Over the years I’ve been blessed by the writings of Marva Dawn. As I take up Psalm 126, with its themes of restoration and rejoicing, I think how Marva Dawn’s own life embodies some of the tensions felt in this psalm. Many, many Christians have been encouraged by Dawn, as witnessed by an Amazon reviewer of one of her books, “She has a keen sense of service and rejoicing that every book she writes conveys, so we can find that same joy in life.”
Yet anyone who knows just a little about Marva Dawn realizes that her life has not been easy, certainly not pure and unmingled joy. She has struggled for decades with health issues that limit her mobility and tax her energy. I remember a lecture she gave once here in our community when her obvious weariness with travel derailed her whole talk into a rant about the difficulties of airport security for a person with handicaps. But that glaring moment when she lacked joy demonstrates, as I said, the tension in the psalm between past joy in God’s help and restoration and the call for help and restoration of joy in the future, as well as the importance of one of Marva Dawn’s own answers to the problem of lack of joy.
Like last week’s psalm, 85, Psalm 126 seems to be post-exilic, reflecting Jewish life after the return from Babylon. Verses 1 to 3 express a great height of joy as God’s restoring grace, and it seems natural to understand “restored the fortunes of Zion,” as the restoration and rebuilding of Jerusalem after the exile. But verses 4 to 6 make it clear that in the present moment of the psalm joy is a hope rather than a current reality, just as it is for many of us as many points in our lives.
How then shall we understand Paul’s direction in the epistle lesson from I Thessalonians 5:16, “Rejoice always?” How can anyone of God’s people accomplish a constant rejoicing? Marva Dawn’s answer is that it is accomplished by the joint work of the community. When I cannot rejoice, some other believer can, and vice versa.
It’s also well to remember the familiar distinction between happiness and joy. Happiness is typically a more transitory state which comes and goes and pain and pleasure come and go. Joy is something deeper which comes from an ongoing and enduring sense of God’s goodness and that there is hope for the future.
So despite my title above, perhaps the message of the psalm is not so much about the restoring of joy, but about joy which continues because of the sure and confident hope that the Lord will “restore our fortunes,” as in verse 4. Such hope can be mixed with sorrow, as the tears and pain of hard labor are mixed with the planting of a crop. But there is both present joy and joy to come in the knowledge that grief will be redeemed and bring with it a good harvest.