ITLOTC
(In The Life Of The Church)
Pentecost
Stewards of Joy
I performed my nephew’s wedding on Sunday. He was the first grandchild in our family to get married. I thought about my dad, how he would have done the wedding if he was still alive, and then I also thought that I was grateful to pinch hit, especially since this nephew is my godson and I held him in a small church in northern Minnesota when he was a few weeks old during his dedication. What a great honor to get to move through one person’s life that completely.
I was thinking after the wedding how much I enjoyed doing it for all of the reasons I just named. It was the wedding I have most enjoyed doing. This sent me into reflecting. I remembered reading in Eugene Peterson’s memoir The Pastor that he said his favorite things to do as a pastor were funerals and baptism. Death and the Christian death before death. It seems almost morbid, but now that I'm a pastor - and have been at it for 13 years - I think I get it. The preference has to do with the difference between joy and pain and what they elicit from us. A few pastors I know don’t particularly like doing weddings. Maybe that’s overstated. But when compared to other monumental life moments they aren’t at the top of the list. I think I know why. Hardly anyone cares what the pastor says at a wedding. There are so many other spectacles to distract from the spiritual nature of the ceremony. Weddings more than any other ecclesiastical function compete with cultural notions for meaning. This is what joy can take from us - meaning.
Now I should make clear that I’m wholeheartedly for joy. Joy has to be a major component of the telos of Christian faith. I’m reminded of Hebrews 12:2, “it was for the joy set before Him, that Jesus endured the cross, despising shame.”
Pain demands something tender from us. Not always. Sometimes pain makes people angry and they persist in that anger and never do anything productive with it and it destroys their life. But pain, and research will corroborate this, very often elicits the most attractive features in a person - tenderness, compassion to name a few. C.S. Lewis said, “Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” I always share that quote with hesitation because it’s not a large jump from that to some dumb dumb blaming a natural disastor or global pandemic on the sin the of a few individuals, but I think the sentiment is true nonetheless. Still even knowing this, I don’t wish for pain. I still wish for and seek joy.
Freddy Buechner wrote the best article I've ever read on pain and about stewarding our pain. I’ve thought a lot about that and joy and weddings and funerals and what they do to us . This has all been subservient to a larger theological problem. Namely that we lack the imagination we need for the eschaton or even heaven. We really can’t conceive of an eternity without pain or a story without a conflict. We are, by nature, overcomers. without resistance muscles atrophy. When things get too easy we get bored. So what do we do with a world full of all joy? Where the happy ending is the beginning? Where there’s only weddings and no funerals?
Those are hard questions. I’ve said too many times in sermons that Einstein was a genius for his conceptual contribution in coming up with the theory of General relativity. the math had been there to prove it for 50 years. What the scientific community needed was someone with the imagination to think a thought never thunk before. To see the world (or in this case the universe) as we had never heard of or imagined before. The joy of the world is like that. So I’d like you to do some homework for me. What does it mean to be a steward of joy? How can we responsibly share, sustain and live in joy? How can we be attentive to the spiritual formation happening at birthday parties, weddings and anniversaries in the same way we show up to funerals and divorces?
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