Mark 2:18-22 "Fittingness and Folly" Scott Hoezee

Have you experienced any joy lately? What, if anything, has recently been for you a source of delight? If you have experienced joy or delight lately, then it seems probable that represented in this room this morning are a variety of sources of joy. Maybe you have taken joy in a child or grandchild or maybe you felt delighted at having done an exceptionally good piece of work at school or on the job. Maybe you and someone you love have recently had a particularly stellar time together while out for dinner one evening or while taking a trip somewhere.

But then, perhaps there are some of you here who ache to hear questions about joy or delight because, as a matter of fact, you can't remember the last time you felt joyful or delighted about anything. If lately your life has felt flat and humdrum--if you have felt only burdened and so not remotely joyful--then I am all-but certain I would be correct in saying that you are deeply dissatisfied about that. You maybe would give almost anything to turn things around, to restore to your life a delight that used to be there or to bring into your life a joy that has never been there but that you dearly wish to experience.

But even if you can point to something that has lately been a source of delight and joy for you, would you say that you've had enough of such things? Just because you could tell me about a joyful time you've had of late, would that then lead you to say to me, "And you know, it's enough. I don't care if I never experience another delightful or joyful moment ever again! When it comes to joy, I've flat out had my fill!"

I doubt anyone would say that. If you have tasted joy, it tastes like more. If your life has been devoid of delight and empty of joy, then likely it strikes you as wrong--something is missing. It seems that we were created for joy. It's no surprise that this is so. The Bible's opening chapter tells us that we were made in the very image of God. At some fundamental level of our existence, we were fashioned to resemble God. That means a myriad of things but in the context of Genesis 1 it means also the ability to be joyful and to take delight.

All through the creative process in Genesis 1--all that stuff that leads up to the creation of humanity--God takes joyful delight in the goodness of his creative handiwork. When at the end of each day of creation we read "And God saw that it was good," we should not read that as some dry, arid assessment. Rather, like a basketball player who just successfully made a really difficult shot, like an artist who just completed the last brushstroke on a masterful painting, or like a chef who artfully places a rosemary sprig as the final flourish on a sumptuous plate of food, so I see God topping off each day of creation with an exultation, with a cry of "Voila!," with a fist-pumping, "Yes!"

The creation is a source of joy for God, and since we are created in this God's image, life is to be for us a source of joy, too. That's why if we feel no joy in life, we sense that something is amiss. This isn't right. This isn't the way it was supposed to be. That's also why even if we do have sources of joy in our lives just now, we want them to abide and not be merely temporary. Christians of all people should know all this about joy and delight.

But all of this may seem an exceedingly odd introduction for a sermon on a passage like the one we just read from Mark 2. At first blush, these words of Jesus seem to have nothing to do with joy or delight but at a deeper level, I suspect that this is precisely one of the topics to which Mark 2 is directing us. After all, look at the surrounding context. Overall, we are deep into a section of severe controversy in Mark's gospel. No matter where Jesus has gone lately, everything he has said and most everything he has done has stirred up some kind of opposition. Just before this morning's passage, Jesus attended a dinner party at a tax collector's house--a party attended by all the wrong people as far as the Pharisees were concerned. So they sneer at Jesus' inability to avoid bad company.

Immediately following this morning's passage, we have a Sabbath controversy as Jesus allows his disciples to do some work in order to secure a Sabbath's day meal. That violated the rules, and so again the Pharisees jump all over Jesus for destroying Sabbath. Nestled in between those two passages--both of which involve food and drink--is this morning's odd little passage. Given the surrounding two stories, it hardly comes as a surprise to learn that Jesus and his disciples were not observing any ritual fasts. The provision of food and drink is a hallmark of Jesus' ministry. Whether he is feeding crowds of 4,000 or 5,000 people, turning water into wine at a wedding reception, attending dinner parties in the houses of so-called "sinners," celebrating a Passover Feast (at which he inaugurates his own special meal), or cooking fish on the beach some time after his resurrection from the dead--whatever the situation, we see again and again that Jesus and his disciples were hardly austere, ascetic types who shunned all things culinary and earthly.

The Pharisees on the other hand observed a ritual fast at least two days every week (and not a few of them made a pretty good show of it, too). The followers of John the Baptist did quite a bit of fasting as well--of course, when you are a disciple of a man who ate grasshoppers all the time, maybe finding the motivation just to skip meals now and again wasn't that difficult! Just in general, however, John the Baptist and company were a pretty ascetic, severe, and austere group. Fasting fit them very well.

There were several possible reasons to fast. Fasting could be a sign of penitence, an outward way to show how sorry you are for your sins. It was also traditionally a discipline that was a mark of how devoted you are to God, how willing you are to sacrifice the pleasures of earth in order to focus on and meditate upon the better things of heaven. But the precise motivation for fasting is not really the issue in Mark 2. Instead, the flash point for this particular controversy with the Pharisees was that Jesus and his disciples apparently never fasted. As we just noted, quite the opposite: they were routinely immersed in eating all kinds of food on all kinds of occasions. Jesus even broke the rules in his eating and drinking by hanging out with undesirable types of people and by fracturing the Sabbath.

So the Pharisees come up to Jesus and say, "Everybody else around here who has a religious bone in his body fasts on a regular basis, Jesus. So what's the deal with your never doing it!? From what we can see, you all could use a good fast, if for no other reason than to repent of the company you sometimes keep when you do eat!" In reply, and not surprisingly, Jesus invokes two sets of images, both of which tie in with eating and drinking. First he mentions a wedding party and second he mentions the production of good wine.

In essence, and in both cases, Jesus is saying to the Pharisees that they can't tell time. It would not be fitting for the disciples to fast for a similar reason why it would be both rude and unfitting to be a party-pooper at a wedding reception. Or think of it this way: if you are having company over for dinner and have labored for hours in the kitchen to prepare a particularly delightful menu of cuisine, how would you and your other guests feel if, as dinner is being served, one of the guests said, "You know, I'm on a diet and so I drank my can of SlimFast before we came. So you all go ahead but I'm just going to sit here and exercise my willpower by not eating a bite." That's just not fitting!

So also in Jesus' example: when you are in the company of the bridegroom, it's time to have a celebration and a party. Choosing that precise moment to observe a ritual fast would be something worse than just bad timing: it would be foolish! It would be morally wrong. People who laugh at funerals and who sit at wedding receptions with a tight-lipped, dour expression on their faces can't tell time. They have no sense for which actions are appropriate in which settings. In the biblical wisdom tradition, the difference between a wise person and a fool is measured in no small part by a person's ability to discern fittingness: what fits where in life, and how can you tell? In this case Jesus says that the disciples rightly sense that they are, so long as they are in Jesus' presence, at a kind of spiritual wedding reception. It is not the time to be a stick-in-the-mud who insists on not eating or celebrating.

This theme of folly continues in Jesus' second metaphor about wineskins. Only a fool would try to patch a leaky wineskin, much less pour one of the world's greatest vintages into an unreliable container. When I was a kid, my Dad used to note with despair that I seemed to operate on the philosophy that there was nothing so broken but that a piece of scotch tape couldn't fix it. Of course, I've matured now to the point that I realize the truth: the real answer to anything broken is duct tape! But no . . . that's not the answer either. If you have a bottle of wine that gets a chink or crack in it, you're fooling yourself if you think a hunk of duct tape will hold the wine in. And you'd be doubly foolish if you actually risked pouring some $100 per bottle vintage Cabernet Sauvignon into an old bottle being held together by duct tape and a prayer.

Really good wine, excellent new wine, deserves the best and newest container you can get a hold of. It's not too difficult to see that in this passage Jesus is comparing himself to the new wine. You had to break all the old molds, throw out all the conventions of the old spirituality before letting the new wine of the spirit flow into you. Fasting and all other ascetic, severe, spiritually dour and difficult practices just could not take hold of, or safely encompass, the joy and delight to be found once the true Christ of God comes onto the scene.

However, there will come a day, Jesus predicts, when his disciples will not feel like eating. The day would come when the bridegroom would be snatched away by force, and that then would be a good time to hold a fast of sorrow and penitence. But that would last only a day or so. Although Jesus does not say so directly here in Mark 2, we now know that the bridegroom was soon restored to the disciples--and through Pentecost he is given now to also each one of us. The entire era of the church now is to be one of joy and delight. That doesn't mean the discipline of fasting has no place for us as Christians. But the ins and outs of fasting are not what this passage or this sermon is about. Mark 2:18-22 is fundamentally about being able to find in Jesus the delicious new wine of God's kingdom and to find in his presence more than enough reason for celebration and joy.

The question is whether or not we as Christians fully understand that or convey that. Of course, we should be careful to distinguish between joy and happiness, between deep Christian joy and the shallowness that can lie behind a pop phrase like, "Put on a happy face!" As Frederick Buechner once noted, happiness pops up pretty much where you would expect it: graduations, weddings, award ceremonies, births. But joy is more unpredictable. Joy can and often is present at also happy occasions but it is just as likely to show up at funerals and in the wake of great national or international tragedies. Joy's roots run deep--deep enough not to be torn up out of the soil of our hearts every time a gale force wind howls or when the earth is shaken by evil. Joy emerges from the deep-down belief that at bottom, in the end as in the beginning, a God of love rules the world and his good purpose will not be thwarted ever. Joy emerges from the core belief that although sin and terrible events often loom large, they cannot and will not erase the fundamental goodness with which God endowed this creation in the beginning. Whether or not we can see the proverbial "silver lining" in the face of unhappy events, joy believes that goodness and grace endure and will one day be the all in all for every last creature in God's new kingdom.

So just because you may not smile all the time, just because you may be the kind of person who seems hard-wired to exude a certain amount of melancholy a good bit of the time, just because we Christians know how to weep as well as we know how to laugh--none of that means we cannot still have joy. In short, I don't want to equate joy with having a sunnyside-up personality. At the same time, however, neither should we miss the fact that if we have deep down joy and delight through our faith in Jesus Christ, that should show itself in many, many ways across the life of this fellowship. But if we find that as individuals or collectively as a congregation that we are never able to convey a certain jouer de vivre, a joyful elan, a spirit of holy gusto when it comes to celebrating the good and delightful things of creation--if we find that we never do that, then something is wrong with us. If we believe we are still today, through the Spirit, in the presence of the bridegroom and yet still we can manage no more than dark and brooding spirits of judgmentalism, paranoia, and tight-lipped suspicion toward one another and the wider world, then something is wrong.

Again, I am not recommending happy-clappy piety that can do no more than slap a yellow smiley face sticker overtop every worship service if not over life in general. Joy for Christians is, as Cardinal Newman once noted, a last feeling, not a first. Christian joy is refined and thoughtful, emerging only after we've been through the horrors of the cross to arrive at the new joy of Easter. Once such real joy emerges, however, it never forgets the cross that made it possible.

That's why Lewis Smedes wrote that only the heart that hurts has a right to joy. If you cannot weep over the needless deaths of so many children every day in this world, then you cannot take true joy in the lives of your own children. We recognize joy's various relationships to sorrow. Or there is the comment made by C.S. Lewis's wife, Joy Davidman, in the context of the play Shadowlands. She was dying of cancer and they knew that even when they got married late in their lives. But as Davidman says to Lewis at one point, "The pain later is part of what creates the joy now. That's the deal."

We are not shallow, "surfacy," or silly in our holding out for, and exhibiting, joy. But still I say to you that joy is what we must offer and show to the world. Not firstly an external list of Do's and Don'ts, not some strict morality code, not narrow judgmentalism or a graceless piety that can scarcely abide differences among people. If we drink the new wine of Jesus' kingdom, if we revel in the presence of the Jesus who wanted his disciples to know joy, then joy and delight in all that is good and right and proper is what we must show. Other people should sense in us a deep engagement with life, not in some hedonistic, pleasure for pleasure's sake selfishness but still we see in the gifts of creation the very hand of God and so we are glad to throw ourselves into it so as to taste and see that the Lord is good.

Mark 2:18-22 is about fittingness and folly. It's about knowing what is what and who is who in God's good order and then conforming our demeanor, our behavior, our very way of life in ways that will fit with the joy of God's kingdom. It's foolish, it's just wrong, to be a party-pooper, stick-in-the-mud at a wedding reception. It's foolish, just wrong, to care so little for an excellent vintage of new spiritual wine that you'd pour it into the same old ratty container you keep using over and over again because you just don't dare break the mold so you can break out into new ways of being.

We were created for joy and delight. In a fallen world, we none of us get enough of such joy. There are even periods in our lives when delight seems to have dried up for us, and that is a fact to lament because it's not right. "I have come that you may have life," Jesus once said, "and life abundant at that!" As Christians, we know that our chief responsibility is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. Let us begin. Amen.