“HIM SERVE WITH MIRTH…” [R, 10-8-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

This year is not a time of mirth. To write mirthfully, even about mirth, seems wrong. All the more reason, I suspect, to look for mirth. [It’s also fun to say “mirth.” Try it…]

An old man got up in church to give his testimony. “Forty years ago, the Lord filled my cup to the brim, and he hasn’t put anything in or taken anything out since.” A little boy spoke up and said, “It must have wiggle tails in it by now.”

That’s the kind of early 20^th century, rural joke I told in sermons when I started preaching 65 years ago. It was out of date most places even then, but not in my life, or in the little open-country and tiny-town churches where I preached.

I grew up on a primitive farm—drinking from a communal water bucket, work done by horse and boy power, etc. The churches I pastored were primitive, too. There weren’t many places left where people stood up in church to “give a testimony,” but the folks in those churches had seen it done. Not many people drank out of open water buckets, but folks knew what they were. And folks knew how wiggle tails congregated in water left alone too long.

So, that story was a good reminder that faith needed to be renewed regularly, or it would get wiggle-tails in it. Try using that in a sermon today and look at the blank expressions on the faces of the hearers.

I thought of this when a friend recently told of hearing a preacher use a WWI story in such a way that it was clear he was using notes from a sermon he’d been preaching for a long, long time. I loved those preacher stories I heard, and re-told, when I started out, but they have wiggle tails in them now.

Mostly, I’m writing about this because of my morning hymnal singing. I recently completed singing through the hymnal, Marching to Zion at # 733, and starting back at O For a Thousand Tongues, # 57, again. [Yes, the first hymn in The UM Hymnal is # 57.] I sing two or three hymns each morning. It’s too much trouble to stay up with the seasons of the church year, so I just go straight through. It’s sort of strange to sing “In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,” on a humid morning in July, but it also helps me hear the message in a different way. This morning, “All people that on earth do dwell” came up. # 75. “…sing to the Lord with cheerful voice. Serve him with mirth…”

Isn’t that wonderful? Serve him with mirth!

Reminds me of the boy who was at his grandmother’s one Sunday. Everything he wanted to do for fun, she said, “No, you can’t do that on the sabbath.” He wandered down to the barn lot where he saw the forlorn looking, long-faced mule. “Poor guy,” he said, “you must be a Christian, too.”

Oops, I did it again. An out of time illustration. Nobody calls Sunday the sabbath, or thinks there are things you can’t do on it, or has a mule. The point is still good, though—Christians should serve God with mirth, not long faces.

The settings for “mirth” have changed, but not the need for it. I was a very serious preacher when I started. People listened politely, but they weren’t “with” me. I found that if I told a story that was really funny, they were “with” me. We laughed together. Some humor is mean, disrespectful to a particular class or gender or race. But humor that is respectful draws us into one, as we laugh together.

“God serve with mirth, God’s praise forth tell, come ye before God and rejoice.” Isaac Watts.

John Robert McFarland