Inevitable Joy

Psalm 126

When was the last time you were out-of-control excited? I mean yelling and screaming and slapping each other on the back and hugging excited.

I’ve felt this way for sports events. I was a New York Knickerbockers fan (that’s a basketball team) when they won the championship in 1970. That one was frustrating because I was living in Germany that year and I stayed up to the middle of the morning listening to the game on Armed Forces radio. I was so excited but I went to school the next day and there was no one I could talk with who even knew who the Knickerbockers were. Bill Bradley who this year ran against Al Gore for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States was on that team.

I felt that way when the Boston Celtics (my allegiance switched to Boston when I went up there for college) won their basketball championships, especially in 1986 when Larry Bird played with Bill Walton, Dennis Johnson, Danny Ainge, Kevin McHale and Robert Parrish. As you can tell, I enjoyed that year with that team.

When France won the World Cup of Soccer (Football), the streets of Paris were full of those celebrating.

There is a lot of excitement when a favorite sports team wins a competition, and when a country is victorious in war, the victory is even greater. People may not know where they were when their sports team won a championship, but people remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard news that WWII was over.

When the Allies won victory in Europe and then in Japan, celebrations in the United States were exuberant. My father was with the US Navy in Leyte Gulf, in the Philippines, preparing for the invasion of Japan. Everyone knew there would be many casualties in such an invasion. It would be the most dangerous invasion of the war. When it was announced that the war was over and there would be no invasion, every ship in the harbor emptied their locker of signal flares. Fireboats shot streams of water in the air and played colored lights on the water. Ships played their searchlights on the water. My father’s ship broke the ship’s bell and blew out the compressor for the ship’s whistle in their celebration. My father had a 360? view of the most spectacular fireworks he had ever seen or has ever seen since.

But there is a still deeper celebration when it has been years waiting for something to happen – so long in waiting that it seemed impossible. Two recent examples come to my mind: The Berlin Wall coming down in November 1989 and Nelson Mandela being freed from prison and apartheid in South Africa coming to an end. The Berlin Wall and Apartheid seemed they would never end. They seemed permanent and then all of a sudden they were gone. Amazing! And the fall of the wall and apartheid precipitated great celebrations.

These last two causes for celebration approach the celebration talked about in Psalm 126, a psalm of celebration, a psalm of joy.

The key verse of Psalm 126 is verse 3:

The LORD has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.

This is a psalm about joy. We live in a world where we seek joy. Everyone wants to be happy, full of cheer. The advertising agencies of the world know this and use this to sell their products. Buy this and you will be happy. Use this product and you will no longer be depressed. Eat this product and you will celebrate.

Bobby McFarrin had a very popular song a few years ago in the United States, Don’t worry, be happy! Watch television and see all the attempts to entertain us, make us laugh, make us happy. Eugene Peterson has a wonderful line in his book on the Psalms of Ascent. He says, ”The enormous entertainment industry in our land is a sign of the depletion of joy in our culture. Society is a bored, gluttonous king employing a court jester to divert it after an overindulgent meal.”

The world seeks joy, craves joy, but what the world has to offer lasts only a few minutes, a few hours or a few days at most. The joy the world has to offer does not last, does not endure.

The joy used in this psalm is translated in the Greek Septuagint by the word from which we get euphoria. It is celebrating what has long been awaited joy.

The LORD has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.

This is a present tense statement of the condition of the psalm writer and those for whom the psalm was originally written. Those who are called “we” in this psalm are glad in the present because of their memory of what God did for them in the past.

This short psalm has a wonderful structure. We are glad in the present (verse 3) because of what God did for us in the past (verses 1&2) and because of what God will do in the future (verses 4, 5 &6). The psalm starts out in the past tense, moves to the key verse of the psalm in the present tense and then concludes in the future tense.

The LORD has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy because we remember when…

The when is written in verses 1 and 2 in the past tense and probably refers to the return of 50,000 Hebrews in 537 BC from the Babylonian exile.

When the LORD brought back the captives to Zion,
we were like men who dreamed.
2 Our mouths were filled with laughter,
our tongues with songs of joy.
Then it was said among the nations,
“The LORD has done great things for them.”

The return to Israel from captivity must have been a joyful time. For sixty to seventy years Israel has been in captivity. A lifetime and a half of longing and waiting and praying and wondering if God would ever answer prayers. Then all of a sudden, Nebuchadnezzar dies, his successor is overthrown by Cyrus of Persia and the Hebrews are on their way home. That is cause for celebration.

This is not the only time in history that people celebrated because of what God had done. As we sang earlier, Israel was sitting in captivity in Egypt. A captive slave-force building pyramids for the Pharaoh. The next thing they knew, they were across the Reed Sea and celebrating their deliverance from Egypt. I will sing unto the Lord for he has triumphed gloriously.

Israel is sitting paralyzed facing the Philistines and their champion warrior, Goliath. The next moment, David has cut off Goliath’s head and the Philistines have been routed and Israel is celebrating.

The disciples of Jesus have studied under Jesus and are sent out on their first field assignment, thirty-six pairs of disciples, and they return rejoicing. In modern lingo, you can hear them celebrating with each other, telling their stories of how God had worked through them, “We kicked some spiritual butt!”

Over and over again in the Bible and in Church History and into the present, what has seemed impossible becomes a reality. There was no way it could happen and then it did happen. “we were like men who dreamed.” What was impossible entered history. Joy is not illusive. There is a history of joy upon which we can stand, remember and be glad.

We are glad in the present because of what God has done in the past and we are glad in the present because we know God will again, repeatedly, inevitably act in a way that leads us to celebrate.

4 Restore our fortunes, O LORD,
like streams in the Negev.
5 Those who sow in tears
will reap with songs of joy.
6 He who goes out weeping,
carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
carrying sheaves with him.

The psalmist uses two images to talk of God’s future inevitable intervention in history.

The first is that of streams in the Negev. The Negev, in the south of Israel, is a desert. The streams of the desert are dry, baked by the sun. But then comes a sudden rain and they are filled with water and the desert comes alive with blossoms.

We can go through barren years. In the history of the church, there have been periods of revival when the whole of cultures have been transformed and the church has been the vital, living, creative center of life. But there have also been periods in which the church has been weak, ineffective and irrelevant to society. Voltaire of the French Enlightenment, in the middle 1700s between the first and second great awakenings, confidently predicted that the church would become extinct within his lifetime. The church appeared to be so weak that it seemed a viable prediction.

Time and time again, it has seemed as if the church has outlived it’s usefulness. It has been led by corrupt leaders, seduced by materialism and seeking the benefit of those in power rather than the people. The television evangelists of today who plead for more and more money to support their gaudy, extravagant lifestyles are not new to church history, merely the latest version of sinful humans who take advantage of the church for their own benefit.

But despite the bleakness of the landscape, despite the pollution of the church, it has risen time and time again from the ashes of greed and decadence to once more be the fresh, exuberant expression of God’s kingdom on earth.

Fresh, living water always comes to bring life to bzrren, sun-baked streams in the desert.

The second image of future joy in this psalm is that of bringing in a harvest. There is always an element of uncertainty when planting a crop. Will there be too much rain, too little rain, rain but at the wrong time, a storm that will wreck the harvest, a freeze that will destroy the crop, a disease that will eat away the harvest?

5 Those who sow in tears
will reap with songs of joy.
6 He who goes out weeping,
carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
carrying sheaves with him.

The psalmist seems to indicate that kind of tentativeness. There is no indication that those sowing have a high degree of confidence that the seeds they are planting will ever result in a harvest. They sow in tears and go out weeping. But irregardless of the level of confidence of the sowers, the psalmist promises that there will be a harvest.

There have been many who have labored, planting seeds, in the history of the church. We, as Christians, wherever we live, whatever we do, are planting seeds. Just by  our daily interactions and in the relationships we are building, we are planting seeds. It may  not seem that the soil is ripe for planting seeds but as a Christian, whether you intend to or not, God is using you to plant seeds.

The church, that in the early years of church history thrived in North Africa, has been almost extinct for thirteen hundred years. The church today is restricted in what it is permitted to do. I am cautioned about what is wise to say in church and what is not wise to say in church. The fear is that if we are too outspoken about our Christian faith, the government will deny us permission to live in this country. The church has trouble opening bank accounts, renting places to worship or buying a car. This does not seem to be good soil in which to plant seeds.

There is a lot of uncertainty in our hearts as we look toward a harvest, but there will be a harvest. Seeds are sown in sorrow, without hope for a harvest, but the harvest will come with songs of joy.

Do not be discouraged if it seems difficult to plant seeds, if the harvest seems dubious.  Remember that God will produce the harvest, and that he will bring you joy.

It is possible to have joy in the present, even when the present causes us to suffer because we know there will be a harvest. In Psalm 125 we learned that we can be secure in our relationship with God even when evil is reigning because we know that evil is always temporary. Evil does not endure.

Psalm 126 makes the same point, but on the positive side. We can have joy in the present because we know that there will be a harvest. The fields will not be barren forever. The seed will grow and it will be harvested.

Now here is the problem for us. We live in the McDonalds age of instant gratification. We walk into McDonalds and if we don’t have our happy meal in sixty seconds, we are impatient. We want food and we want it now and most times we get it when we want it.

We pray and ask God for help and then we wait. We do not like to wait, but we wait. We wait for a week, two weeks, two months, a year, maybe even two years or even five years or ten years and then we say enough is enough. What does it mean in the Scripture that God is our help. We prayed and prayed and prayed and nothing has happened, nothing has changed.

“You helped Israel escape from Egypt,” we pray. “Why not help us?” But Israel prayed for help for at least eighty years and probably longer before God helped. That means that no one alive during the Exodus could remember a time when they or their parents had not been praying to God for deliverance. People of faith prayed their entire life for help, for deliverance and died without seeing their prayer answered. But even so, their prayer was answered – just not in their lifetime. Their prayer was answered in God’s time.

The Hebrews who returned after the Babylonian Exile were, with a possible few exceptions, Hebrews who had been born in captivity. Sixty to seventy years had passed from the time when the Babylonians defeated Israel and took them away. The prayers of those who died in captivity were answered. Israel did return from captivity to Jerusalem. What was longed for and prayed for did happen, in God’s time.

The psalmist says we are glad because of what God did for us in the past and we are glad because God will do it once again.

We don’t know why God acts when he does. We don’t understand why God does not act sooner than he does. We don’t know why but we do know that God does act decisively in history in a way that leads us to celebration.

I have heard many Christians speak of an impending world-wide revival. In large numbers, all over the globe, Christians are gathering to pray – something that has preceded every great revival in the last two hundred years. Many prophecies have been given that speak of an impending revival, an awakening of men and women to God’s heart for the world.

For ten years or so I have been praying that I will not die before I see this world come alive to God. I’ve prayed to have the experience of Simeon who was promised by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before seeing the promised Messiah.

“Sovereign Lord, as you have promised,
you now dismiss your servant in peace.
30 For my eyes have seen your salvation,
31 which you have prepared in the sight of all people,
32 a light for revelation to the Gentiles
and for glory to your people Israel.”

But even if I die without seeing the harvest, the waters that will flood this barren land and make the desert come alive with blossoms, I know the harvest will come.

So even though we wait for an answer to the desire of our hearts, we are glad. Even though we see no answer to the desire of our hearts, we do not give up hope. Even though we die without seeing what we long for, we do not die in despair. God will do what he promised.
We are not fighting for a lost cause. God will bring the harvest.

Psalm 126 does not give us a formula for joy. It reminds us that joy does not come without sorrow. It reminds us that the joy we seek comes from God’s inevitable acts in history, acts that fill our mouths with laughter and puts songs of joy on our tongues. It reminds us of the promises of a God who accompanies his wandering, weeping children until they arrive home, exuberant, bringing in the sheaves.

It speaks of people who gather to worship God whose lives are lived between memories of God’s mighty, inevitable interventions in history and God’s certain promises of future inevitable interventions.

It speaks of people of faith who, despite the conditions of their lives, are able to say, “We are filled with joy.”

As the Hebrew pilgrims made their way up to Jerusalem for their annual festivals, this psalm put hope and joy into their hearts. I pray that it will do that for you as well.

We are filled with joy.