Make My Joy Complete
A sermon by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Readings for this service: 1 John 1:1-2:2
I want you to imagine that you were reaching a critical moment in your life and you had the opportunity to write a letter. You wouldn’t be writing to ask for help, because you wouldn’t be in the kind of situation where help was relevant. You wouldn’t be writing to those you loved and who loved you, because you’d just be telling them something you both already knew. No, this letter, which at the time of composition you imagined might be the last thing you would ever write, would be to someone you didn’t know, had perhaps never met, but whose life, you had come to realise, was like a jigsaw for which you held the missing piece, like a riddle that only you could unravel.
I want you to think about how you’d start that letter. I guess you’d say, ‘You don’t know me, but I’ve got something important to tell you.’ That would get their attention. But then you’d need a way to summarise fairly succinctly why you were writing the letter. You could say, ‘I’ve got something to tell you you’d probably like to know’; but that’s just playing them along. It’s like saying ‘Can you guess what I’ve got in this bag?’ You might say, ‘If I can do one good thing in my life I’m going to do it now.’ But that’s distracting, because it makes the reader want to know all the lurid details about the wrongs you’ve done. So maybe you just say, ‘I wish I could meet you, and we could be friends. That may not be possible, so I’m going to tell you something that will bind us together. And telling you is going to make me very happy.’
When John the Evangelist starts his first letter, that’s exactly what he does. He says at the outset, ‘I’ve got something amazing, the most important thing of all to tell you. I’ve heard it, seen it, and touched it. And now I want to tell you about it. Why? Because I want to be in relationship with you, and for us both to be in relationship with the Father and the Son. And because telling you makes me so happy: it gives me complete joy.’
Note what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say ‘Reading this will save you; reading this will make you laugh; reading this will teach you something important.’ It says, ‘Restored, humble, mutual, truthful relationships are the most important thing in life. And to have such a relationship with you, and with God, is the greatest joy there is.’
I want you to read you a letter written by a man last December when he realised he had one letter he needed to write. He didn’t write it to teach a lesson or make a joke or save anyone’s soul. He wrote it to restore a relationship and make his joy complete. This is how it went.
Dear Pastor
Everyone has a story. I want to tell you mine. I grew up near your church. I used to play nearby with my friend Peter. I remember your church being built. It was 1978 and we were both 12 years old. Peter and I both had strict fathers, both of them recently retired from the Navy. We were both bullied incessantly at school. Peter’s father used to beat him with a belt. My dad wasn’t so cruel, but he would bark orders at me and expect perfection. Peter and I used to escape by sneaking out of school, and often slipping out of the house at night and getting in trouble, sometimes being brought home by the police. School was misery, and home was often worse.
One night we cycled up to the new church. The door was open, but no one was there. We were curious so we wandered in. We were just turning to leave when something inside me snapped. Every ounce of my anger, fear and frustration leapt out, and I started to wreck the church. Everyone else had turned against me, so I thought I’d see what God was made of. I can’t recall what we destroyed, but I know the church was closed for a month afterwards.
Peter and I knew we’d gone too far, and we swore each other to secrecy. The next morning the news was all over the local paper. And at 11pm that night the police came to our door and put handcuffs on me, and threw me in the back seat of their car next to Peter. I felt my life would never be the same. I was circling the drain, waiting to be pulled under. I was so lost.
The police brought me home next day. I was expecting the beating of my life. But I walked in and found my father holding the newspaper clipping, surrounded by ashtrays, his face puffy from having wept all night. His face was a mask of pain I’d never seen before. I wanted him to be angry – it would’ve been easier. I walked towards him and choked out a question: ‘Can you give me another chance, Dad?’ I suddenly saw he was as lost as me. ‘I’ll give you all the chances you need.’
Peter and I were given the option to pay the restitution in full or pay half. Peter’s father paid in full and moved away and I’ve never seen Peter again. My dad paid half and I made up the rest in labour. A few days later my dad took me to see the pastor. We met in his office, which was the only room undamaged by our attack. The pastor didn’t say anything. He just looked me in the face and shook my hand. And then I started crying twelve years’ worth of tears. And my father did too. The pastor said, I forgive you, but I’m going to ask you to do do the hardest thing you’ve ever done. I want you to learn this short passage of the Bible by heart and come back on Sunday and recite it to the whole congregation.’
I had no choice. I practised every day in front of my dad. And on the Sunday I stood up and said to everyone, ‘The Lord is my shepherd. He restoreth my soul. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil: for thou art with me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.’
I changed. And so did my dad. He stopped demanding, ordering, threatening and yelling. He became someone I could talk to, laugh with, and lean on. He had walked with me shoulder to shoulder through a fire of my own making. I still felt anger and bitterness, but I didn’t hold it in anymore: I talked it through with my dad.
My dad died in 2014. He never threw away the news clipping. He kept it in his wallet. We rarely talked about it, but when we did, he would call it ‘the blessing in disguise.’
I believe the Lord did lead me like a shepherd. He opened the door of his house to me when he knew I was in pain. As I look back now it’s so painfully clear. I realise that I could never have done damage to his church. His church is made entirely out of love.
That letter was written four months ago. The man who wrote it was like John the Evangelist, because he’d heard and seen and touched the most precious thing of all. But he was like John the Evangelist in a more important way than that. What this letter describes is exactly what John the Evangelist said was his reason for writing his letter: the joy that comes from the restoration of relationships between human beings and between humanity and God.
The letter to the pastor of that little church isn’t saying, ‘Hey, I’ve made my mistakes in life but I learnt from them and I’ve gone on to be a fine upstanding citizen who’s given back to my community a hundredfold for what I got wrong.’ It’s saying something different. It’s saying, ‘I was a stranger to God and my father was my enemy. And through what seemed to be my disastrous loss of control, I met God and I for the first time found a relationship with my father. And once I’d heard and seen and touched those things, I knew that they were the most important things in my life. And it wasn’t hard to see how without them I’d been utterly lost. And now I want to take what I’ve learned from those two kinds of restoration, and I want to make a relationship with the new pastor of that little church, and maybe with the congregation, only a handful of whom could possibly remember the damage I did. I’ve discovered the most wonderful thing of all: a new future that’s made out of the healing of the past. And I’m so excited about it that I can’t help talking about it.’
There’s only one sad thing about the story that letter tells. It’s that Peter, the 12-year-old boy with the same anger, the same estrangement from his father, and the same predicament, never got to live the rest of the story – never got to share the joy. For all we know the moment of madness in the church just became for him another episode in a cycle of violence, isolation and misery. And that’s what makes that letter more than just a story of something bad that became something good. Because that letter is a portrayal of salvation. Salvation isn’t an escape from a scary place to a safe place, a rescue that scoops the righteous out of a vale of tears. Salvation is the moment when you realise that, in spite of the pain and the regret and the hurt, you’ve been drawn into companionship with the one who was your enemy, and you’ve emerged from enmity with God into a relationship of grace and peace and joy. And we have a name for that a process and its cosmic significance – a name for the transformation described in the letter to the pastor. We call it resurrection.
