s beautiful. She’s dainty and sweet but I suspect after a few rounds with her older brothers, she will be able to more than hold her own. I won’t go on to list all her virtues here, but I do want to relate something that I was thinking about driving back home from this visit.
In Luke 15 there are three (or 3.5) parables: “The Lost Sheep,” “The Lost Coin,” and the somewhat inaccurately named “Prodigal Son” (which includes what Robert Capon has called the “Lament of the Responsible Child.”), all of which end with an invitation to rejoice. The phrase that is used is, “Rejoice with me!” That is what the good shepherd says to his neighbors and what the woman who has found the lost coin tells “her friends and neighbors.” And of course, it is basically what the father says to his elder son, whose particular hell is that he cannot rejoice.
In one sense there is nothing that extraordinary about the birth of a child. It happens every day. On the other hand, when you see such a little one begin her first day on earth, breathing with her own lungs, sleeping on her mother’s breast, her fingers and toes just perfect, well you look at all of that in awestruck wonder and then say something like those folks in the parable: “Hey, look at this! Come and rejoice with me!”
I know that parallels are not perfect: my granddaughter was not lost, her parents did not have to go looking for her, etc. But the joy such a gift brings compels the telling of it to others. “Come, rejoice with me!”
There are plenty of reasons to be discouraged in this world and indeed, not all days and not all lives and not all places are so full of joy. Children who are born in Haiti, for example, are born into a very different world than my granddaughter. Still, I would venture to guess that even in that island that has known such misery, the birth of a child brings great joy.
What motivates us to care about the child in Haiti or support those who are seeking to relieve their pain is not unrelated to the joy we receive in the gifts God has placed in our hands, most especially the gift of another baby, whose life connects us to the little girl born here and the little girl born there. The only sin, I believe, is to refuse to rejoice, to choose to stay away from the party, to ignore the gifts in our midst. Joy is not the whole answer and cannot be used to do things that only medicine and money and labor can do, but it is what makes medicine and money and labor gifts that fill this world with hope.
A little baby teaches such things even to grandparents. Maybe that is why we babble on in such astonishment. “Come, rejoice with me!”
August 11, 2011
One of my favorite people is Sydney Smith (1771–1845), an Anglican divine, not much read today or even remarked upon, but who was and is as refreshing and delightful a companion as one could ever desire. As a young man, he wanted to be a lawyer, but his father prevailed upon him to become ordained. He submitted reluctantly, embarking on a career of parish ministry, political engagement, and intellectual endeavor remarkable by any standards. He was known in his day for being dangerously witty, often sending up the powerful or pompous and just as often defending the excluded or downtrodden. He is best-known today, I suspect, for being one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, the first or one of the first literary and critical periodicals. But what interests me most was his allergic reaction to any form of self-pity, his theological refusal to play the victim, his joy in embracing the ordinary gifts of life.
He was not a Mr. Rogersish character. He did not believe in “the power of positive thinking.” He would have been appalled at anyone proclaiming the gospel of “your best self now.” He rarely served in a parish considered fashionable or prestigious, never made bishop, never rose to high office, either in his church or in the government. (His brother rose to a very high position in the British East India Company. Sydney, who had offended some higher-ups in the Anglican communion, once said of his brother, that “he had risen as a result of his gravity, while I have fallen due to my levity.”) His only son, Douglas, an intellectually gifted young man, died in 1829, a loss that devastated his father. Sydney Smith had reason to be something less than cheerful.
But he was not. A leader in the anti-slavery movement, a proponent of Catholic emancipation and female suffrage, Sydney Smith was ahead of his time in many ways, but he never took on the mantle of an embittered prophet preaching to the incorrigible, or a self-righteous parson ashamed to be lumbered with the dullards of his own congregation.
One of my favorite quotes from Smith is contained in a letter he wrote following a visit to some puritanical sect. He wrote: “I endeavored in vain to give them more cheerful ideas of religion, to teach them that God is not a jealous, childish, merciless tyrant; that he is best served by a regular tenor of good actions—not by bad singing, ill-composed prayers and eternal apprehensions. But the luxury of false religion is to be unhappy.”37 The luxury of false religion is to be unhappy. This luxury is possible, I believe, only as a form of hopelessness. It is so easy to lose hope, not just about the world or our own failings, but about the church and the weakness of its message, the brokenness of its witness, the anger that seems to rage just below the surface of our attempts to live the Christian life.
So, it is good to be reminded that such luxury is not something the gospel ever affords. It is much poorer. Its people must exist on manna, on bread and wine, on words of grace. Yet, such poverty is always a happier thing. Not in the sense of being unremittingly upbeat, but happy in the simple confidence that knows the deep goodness of God, that knows something important, that knows that Jesus has won and the battle is no longer in doubt. To be unhappy in the face of that decisively good gift is to sin, to reject the manna that God daily provides.
Read Sydney Smith. He knows something about the deep joy that is at the heart of the gospel.
November 9, 2011
In a course I have been teaching this fall, we have been reading Will Willimon’s book, Pastor, The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry (Abingdon, 2002). In this book Willimon has a chapter entitled, “Why Some Pastors Call It Quits.”
