Sermon - Jubilate - John 16:16-22

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia! “Shout for joy to God, all the earth; sing the glory of his name; give to him glorious praise! Say to God, “How awesome are your deeds!”” The Lord has done such awesome deeds upon the earth; the scriptures are filled with them! By the power of His Word He created all things. He divided the Red Sea and let Israel pass over on dry ground. He caused water to spring forth from a rock. He preserved the three men in the fiery furnace. He has marked us with the blood of the Lamb so that the angel of death passes us over. Great is our God and awesome are His deeds! 

Those words of our introit that we read this morning sure start out joyful, don’t they! But Psalm 66, from which our introit is taken, continues: “For you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried. You brought us into the net; you laid a crushing burden on our backs; you let men ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water; yet you have brought us out to a place of abundance.” The Lord tests us and crushes us. He exposes us and accuses us. He breaks us and He even kills us. Those too are the awesome deeds of the Lord, so say to God: How awesome are your deeds!

Because the awesome deeds of the Lord gives us reason to rejoice, even when we weep and lament. Yes, the Lord’s work of testing us is one of His awesome deeds. So today, which is called Jubilate Sunday, meaning rejoice, we hear Christ tell us: “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy.” How odd, a day called Jubilate, and Jesus tells us that we’re going to weep and lament in this world. 

Today is kind of a break from the norm of the Easter season, since we go from all of this talk about the resurrection and having peace in Christ, to Jesus telling us about how we will suffer. Each of the festival seasons has one of these days: the penitential seasons of Advent and Lent have Gaudete and Laetare, where we take a brief hiatus from the somber penance to rejoice. Likewise today, we take a brief hiatus from the joy and celebration to consider the realities of sorrow in this life. But this sorrow, turns to joy.

Nevertheless, in this life we will have sorrow because we are sinners. We are selfish, indulgent, lustful, hateful, petty, and proud people. We’re like David, surrounded by beautiful wives, yet we lustfully gaze upon Uriah’s wife. Like Adam, we have all the food and provisions we need, we’re surrounded by mountains of delicious ripe succulent foods good for the body and we still choose the single poisonous tree loaded with unworthy and unrighteous fruit that will cost of everyone and everything we love. We’d rather pervert our intimacy with our spouse, send our sons and daughters to die in war, torture our animals, partially lose our image of God, and send the whole creation careening to death so that we can eat of that forbidden sin-filled fruit. 

The devil doesn’t even make you do it! We don’t have to sin. We could live very fruitful lives without sinning. It’s not like you have to sin in order to live. No, we sin because we are evil. We sin because we choose to sin. Do not make excuses. Do not feign ignorance. Like Adam and David, we sin without extenuating circumstances. We sin and we expect God to look the other way or ignore it. Repent.

Repentance. This is the net that the Lord has led you into. Repentance. This is the burden the Lord has placed upon your back. Repent but don’t despair. The Lord has led you into repentance so that you may live and not die eternally. So rejoice! “Bless our God, O people; let the sound of His praise be heard, who has kept our soul among the living and has not let our feet slip.” 

The awesome deeds of the Lord for you are that He tests you and gives you burdens in this life to lead you out of death to joy everlasting. I know we often don’t like to think about God testing us. The pope even feels uncomfortable talking about God testing us, He wanted to change the Lord’s Prayer, but our Lord does test us. He tests us for our good. He tests us because He loves us like a father loves his children when he disciplines them. 

God doesn’t discipline us because of some perverse sense of masochism, but He disciplines us out of His mercy because it is for our good. He tests us in order to break us of our love of sin and this world, so that we wouldn’t fall away forever with a hardened heart, but live with Him forever.

He promises that this discipline will only last for a little while. “A little while, and you will not see me, and again a little while, and you will see me.” For a little while we will weep and lament, the world will rejoice, and we will still be sorrowful. But our sorrow will turn to joy. The tough part is that this little while, however, is our whole life here on earth. So relatively speaking, in the eyes of God who is beyond time, our lifetime of sorrow is really just a little while, but in our eyes it seems like a whole lot longer. I want you to know that it really is just a little while, for this life is temporary and transient, it will pass away. And when this world is burned up, we won’t be. For we shall live forever in heaven in utter joy. 

I know this is counterintuitive, but bear with me: try to find joy and comfort in your sadness. There are a few reasons your sorrow can give you joy, not only because God works together all things for your good. That’s true, but there’s more. Your sorrows are a sign and symptom that you’re dissatisfied with this world and that you don’t belong here. You’re an alien, a stranger in a strange land, a hostage in captivity. 

Because you don’t belong here, nothing in this world will truly satisfy you. You’re not ever going to find true lasting happiness upon this earth because everything, even the good things, are tainted with sin and are imperfect. Everything is broken. So deep down your sorrow means that you yearn to be with your Good Shepherd, to be with Him in paradise where there is no sin and everything and everyone is whole again. Your sorrows in this life, demonstrate and prove that you belong to Jesus and you belong in paradise, not this broken world.

Moreover, Jesus told us that we would have sorrows, and He said that He came as a good physician to care for the sick not the healthy. We are the sick and sorrowful people for whom Jesus has come to bring comfort. You need Jesus. Jesus has the medicine for your sorrows. He doesn’t simply take away the symptoms, He doesn’t just give you pills that make all your sorrows go away, but He gives you the healing balm for your sinsick soul which is found only in His shed blood for you. Because your filled with sorrow and you’re broken, you can know with great certainty that Jesus has come to heal you.

Finally, when you suffer, when you’re sorrowful, Christ unites His cross with yours and He shares in your sufferings and you in His sorrows. Your sorrows bring you together with Christ so that you are not alone in your anguish, but the mercies of the Lord are ever present in your life. Because of your sorrows, you are with Jesus.

In these ways your sorrows can give you joy, to know that Christ unites His sorrow with yours so that you are not alone; to know that Jesus has come to take away the root of your sorrow, sin, by His death on the cross; and to know that Christ shall take you out of this world where you’re a stranger and bring you into His kingdom where you’re an heir of all the riches of heaven.

So don’t bother pretending that you’ve got it all together and that you’re living the dream without any problems in this life. I may have only known you all for a couple years, but I know you all well enough to know that your lives are filled with sorrows. Don’t feel bad about that, “even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted.” 

Don’t put on an act that your sorrows are no big deal, because they are a big deal. Christ likens our sorrows in this life to a woman in the pains of childbirth. I just watched my wife give birth a few weeks ago, without painkillers mind you, and that tough woman was in great agony for that little while. Likewise do we experience great sorrow in this life. We lose our loved ones to death, we feel alone and afraid, we watch those we love wander into darkness. We watch ourselves wander into darkness. We are people of great sorrow. 

Wait in the Lord, for in a little while He will return again. The Lord shall renew your strength in that great day. You shall run and not be weary, you shall walk and not faint. The Lord disciplines us, the world reviles us, and at times we even hate ourselves. So don’t look to this world for joy, but look to Christ who has died for you and has risen for you so that in a little while you would be taken out of this life.

During this little while, when we are in labor and the pains of childbirth are at their worst, it’s hard to focus on anything except the pain. But see through the cloud of sorrow and look to what the future holds. For after giving birth, the pain gives way to joy because of the child you hold in your arms. Look beyond the sorrow of this life, and look to the Christ child who was born for you, who you now hold in your arms in the sacrament. Look to the Savior who has borne your sorrows upon the cross so that you would enter with Him into bliss untold: joy, He gives you, which can never be taken from you ever again. That is the most awesome deed of the Lord.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!