Community Church Sermons
The Third Sunday in Advent – December 15, 2002
“Those Who SOW In Tears…”
Psalm 126
Today is Joy Sunday. On the third Sunday of Advent every year, we celebrate this strange but wonderful shift in the mood of the season. The Advent wait always begins in a spirit of mourning – being aware of the brokenness of our lives and our world, and looking for the dawn of hope and peace. Those first two candles on the Advent wreath are purple which is the color of mourning.
But today, the color changes! The third candle on the Advent wreath is pink or rose colored!
It is the candle of joy!
Now, I want you to think about this for a moment. What a strange and puzzling thing this is! Anybody who has ever gone through a time when their heart was broken, their life shattered, their world turned upside down can understand what it means to light candles of hope and peace in search of the day when it won’t hurt so much anymore.
But to light a candle of joy?
What a strange thing for sad people to do!
In fact, if you’re sitting here today bearing some scarf of sorrow around your shoulders, you probably feel as far from joy as you can possible get. The death of a loved one, the terror in the world today, the diagnosis of serious illness, the breaking up of a relationship, a life lived in poverty, the experience of racism or any of the other million-and-one kinds of injustice…hardly make us feel like lighting a candle of joy!
But that is what we Christians do today in the face of life as it really is. We light the Advent candle of joy! It is, I think, one of the truly wonderful gifts that Christmas gives to us. It is a form of therapy. It is a way to healing. It is good medicine!
So to anyone here today who is going through the dark times of life, I want to invite you to come and learn to light a candle…of joy!
Did you hear the story told in the song of Psalm 126? It’s a story about God and the people of Israel as they faced a desperate situation. The nation had been attacked and conquered by the Babylonians. The beautiful temple in Jerusalem was burned down. The walls of the city were crushed. The forests all around were chopped down and the wood burned so that Jerusalem would never be rebuilt again. And many of the people were dragged off to live in captivity.
Now I thought I had problems! You know, whenever I go to Wal-Mart, I always pick the checkout line where the person up ahead doesn’t have a pricetag on the thing they’re buying, and no one between here and Arkansas can figure out what the price ought to be! And that gets me upset! But actually, beyond the little daily aggravations of life, I do know a little bit about living in times of exile. When our grandbaby Ryan was born 9-weeks early, with all the potential problems and dangers involved with a premature birth, we were like captives to the fear and worry. When Sandy and I have gone through rough times in our marriage, we’ve borne the pain that is so large it keeps you from enjoying the rest of life. Facing some health problems as we are in our family right now, we have become aware that life has changed for us in many ways, and we are facing new challenges of growing old, and contending with the fact of our mortality. And that is a difficult road to journey along. Even trying to live as Christian people who anchor their lives in God’s grace, we sometimes feel like we are cut adrift from large parts of the religious community that prefer to build their faith upon God’s judgment. Life has come to us in ways that have sometimes led us to places we don’t really want to be. We know a little about living in exile. And so do you.
So this song in Psalm 126 is about people like us. And it tells us something wonderful about God!
The first verse says, “When the Lord brought back the captives to Zion, we were like people who dreamed!” That’s a pretty joyful image! It must have been like the day the prisoners of war came home from Vietnam. Or like those times on TV when they show brothers and sisters reunited after being separated at birth. You can almost imagine the joy of the people the day the exiles returned home to Jerusalem. But as joyful as the picture may be, that verse is not a very good translation of the Hebrew words. The original language is even better! Here is a more accurate rendering of the first verse:
“When the Lord DETERMINED THE DESTINY FOR ZION….we were like people who dreamed!”
When the Lord DETERMINED THE DESTINY…!
You see, at some point in time, as the people wept and hurt and experienced the sorrows of their exile, an UNSEEN DECISION WAS REACHED! Far beyond their own ability to see, or hear, or know, or perceive as they experienced the darkness of life, A DETERMINATION WAS MADE!
The Lord made a decision about the DESTINY of the people.
And here is the fourfold decision God made:
They will be brought back to Zion.
Their tears will be supplanted by joy.
And they will return with arms overflowing with an
abundant harvest.
So the psalmist sings, “When the Lord DETERMINED THE DESTINY for Zion, we were like people who dreamed! Our mouths were filled with laughter, and our tongues with songs of joy!”
And that’s why we light the candle of joy today!
Because, you see, God has made a DECISION about you! God has made a decision about your life! God has MADE A DETERMINATION ABOUT YOUR DESTINY!
In the face of all you are going through - in the midst of your exile because of your loss, your bad decision, your illness, your frailty, your disappointment, your tragedy – in the middle of your life with all it’s up’s and down’s right now, GOD HAS MADE A DECISION ABOUT YOU!
You will be brought back to Zion,
the place where life is full and all God’s promises are kept. God has
decided that for you! You will have returned to you all that you’ve lost –
your loved ones, your health, your strength, your youth, your freedom. That’s
God’s decision for you! Your tears will give way to joy and laughter. God
has already decided that! Your arms will be filled to overflowing with the
gifts of life and the blessings of God. It is the decision of God!
God has made a DETERMINATION about your destiny!
But, of course, you don’t have to accept it, if you don’t want to. God never forces anyone to receive God’s goodwill, and God’s good gifts.
So the song of Psalm 126 tells us how we can respond to God’s decision. In a sense, it’s like learning how to light the candle of joy in your own life! Would you like to learn how to do that? Well, listen to the lyrics of the Psalm:
“Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.”
You know, we often misinterpret this verse. A friend of mine once faced the frightening reality of testicular cancer. Things looked pretty grim. Life became awfully dark. He was very scared. And into the middle of this terrible exile of testicular cancer stepped a young minister who didn’t quite know what he was doing, who thought he was bringing my friend some comfort by quoting this verse and not explaining it.
“Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.”
Sort of sounds like a promise that sadness always leads to joy. Years later, while reminiscing about the experience, this friend told me that what he got out of that message was a rather pathetic formula that seemed to be saying that bad things always turn to good things. In other words, be glad you have testicular cancer because it will bring you joy! And you know, there are a lot of religious people out there who believe that suffering is a good thing.
But that wasn’t a message that helped my friend. In fact it really turned him off, and for a long time, he couldn’t even look God in the eye. That was a gospel that sounded to him an awful lot like Bobby McFerrin’s very popular song on the radio in those days:
Here is a little song I wrote,
You might want to sing it note
for note,
Don’t worry, be happy!
In every life we have some
trouble,
When you worry you make it
double,
Don’t worry, be happy!
Not what you want to hear when you’re facing testicular cancer. That’s not a song that helps you when all of a sudden your partner dies and you’re left to live life all alone. I would find it very difficult to sing a song like that if my child was seriously ill, or I was a single mother trying to support three children, or I didn’t have the money to pay the electric bill in the cold winter months. I don’t know about you, but I’d WORRY! And rightly so!
But Psalm 126 is not Bobby McFerrin’s song. It does not tell us that those who weep will reap songs of joy. Did you notice what it does say?
It is not the sorrow that leads to joy, but what you SOW with your life when the sorrow comes.
I’ll always remember Norma whose heart was broken when her daughter Esther was killed in a terrible automobile accident. Only those who’ve lost children themselves can possibly understand what Norma was going through. We all wondered how she’d handle it as we came up to the first Mother’s Day after Esther’s death.
In the meantime, another woman in our church – Joy – lost her son. And it was the most amazing thing, when that Mother’s Day came, to look out over the congregation and see a sobbing, tearful, devastated Joy sitting there in the back row – and sitting there with her in the back row with a loving and comforting arm around Joy’s shoulder was…Norma.
“Those who SOW in tears….”
There is no greater faith than
that which drives a person who has been injured to nonetheless reach out to
heal another. When you have been wronged, but you nonetheless go ahead and do
what’s right, you are expressing faith at its highest. It’s like the man I once
knew who was diagnosed with terminal cancer just before the holidays. When his
wife asked him what they were going to do about it, he said, “We’re going to
have Christmas just like we always do. Even though I’m sick, the children need
Christmas.”
Now I don’t know what form of exile you may be experiencing today, but you need to keep living. You need to keep loving. You need to keep forgiving. You need to keep caring. You need to keep praying. You need to keep worshiping. You need to keep SOWING the seeds of righteousness and goodness.
Because God has made a decision about you! You will be brought back to Zion, the place where life is full and all God’s promises are kept. You will have returned to you all that you’ve lost – your loved ones, your health, your strength, your youth, your freedom. Your tears will give way to joy and laughter. Your arms will be filled to overflowing with the gifts of life and the blessings of God.
God has made a DETERMINATION about your destiny!
And all God asks you to do is to light the candle of joy. Every day, and in every way, to light the candle of joy by sowing seeds of life in the midst of sorrow.
Do you believe it?