May you always be joyful in your union with God. I say it again: rejoice! Show a gentle attitude toward everyone. God is coming soon. Don't be anxious about life around you, but in all your prayers ask God for what you need, always asking with a thankful heart. God's peace, which is far beyond human understanding, will keep your hearts and minds safe, in union with Jesus.
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This isn’t the sermon I wrote earlier in the week. Just as the sermon was finished, news came of a horrendous shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Some of my colleagues thought that we should not light the candle of Joy today, as a way of remembering those people, including eighteen children - whose families will feel no joy this Christmas.
Others of us felt the opposite - that this is precisely the time when the candle of Joy should be lit. If we allow such things to even push us to stifle the light of faith, then the young man who did the shooting wins again. The passage from Philppians tells us to show a gentle attitude towards everyone; not to be bogged down in anxiety about life, but pray to |god for what is most needed, and pray with a thankful heart. Precisely what is needed in this tine is a message of peace, and the message that there will yet be joy, even in the face of such great and unspeakable sorrow.
Following the shootings, Mike Huckabee, former Governor of Arkansas, was interviewed on Fox News, and made this comment:
“It’s an interesting thing. We ask why there’s violence in our schools but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage? Because we’ve made it a place where we do not want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability. That we’re not just going to have to be accountable to the police, if they catch us, but we stand one day before a holy God in judgment… Maybe we ought to let [God] in on the front end and we would not have to call him to show up when it’s all said and done at the back end.”
When I heard this comment, I had quite a strong, negative response, and in fact sent a message to Mr. Huckabee suggesting that his personal political agenda had not place in this time of great tragedy and grief for these parents. I’ve had to struggle with why the reaction to him was so strong.
One reason is that Huckabee’s argument is painfully crass. The odds are that this person suffered a personality disorder, or some deep grief of his own which took him to such a place of darkness.
According to media reports, Adam Lanza killed his mother and then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he proceeded to kill 20 children and six adults before killing himself. To say that he went on this rampage because “God has been removed from our schools” is witless. A simple generic prayer at the beginning of the school day would not have prevented this young man from carrying out this act.
If he believes that removing God from schools took God’s protection from 20 children and seven adults, which resulted in their deaths, then he’s also theologically confused. Huckabee’a faith teaches that sometimes suffering and death are evidence of one’s devotion to God (see the fate of Jesus and almost every one of His disciples). Why were the victims people who had nothing to do with the offenses that so upset Huckabee? Why would anyone link the attacks to “removing God from our schools”, instead of linking indifference to the plight of the poor – a concern spoken about much more often in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament?
Was Mike Hucakbee more godly and Christian in his comments? Did his comments offer any compassion to these families? Or were they dismissed because there was no prayer every morning in that school?
The great writer C.S. Lewis was a novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland. Although raised an Anglican, he fell away from the church, and only began to deal with faith when he met the great Christian writer J.R. R. Tolkien. He held academic positions at both Oxford University, and at Cambridge University. He is best known for his fictional work, The Chronicles of Narnia, and for his non-fiction Christian writings, such as Mere Christianity, and Miracles. In 1947 Time magazine portrayed Lewis on its cover alongside a pitchforked, horned, and tailed devil. The magazine accused Lewis of heresy. His heresy, interestingly, was Christianity in a world gone awry. Lewis was a man of laughter and surprises, of jokes and joy. He had a ruddy face because he had a sunny heart. A publisher who collecting selections from Lewis’s works for a book, called it The Joyful Christian.
Yet Lewis knew pain. His wife, the American writer Joy Davidman, died a scant four years after their wedding. Lewis's book “A Grief Observed” describes his experience of bereavement. Throughout the months immediately following his wife’s death, he very candidly describes his resulting anger and bewilderment at God, his observations of his impressions of life and his world without her, and his process of moving in and out of stages of grieving and remembering her. Lewis exhibits doubt and asks fundamental questions of faith throughout the work. Because of his candid account of his grief and the doubts he voices, some of his admirers found it troubling. They were disinclined to believe that this Christian writer that they had grown to know and love could be so close to despair. They even thought that it might be a work of fiction. Others, such as Lewis’s critics, suggested that he was wisest when he was overcome with despair.
About four years ago the Atlanta Journal carried an article that which talks about depression, particularly around the holidays. Christmas is often a season of unmet expectations, because in some ways it touches the most idealized memories of our childhood; we get nostalgic over the loss of that time in our lives…over losing the ability to enter innocently into the joy of the season. The parties we thought would be great aren't; we see all sorts of ads on TV about toys and realize we can't get our kids everything they want. At Christmas dinner mom or dad gets drunk again, a family argument erupts, the car breaks down, a family member gets the flu and joy is sucked away.
Or, worse, a disturbed and violent young man takes two guns, shoots his own mother, and then goes into a school and simply begins shooting again.
But I have to say again, that it is precisely because this threatens to overwhelm us that we have to light the candle of Joy, and hold fast to that faith - to be gentle with others, to rejoice in God always. God does not cause such horrendous acts as some kind of punishment. The whole of Jesus’ life and message was that God does not behave in such a way. God has given human beings choices and will; sometimes the world around us becomes so heavy and unbearable that such atrocities can happen. God does not desire them, does not cause them.
The theme of joy surrounds the whole Christmas story, and it’s at this time that we can NOT let go of it. The angel said "I bring you good news of great joy" (Luke 2:10). Peter writes of the Jesus movement, "Though we do not see him now, we believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy" (1 Pet. 1:8). In the New Testament the word for "joy" occurs 60 times. The verb form, which means, "to rejoice" is used 72 times. If we do not see the New Testament as a book of joy, we fail to understand the message.
In our hymnbook, we have the wonderful chorus:
"You shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace;
the mountains and the hills will break forth before you,
there’ll be shouts of joy, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands."
On Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the Sundays following, we sing one of the greatest hymns of Isaac Watts. Watts was in poor health most of his life, and for the last thirty years was an invalid, unable to leave home. He could have been bitter, instead he wrote: "Joy to the world, the Lord is come, let earth receive her King”. He wrote it for Easter, but it has become such a part of the Christmas season, that it works in either. In fact, it works all the time.
There’s another one “While by the Sheep”....
While by the sheep we watched at night, glad tidings brought an angel bright.
How great our joy! Joy, joy, joy!
This gift of God we'll cherish well, that ever joy our hearts shall fill.
How great our joy! Joy, joy, joy!
And another one “Joy shall come, even to the wilderness.....”
I am sure those families in Newtown will feel as if joy has gone from the world. Our prayers go to all of them, to hold them in love. Our prayers must even go to the family of the young man, who will find no joy this Christmas. Yet for the Christian, it is Joy which is our theme in this season. Joy which comes from the knowledge of the love of God, the love which holds us in spite of ourselves, in spite of the things which happen in the world. Joy shall come, even to the wilderness......may it be so.
Sources:
1. Mars Hill Review 8 (Summer 1997) “Joy and Sehnsucht: The Laughter and Longings of C.S. Lewis” by Terry Lindvall
2. Sermon “All I Want for Christmas”, by Rev. Steve Jackson, New Song Church, 230 Elm Street, Cumming, Georgia. Dec. 2000.
3. Voices United 884 “You shall go out with joy”
4. “While by the Sheep”, Traditional German carol, Nach Friedrich von Spee.
5. Comments re: Mike Huckabee, from a blog by Peter Wehner, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Previously worked in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.
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