April 4, 2004 - Dr. Stephen C. Lien, "A Hunger for Joy"

Our Scripture Lesson for today is from the Gospel of Luke, the 19th chapter.

I want to give some background information to help us understand Palm Sunday. Sometimes our modern understanding of these celebrations changes in church history.

If you read just the Gospel passage from Luke, you don't hear mention of palms and you don't hear that it's a Sunday. It is the Gospel of John that tells us that this is on Sunday and mentions the idea of palms being torn down and thrown in the way of Jesus as He is entering Jerusalem.

All the Gospels reference two places in the Old Testament related to this event. One is Psalm 118, a song that describes how, as the King approaches, worshipers follow behind in festal procession singing Hosanna (which means "save us!") and waving branches, while the priests pronounce the blessing: Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.

The palms were actually a symbol of nationalistic zeal--much like we saw proliferated around the United States after 9/11, with all kinds of American flags waving in everyone's yards. The palms were symbols of nationalistic zeal and of peace. A second Scripture is Zechariah, Chapter 9, verses 9-10, describing a victorious king returning from battle. But the primary warrior image is ironically reversed. Instead of a fist raised in victory, the king comes in humility. Instead of chariots and stallions, this king comes riding on a lowly donkey.

The point again is that Jesus is king, but a king of peace, not war, a king whose power comes cloaked in humility.

The gospel writers tell the story of Jesus coming into Jerusalem riding on a donkey, and people proclaiming "Hosanna, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord". If we put these images together, we have an understanding that this was a common greeting for any pilgrim who was coming to the Festival of Passover. It was basically saying "Good morning! Welcome to the festival. Have a great time."

"Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." Those were the words spoken as Jesus was coming into Jerusalem. The idea that Jesus is king is a major motif in the Gospels, but Jesus is not a king in the ordinary political sense. He is king because of who He is and the truth He speaks. The fact that the crowd waves palm branches is a clue that they misunderstand the true nature of Jesus' kingship. We need to remember a little bit more about this story, because if we take it in isolation, we only hear a very small portion of what Palm Sunday is about.

Today we begin Holy Week. Many times, we want to skip from Palm Sunday directly to Easter Sunday. But in order to really understand the joy of the empty tomb, in order to really understand the gift of life eternal, the gift of God breaking the bonds of death for humanity and releasing us from sin and giving us the gift of eternal life, we have to go through Good Friday.

We don't understand or appreciate lightness until we have been in the dark, do we? We don't understand what true joy is, until we have gone through the depth of discouragement and the abyss that we often find on the "Good Fridays" in our own lives,
the "Good Fridays" of despair and darkness. It is then that we come all the way around to Easter Sunday.

I think there are many times in our lives where we live in "Good Friday" but Sunday is coming. And today as we read about Palm Sunday, we get a foretaste of that Sunday that is coming. I invite you to follow along in Luke, Chapter 19, starting at verse 28:

28 [Jesus]. . . went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem.
29 When he drew near to Beth'phage and Bethany, at the mount that is called Olivet, he sent two of the disciples,
30 saying, "Go into the village opposite, where on entering you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever yet sat; untie it and bring it here.
31 If any one asks you, 'Why are you untying it?' you shall say this, 'The Lord has need of it.'"
32 So those who were sent went away and found it as he had told them.
33 And as they were untying the colt, its owners said to them, "Why are you untying the colt?"
34 And they said, "The Lord has need of it."
35 And they brought it to Jesus, and throwing their garments on the colt they set Jesus upon it.
36 And as he rode along, they spread their garments on the road.
37 As he was now drawing near, at the descent of the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen,
38 saying, "Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!"
39 And some of the Pharisees in the multitude said to him, "Teacher, rebuke your disciples."
40 He answered, "I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out."
(RSV)

This is the Word of the Lord, thanks be to God.

Dear Friends in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Today is Palm Sunday - it is also the end of our Lenten journey, when we have been talking about the hunger in our lives, "A Hunger for Wholeness."

Today's sermon is "A Hunger for Joy." I am convinced that there is such a deep, innate hunger in our hearts and in our lives. It is a hunger that most of us do not understand very well. We substitute a rather saccharin-like happiness for joy and we think that it counts. There is an enormous difference between joy and happiness, which is so often circumstantial. Happiness depends on whether we have the weather and the stock market being good on the same day. Then we are happy. Or if the budget balances or the kids are well behaved or if the sun is shining, then we are happy.

The Scripture doesn't note a lot about happiness by itself, but it talks to us about joy. I think there's a desperate hunger in our lives and in our world for joy. If you want evidence of that … just look at our entertainment industry.

We are so deprived and depleted of joy that many times we go to our entertainment industry to find it. But there we only find a shallow happiness. We find comedy, we find laughter or funniness, but I am talking about joy with a capital "J".

Joy is God's gift: God's spirit living, dwelling, working deeply in souls to set things right, not circumstantially, but fundamentally, eternally. Joy is being desperately in love with the God who is desperately in love with us. It is a torrid love affair with the One who created us! I have to tell you that this is something that burns in my soul, this joy thing.

If I were to have a "life verse" for me, it would be from Nehemiah 8:10:

The joy of the Lord is your strength!

For most of my life I have been on a one-person campaign to stomp out the stereotypical notion of what a Christian is and what the Christian faith is about . . . because the world thinks that Christians are dour, dull, grim, boring, life-less. They think, "Dear God, why would I want to be a Christian? There is too much fun to be had."

If I have a hero in this regard, it is probably Charles Haddon Spurgeon. He was this fiery revival preacher in England at the turn of the century, and people just flocked to him, endlessly, to hear his message. You might assume that he was really stern-faced and had a basset hound look, but he didn't. He was absolutely delightful. In fact, contrary to social convention, he introduced all kinds of humor into the tabernacle pulpit - so much so, that it became a little scandalous to his fellow clergymen. They called him aside one day, reprimanding him for all the frivolity in the pulpit. With a twinkle in his eye, he replied:

"Gentlemen, if you knew how much I hold back, you would commend me!"

I want to be known as that kind of the Christian. Infectious with the love and joy of Jesus Christ, because it is something that we desperately hunger for in our lives.

Joy is the second thing in Paul's list of fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22):

Love
Joy
Patience
Kindness

Jesus' first miracle - turning water into wine - was an indication of what his life was about.

I heard a great joke about a priest who was stopped by a cop. The priest was speeding and as the cop is looking at his license, he leans in and says, "Father, what have you been drinking? I smell alcohol on your breath." And the priest says, "I've just been drinking water." And the cop says, "Well, it smells like alcohol to me," and the priest says, "He's been doing it again!"

The world knows so little about true joy.

We try to get it through entertainment. We pay someone to make jokes, tell stories, perform dramatic actions, to sing songs. We buy the vitality of another's imagination to divert and enliven our own poor lives. Our entertainment industry is a sure sign of the depletion of joy in our culture. Eugene Peterson writes: "Society is a bored, gluttonous king employing a court jester to divert it after an overindulgent meal. But that kind of joy never penetrates our lives, never changes our basic constitution." The effects are extremely temporary-a few minutes, a few hours, a few days at most. When we run out of money, the joy trickles away.

We cannot make ourselves joyful. Joy cannot be commanded, purchased or arranged.
You see, joy is something that God gives us. Joy is the verified, repeated experience of those involved in what God is doing. It is as real as a date in history, as solid as a stratum of rock in Palestine. Joy is nurtured and lives in this history of God's love for humankind and it never ever stops.

But joy does not exclude weeping and pain and sorrow. Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that if we are joyous, we are just skating across the top of life, and nothing could be further from the truth. Joy encompasses our pain, our sorrow, the depth of our desperation at many different times in our lives. Joy is not an escape from sorrow. Pain and hardship still come, but they are unable to drive out the true joy of those whose lives belong to God.

A common but futile strategy for achieving joy is trying to eliminate things that hurt: get rid of pain by numbing the nerve ends, get rid of insecurity by eliminating risks, get rid of disappointments by depersonalizing your relationships. And then we try to lighten the boredom of such a life by buying joy in the form of vacations and entertainment.

But it doesn't work.

Walter Wangerin writes in his book:

"The difference between shallow happiness and a deep, sustaining joy is sorrow. Happiness lives where sorrow is not. When sorrow arrives, happiness dies. It can't stand pain. Joy, on the other hand, rises from sorrow and therefore can withstand all grief. Joy, by the grace of God, is the transfiguration of suffering into endurance, and of endurance into character, and of character into hope-and the hope that has become our joy does not (as happiness must for those who depend upon it) disappoint us.

Joy is what God gives, not what we work up.

This joy is not dependent on our good luck in escaping hardship. It is not dependent on our good health and avoiding pain. Christian joy is actual in the midst of pain, suffering, loneliness and misfortune." (Reliving the Passion, Walter Wangerin, Jr., © 1992)

There is a line from today's Gospel lesson from Luke. The stuffed-shirt religious people of Jesus' day were the Pharisees. When everyone was riotously having this parade and celebration, they took Jesus aside and said, basically, "Jesus, tell your disciples to put a lid on it." And look at what Jesus said:

"I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out."

Because what God was doing in Jesus was a setting the whole creation right, fundamentally, at the foundation, things were made right with God - releasing people from bondage to live to laugh to love . . . and there was joy.

This is a day of joy; true joy.

And I'd like to teach you a song to remember it by. The words are little tricky, but it goes like this:

The joy of the Lord is my strength,
The joy of the Lord is my strength,
The joy of the Lord is my strength,
The joy of the Lord is my strength,
The joy of the Lord is my strength,

That is my prayer for us as the people of God: that we will give up our joyless lives and that we will make a decision to receive the goodness of God. It isn't something that we do; it is something that we surrender to. This is good news. It is a sure thing God has already given us, because God has loved us beyond our imagination. I hope that this is truly a day of joy, and that you live with the joy of the Lord as your strength. A blessed Palm Sunday to you.

And all God's people said, "Amen!"

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