Chris Taylor’s Sermon –10/19/08
God’s Gift of Joy
Psalm 99
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
One of the great experiences of my life took place about sixteen years ago. I was on sabbatical, finishing work on my dissertation. I was out on Cape Cod, and it was the middle of winter – the kind of cold, grey, damp winter that is typical of the Cape. Most of all, I was alone. Bonnie and the kids had stayed back in Cleveland so the kids could continue with their school. With no interruptions, I was able to get all kinds of work done, but I was also pretty lonely. We spoke every day, but hearing their voices made me miss my family even more.
One night – and this was around the third or fourth week of my sabbatical – the doorbell rang. It was pouring outside. It had been raining all day and it was an absolutely miserable evening. I opened the door and to my complete surprise found Bonnie standing there, soaking wet. I will never forget the surge of sheer joy that seemed to sweep through every part of my being at the sight of her. It was, far and away, one of the happiest, most joyful moments of my entire life. And traces of that joy stayed with me through the weekend until it was time for Bonnie to make her way home.
When we think of joy, that’s the kind of feeling that usually comes to mind. It is seeing your bride walking towards you down the aisle. It is that moment when you finally hold your new-born child. At a lesser level, it is getting a hole in one, or seeing the Steelers win the Super Bowl. That feeling of joy is one of life’s great blessings. You never forget it. It is a mountain-top moment when, for a brief instant, everything seems to come together and your life is filled with light and happiness.
The only problem with that kind of joy is that it doesn’t last. As joyful as I felt on that Friday when Bonnie showed up, I felt something very different three days later when it was time for her to leave. You get the hole in one, but then the next day or a few days later you are hitting five strokes over your handicap. The Steelers win the Super Bowl, but a few months later their quarterback is in a motorcycle accident. Two months after that he is getting an emergency appendectomy. The season that follows can only be described as mediocre.
The issue with this kind of joy, as wonderful as it is, is that it is so dependent upon our circumstances. What we discover is that the same world that brings these beautiful children into our lives, is also a world of car accidents and cancer, and the kind of random violence that changes everything in a single moment.
But what if we could find a joy that lasts – a joy that isn’t dependent on our circumstances but is grounded on something sure and lasting? What if there was a kind of joy out there – a quiet, steady joy – that you and I could know even in the roughest times?
That is the joy that Paul is talking about here in our text, this morning. It is the joy these Christians in Thessalonica knew even – and this is the amazing thing – even as they were being persecuted. Look again at the sixth verse of our text, “in spite of persecution you received the word with joy.” In spite of all the hardship they were facing, in spite of being socially ostracized and seeing their businesses and their livelihoods jeopardized, still, these Christians received the word with joy.
People, that’s a kind of joy that doesn’t go away. It is a joy that lasts, and Scripture tells us that through Jesus it is a joy that is available to every one of us no matter what our circumstances.
There is a story making the rounds, you may have heard it, about a piece on television’s 20/20. Several years before our invasion of Afghanistan, Barbara Walters had taken a look at gender roles in Kabul. She had found, among other things, that it was the custom there for women to walk about five paces behind their husbands – a sign and a constant reminder of the male’s dominant place in that society.
Not long ago Walters returned to Kabul, curious to see what changes might have taken place since the Taliban had been forced out of power. To her surprise she found that women were not only continuing to walk behind their husbands but that now, if anything they were even further behind than before and seemed perfectly happy about it. Puzzled, Walters approached a woman and asked her why she seemed okay with this custom when they had once tried so desperately to change it. The woman looked Walters right in the eye and without hesitation offered just two words, “land mines.”
Well, that’s one kind of “joy in the journey.” There are some times in which it is kind of nice not to have to be in front; times when it is a great blessing not to have to put our own lives on the line.
This is what is so remarkable about this text: these Thessalonians were doing precisely that. They were out in front. They were putting everything at risk. And they were doing it for the sake of a faith that they might just as easily have ignored or renounced or pretended not to have. What does it tell you about their faith that they refused to do that? That in spite of persecution, they wouldn’t turn away from it?
And the result? The result, Paul tells us, was joy. Joy inspired by the Holy Spirit. Joy breathed into them by God’s own presence. Clearly, this joy wasn’t dependent upon their circumstances. It wasn’t the world which gave this joy to them. And if it wasn’t the world that it gave it to them, then the world couldn’t take it away. This joy, rather, was grounded in the Gospel. It was a joy that lasts. And our text tells us that the key for them was in receiving this “word.” The key was Jesus Christ.
“You became imitators of us and of the Lord,” Paul writes. Imitators do the same things. Imitators walk in the same footsteps. They make the very conscious choice to shape their lives after the pattern of their model. That’s what these Christians in Thessalonica were doing. The result for them was threefold.
First, walking in Jesus’ footsteps they embraced a faith that there is, indeed, a God and that this God is actively involved in our lives and in our world. That’s the God revealed in the person of Jesus. And if God is there and if God is active that means we aren’t here as the result of some great, cosmic accident. We are here for a reason. We are the product of God’s own choosing. Walking in Jesus’ footsteps, they found a faith that gave their lives both purpose and meaning.
Second, they found hope. This isn’t a hope of this world – a hope for our careers, or our families, or our home; a hope that may or may not come to pass. This hope, rather, is of God. It is God’s promise of all eternity. It is the sure knowledge that the Kingdom of God is wrapped all around this present moment. Our lives in this world may be very brief, but here is the assurance that this life isn’t all there is. That when our lives do come to their end as they inevitably will, there is this whole other life that lies beyond this one – a life that extends forever. And even better, this new life will be lived in the presence of our Creator, and in fellowship with all who have gone before. This is real hope! This is hope that can make a difference!
Finally, walking in Jesus’ footsteps they encountered Christ’s call to love. There is no such thing as hating someone in Jesus’ name. There is no place here for being mean or spiteful because we might happen to disagree. God’s very nature is love. To choose anything else, to hang on to bitterness or to anger, is to choose a life outside of God. It is in God and in God’s love that we find real joy. It is there, in this movement out beyond ourselves towards our family and our neighbors and our co-workers, that we find a joy unlike anything we’ve ever known before.
Faith, hope, love. These are the three great Christian virtues. They are what these Thessalonians discovered as they embraced the word, verse 3, “your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.” Today, we know that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen. In much the same way, joy has its own constituent elements. There is a joy of this world which is made up or right circumstance and right timing. And then there is that joy which is of God. On the surface the two might look very similar. But this joy, the joy of the Lord, is composed of faith and hope and love. And unlike the first, there is nothing in this world that can ever take that kind of joy away from us.
Think about those women in Afghanistan, carefully watching the footsteps of the men in front of them so that they can place their steps in precisely the same spots and so avoid the mines that have been scattered across the region. Following in Jesus’ footsteps is a lot like that. Only we don’t follow Jesus out of fear, but out of love. And we don’t follow Jesus because we have to, but because we are utterly convinced that it is there, in Jesus’ footsteps, that we are going to experience life at its very best… and there, in his steps, that we will discover a joy that lasts.
.