This is the wey to al good aventure;
-Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parlement of Foulys, 131–132
Be glad, thou reder, and thy sorwe of-caste
In January I had the honor and delight of speaking at the Church of the Redeemer’s 2025 Christendom Lectures. What follows are drawn from the notes for one of the talks I gave.
There seems to be much talk today in the way of “vigilance, sobriety, alertness.” On every side sounds some call towards activism. We are coming to the breaking of the epoch, it seems, and all around are horns sounding, calling us to action. Activism—of some ill-defined, generic and weary kind—has become our corporate steady-state. Uncountable for me are the number of recent sermons, essays, forms of punditry, videos, media posts of various kinds, etc. which begin along the lines of “it is important for us, in this moment, to make sure we…” followed by some call to action. 1 Peter 5:8–9 seems to be the rallying cry for the hour: “Be sober; be on the alert. Your adversary the devil walks around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. Resist him.”
For all our vigilance, however, I worry it is for nothing if we fail in being merry. For all our sobriety, for all our vigilance, for all our “getting real about the hard facts of life,” I fear we tempt even deeper kinds of drunkenness (of the damn-it-all-to-hell-I-cant-take-it-anymore-Im-so-tired-whats-it-all-for-anyways sort) unless we learn our sobriety from the doughty Galilean who turned 160 gallons of water into wine for a small rural village wedding when they had run out. The merry Jesus of John 2 must define what we mean when we talk about sobriety and vigilance or else everything under that heading will tend towards baking bricks in Egypt and resenting the younger brother who has come at last to the end of his prodigality.
I. “Get real!”
It is always under the guise of “being vigilant” that a joyless disheartenment creeps in to subvert the very vigilance we thought would succor. There is no lack of tragic irony here: merriment will always seem like folly and drunkenness to those who want to “get real” about the hard facts of life. One can think of the report that the spies bring to the people of Israel at Kadesh in the desert of Paran, as one such example.
I remember the story in vivid colors from my childhood Sunday school class flannelgraph set: The spies, sent from Moses to reconnoiter the land, have had a merry adventure: “We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey! Here is its fruit” (Numbers 13:27). That ethos of rollicking bivouacking espionage is not maintained, however. Almost all the spies realize it is time to sober-up and “get real” about the facts. And that’s a part of the problem.
Notice the disheartened spies say nothing false. All their information is, as a matter of military intelligence, the hard truth: there are giants (Numbers 13:33), the children of Anak, sons of the Nephilim; the cities are large and fortified, the Jebusites and Amorites do live in the hill country, and the descendants of Amalek do dwell in the Negev (13:28–29); the land does in fact devour those who live in it (13:32).1 To any accusation of cowardice or sedition they might rightly protest, “We’re just stating the facts. It’s our job to be watchful and vigilant, and we’re just giving a full report.”
There is a similar grimness to the assessment Denethor gives of Gondor’s situation after his son Faramir returns from combat on the brink of death:
There is no news of the Rohirrim […] Rohan will not come now. Or if they come, it will not avail us. The new host that we had tidings of has come first, from over the river by way of Andros, it is said. They are strong: battalions of Orcs of the Eye, and countless companies of men of a new sort that we have not met before. Not tall, but broad and grim, bearded like dwarves wielding great axes. Out of some savage land in the wide East they come, we deem. They hold the northward road; and many have passed on into Anorien. The Rohirrim cannot come.2
Like the disheartened spies, Denethor is also, on one level, just rehearsing the facts as he has gathered them from his vigilant surveillance of Mordor by way of the seeing stone. To him all of Gandalf’s hopefulness seems like folly:
For thy hope is but ignorance. Go then and labour [sic] in healing! Go forth and fight! Vanity. For a little space you may triumph on the field, for a day. But against the Power that now arises there is no victory.3
So also, in the camp of Israel, what Caleb says seems like anything but clear-eyed sobriety to the other spies: “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it” (Numbers 13:30).
Were we there we might, along with the others, shake our heads sadly at the boyish overconfidence and rebuke him in the elevated diction of Denethor: “Fool art thou, Caleb son of Jephunneh; feed us not with thy haughty swagger.” And then, turning slowly, hang our heads as we set our faces to the long trek of four decades’ dying.
II. The full picture
What did Caleb have that the others didn’t? Bravery, sure, but more than bravery and obedience, I think. “Guys we have to go, God said so” would be obedient enough. Caleb’s response is not merely obedient or brave in a kind of austere and grim way. It’s qualitatively other. Something more than dutiful resolution charges and inflames his speech. It is that his courageous obedience is tongued with the fire of merriment. You can almost hear within the valiance of his speech, some rumor of deep laughter.
Caleb’s report does not differ from the spies because he thinks the things the other spies are saying are factually inaccurate; he affirms the truth of their account. He differs in terms of how he thinks Israel should respond to those truths. Their account is not wrong per se, but it is not the full picture. Israel has just passed through the waters on dry land, the horse and the rider have been hurled into the sea, water has sprung from a rock, meat and bread fill their camp each day, above them and before them burns the Fire Cloud of Yahweh. Caleb differs because he thinks that any account which does not include these things is wrong. Israel’s fear and despair have blinded them to the full and gladdening picture of what is really Real.
It’s not that Caleb denies the existence of giants, it’s that he believes he can slay them.
At the heart of Caleb’s account of the real is the Terrible Joy of Sinai, the trembling trumpet-filled myriad of angels, the tambourine of Miriam sounding over the flotsam of up-turned chariots. If being sober and watchful means, on the one hand, not being drunk on too much wine, it also means avoiding another kind of drunkenness: the drunkenness of despair, of cold worrisome calculation, and of deadly incredulity about God’s faithfulness and goodness. Any vigilance that does not have at its core the unfathomable mirth of the God who “himself is festival”4 will tend towards joyless burn-out, exhaustive failure, and entropic collapse.
A joyless vigilance cannot be long maintained.
There is an illusion to believing that you see through the surficial happiness of the world, reading all joy as empty, into what you imagine is the real bitter heart of the world. But this mode of cunning and calculation, insofar as they often treat the world and people and spiritual forces and dominions and systems and God Himself as closed and dead, actually blinds us to the possibilities posed by a living world ruled by the Living God. For the Living God cannot only do new and unexpected things, the Living God can also raise the things that are dead.
III. On being merry
If ours is a time marked by increasing calls to vigilance and sobriety, it is also a time marked by an overwhelming sense of joylessness. It is good for us to hear the apostle’s injunction to be vigilant and sober but if that vigilance and sobriety are going to be anything other than a spiced foaming cup of hopelessness, we must be careful to cultivate and guard that deep and unquenchable merriment which lies at the heart of the world.
For all their similarities, Gandalf and Denethor differ precisely on this point, as Pipin recognizes in the darkest hours of the War of the Rings:
Yet in the wizard’s face he saw at first only lines of care and sorrow; though as he looked more intently he perceived that under all there was a great joy: a fountain of mirth enough to set a kingdom laughing, were it to gush forth.5
And so as a final movement I just want to offer a couple of notes on merriment that are more like theses than they are like fully-formed applications:
- Merriment is not opposed to sorrow. The merry in heart makes of pain and sadness, not an empty happiness, but rather a communion meal with the Lord: “My tears have been my food, day and night” (Psalm. 42:3). Joy and sorrow are not separate things for the merry heart. Tolkien captures this truth in his description of the feasting at the end of the War:
And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed. And he sang to them, now in the Elven-tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.6 - Merriment also, slowly and overtime, shapes what comes out of us when we are in pain. It shapes our “ouch.” As tender as my years in pastoral ministry are, I have come to the conviction that we are defined by what we say when we are in pain. True growth in holiness, the true merriment of the Kingdom, shapes not just the surface of Mark Brians but the deep/real Mark Brians, so that when I am wounded what pours-out is not self-justifying sourness, the tantrums of my (real or perceived) victimhood, nor the vitriol of my countermanded ideas of the way things should be, but rather the “ouch” of my Savior. The wine of the Spirit fills me week by week so that when I am cut I bleed not my own insecurities but the red blood of Jesus. Merriment trades my frustrated damnits for sanctifying lordhavemercies.
- Merriment is cultivated in the hazard of loving community composed of the real rag-tag assortment of people who gather in a particular locality around the Lord’s Table —a people who say “Therefore, let us keep the Feast” and do it in their churches and in their neighborhoods.
- Merriment is the fountain from which we can love our enemies. I am not forbidden from having enemies, necessarily, though I should strive to be at peace with all men (Romans 12:18). Holy Merriment, however, demands that my enemies, when and as they come, receive the full force of my charity. When Guy of Gisborne and the Sheriff of Nottingham are captured and brought into my Sherwood forest, they are dressed in the best robes, decked with flowery garlands, and given the honor of presiding at our feast of the King’s best venison. When Saul comes into the home of Ananias, he is received as “Brother.” Far from promoting a kind of milquetoast pacifism, merriment protects Christians from the sin of waging private wars.
- Merriment modulates and qualifies my evil-resisting and vigilance-keeping so that it does not get co-opted by vigilantism, hatred, vendetta, and violence.
- Merriment keeps the cities of men alive precisely because it keeps life order around the a festal cultic center set aflame by the city of God. Sherwood keeps Nottingham alive when Nottingham forgets who it is. Sherwood is the true Nottingham. Merriment not only makes survival possible; it makes survival worth it.
- Merriment creates a culture wherein leaders rejoice when their sons’ tens-of-thousands out-pace their thousands. Indeed, merry leaders understand that their own thousands find true and lasting fulfillment only in the tens-of-thousands of their captains.
- Merriment expands our capacity to keep the vigil because it spares us from the impossible tax of anxiety and grants us a ludic sense of being.
- In a culture of neurosis, where we all worry so much about “not being a burden,” merriment offers the freedom from taking ourselves so seriously. I am a burden, and so are you. The Gospel does not promise us a kingdom in which we are free from being burdens, but rather the kingdom in which we carry one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2).
- Merriment qualifies our feasting so that it is not just partying and carousing. Nightclubs for all their partying are not known for being merry places. Merriment is wholly different. Merriment fills our festivity with conviviality in the form of speech, toasts, garlands, poetry, riddles, songs, and clean-up duties ordered to the sound of work-songs.
- Because merriment calls us to the festive enjoyment of God’s universal realties, because it calls us beyond ourselves it cultivates a loving cohesion in the form of costly friendship. The lack of friends is ultimately the undoing of Mordor where Sauron has not friends but only “many slaves of fear.”
- In all merriment we follow our Master, the wine-making, dead-raising, swashbuckling prince of (penitent) thieves, who does not break Pilate’s gaze as he tells the governor that he would have no power save that his Father granted it. In being truly merry we are “looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2).
Merriment is not merely an ideal or a lofty abstraction; it is earth-shatteringly real—literally. In Acts 4, the apostles rejoice at their sufferings and ask for more boldness, and the place of their meeting is shaken. In Acts 16, Paul and Silas in prison sing songs to the Lord, and the prison shakes, and the fetters break. Filled with divine merriment, Paul and Silas not only do not leave; they also make sure all of the hardened criminals stay put. What kind of mysterious strength is this? It is the joy of the Lord. In days such as ours where it seems that God is once again “shaking everything that can be shaken,” we often think that the subject of the shaking, the thing doing the shaking, is some joyless and dour inscrutability in God’s harsh will. That is just not the case. In the Bible, when things shake it is because the merry God, bright Jove enthroned above the Cherubim, laughs (Psalm 2:4).
As Ambrose famously glosses Ephesians 5:18 so I here repeat: “Do not be drunk with wine, but be inebriated by the Spirit.” I am uninterested in any vigilance that does not look like David dancing before the Ark. In an age of great shaking and the shattering of the epoch, “I will become even more undignified than this.”
Mark Brians is rector of All Saints Anglican Honolulu.
NOTES
- See Gen 14:10; 19:24–25 as examples of the land devouring, under the Lord’s hand, the inhabitants. It is important to note that Yahweh himself actually makes this fact explicit in places such as Deuteronomy 28. The condition for being devoured or vomited-out by the land is in fact related to the conduct of the inhabitants. The despairing spies seem to be immanentizing future judgements, anticipating their future failure to remain faithful while enacting it “now.” ↩︎
- J. R. R. Tolkien, Return of the King (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1966), 803. ↩︎
- Tolkien, Return 835. ↩︎
- I got this phrase from Peter Leithart, The Ten Commandments: A Guide to the Perfect Law of Liberty (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2020), 55, citing Ramon Lull, De Proverbiis moralibus, tertia pars caput VIII–caput XVII, tome II, in Opera omnia (Mainz, 1721; repr., Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1965), as quoted in Pual Kuntz, The Ten Commandments in History: Mosaic Paradigms for a Well-Ordered Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 53. ↩︎
- Tolkien, Return 742. ↩︎
- Tolkien, Return 933. ↩︎