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October 2, 2002

In the class I am teaching this fall we are reading The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann (St. Vladimir’s, 2000), and I have been struck once again with his references to “joy” as a theological term. He does not think “joy” is to be interpreted as “happiness” or “feeling good” or “simple euphoria.” Rather, he thinks the word contains some deeper meaning, something that combines settled confidence with gratitude and hope. Since “joy” has not always characterized the way the gospel has been mediated to me, and since so much of the modern world seems to be engaged in “joyless” pursuits, I thought I might simply offer you some quotes from Schmemann’s book as a gift this week.

The source of false religion is the inability to rejoice, or, rather, the refusal of joy, whereas joy is absolutely essential because it is without doubt the fruit of God’s presence. One cannot know that God exists and not rejoice. Only in relation to joy are the fear of God and humility correct, genuine, fruitful. Outside of joy, they become demonic, the deepest distortion of any religious experience. A religion of fear. Religion of pseudo-humility. Religion of guilt: They are all temptations, traps,—very strong indeed, not only in the world, but inside the church. Somehow “religious” people often look on joy with suspicion.”26

I think God will forgive everything except lack of joy; when we forget that God created the world and saved it. Joy is not one of the “components” of Christianity, it’s the tonality of Christianity that penetrates everything—faith and vision. Where there is no joy, Christianity becomes fear and therefore torture. We know about the fallen state of the world only because we know about its glorious creation and its salvation by Christ. The knowledge of the fallen world does not kill joy, which emanates from the world, always constantly, as a bright sorrow . . . . This world is having fun; nevertheless it is joyless because joy (different from what is called “fun”) can only be from God, only from on high—not only joy of salvation, but salvation as joy. To think—every Sunday we have a banquet with Christ, at His table, in His Kingdom; then we sink into our problems, into fear and suffering. God saved the world through joy: “ . . . you will have pain but your pain will turn into joy . . . .” (John 16:21 “When a woman is in travail, she has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world.”27)

. . . for if a man would see what I call joy, or if a man would simply love Christ—just a little, would come to Him, nothing else would be needed. If not, nothing will help. All begins with a miracle, not with conversations. I feel tired of the noise and petty intrigues that surround the church, of the absence of breathing space, of silence, of rhythm, of all that is present in the Gospel. Maybe that is why I love an empty church, where the Church speaks through silence. I love it before the service and after the service. I love everything that usually seems to be ‘in between’ (to walk on a sunny morning to work, to look at a sunset, to quietly sit a while), that which may not be important, but which alone, it seems to me, is that chink through which a mysterious ray of light shines. Only in those instances do I feel alive, turned to God; only in them is there the beating of a completely ‘other’ life.”28

April 16, 2003

A month or so ago, we read Karl Barth’s Dogmatics in Outline (Harper Torchbooks, 1959), an exposition of the Apostles’ Creed. In commenting on “The third day, he rose again from the dead,” Barth writes:

If you have heard the Easter message, you can no longer run around with a tragic face and lead the humorless existence of a man who has no hope. One thing still holds, and only this one thing is really serious, that Jesus is the Victor. A seriousness that would look back past this, like Lot’s wife, is not Christian seriousness. It may be burning behind—and truly it is burning—but we have to look not at it, but at the other fact, that we are invited and summoned to take seriously the victory of God’s glory in this man Jesus and to be joyful in him. Then we may live in thankfulness and not in fear.29

So rejoice in this Easter season, not in ignorance or denial of all the world’s miseries, but in the knowledge that as miserable as all of these no doubt are, they are not capable of doing what they want to do, that is, to separate us from the love of Christ. Jesus is Victor! That is the reason to be glad and rejoice in this day

November 6, 2003

Yesterday at staff meeting I read some words from Father Schmemann, which I would like to share with you. A leader in the Orthodox Church, Father Schmemann was often called upon to settle church squabbles and debates. This entry is dated Monday, April 10, 1978, and it expresses some of Father Schmemann’s weariness with turf battles in the church. He writes:

I feel no desire to fight, only a desire to leave (to get away) as far as possible. Not out of cowardice, but out of conviction that it is impossible to even hint at what would be the goal of such a fight. To hint at the joy (of the Gospel)—mysterious, never loud; at the beauty and humility—secret, never showy; at the goodness, never extolling itself. ‘Come to me . . . .and I will give you peace.’—How can this be reconciled with a never ending, thunderous, ‘we declare, we demand . . . .’ [While] standing on Second Ave. changing a tire in the garage, I contemplated people on the street who were going home from work with shopping bags; and earlier, a mother, with two little boys, all three in poor but so obviously festive clothes, all three lit up by the setting sun. Why do I like it so much? I, the most unsentimental and indifferent man, I want to cry. Why do I know with such certitude that I am in contact with the “ultimate,” that which gives total joy and faith, the rock against which all (my little) problems crash?30

One longs for such “unsentimental” gifts amidst our own church’s squabbles.

October 27, 2004

I have been teaching a Sunday School class recently on “Sabbath as a Way of Knowing God”. In preparing for that course, I ran across these words from Karl Barth, which I would share with you:

As we all know the minister’s Sunday involves both a program and work, yet does this mean that he has to bemoan it? Is not the minister the ideal case of the man who works joyfully on the holy day and in this very way keeps it holy? If it were toilsome and dull for ministers to do their Sunday work, how could they expect the congregation and the world to find it refreshing? More generally, we may ask whether even during the week theology is a labor operosus, a burden and anxiety, something which has to be done for professional reasons but which we should be happy to lay aside with a clear conscience. If theology as such is not a joy to the theologian, if in his [or her!] theological work, he [or she] is not genuinely free from care, what is it? Can he [or she] then abandon it on Sunday and devote himself [or herself] to all sorts of tomfoolery? Why should he [or she] not be free for theology? Fundamentally, cannot the heaviest theological working day be for him [or her] the best day of rest?31

Which is why one’s time at seminary ought to be, despite the immense amount of travel, work, and weariness involved, the most joyful time of all.

November 2, 2005

This morning at staff meeting, I read this quote from Simone Weil which I would like to share with you. She writes:

Will power, the kind that, if need be, makes us set our teeth and endure suffering, is the principal weapon of the apprentice engaged in manual work. But, contrary to the usual belief, it has practically no place in study. The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking, there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship will not even have a trade. It is the part played by joy in our studies that makes of them a preparation for the spiritual life, for desire directed toward God is the only power capable of raising the soul. Or rather, it is God alone who comes down and possesses the soul, but desire alone draws God down . . . 32

“The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.” So may we run (and breathe and study) with such joy.

February 8, 2006

In his introduction to Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir, Hope Against Hope, Clarence Brown writes of Mandelstam’s husband, Osip, that he was not only one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, but also a poet who, despite years spent in exile ending in death in one of Stalin’s gulags, sought to account for the joy he espied at the heart of life. In the introduction, Brown refers to a fragment of one of Mandelstam’s early essays in which he writes of this inexpungeable joy, concluding finally that Mandelstam found this joy in Christianity. “In an early essay on Pushkin and Scriabin, of which only fragments remain, Mandelstam was evidently trying to find the source of this joy within the terms of Christianity. Christian art, is joyous because it is free, and its art is free because of the fact of Christ’s having died to redeem the world. One need not die in art nor save the world in it, those matters having been, so to speak, attended to. What is left? The blissful responsibility to enjoy the world . . . .”33

I am not sure that a Reformed theologian could have said it better. This last week in theology class we read about what it means that “Jesus takes away our sins.” The loss we often bewail of being exposed as a sinner who seeks in fact to be God is actually a great liberation, says Karl Barth. It is a nuisance, and at bottom an “intolerable nuisance” always to be pretending to be divine. And it is very hard work. To discover that this matter has been taken out of our hands, that we are not in fact judges of ourselves or others, is liberation. “A great anxiety is lifted, the greatest of all. I can turn to other more important and more happy and more fruitful activities. I have a space and freedom for them in view of what has happened in Jesus Christ.”34

Space and freedom to “enjoy the world.” Maybe the poet Mandelstam’s joy derived from the freedom he discovered in not having to undertake the hard work of saving himself.

June 21, 2006

In one of his essays, W. H. Auden comments on the difference between classical comedy (as found, say, in the plays of Plautus and Terence) and comedy in a culture that has been influenced by the Christian faith (e.g., Shakespeare). In classical comedy, the comic figures are all lower class fools, slaves, and rascals. (If you have seen, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, you will know exactly what Auden has in mind.) The comedy comes from watching these knaves connive and fool the noble classes, deceiving them with underhanded tricks. But in the end, these rascals are found out and shown to get what they deserve. Christian comedy, on the other hand, exposes all classes and conditions of folk, especially the heroic and virtuous, to the unsettling gift of grace. And at the end of the play, no one gets what he or she deserves, though all are revealed to be recipients of grace. At the end of a classical comedy, Auden notes, the audience is laughing while those on stage are weeping. In Christian comedy, he adds, both the audience and the actors are laughing together.35

That is how forgiveness works its healing way, and gives in the end, not what we deserve but the deep, deep joy of something better, the gift of God’s grace.

October 18, 2006

More on Schmemann and joy:

To love—one’s self and others—with God’s love: How needful this is in our time when love is almost completely misunderstood. How profitable it would be to think more carefully and more deeply about the radical peculiarity of God’s love. It seems to me sometimes that the first peculiarity is cruelty. It means—mutatis mutandis—the absence of the sentimentality with which the world and Christianity have usually identified that love. In God’s love, there is no promise of earthly happiness, no concern about it. Rather, that love is totally submitted to the promise and the concern about the Kingdom of God, that is, the absolute happiness for which God has created man, to which He is calling man. Thus the first essential conflict between God’s love and the fallen human love. ‘Cut off your hand,’ ‘pluck out your eye,’ ‘leave your wife and children,’ ‘follow the narrow way,’—all of it so obviously irreconcilable with happiness in life . . .

What has Christianity lost so that the world, nurtured by Christianity, has recoiled from it and started to pass judgment over the Christian faith? Christianity has lost joy—not natural joy, not joy-optimism, not joy from earthly happiness, but Divine joy about which Christ told us that ‘no one will take your joy from you’ (John 16:22). Only 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.” The title is not meant to be facetious. Willimon knows how hard ministry can be, how exhausting are its demands, how seemingly small are our resources, how indifferent if not hostile the culture appears to be, how frustrating the church and its governing bodies and congregations often prove to be, and how weary any pastor can become. This book is not a recruiting tool for seminaries.

But neither is it a cry of despair or a rant at the impossible nature of the job. Curiously the book inspires. So many of the reasons that are given for calling it quits are exactly what reveal this impossible work to be a gift. It is when ministry turns into a project that we are tempted to “call it quits.” It is when ministry becomes a career that we burn out. It is when the impossible nature of ministry is forgotten or reduced to something that can be managed that it ceases to be a joy.

I know that ministry is hard. But it is not heavy. It becomes heavy only when we make it so, only when it becomes about our strategies for success, or more likely, our explanations for failures. No, this yoke is light. Hard but light. We are playing with house money. That is what ministry really is.

In trying to frame a response to Willimon’s book, I kept thinking of Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” We think of that hymn, rightly, as a great Reformation text and we sing it lustily at the end of October, celebrating its triumphal notes. Its lyrics constitute one of the best and most succinct statements of the Christus Victor theory of the Atonement. But the lyrics also have a great deal to say to those who are foolish enough or daring enough to take up the work of ministry. “Did we in our own strength confide, Our striving would be losing.” What makes ministry possible, not to put too fine a point on it, is the fact that “the right man is on our side, the man of God’s own choosing.” Luther knows that the most implacable foes of ministry are not the relentless demands of the work or the paucity of resources but the “principalities and powers” that are capable of making us despair of God’s work in the world, giving into the temptation to believe our self-doubts and manifold failures to be more powerful than God’s grace. Behind such despair, of course, is an even larger pride, and behind that, an even more massive amount of self-absorption from which only God can deliver us.

“Dost ask who that [Deliverer] may be? Christ Jesus, it is he; Lord Sabaoth his name, From age to age the same.” And, oh yes, lest we forget, “He must win the battle.” This “little word” is stronger than all the things that “threaten to undo us.”

So, knowing all of the reasons not to enter into this work becomes an occasion for laughter. Who did we think we were kidding? Did we think it was our virtues, our charming personalities, our expertise that was at stake here? Did we think this “career” would allow us to finish on top? Like who? The disciples? The prophets? Jesus? No, the only reason to go into this work is for the joy of it all, the dumb, stupid joy of it all, the joy that knows that in proclaiming the word, entering into the hearts of fellow pilgrims, pulling out of the treasure of the gospel what is new and old, we have been given a surpassingly marvelous gift, and are engaging mysteries beyond our capacity to state or comprehend.

Yes, the work is hard, very hard. But it is not heavy.

26. Schmemann, The Journals, 129.

27. Ibid., 137.

28. Ibid., 193.

29. Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 123.

30. Schmemann, The Journals, 193.

31. Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4, 68.

32. Weil, Waiting for God, 61.

33. Brown, Introduction to Hope Against Hope, xxii.

34. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, 234.

35. Cf. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand, 177.

36. Schmemann, The Journals, 291.

37. Pearson, The Smith of Smiths, 230.