One of my fondest memories at Trinity is when Butch Glace grabbed me before church and told me that he’d be the acolyte if there wasn’t someone else to do it. As many of you know, it was often his job to light the candles during the prelude if there wasn’t anyone younger available to do it. After pulling me aside and telling me he’d do it, he referred to himself as “Mifflin County’s oldest acolyte” at around 88 years old.
Another fond memory is with the kids. Eliza was playing the game Candyland with one of the younger elementary aged kids. When he realized that it was pretty clear he was losing, he looked at her and said, “God must want you to win”. As if God has an interest in an adult beating a child at Candyland.
My most embarrassing memory in church is at the first church that I served after seminary. When I first started as the pastor of that church, they tried to recruit me to join the choir. The previous pastor had a lovely voice and they were hoping the same from me and that I’d join the choir too. I explained that singing was not my gift. But I don’t think they believed me. However, one Sunday I forgot to turn my microphone off during one of the hymns. After the service, when I was greeting people on their way out, one of the older guys, rather straight faced, shook my hand and said, “You really weren’t kidding that you can’t sing.” I was so embarrassed – I hadn’t realized the microphone was on. No one ever asked me to join the choir after that.
It’s good to laugh in church. That doesn’t mean we always have to. There are some real serious and hard things that we deal with in church like sin and death. But, joy and laughter are a sign of the grace of God.
The early Christians dating back to the first few centuries of the faith referred to this second Sunday of Easter as “Bright Sunday” or in more modern English, Holy Humor Sunday. Early Christians used this Sunday to continue celebrating the resurrection of the Lord Jesus with picnics, parties, and playing practical jokes on their pastors and one another. In Latin, this Sunday was known as Risus paschalus – the Easter laugh. The thought behind this merriment and celebration is that by raising Jesus Christ from the dead, God played a practical joke on the devil.
In our four assigned readings for this morning, we are given a word about what makes joy possible. We’ll begin with our reading from Acts. In the reading, Peter, the disciple who denied knowing Jesus three times until the rooster crowed – Peter is a changed man after encountering the risen Jesus. Peter finds his moral spine. He’s filled with courage. And, he is ready to announce to all who will listen the new thing the Lord has done in raising Jesus from the dead.
In our reading, Peter is giving a sermon to a crowd of Jews in Jerusalem, who had just experienced the outpouring of God’s Spirit on them. The sign of God’s Spirit was that everyone can understand everyone else in their own native language. This is the story of Pentecost. People from different cultures, speaking different languages, were able to come together, understand one another without a translator, and experience fellowship. There was a lot of amazement and wonder at this, as you can imagine. But there were also the cynics, as you can imagine too. And the cynics accused everyone of being drunk.
Our reading from Acts, Peter’s sermon, is Peter’s answer to the accusation that they are all drunk. He begins his sermon by talking about the Old Testament, and tying words from the prophet Joel to what they are experiencing with the Spirit. Here’s a quick summary of his first point (using words from the prophet Joel): These people are not drunk, as you suppose, but instead this is what God said would happen through the prophet Joel, “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, your sons and daughters shall speak, your young men shall see visions, and your old men will dream dreams.”
His next point is that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead – Easter – is the cause of all of this celebration and wonder and the beginning of the times the Lord spoke about through the prophet Joel. Here is part of what we heard read:
“Fellow Israelites (meaning, fellow worshippers of God and people of God’s promise), Jesus from Nazareth was a very special man. God clearly showed this to you by the miracles, wonders, and signs he did through Jesus. You all know this, because it happened right here among you. Jesus was given to you, and with the help of those who don’t know the law, you put him to death by nailing him to a cross. But this was God’s plan which he had made long ago; he knew all this would happen. God raised Jesus from the dead and set him free from the pain of death, because death could not hold him.
Going back to what we opened with, God’s raising of Jesus from the dead is a sort of hinge on which the world changed directions. The key is the last verse of what we just heard: “God raised Jesus from the dead and set him free from the pain of death, because death could not hold him.”
Peter’s claim is that the grip that sin and death have had on the world has been broken. One of the images that the New Testament writers used to describe the human condition is that we are in bondage (to use a more familiar image, we are in chains or handcuffed) by sin and death (by death they mean both the loss of life, but also the social and spiritual death that people experience because of loneliness, aimlessness, sin, and degradation). They continue the image by saying that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, that bondage has been broken (or to use the image of chains, those handcuffs have been taken off). That is not to say that death is no more. It clearly is still our human reality. “It is from dust that we are taken and it is to dust that we shall return.” But it is to say that sin and death’s grip on us all has been broken and a new day has dawned. Think here of the hymn Amazing Grace, “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.” That’s the way the New Testament thinks of this life of freedom in the risen Christ.
For Peter, this news is cause for joy and celebration. He quotes from Psalm 16, our responsive Psalm this morning. If you turn in your bulletin to it, starting with the italicsized portion where the women are saying the response:
I keep the Lord before me always.
Because he is close by my side,
I will not be hurt.
So I rejoice and am glad.
Even my body has hope,
because you will not leave me in the grave.
You will not let your holy one rot.
You will teach me how to live a holy life.
Being with you will fill me with joy;
at your right hand I will find pleasure forever.
The Christian life is a life of joy because Christ has been raised from the dead. That is the message of Psalm 16, according to Peter. That doesn’t mean that everything is happy all of the time. Pain, sin, suffering, disappointment, death – these are all realities that we face. But in Christ, we face them knowing that God has done something about them. And the something God has done is to raise Jesus from the dead. And in Christ, we share in that resurrection. It is like we are in the recovery stage from our bondage to sin and death. In Christ, we are like David who says, “God will not let his holy one rot, you will teach me how to live a holy life. Being with you will fill me with joy; at your right hand I will find pleasure forever.”
Shifting gears, our gospel reading from John records one of Jesus’ appearances to the disciples after his resurrection. The more famous story of what we read is the story of Jesus and Thomas, the disciple who gets the name Doubting Thomas from his demand that ‘Unless I see the marks of the nails in his hands and put my finger in it…I will not believe.” But for our purposes today thinking about how the Christian life is a life of joy, there are other parts of the story that are important.
First, when Jesus appears to his disciples after his resurrection, his greeting to them is, “peace be with you.” Being at peace with God, yourself, your neighbors is an important part of the life of joy. That is to say, if someone is at odds with God, in turmoil on the inside, and divided and isolated from their neighbors, it is going to be really hard to experience the joy of Christ.
Jesus’ greeting to the disciples, ‘peace be with you’, is followed by him showing them his hands and his side. This means that he showed them his wounds from his crucifixion – the nail holes and the pierced side. We’re told the disciples rejoiced, meaning they were full of joy.
That sounds like a strange thing to be joyful about. But it goes back to this idea that we’ve been repeating that is best summarized in the Psalms: that when God raised Jesus from the dead, it is a confirmation that God will not leave us in the grave. Meaning, God will not leave us in bondage to sin and death. Rather, we are in recovery from those things. God will teach us what it means to live a holy life, and being in the Lord’s presence will fill us with joy and pleasure.
The second part of Jesus’ appearance to his disciples after his resurrection involves a blessing and a charge. The blessing is to receive the Holy Spirit and the charge is to forgive sins. Here are the risen Jesus’ words, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
Another important thing about joy in the Christian life is forgiveness of sins. Here is what I mean: knowing that God has forgiven you is an incredibly liberating experience. It is joyous because it means that the worst decisions and behaviors that we have done are not the defining part of our life. There may be consequences for them that we face, but our heart, mind, and spirit does not need to be condemned to a life in chains, ‘the bondage’ to sin and death that we talked about earlier. Christ has freed us from that bondage to sin and death. There is incredible joy in that, even if it is really hard to believe at times.
There is a second part to Jesus’ charge – forgiving others for their sins against you. To do that, we need to experience the grace of God ourselves. It doesn’t mean that you need to be happy or accepting of what happened that led up to the need to forgive someone else. But grace is important because it is hard to forgive someone when you yourself are bitter, resentful, and angry. We probably all know that. But bitterness and resentment are signs that grace has gone into hiding in your life. Still, the Christian call to forgive sins remains. He himself is grace and in his grace there is joy and pleasure.
We’ll close here: we’ve made two basic claims this morning. First, the Christian life is a life of joy. And second, our joy as Christians is grounded in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (remember the early Christians who said the reason to celebrate is that God played a practical joke on the devil).
This doesn’t mean that if you are not joyful, but if you are sad, angry, tired, confused, or full of sorrow, that you are failing as a Christian. Not at all. We have all probably been there at some point or the other. To use the Christian story, Good Friday and suffering and death are as much a part of the Christian life as Easter and its celebration of Christ’s resurrection.
But it is to say that the Christian message is that in spite of the reality of sin, death, sorrow, and fatigue this side of heaven, we have reason for hope. In the words of Peter “God raised Jesus from the dead and set him free from the pain of death, because death could not hold him.” God’s raising of Christ from the dead, Jesus’ granting of peace, the forgiveness of sins – those things create the possibility, the conditions, for joy and gladness.
The promise of the gospel is not that God will give us an easy life. But in the words of the Psalmist, the promise is that God will not forget us. The Lord will be close to us. He will not abandon us in the grave. Instead, he will teach us how to live a holy life. And being in the Lord’s presence will fill us with joy, and in being in fellowship with God, we will find pleasure. Amen.