"The Primary Colour of faith" 
The one true source of joy.
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, November 14, 2004
Text: John 15:1-11
A couple of weeks ago I was in a garage having my snow tires installed in preparation for winter. As I went into the waiting room a gentleman pulled up, his car kicking, bucking, knocking and making all kinds of discordant sounds. He got out of the car and approached the technician and said, “This car is a piece of @&#!” The air was blue and in great frustration he began to kick the tires. Swinging his right foot with a great deal of enthusiasm, he missed the tire and hit the steel wheel. More curses filled the air. Finally, he said, “You fix it.” He then came and sat next to me.
For the next few minutes he remonstrated on what a piece of junk this was and how he would never come to this dealership ever again in his life and what a terrible disaster his day had been. About 20 minutes later the mechanic came back to report on the state of the automobile I held my breath. He said,” Sir, we have examined your car and I have a question for you. What type of gasoline do you put in this car?”
The man responded, “Well, since the price of gas has gone up, I just put in the cheapest.”
The mechanic said, “Sir, your car requires high-octane gasoline. It is pinging, knocking and banging because of what you have put into it, not because there is anything wrong with the car.”
The man made a comment under his breath that I dare not repeat, paid his bill, got into his car and probably drove to the nearest gas station to put some very high-octane gas into it. While he had been remonstrating about his automobile, my mind turned to something the great C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity:
Human life and existence is just like gasoline in a car. If we do not have God in our lives then we will not run properly or effectively. Our lives will splutter but they will go nowhere, for God is the gasoline of life, God is the one who makes it go, God is the one that we need. [paraphrase]
As I thought about that this morning, my mind turned to our passage from the Gospel of John, for in this passage Jesus is saying exactly the same thing to his disciples. He said, “I have said these things to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full,” or in another translation, “complete.”
In other words, Jesus is saying to these disciples that their life, their joy will only find completion in him and in his life. But this is not, as some suggest, just an emotional thing. For indeed Christian joy is not just something that is emotional, it is not something that ebbs and flows with the tide of how you feel at any given moment. Joy is something substantial, based and predicated on what God has done and can do through us.
Please note that Jesus isn't talking about some sort of mystical union with God, about us becoming one with God and God becoming one with us, in some kind of mystical sense. No, if you look at this passage very carefully, you'll see that Jesus is saying that if we are obedient to him we will have the fullness of joy, as he was obedient to the Father and was the recipient of this joy. As he had found joy in serving God, the Father, so, he believes, the disciples and followers will find joy in obedience to him.
There's another passage in John where Jesus says, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.” In other words, become part of it in obedient living. In other words, the gasoline of our lives, the joy that makes our lives go, is actually found in our obedience to Jesus Christ. This joy is much fuller and complete than all the imitations out there. Indeed, from the very beginning of the gospel to the very end of Jesus' life, this word “joy” constituted the foundation of his ministry.
That is why at the beginning of Luke's Gospel there is the announcement, “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy.” The joy that they were speaking of is the joy that people would experience in obedience and union with Christ. But at the very end of the Gospel of Luke, after the resurrection, when Jesus appeared to his disciples, Luke tells us, “And they worshipped him and went into Jerusalem with great joy.” At the beginning and the end of the Gospel there is joy.
One preacher called this (and I love the phrase) “the primary colour of the Gospel.” Joy is the first colour. Every other colour with which we paint our lives is based on it. Joy is the foundation of everything. Now, Scripture tells us that this primary colour was at the very beginning of creation. The Gospels continually refer to Jesus fulfilling and restoring something that we find at the very beginning of the Book of Genesis: When God created the world he said it was good, it was beautiful, it was holy, it was joyful.
In fact, Job, a book that is not known for its great joy, contains this rapturous statement of the wonderful joy and goodness of creation:
Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?
In Job then, even at the beginning the foundations of the world, the angels shout with joy. Whatever time or eon or form in which God might have made this world will always be subject to debate, but for the believer it is creatio ex nihilo: God made this world out of nothing, but God made it with joy.
Scripture tells us that this world that God originally made fell from that ideal state of joy. Adam and Eve symbolize the fall that came through disobedience. In other words, the creation in all its glory, and all its splendour fell through disobedience, and the joy was gone. The whole message of the gospel of Jesus is that he came in order to restore this broken creation. If you look at that famous text, John 3:16, that God came and blessed us because he so loved the world, the original Greek word for world is kosmos. God came and loved the entirety of the kosmos in and through Jesus, and the ministry of Jesus was to redeem the brokenness of creation - to bring back the joy.
Jesus saw his ministry as an extension of the ministry of his Father. As he was obedient to the Father, now if creation is obedient to the Son it therefore will receive… what? The joy that God created! And this is what the New Testament proclaims, this is what it believes - Jesus is the source of the joy of God.
Now, I know that there are days when even the most faithful of us look at our lives and the world, and they do not always appear joyful. I know the sorrows that we bear and the hardships that we have to endure even when we confess Jesus Christ, but I like something that a man said to a colleague of mine whose ministry wasn't going well. He went to one of the senior elders in the congregation and wished him a good day. The elder responded by saying, “Reverend, every day is a good day. It's what you put in it that makes the difference.”
So it is with obedience. So it is with the Gospel. Every day that we have been given, every moment that we have to worship God is a gift, but we only truly realize the value of this gift when we live it in obedience to Christ. That's what we need to put in it, to have the fullness of the joy of the grace of God.
The ministry of Jesus also has, then, this gift of joy as its primary colour. In our western tradition we talk a great deal about Jesus being a man of sorrows. You might even find churches that have “sorrow” in their names. It's one of the images we have of Jesus in the western church. But while there is the cross and while there is the sorrowful nature of the burden that the Son had to bear for the sake of this broken world, we must not lose sight of the joy that is at the heart of his ministry.
In fact, recently I found something very interesting in the New Testament: the word “sorrow” is only mentioned eight times, whereas the word “joy” is mentioned 57 times. The word “cross” is mentioned 27 times, but the word “rejoice” 45 times. The word “crucify” is used 12 times, but “resurrection” is mentioned 41 times. Even at the moment of Jesus' greatest sorrow, when he was in the upper room anticipating the death he faced, even at the saddest moment in his life Jesus said, “These things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full.” He was saying, here is the power of life, if you will but understand what I am doing and what I am giving to you.
That is why it saddens me that in this world with its brokenness and violence and inhumanity and death, people think they can find the true joy in life by what is known as taking “Easy Street.” In other words, by avoiding the really important things in life and just taking the expedient way. But doing so is like putting poor gasoline in your tank and wondering why you splutter and ping and knock and go nowhere.
A friend of mine recently went onto one of those mapping websites and entered the words “Easy Street,” just to see if it existed. You know what? It does. There is an Easy Street in Hawaii just north of the city of Honolulu. As you're heading north out of Honolulu, you turn right onto Park Street (just in case any of you want to find it), and you take the first right which is Easy Street. And of course the sign that greets you as you turn the corner (and this is true) says, “Dead End.”
Easy Street is a dead end. Other sources of joy are like pouring bad gas into our engine, if we do not have the joy God's joy, that we are obedient to Christ, the Son. Therein is life. So joy is also, then, the primary colour of discipleship. Joy is the primary colour of service to God.
My friends, the last few days my heart has been broken over this discussion of the unionization of ministers. I know there are ministers out there who are living in penury, who are suffering and who are hurting in their ministry. I know the wind of joy that drove their ministry has gone out of their sails. I feel for ministers who do not receive acceptance and whose words are not heeded and who are in declining congregations, struggling to proclaim the Gospel under very different and difficult circumstances than they anticipated when they were ordained. I feel for them. But I want to say this to them and I want to say it to you and I want to say it to the Church of Jesus Christ wherever it may be: No intermediary, no contract, no union can replace the joy that comes from serving Christ our Lord. Nothing can mend the broken ministries, nothing can renew or restore the broken churches except Christ and his joy.
Many years ago, I used to go with my father to visit his friend, the great hymn writer, Albert Bayly who lived in the town of Thaxstead, in East Anglia in England. He had a very ordinary life in a very small church. In fact, in many ways he seemed to be not particularly successful at all in ministry, stuck in the middle of Essex in a tiny rural charge. You could never say that by professional standards he had really made it. Yet while he was there, he committed himself to writing hymns and letting those hymns speak for him.
Even at this week's prayer breakfast, we sang one of his hymns. As I go through the hymnbook, I find his hymns all over the place. As I look at them and listen to his words, I realize that his joy was in serving Christ. His passion was in proclaiming the goodness of God. These are the words of one of his hymns:
O Lord of every shining constellation
that wheels in splendour through the midnight sky:
Grant us thy Spirit's true illumination
to read the secrets of thy work on high.
O Life, awakening life in cell and tissue,
from flower to bud, from beast to brain of man:
O help us trace, from birth to final issue,
the sure unfolding of thine ageless plan.
Albert Bayly struggled in ministry, but he knew that in his heart his calling was to proclaim Christ. And nothing and no one must stand between a minister and the Christ who calls him. And no church should be governed except by that which is of Christ and his Spirit. Yes, we need to hear what is broken. Yes, the church must pick up the mantle of caring for its ministers, but it is only through the joy of the One who created us in the beginning, only when we are obedient to him will the church have life, its ministers have peace and all of us have joy. For when Jesus took those broken disciples to himself in that upper room he said, “These things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full.” Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.