Why I'm Optimistic

A LIttle Book on Joy

Chapter 20

Joy - Anchor to the Future

Matthew C. Harrison

Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead. Isaiah 26:19

A young boy peered skyward at the one-hundred-foot obelisk—one hand shielding his eyes from the afternoon prairie summer sun, the other clutching the handlebar of his well-worn bicycle. His mother wouldn’t appreciate his being so many blocks from home at his age. But it wouldn’t be the first time (or the last) that he wouldn’t tell her exactly where he’d peddled to that day. She need not worry. It was a different era, a time of innocence fading, but innocent enough still. The turmoil of the world over Vietnam, Richard Nixon, or the breakup of the Beatles barely touched his little world. The bluff on the edge of the Loess Hills afforded a view miles west over Nebraska. South Dakota was visible to the north. The mighty Missouri—channeled narrowly below with logs and debris, boiling undercurrent, and whirlpools (like the confluence of his French, Irish, German and Czech forbears)—flowed like time itself. It might as well have been the very edge of the earth. One hundred and sixty-five years earlier, it had been.

The monument, the first National Monument of the United States, was finished in 1901, some ninety years after the death of the man it commemorated. The expedition commissioned by Thomas Jefferson to explore the Louisiana Purchase had encamped a thousand yards up river from this very place. Sergeant Charles Floyd fell ill with “bilious cholic” (appendicitis) on August 19, 1804. At the last, the fine young sergeant, born in Kentucky around 1782, told Clark, “I am going away.” He died—the first U.S. Soldier to die west of the Mississippi—just after 2:00 p.m. on the twentieth. Clark read the funeral liturgy and recorded in his journal, “We buried him on the top of the bluff a mile below a small river to which we gave his name. He was buried with the Honors of War, much lamented.” The grave was located with some difficulty one Memorial Day some ninety years later. The remains were placed in two earthen jars and interred at the base of the monument.

On that August afternoon in 1804, another man looked on with some trepidation over the journey ahead into the unknown. John Shields, who at 34 was the oldest member of the expedition and had been specifically chosen for the journey by Clark, was praised as one of “the best young woodsmen and hunters” and for his “ingenuity” as a gunsmith and more. He is most famous for the iron axe heads he forged to trade for corn while the party was camped in the dead of winter and at the mercy of the Mandan Sioux. Miraculously, Sergeant Floyd’s was the only death on the journey.

After the expedition, Shields reportedly trapped with his kinsman Daniel Boone in present-day Missouri. It is not certain what he did with his land warrant [as a reward for his service] to 320 acres in Franklin County, Missouri . . . John and Nancy Shields followed another Boone, Daniel’s brother, Squire, to the area of Corydon in Harrison County, Indiana Territory, settling there in 1807 [Larry E. Morris, The Fate of the Corps (Yale, 2004), 80–81].

As a boy—as oblivious to the monument’s significance as I was to the wide world beyond Sioux City, Iowa—I hadn’t the slightest idea that John Shields was the brother of my great, great, great, great, great grandfather, Richard Shields. Nor would I have cared. I haven’t quite put my finger on just why this history should matter to me at life’s midpoint, but it does. Slowly, like many other things, it has become for me a piece of the puzzle of this life, put in its place; the puzzle of who I am, how I came to be, where I came to be. Suddenly I realized that the fabric of a family I’d so taken for granted, and in my worse moments wanted to forget, was woven tightly into the tapestry of America far earlier and more significantly than I had imagined. It is a source of joy—First Article creation joy, to be sure, but joy nonetheless. I am connected to the past in a way that is meaningful to me, and because that is so—and this is somewhat hard to explain—I feel as though I can stand against the future, stand into the future, even lean into it, dash into it with courage. “I study the past, but I live for the future” (Ronald Reagan). I have an anchor, but it doesn’t hold me back. It pulls me into the future.

The secret of living a good news life in a bad news world is Jesus Christ, our eternal anchor—drawing us forward to the future, to an eternity in heaven. The foundational message of joy in the New Testament, as old as Easter itself, is the Gospel truth that, “He is risen! He is risen indeed!” (Luke 24:34). Christ is no anchor like the device sailors dragged through the stormy Mediterranean to slow their drift, “fearing that they would run aground ” (Acts 27:17). Christ is no defensive device to slow the catastrophes of life. Faith is no defensive tactic to blunt the hard blows of reality. In fact, Christians have lives full of accelerated pain and difficulty, with heightened sensitivity to the cold, hard fact of sin. All of this only drives us forward to Jesus. Christ is drawing us through life, through trial and cross to be sure, but drawing us purposefully toward eternity. He does not pull us back. He draws us forward, through it all, toward himself. That’s reassuring because sin, death, and the devil throw at us “no small tempest” (Acts 27:20). Our outlook on life is optimistic because we know that the mystery of his eternal purpose has been accomplished in the cross and empty tomb and will be fulfilled in our lives, especially when, as members of his body, our afflictions will somehow mysteriously “share in” and “fulfill” his suffering (Colossians 1:24; 1 Peter 4:13). So we lean into life, we press forward, we live in view of eternity. We dare to live purposefully, and . . . joyously.

The New Testament repeatedly asserts that the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ accomplished all that needed to be accomplished. There is nothing left for us to do. We only receive what has been accomplished, by faith. “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself ” (2 Corinthians 5:19). “He was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Romans 4:25). Paul’s teaching regarding baptism is astonishing. Baptism connects us to Jesus so that his death for sin is ours, and his resurrection is ours too (Romans 6:1ff.; 1 Peter 1:3; Titus 3:5). Baptism brings us the joy of the resurrection—Christ’s and ours.

Luther has a delightful explanation of what it means that Jesus is the “first fruits of them that sleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20).

Therefore death has already been deprived of his power, and he has but few more people left to slaughter; for almost all have already passed through death, and the time is near at hand when God will present us all alive again and cast death and hell under our feet. In short, our head, yes, our back and our belly, our shoulders and legs have already passed from death, and all the hold death still has on us is by a small toe. This, too, will extricate itself soon. Therefore we who have now reached the end of the world have the defiant comfort that it will be but a little while, that we are on our last lap, and before we are aware of it, we shall all stand at Christ’s side and live with him eternally (Luther’s Works, 28:120).

What then of suffering? It is as purposeful as the very cross of Jesus, as intentional as the suffering he endured, salutary for us like the suffering and death of Jesus, whom we come to know and own firmly in trials, and in no other way (2 Corinthians 11:30). The only way we “may know him and the power of his resurrection” is to “share in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:10). “Without the resurrection, the cross would be a cause for despair. Without the cross, the resurrection would be an escape from reality” [ James Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Eerdmans, 1998), 235]. In Christ I do not despair, nor do I escape from reality. I am captive to the future because Jesus has a future. I am captive to joy—my anchor to the future. That’s worth A Little Book on Joy.

“I am overflowing with joy” (2 Corinthians 7:4).

Matt Harrison