On Joy

I’ve been considering the Chritian Union ball on Friday night; the banter, the dancing the general glimpses of joy contrasted with comments made to me from members of the Edinburgh University CU that a ball was not within the mission statement of the Christian Union.

I had an great night wearing my pyjama’s/dress/Cameroonian chieftain’s outfit and enjoyed the pleasure of a 5 am finish and 9 am start for breakfast with some of the more hardcore ball-goers, combined with chilling in the park and again a good meal. In all it was almost 24hrs straight of social revelry (the good kind.) And I was struck by the assumption that this kind of celebration – provided God is acknowledged and worshiped in it, which He was - could ever be contrary to any Christian Organisation’s (Church or not) mission statement.

I just finished reading Mark Buchanan’s excellent book Your God is Too Safe and in the concluding chapters he talks of the importance of celebration: not the 'we should always be celebrating God and worshiping Him at every moment of every day' type of celebration but the full fledged cracking out the music and dancing, and experiencing God’s joy. He points out that there are 60 references to celebrations of God’s people in the Bible, only two of which are negative. He also points out that “Exodus, Deuteronomy and Numbers reads like a string of invitations to a non-stop whirlwind of festivals.”

Joy is a required discipline of the Christian Life, C.S. Lewis’ literary devil Screwtape describes it as an acceleration of the rhythm of the celestial experience, quite opaque to us. Opaque not because they don’t understand it as Lewis puts forward but because they have turned their back on the experience they once had of it in God’s presence. We are constantly in danger of turning our backs of the glimpses of joy God blesses us with because we think them indulgent or misleading.

But these gatherings of God’s Children, regardless of the previous mission statements and goals are glimpses of the joy of heaven, and it was for the joy that was set before Him that Christ endured the Cross*, and likewise it is those glimpses of joy that spur us heavenward towards the upward goal in Christ Jesus – they should never be underestimated.

* Hebrews 12:2