A Meditation on Philippians 4:4-9
Sunday, September 25, 2022
1.
Joy can seem like a privilege, sometimes even a delusional idea. So we turn our backs on delight, throw ourselves into serious pursuits, and leave joy and maybe even dancing to those with happy feet and carefree hearts. After all, we’re serious about things.
But Paul’s Letter to the Philippians flips this very temptation on its ear. Joy, he says, is the inheritance of those who love God. Joy, he says, is the substance of lovingkindness and resistance. If Jesus is your example, if Jesus is your hope, if Jesus blazes your trail in the world’s woods, then joy is the fire kindled in your heart. And joy is the light that shines through you in the world. “Rejoice in the Lord always,” Paul says to the Philippians, “again I will say, Rejoice!”
It's such a simple instruction. But so tempting to reason away. What if we didn’t?
What if we accepted the promise, the affirmation, the gospel even, that says each one of our lives is an instrument of God’s creativity in the world? My life. Your life. Each one of our lives. Designed to resonate with beauty and wonder. Calibrated to notice goodness and kindness. Each one of our hearts. Sensitive to the slightest movement of mercy. Alert even to the tiniest, quietist miracles of each day. We are designed, wired, created to notice. We are designed, wired, created to rejoice. In the song of a loon on a summer lake. In the laughter of an old man telling his favorite story for the tenth time. In the courage of a politician doing the right thing though it costs her her job.
“Rejoice in the Lord always,” Paul says to the Philippians, “again I will say, Rejoice!” What if we accepted the promise that says each one of our lives is tuned—or can be—to the glory of God in the world? To the subtlety of God’s grace in the world? To the fragile but fearless love that made the world? Each one of you. However old or young you may be. Wherever you come from or whatever wounds you’re nursing. What if your life—right now, in this moment—is tuned to the glory of God in the world? What might you do with that? What might your Sunday afternoon bring?
Now I’m not saying—and I don’t think Paul was—that you’re supposed to be cheap with your happiness, or phony with your fearlessness, or joyful in a forced and insincere way. We all know what that looks like. And we all know that it has an especially dispiriting effect in religious life—when folks seem to be putting on their joyful face, or staging their salvation smile, or ignoring the messiness of life. That’s not really joy, right?
The joy Paul’s talking about in this Letter to the Philippians doesn’t rely on a good day on the stock market, or a promotion at work, or even absolute confidence in your beliefs or your faith or your skills. The joy Paul’s talking about is generated by love, God’s love, Jesus’ love; and it’s nurtured in communities like this one; and it’s open to all that’s weird in the world, and all that’s lovely in life, and all that’s real and hard, and really hard to bear.
Think about the truly joyful souls you’ve known in your life. Think about what they’ve shown us. You can live in the real world—in the world of doubt, in the world of unsettling, unnerving truths—you can live in the real world with gratitude and wonder; because you recognize God’s hand in the midst of it all, because you perceive God’s compassion even and especially in the messiness, because you celebrate the gift that is your life and your participation and your communion in the big life that we share on the third rock from the sun. There’s plenty of pain in the world; and there’s a fair measure of pain in each one of our families, in each one of our lives. But that doesn’t render us incapable of joy. Hardly. It reminds us that our joy is just the first taste of a feast God intends for all creation. For the gathering and the healing of all creation. Your joy doesn’t cheapen the world’s pain, and it doesn’t turn a blind eye to the world’s injustice. But it fuels your passion for kindness, and it generates your commitment to the common good. And it serves the rest of us as a reminder of what we all can be, what we’re all here for. There's nothing cheap about that kind of joy.
Paul, if we’re serious about his legacy: Paul is a realist. He knows that the world of empires is cruel. Hey, at the moment he’s writing this letter to his friends, Paul’s sitting in a shabby shanty in Rome, under house arrest, tethered to his rickety chair. He knows that the Gospel of Love is a threat to the powers that be. He knows that the radically inclusive vision of Jesus stirs up bigotry and racism and worse. They’ve taken away his freedom. And they’ve intimidated him with violence. So he’s a realist, to be sure. But what they can’t have, what the world can’t take from Paul, is his faith in God, his love for Jesus and his joy. That joy that Paul knows—and it’s stirred up by his affection for the Philippians in particular: that joy doesn’t simplify the world, and it doesn’t diminish the world’s strange and painful contradictions. Instead it opens his heart to the presence of Jesus even in his captivity, to the grace and protection of God even as he suffers, to the beauty of life itself wherever he may be and however he may be treated.
So the temptation for us is to forget, right? The temptation for us is to think of joy as a privilege, a special personality thing that some folks get and others not so much. Maybe that gene just passed me by, right? But the message today, the message here in Philippians is that joy is a cosmic seed, a divinely blessed and cosmic seed, that’s planted deep in every one of our lives. In every one of our hearts. It’s a God thing. And that makes it a you-thing. And what we’ve got to do for one another—in a church like this—is call it out. Love those seeds in one another. Water them with our gratitude and kindness. Make generous space for all that joy to germinate and grow. Because you are made for it. And I am made for it. And we are all made for joy.
4.
Last month I officiated at a wedding here in the sanctuary. Actually I like the language of celebration so much better. I celebrated that wedding, Kim and Melissa’s wedding, here in this sacred space, with many of you. It was my great honor to speak the words of blessing, to remind the couple of their calling, to see the light shining in their eyes up close. Ministry can be a great privilege in that way. And talk about joy—there was a kind of irrepressible joy in the room that day, the joy of a couple we’ve come to know and love, the joy of their church gathered around in celebration, and the joy of a host of friends from other places, other communities, other chapters of Kim’s life and Melissa’s life too.
Here's another thing about joy. Real and generous joy. Divine joy. It’s rather infectious. And that bright, warm August day—you could feel the connections being made, the love being passed around, the joy popping from heart to heart and uniting a diverse group of individuals into a body of blessing and celebration. With all the ways the world divides us up, with all the suspicion stirring in the country, with all the fear and prejudice driving politics in 2022, Kim and Melissa’s wedding was like a great awakening, a spiritual revival of what’s most important and what’s most glorious and what’s most precious among us. Love and patience. Love and gratitude. Love and integrity. Love and all kinds of people in God’s house: loving one another.
It was a big church day. And joyful. And infectiously so.
And several days later I got a phone call from two women who’d attended that wedding, and they told me it was the first time either one of them had been to church—any church—in a long, long, long, long while. And the joy they experienced watching Kim and Melissa share their vows, and the light that shined on all of us as they did, and the thrilling love, the divine love that danced in our many hearts—it was unlike anything they’d ever known. “We’re getting married too,” they told me on the phone, “in October. And we’re wondering if you’d perform that wedding. Just like you did for our friends.”
Infectious, right? That kind of joy. To be shared, right? That kind of moy. To be channeled through our relationships and into other relationships, right? To be cherished and given away, right? That kind of joy. So I'm celebrating another wedding in a couple of weeks; and I'm counting on their joy to awaken in other hearts the joy we're all meant for.
“Rejoice in the Lord always,” Paul says to the Philippians, “again I will say, Rejoice!” Not because the world is easy, but because God is love. Not because our lives are simple, but because Jesus is always near. Not because we have all the answers, but because we have the Spirit in our hearts. What if you were to trust that you are created to shine like that? What if we were to trust that our joy is what the world needs most? What kind of mischief might we make together? What kind of mission might we do together? What kind of a church might we be?
“Rejoice in the Lord always,” Paul says, “again I will say, Rejoice!” Let it be so--in our lives, in our church, in our generation.
Amen and Ashe.
