Guest Preacher: Dana Cassell
5-12-2024
John 17: 6-19
Every Friday afternoon, when I was in seminary, at Emory University in Atlanta, a group of us seminarians would get together to play ultimate frisbee on the quad in the middle of the campus. We took over a big field-sized area between giant academic buildings and ran, threw, and yelled for a couple of hours to celebrate the end of another week. I was absolutely no good at ultimate, but I loved it.
One Friday afternoon, while we were running around and yelling at each other, some Tibetan monks, on campus for who-knows-what, stopped on the sidewalk in their yellow and red monastic robes to watch the game. Someone – I can never remember who – asked if they wanted to join the game and, to everyone’s surprise, they agreed.
Which is how my seminary friends and I ended up playing ultimate frisbee with Tibetan monks. The game slowed wayyyy down – it’s hard to run in a robe! And the play got gentler. And more fun. The surprise of Buddhist monks playing ultimate frisbee – WITH US – was pure joy.
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I’m not sure, but I suspect that those Tibetan Buddhist monks were on campus as part of one of the Dalai Lama’s visits. And I don’t know if you know much about the Dalai Lama, but JOY is sort of his thing. The spiritual leader of Tibet, he has been exiled from his home country since 1959. His deep friendship with Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa was marked by lots of tenderness, teasing and uproarious laughter. The two spiritual giants even wrote a book together, called The Book of Joy. All you need is ten seconds of listening to the two of them together to understand why they might be qualified to write such a book:
Tutu, explaining his friend’s history, says in their book, “By rights, the Dalai Lama should be a sourpuss.” Tutu’s own life, filled with racism and fighting apartheid, was not one we might expect to be so filled with joy, or to produce THAT irresistible laugh.
But the two men found joy in places deeper than circumstance and suffering. In their book, they write about 8 pillars of joy: perspective, humility, humor, acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, compassion and generosity. Joy, they say, is not dependent on circumstance. It is, instead, a way of looking at the world, a practice and perspective that we can cultivate and learn.
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I was remembering that ultimate frisbee game on the Emory quad this week because I was thinking about joy. Jesus’ joy, in particular. The lectionary has been guiding us through what’s called Jesus’ “farewell discourse” in John’s gospel. The disciples are upset and scared about Jesus’ admission that he is about to leave them, and Jesus is trying to comfort and remind them of all that he has tried to teach them over the last few years together.
And over and over again in this sermon for his friends, Jesus talks about JOY. He’s about to be arrested, tried, and murdered by the state, and he’s asking them to think about REJOICING. It’s odd, if not straight up offensive.
“I have said these things to you,” Jesus says, so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.”
And then, again, “you will have pain, but your pain will turn into JOY. You have pain now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice and no one will take your joy from you.”
And again, “Until now, you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive so that your joy may be complete.”
And then, finally, in the passage we hear this morning, Jesus turns from addressing his friends and prays to God for their well-being and protection after he leaves. “But now I am coming to you,” he prays to God, “and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my JOY (χαρα) made complete in themselves.”
In fact, that last mention of joy is the chiastic center of Jesus’ prayer. A chiasm is a literary form found all over scripture: the phrases or verses are “X” shaped, with an original concept or idea repeated in reverse, so that both sides of the passage point to the center. And in Jesus’ prayer here in John 17, both sides of the prayer point to verse 13: I speak these things in the world so that they may have my JOY (χαρα) made complete in themselves.”
What is UP with this obsession with JOY? Why is complete JOY at the center of Jesus’ prayer and his insistence in his farewell discourse? Why, in the midst of horrific violence, loss, and trauma, is Jesus asking his friends to rejoice?
I suspect that it has something to do with what the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu know really well: that joy is not circumstantial. Joy isn’t anchored in what’s happening around us; it is anchored in a worldview that trusts in the goodness of God or the rightness of the world. Joy is a specific orientation, a particular posture.
I suspect that Jesus, in his farewell discourse and in his prayer for his friends, is inviting the disciples – and us, right along with them – to consider where we anchor ourselves. How will we ever survive the shifting winds of the world if we aren’t connected to something more stable, more sturdy, more enduring than fleeting happiness or grief?
And Jesus, like Tutu and the Dalai Lama, is insisting that anchoring ourselves in JOY, in delight and gladness at the very fact of existence and the truth of God’s resurrection power is a very good option.
There’s a gospel song, originally by Shirley Caesar. It goes, “this joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me. This joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me. This joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me. The world didn’t give it, the world can’t take it away.”
I heard that song performed by the Resistance Revival Chorus, and it’s just so good. It’s a gospel song, a praise song, a way of worshiping the God from whom all good things flow. But it is also a resistance song. It’s a bold claim that joy is given to us by God, and that nothing the world tries to do can remove that gift. Just like Jesus says, no one will take your joy from you.
Last week, on the same Emory quad where I had the incredible joy of playing ultimate frisbee with Tibetan monks in their red and yellow robes, the current President of the University enlisted Atlanta police to attack, demolish, arrest and beat up students, professors and community members who were witnessing to the horrors of genocide in Gaza.
There were dozens of encampments on college campuses over the last few weeks, but the response of Emory University was one of the most swift and brutal of all the administration responses. Students were tear-gassed and tased. Professors were arrested for questioning the officers’ brutality. It was awful.
And amid all the tear gas and police brutality, this was one of the scenes that emerged:
This joy: the world didn’t give it, and the world can’t take it away.
I suspect that THIS is what Jesus was talking about in his farewell discourse and prayer there in John’s gospel. He was trying to prepare his friends – because that is what they are, not just his disciples or servants or followers, but FRIENDS, like Tutu and the Dalai Lama – trying to prepare his friends for the awful things that are about to come, trying to invite them to anchor themselves in a truer truth, an existential reality, a trust in the God who created the world and holds all of it in Her hands.
Jesus is telling them, and telling us, that the world will be brutal. It will crucify saviors, arrest truth-tellers, murder children – and pretend it never happened. We should, Jesus says, expect all of that. And we should grieve and mourn and scream and lament.
But nothing the world does can alter God’s love, or eliminate the power of resurrection, or undo the truth that we – all of us – were created in love, for joy. Nothing can separate us from that love, and nothing can deny us the joy of sharing it.
I’m telling you all this, Jesus says, so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. You know what’s going to happen, but you also know that it has not, will not, cannot defeat what God has already done. These next few days? They’re part of it. But they are not the end of it.
I am grateful for the opportunity to think about joy, to interrogate what it is and where it comes from. I’m grateful for that Friday afternoon playing ultimate frisbee with Tibetan monks, and I’m grateful for that young person’s witness to joy last week, even as she is carted off that same quad by four police.
This joy, Jesus’ joy: the world didn’t give it, the world can’t take it away. Amen. So be it.
Washington City Church of the Brethren 
Dana again knocks it out of the park with this sermon on joy! The world didn’t give it and the world can’t take it away. Amen!