Psalm
126
Advent
3
December
17, 2017
William G. Carter
When
the Lord restored
the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then it was said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’
The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then it was said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’
The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.
Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like the watercourses in the Negeb.
May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.
Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.
December
is a time for Christians to sing about joy. “Joy to the World, the Lord is
come.” “O tidings of comfort and joy.” “Joyful, all ye nations, rise; join the
triumph of the skies.” “This child, now weak in infancy, our confidence and joy
shall be.” “Good Christian friends, rejoice with heart and soul and voice.” “O
come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant.”
Joy
is one of the words of the season, and it’s certainly the word for today. But
what do we know about joy?
A
few years ago, there was a million-selling book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering
and Organizing. Marie Condo, a Japanese organizing consultant, set off a
decluttering craze around the world. Her book lays down a single principle for
tidying up your house. Here it is: put your hands on everything you own, ask
yourself if it sparks joy, and if it doesn’t, thank it for its service and get
rid of it.
I
was thinking about that when I pulled out the box of broken Christmas tree
ornaments. They don’t give me joy, so out they went. Or that plastic bin of
outdoor lights where half the string of lights don’t work; I gave them away to
Mount Trashmore.
It’s
generally true that we fill our lives with a lot of stuff, and very little of
it gives us joy. I asked my wife the other day what she thought of a t-shirt
that I saw in an ad. Jamie has gotten into woodworking in a big way. The
t-shirt read, “I turn wood into things. What’s your super power?” She said, “How much is it?” I told her, and
she said, “$24.99 plus shipping for a t-shirt? Are you crazy?” It didn’t give
her much joy.
“Besides,”
she said, “I wear all of your old t-shirts anyway.” It’s true. Just the other
day, I saw her trotting around wearing the message, “So many books, so little
time.”
What
do we know about joy?
I
think we know that joy is not the same thing as happiness. Nor is it the same
as delight. All three – joy, happiness, and delight – all of them dwell in the
realm of emotions. Happiness comes and goes; we can have joy even if we are not
happy. And delight, or pleasure, is even more fickle; it lasts as long as a
Carol Burnett rerun or a tasty meal.
For
Christians, the apostle of joy was the British writer C. S. Lewis, who lived in
the middle of the last century. He said it was joy that converted him, that
surprised him and helped him become a believer. The singular characteristic of
joy, he said, it that “anyone who has experienced it will want it again” … and
would never “exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.” That’s because
“Joy is never in our power and Pleasure often it.”
He’s
talking about Joy as a spiritual power. It’s something beyond ourselves that
comes close and changes us. And when it does, we want more of that.
As he wrote to someone in a personal letter, “It jumps under one’s ribs and tickles down one’s back
and makes one forget meals and keeps one (delightedly) sleepless o’ nights. It
shocks one awake when the other puts one to sleep. My private table is one
second of joy is worth twelve hours of Pleasure.”[1]
To
put it quite simply, Joy is what happens when God comes to you, when you have a
momentary flash that Jesus has been born in you, when you have the clear and
abiding sense that the Spirit of Christ is doing something extraordinary in
you, among you, in the world.
That’s
what unlocks the Psalm that we heard a few minutes ago. Psalm 126 is all about
joy. “When the Lord restored our fortunes, we were like those who dream,” says
the poet. “When we had the sense that God was doing great things for us, our
hearts were full of laughter, our tongues shouted with joy.”
The
poet is remembering the moment – or moments – when it suddenly became clear
that God was acting on behalf of him and his people. God did not abandon any of
them. Maybe there had been trouble on earth or silence from heaven – most of us
have had our share of both – but somehow God broke through. Somehow God came to
earth. Somehow God saw the “low estate” of his people and did something about
it.
And
this brought the gift of joy.
Today
I’m thinking about my friend Betsy. We grew up in Sunday school together, and
have known one another since we were five or six years old. I think that
includes a Christmas pageant or two. Some months back, Betsy announced she was
fighting breast cancer. She has been through surgery, chemo treatments, and
lost her hair. Through the whole ordeal, she has held on with tenacious hope.
Her courage has been an inspiration to me and all our old friends.
Just
last week, it occurred to me that we hadn’t been in touch for a while. So I
sent her a message: how's it going? And there was no answer. I waited a couple
of days and there was only silence. That was pretty unsettling. I didn’t feel
very good about that.
Suddenly
on Tuesday, my phone made a noise, and there was a message from her. “”Sorry I
never responded,” she wrote. “You sent your note on one of my pajama days when
I never leave the house. But I have had my appointment in New York City, and
the doctor said, ‘No evidence of the disease.’ He feels my ten year survival
rate is 90%. After what I’ve been through, I’ll take it.”
Too
many of us have known people we loved who didn’t get that good news, and when
Betsy received it, she said, “I’ll take it.” She’s grateful to get her life
back.
“When
we got our lives back,” says the poet of Psalm 126, “we were like those who
dreamed. Our mouth was filled with laughter, our tongues with shouts of joy.”
The
Joy comes from the present memory that God has fixed something, that God restored
our lives and made them fresh and new. That’s what the Psalmist is naming, a
restoration of what he calls our “fortunes.” He’s not talking about a pile
money, in that sense of a “fortune.” Rather it’s a “good fortune,” the feeling
of well-being. It’s the restoration of relationships.
Maybe
that’s why the moment in a holiday movie where I am most likely to tear up, get
a little emotional, and feel grateful that the theater is dark so nobody can
see my crying is when something gets patched up, when something is restored.
I
always like the first “Home Alone” movie, for instance. It’s a fun film, based
on an impossible premise, but I like to see Kevin McCallister outwit those
goofy bandits. Always gets a laugh! But the touching moment is when his mom
gets home. Something broken is restored. That's what prompts the tears of joy.
I
don’t know what all of you need to have restored this Christmas. For all the
bright lights, this can be a tough time. If there are fractures in any of our
personal relationships, the pressures of the holidays make it worse. If we’ve
experienced disappointment, loss, or emotional pain, the lack of daylight adds
to the gloom. The TV, newspapers, magazines, and unwanted e-mails will push us
to spend more money than we have. (Remember that $24.99 t-shirt for my wife? I
ordered it for her yesterday.)
And
there are some who feel deeply unsettled whenever they turn on the national
news. Somebody stopped by for coffee the other day and unloaded for a while.
She said, “It feels like everything that I could count on is now coming
unglued.” The anxiety keeps her awake some nights.
That’s
why we need Psalm 126, and that’s why it is such a good fit for the season of
Advent. The psalm pushes us back to remember those astonishing moments when God
did something to restore our lives – a broken relationship was mended, a
national calamity was relieved, a Savior was born to redeem us from our worst
human impulses. That’s the invitation to a faithful memory.
And
such memory will invite us to hope. God helped us in the past, so we pray for
God to help us again. It’s because God helped us that we continue to pray.
Memory is the grounding for our hope. That is what makes hope more than mere
wishing. We hope for God to act because we remember that God has acted before.
“Restore
our fortunes, O Lord,” prays the Psalmist. “May those who sow in tears reap
with shouts of joy” . . . because this is the promise of the Gospel. And it’s
for us – and for all – even if we can’t immediately recall a prior memory of
when God drew near and became real. We have this faith community to remind us.
During the Second World War, an 18-year-old
German boy named Jürgen was drafted to serve in Hitler’s army. He was assigned
to an anti-aircraft battery in his hometown of Hamburg. The city was bombed by
the British, and Jurgen saw his fellow soldiers being incinerated in fire bombings.
He and others surrendered to the British and he was taken to a prisoner camps
in Belgium and Scotland.
Jurgen had not grown up as a Christian, but
an American chaplain gave him an Army-issue New Testament and book of
Psalms. He read the Psalms and found something he desperately
needed: hope. He became convinced that God was present with him, “even behind
the barbed wire.” And then Jurgen was transferred to a camp run by the YMCA.
They taught him basic Christian beliefs, and more than that, he experienced acceptance
and love unlike anything he had known before. As he later told a journalist, “They
treated me better than the German army.”
You see, Jurgen was Jürgen Moltmann, who would
later become one of the leading Christian theologians in the world. His
insistent message was that God is present with us in our suffering, and God is
leading us to a better future. We remember because we hope; we hope because we remember.
It was Moltmann who loved the phrase “the laughter of the redeemed.” That, he
says, is God’s protest against the ways of death. ” God is not satisfied with
the way the world is today, and he intends to make all things new.
That’s the promise of the Gospel: a whole
new life, a whole new world. And so, as we get ready for Christmas one more
time, let’s make this a time of prayer – an earnest desire for God to come
again, as God has come so many times before.
This year, as we remember the birth of Jesus,
as we recall the coming of God into our world, we pray and hope for God to be
revealed again. For there can be no greater joy, no greater memory, no greater
hope, no greater song.
Even so, come quickly, Lord!
(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.
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