Sorrow and Joy

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Bulletin

1. Mix of joy and sorrow

Dropping a student off at college creates a mix of sorrow and joy. Seeing the car pull out of the driveway as a child or grandchild heads off into the world. You know it’s meant to be and maybe you even know joy will follow, but first there is a clear measure of pain, loss.  Pain of saying goodbye.  

Jesus is always coming and going in John, he stays on the move. He descends from and ascends to God; he crosses territories of land and the human soul. He has a way of providing home, where he is. For all restless souls, he provides belonging.

But the disciples are still restless, especially with his talk of leaving them; of the time when they will no longer see him.

While he acknowledges their grief, he sees what they cannot see through the tears that cloud their eyes: joy awaits them.

The disciples’ pain is real.

Jesus does not tell them to snap out of it, ignore the pain, or pretend grief does not exist. He tells them plainly, “You have pain now.” (16:22)

And that honest acknowledgment allows us to attend to our own grief and sorrow. Over 10 million Ukrainians, about ¼ of the country’s population have been uprooted from their homes in the past month. Of the 10 million, about 7 million have moved to other parts of Ukraine, while more than 3.5 million are fleeing from country to country, with no place to call home. There are people fleeing atrocities, battling poverty, drought, and disease around the globe and in our own country, in our own neighborhoods. There are countless children who struggle with abandonment and search for attention, love and care; home. Perhaps we need to sit with grief for a while, a grief that belongs to us because it affects us directly or indirectly.

Grief can cause disconnect and confusion. It can leave you halted and overwhelmed. The disciples hear his language of leaving and they sit in stunned silence. What are they feeling, thinking?

Jesus tells them that the hour is coming, indeed it has come when you all will be scattered, he will be taken, and they will know sorrow.

That kind of honesty is essential. Tobias Wolff expresses this in the forward to a collection of short stories called The Vintage Book of American Short Stories:

As it happens, many of the stories in this book confront difficult material: violence, sickness, alcoholism, sexual exploitation, marital breakup. Well, so do we. I have never been able to understand the complaint that a story is “depressing” because of its subject matter. What depresses me are stories that don’t seem to know these things go on, or hide them in resolute chipper-ness; “witty” stories, in which every problem is an occasion for a joke, “upbeat” stories that flog you with transcendence. Please. We’re grown-ups now, we get to stay in the kitchen when other grown-ups talk… Far from being depressed, my own reaction to stories like these is exhilaration, both at the honesty and the art. The art gives shape to what the honesty discovers, allows us to face what in truth we were already afraid of anyway. It lets us know we’re not alone.”  

You will have pain.

2. Joy

But your sorrow will turn to joy. Can they imagine joy on the other side of their pain?

His earthly life, which lasted only a little while would come to an end. They would feel the pain and did feel the pain of letting go and seeing their Savior crucified. But Jesus continues that he will soon see them again. By leaving, He would send the Holy Spirit as their guide, their advocate.

Now they see as through a glass dimly, but then face to face. They have known in part… I Corinthians 13:12

Their pain and sorrow will be turned into complete and everlasting joy.

In the metaphor that Jesus uses to describe this transformation from sorrow to joy, he explains that a woman in labor experiences pain. However, when the child is born, something happens to that pain. With the child in her arms, she knows the pain of what she has impossibly been through, but she holds her child in her arms. The anguish somehow turns to joy. (16:21). He does not say that her pain was not real. He says the pain will turn to joy. Joy and pain mingle in the room together.

And when that child grows and is launched into the world, that parent will again feel the sorrow of letting go, but the joyful pride in watching that child bound into life and stretch into adulthood.

When we make room for sorrow, we make room for joy.

When we make room for Good Friday, we are making room for Easter.

It’s all happening because, with Jesus’ death and resurrection, a new world – the new world is being born. He’s not saying, there’s trouble coming, and it will be all right afterwards. He’s saying, I’m making all things new, a new world is really coming to birth at the foot of the cross, and then in the Easter garden.

Far from being opposites, lament and joy belong together. The same is true of truth and hope.

Lament doesn’t keep us from joy – it is part of the journey back to joy. And the harsh truth of loss and death does not preclude hope. It’s our ability to speak our (sometimes painful) truth that makes way for the hope. We can hope boldly because, as Jesus teaches the disciples here, the final word with God is never ultimate separation, but eternal connection, however unimaginable it might seem to us at the moment.

So we ask Jesus to help us face the difficulties of life with honesty about ourselves, the people in our lives, and the conditions of the world. We ask for courage to set out into the world anyway. We ask for peace from the assurance that we are never alone.

I just finished another Kristin Hannah novel, Winter Garden. Writing about the mother in the story:

“And if there was a shadow of sadness in her eyes, a memory… it was to be expected, and it was softened by the joy in her voice. And maybe that was how it was supposed to be, how life unfolded when you lived it long enough. Joy and sadness were part of the package; the trick, perhaps, was to let yourself feel all of it, but to hold on to the joy just a little more tightly because you never knew when a strong heart could just give out.”

So tell me of those times when a strong heart just gives out, when the struggle, the courage, the hope, just gives out. In those times, it is not about your resolve, your insight, or your stamina. It is in and for all those times that Jesus is telling us, your pain will turn in to joy, and that joy is not about happiness, or circumstances. That joy is complete in you because of One who would not leave us alone in our sorrow, alone in our grief, alone in our sin. That One would make sure despair does not have the final word. That One would make sure that death would not even have the last word. I will see you again. I will come to you, I will stay with you.

Jesus reveals to the disciples that they will all leave him alone. But that is not the last word of his story. Or theirs. Or ours. “Yet I am not alone because the Father is with me. I have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you will face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world!” (16:32-33).

The world that will hate, persecute and ridicule Jesus’ followers has been not sidelined, not downgraded, but defeated. When Jesus took upon himself the weight of the world’s sin; when he burst through death itself into God’s new creation; and when he decisively challenged the power of corruption, decay and death in healing the cripple, the man born blind and Lazarus, in and through all these things, he was not just proving a point but winning a victory. Not just setting an example but establishing a new reality – the way everything will one day be.

 It was for the joy set before him that Jesus endured the cross, despising its shame and sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty. (Hebrews 12:1-3)

3. No one will take your joy

“You will have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”

I will see you. He will see us, and no one will take this joy from us.

They will know pain, anguish. They will confront their own sorrow and the sorrow of the world. They will contend with forces of evil that belittle and divide and do such damage to so many. But Jesus is telling them that God is bringing new life into the world. The ascendency of evil will be over in a little while, but sorrow’s transformation of joy in the resurrection will last forever.

In the midst of evil, in the midst of atrocities inflicted by Russia, there is pain. But evil will not ultimately prevail.

He calls them to active hoping. He shares the promise of unending joy and then charges them to be about the work of prayer. Ask, and you will receive. In my name, in my mission. As anything of the father in my mission, and the Father will give it to you. 

Be about the work of simplifying life so there is room for honest grief and complete joy.

Be about the work of standing with and caring for the refugee, the lost and lonely.

You will have pain, but your pain will turn to joy.

Psalm 30

You have turned for me my mourning into dancing;
     you have loosed my sackcloth
     and clothed me with gladness,
that my glory may sing your praise and not be silent.
     O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever!

Both in our joy and in our sorrow, God is with us.

 Rilke

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

 These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like a flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

 Give me your hand.”

John 16:16-24

“A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me.” Then some of his disciples said to one another, “What does he mean by saying to us, ‘A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me’; and ‘Because I am going to the Father’?” They said, “What does he mean by this ‘a little while’? We do not know what he is talking about.” Jesus knew that they wanted to ask him, so he said to them, “Are you discussing among yourselves what I meant when I said, ‘A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me’? Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy. When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you. On that day you will ask nothing of me. Very truly, I tell you, if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete.