The Rev. Ann R. Lougee

March 5, 2006

"that my joy may be in you..."

John 15:9-17

This past Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, when we began our annual journey into Lent, to prepare ourselves for Easter. This is, of course, a time to be reflective, a time to think about our lives and where they’re taking us. To some minds, this is a gloomy time, because we say it’s the season of repentance.

But I’d like to re-frame that thought. To repent means, not to feel bad about ourselves, but to turn around, to turn from whatever is keeping us from living our lives fully and joyfully, and to set our feet upon the path to abundance of life.

This journey of Lent is supposed to result in our finding new life at the end of it. That’s what Easter joy is all about. So for our scripture today, I chose to ignore the lectionary calendar and use the passage that gives the words I often use during our Communion celebration: "I have told you these things so that my joy might be in you and your joy might be complete."

Somewhere I’ve seen a quote that Lent should not be about looking backwards with guilt and despair but about looking ahead and saying, "Wow!"

In today’s scripture, the writer imagines Jesus preparing his disciples to carry on after his death. He tells them that he wants them to have the joy in life that he has known. The way to have this joy is to know and love God, to live life fully, all the good and the bad of it, and to love one another.

The little bit of John’s gospel that we’ve heard this morning is part of a five-chapter-long theological treatise, called The Farewell Discourse. It’s written as a speech of Jesus, but most contemporary scholars think that the writer of this gospel was not recording actual words of Jesus.

Rather the author was working out on paper how the disciples had felt themselves mandated to live by what they had observed in Jesus. Most of us, after all, are influenced more by the love and care we feel from and the example that is set for us by people that we look up to that by the particular words that they say.

I think it was Emerson who said something to the effect that I cannot hear what you say about yourself because who you are stands over you all the while and thunders so that I cannot hear anything to the contrary.

There was a long tradition, too, among the Jews of learning from the actions rather than the words of their prophetic figures. Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel all used non-verbal means of instruction, sometimes going to bizarre extremes to get across a point. You can read how weirdly they behaved right there in the Bible in the books that bear their names.

Somewhere, not in the Bible, I read an amusing story about a monkey god who was very vain and boastful. He came to the Buddha to try to prove that he was just as powerful, if not more so. To do so, he set about doing some astonishing tricks. But all the while, the Buddha just sat there, silent, polite and inscrutable.

Finally, in a desperate attempt to impress the Buddha, the monkey god took an enormous leap into the air and disappeared. He was gone for five minutes or five centuries – it seems to make little difference in the story – but eventually he comes back and then stands around, obviously eager for the Buddha to ask him where he’s been.

But the Buddha says nothing at all. So the monkey god tells him that he’s been to the outermost limits of the universe, implying that this is a journey that even the Buddha might admire.

Then he stands around a while longer, hoping that the Buddha might ask him what he saw there. But again the Buddha makes no sound, so he is forced to answer the question that has not been asked. He explains in some detail how, when he reached the outermost limits of the universe, he saw five huge granite pillars which extended up and up until the tops of them disappeared into clouds. And what does the Buddha think of that, he asks, looking up into the silent face.

Instead of saying anything, the Buddha simply raises his hand and holds it up before the monkey god’s eyes, and as the monkey god looks at it, his attention is drawn to the Buddha’s fingers. As he gazes at them, he sees them not as fingers but as five huge granite pillars which extend up and up until the tops of them disappear into clouds.

It is said that the Buddha, when asked about the meaning of life, merely held up his hand. To this day, Buddhist teachers when asked such a question are likely to throw a handful of feathers up into the air, to cuff the student on the ear, or simply to turn and walk away.

If the meaning of life could be captured in a string of theological words, I wonder who would care about it one way or another, what difference would it make, and why would we bother to say the words at all, even if in some sense they were true? But if it is indeed a reality, then words cannot contain it and you can know it only when you experience it.

If life has meaning, then every part of life also has meaning, much as a fractal contains the image of the whole of a pattern. So you might then experience it equally well by watching the feathers fall to the ground, by feeling the shock of a blow, or by seeing the teacher walk silently away.

To put it another way, suppose that a woman falls in love and that a friend of hers asks what it is like to fall in love. She could try to tell her friend, to describe the symptoms, to recite a poem on the subject, maybe show a picture of the one she loves, and so on, giving the friend words with which to think about love but no real understanding of it.

A better way, though, might be not to try to tell her friend but instead to put her hands on her friend’s shoulders and push her out the door. The idea, of course, is that the friend needs to find someone to fall in love with and then, only then, will that friend know fully what it is like.

As a preacher, I sort of envy the silence of the Buddhist monks and teachers, because when you come right down to it, the kinds of things that religion is about are impossible to put into words. This is most obviously true when we try to talk about God because words, after all, were invented to deal with the world of space and time whereas, by definition, God exists beyond such categories.

To try to talk about God in terms of time and space is like a person blind from birth trying to talk about colors in terms of sound and touch. The best one can do in either case is to speak in the language of symbol and metaphor. That is what the Communion ritual is all about. There are, of course, layers and layers of meaning in a ritual and, just one should not explain the punch line of a joke, one risks diminishing the effect of a ritual by explaining it.

But it seems that our culture has lost some of the interpretive keys, so that one feels almost forced to help people find some of the meanings. So I’m going to suggest just a few of the main ones that have the most significance for me. If there are other meanings that you find important, please don’t feel that I am saying they’re not. I’m simply lifting up a few that I’d like to keep before me on this journey through Lent, in hopes that they might help someone else too.

Perhaps the most obvious meaning is that by symbolically eating and drinking Jesus’ body and blood, we become his flesh and blood, taking his spirit into ourselves. In this way, we are to learn ourselves how to have fullness of life by letting our lives be taken, blessed, broken and given for others. Here too we rehearse the heavenly banquet, the table at which all of God’s children are welcome. We are learning how to share and how to include everyone in our table fellowship, as Jesus did.

Here we are learning too that joy is a mystery that can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most bleak circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes, even facing death. For Jesus demonstrates that human beings are made for fullness of life and joy, and that anyone who is truly joyous is doing God’s will on earth. Where we have known joy, we have known God.

We are, of course, like the monkey god – vain and boastful, outrageous and ludicrous. And in answer to all our words about ourselves, about the meaning of life, God holds up before our eyes, not a hand, like the Buddha, but the figure of a man whose face is battered almost beyond human semblance who says, "These things I have spoken to you, have done for you, that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be made full. May it be so. Amen.