Says the poet, "A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and Thou beside me singing in the wilderness … Wilderness were paradise enow"
The very picture of romantic fulfillment. All I need is a chunk of good fragrant bread, a flask full of the vintner’s art, and you whom I love, and I will be fulfilled.
Idyllic, shimmering, romantic. A lazy fall morning. An afternoon of relaxation. Sounds nice, doesn’t it?
And if you and I are typical this morning of much of the Christian world, we expect to hear a sermon that puts it down. We expect to hear all that put down as self-indulgent, self-centered, frivolous, unworthy of serious Christians!
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou singing beside me in the wilderness. Now be honest, when you heard me quote that scrap of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, didn’t you halfway expect me to launch out into a diatribe against alcohol? Didn’t you just about predict that the preacher would take off on folks who have nothing better to do with their time than to sit around and dream of paradise? Isn’t there something inside of you that thinks that with a lead like that … a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and Thou beside me singing in the wilderness … that any sober preacher worth his salt would scream and holler about such laziness and such self-indulgence?
Why, you know and I know what I am supposed to say: that young people just don’t think about the things of the Lord and that the world is going to hell in a handbasket with this kind of stuff going on!
Oh, but, there is our problem. Our problem is that we take ourselves too seriously. Our problem is that we do not laugh enough. Our problem is that we do not hear the Gospel.
Let me say that again. We take ourselves too seriously, and thus we do not take the Gospel, the good news, seriously enough. We do not hear the good news. It isn’t good news for us anymore; it’s bad news, heavy news, but not good news.
Let me just state the thesis of this morning’s message. Let me capsule for you all that I will be developing:
Faith, genuine faith, gives us joy even in the middle of difficulty and disaster. Faith, authentic faith in Christ Jesus, enables us to laugh, to be full of joy, even when everything around us seems gloomy and sad. All we have to do is to hear the good news and celebrate, celebrate with the God of our redemption.
Consider now the peculiar Old Testament book called Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is a part of the Wisdom literature, written very late in the Old Testament period, and it has by and large the most pessimistic, somber mood in all the Bible. The writer of Ecclesiastes, who calls himself the Preacher, I’m sorry to say, is full of the emptiness of life. He has lived through it all, he has seen it all, he has heard it all, and it stinks!
In Ecclesiastes you read such inspirational gems as, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, says the preacher". Empty everything, nothing matters.
Or he says in another place, "I have seen everything under the sun, and there is nothing new... nothing new under the sun." Just the same old plodding existence.
He even has a word of advice for young people, based on the theory that when you get old, you aren’t going to like it. "Remember now thy creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them!"
It would be hard to find anywhere in the Bible a gloomier piece of literature than the Book of Ecclesiastes. He just doesn’t see much fun in his life at all.
And yet right in the middle of all this gloom and doom there is something else altogether. Right square in the middle of all this negativism, all this pessimism, there is a word of joy. There is a word of sheer laughter.
Ecclesiastes 10:19a: "Bread is made for laughter and wine gladdens life"
To have a word like that spoken to us by the gloomy Gus who penned Ecclesiastes is like having a sudden burst of sunshine on a stormy day. It reminds us that our God is capable of giving us joy, laughter, in the middle of everything somber and stormy and difficult. And further that he does it in the simplest of ways, the gentlest and simplest of ways. Bread and wine -- the most basic of foods and the essence of the grapevine -- the commonest of things. But they become vehicles for the joy of God.
"A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou beside me singing in the wilderness"... oh, no, I am not going to take off this morning on idleness, I am not going to scream against romantic illusions. I am far more interested in the good news of our God. A God who has it that "bread is made for laughter, and wine gladdens life."
Why is it that so many religious folks are so deadly serious about nearly everything? Why is it that in the process of becoming Christian so many of us seem to lose our sense of humor? Did it wash off in the baptistry? The image of religious folks in the popular media, for example, is either that they are wild-eyed fanatics bent on getting everybody to conform to their narrow view of reality, or else that they are grim sobersides who cannot take a joke. The popular image of religious folks seems to be that they take themselves terribly, terribly, seriously, and can be counted on to be the wet blankets at anybody’s party.
You know, some Sunday mornings I stride out here and look at you, and in some cases when I catch your eye I get at least a feeble imitation of a smile. But in other cases I seem to get a frown, a scowl, or maybe a dull, glazed-over look, as if you are about to endure your weekly dose of religion, which, like castor oil, tastes bad but your grandma told you it was good for you.
And I wonder where the joy is. I wonder where the laughter went. I wonder whether we have experienced good news in the middle of all our tension and our worry. Good news … Gospel … good news, right square in the middle of everything we have to deal with, every ounce of suffering we have to endure, good news. Where is it?
Several years ago Norman Cousins, then editor of Saturday Review, was diagnosed with a serious, life-threatening illness. Told that he would likely not have long to live, he decided, first, to enjoy what little life might be left, and second, to experiment with laughter as his medicine. Norman Cousins ordered in to his hospital room everything from Marx Brothers movies to stand-up comedians. He found himself laughing, day and night, at something. And you know what? It wasn’t long before he was able to get out of bed, and the disease was in remission, and years later, he was still criss-crossing the country as a kind of evangelist for laughter.
I am not this morning trying to engage in medical quackery, but I am lifting up that scripture which proclaims, "A merry heart doeth good like a medicine."
I am not suggesting that illness is not real or that cancer will not kill, but am encouraging you to a lifestyle of joy, having the faith and the courage to expect God to offer you something that gives you joy, no matter how dismal the pattern of your life.
I had a great-aunt who had this marvelous faculty of seeing the ridiculous where the rest of us saw only irritation. During most of her later years she lived way out in Montana, which I guess is about a million miles from Kentucky. But every now and then she would get on the Greyhound bus and ride and ride and ride some more to come and visit us. Now if I were to have to ride a bus a couple of thousand miles over several days, I would be tired and grouchy and, as we Kentuckians would say, fit to be tied. But when Aunt Dedie would come out of that bus door, she would be laughing and giggling and ready to tell us all these stories about what had happened along the highway, and the driver and half the passengers would be laughing with her and hugging her goodbye and just enjoying her presence.
I’ll wager most of the other passengers wouldn’t have seen anything at all, but if you were my great-aunt, you knew how to look for something funny, something to make you laugh in the middle of an unpleasant experience. And you would believe that it came as a gift.
And so when several years ago I stood at the graveside and did the funeral service for my Aunt Dedie, I just told stories about her, and we all had a good laugh. Laughter at the graveside? Yes, because in her we saw and heard good news. We saw and heard that authentic faith and an open spirit and the willingness to laugh can get you through even the toughest of times.
For our God wants us to laugh … our God expects that we should have joy... our God has created us to enjoy Him and for Him to enjoy us.
And so if we trust Him, truly trust Him, then watch for Him to use something ordinary, something simple, to give us joy and create laughter in us, and it will see us through.
Now listen again to the text: "Bread was made for laughter and wine gladdens life."
Trust a God like our God to use ordinary bread, made for laughter, and simple wine, made to gladden life, to bring us through the gloomy and the dismal times.
How often He uses the ordinary to make His miracles! In my backyard this week, amid the chilly damp days of fall, I discovered two lovely roses and four more buds coming, and a smile crept on to my face. God creates beauty in the middle of the dismal with ordinary flowers, and we laugh in delight.
Last week I visited in the home of a grieving family, and two of our church members went with me. When we left that home, which of course was under a cloud of sadness, one of the two with me just reached out a hand and grasped my hand for a second. Just a brief second … but I left with a warm feeling that somebody cared and that there was a place to smile in the setting of death. An ordinary thing, a small thing, but God uses it to create laughter.
But now, I ask you, who but our God would take a loaf of bread, ordinary bread, used by men and women as the staff of life from time immemorial, and transform it into a symbol of brokenness and, yes, of death, but then call it joy? But He did, He does.
Who but our God would take a cup of wine, simple juice of the grape, pressed out by human labor every day from ancient times, and transform that into a symbol of blood poured out, and, yes, of sacrifice, but then call it joy? But He did, He does.
For today as we come to this table, spread with bread made for laughter and wine made to gladden life, we do remember the most abysmal event in all of human history, the crucifixion of the Son of God, but in it we hear the echoes of joy and even of laughter •• for the Scripture says that here we look to Jesus the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy …for the sheer wonderful joy… for the glorious, abundant, rollicking joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.
Who but our God could take simple bread and make it both the picture of brokenness and the laughter of salvation?
Who but our God could take ordinary wine and make it both the picture of sacrifice and the exhilaration of good news?
Therefore, whoever you are, whatever you have done, whatever the pain in your life right now, whatever circumstances surround you … whoever you are, come this morning, take this bread and remember Christ, broken for you, but bringing you laughter and hope.
Come this morning, sip this wine, remember Christ, sacrificed for you, but bringing you good news, the best of news, that there is redemption for you and there is life, a joy-filled life.
Here is all you need: a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and laughter.
