Rejoice

Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:7-18

Are you rejoicing right now? Rejoicing always?

If not, why not?

You heard Paul: “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say, Rejoice!” Let your gentleness be known, don’t be anxious: Rejoice!

It’s a great idea, isn’t it? Who doesn’t want to be joyful?

Except, well, there’s a lot of pressure on our emotions right now, most of us. Pressure to make happiness, to give happiness, to be happy. The TV commercials and the internet and the proliferation of Santas all noisily, constantly, insist that the only appropriate way to feel this month is happy, with a spoonful or two of both generosity and greed. 

For many of us, this is fun and friendly, a delightful time of year.

But for many of us it’s exhausting or anxiety-provoking.  

Sometimes right at the same time that it’s fun.

For some of us, maybe many of us, that constant expectation of happiness beats against our grief. Old, deep sorrows, or new fresh wounds. Grief not only for loved ones we miss, but for opportunities lost; love unfulfilled, or change we didn’t choose. Or it presses on our fears, for ourselves and our world. Or our worries.

It’s hard – maybe impossible – to be happy when you are sad. Or afraid. Or anxious and exhausted. 

But you can be joyful.

Paul knows that. He’s writing from prison when he instructs, commands, his friends in Philippi to rejoice. And he knows that they’re under stress too: pressure to change their faith from outside the community, and leadership struggles within. Rejoice always, he says, right in the midst of that.

A few years ago, the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop Emeritus of Southern Africa, Desmond Tutu, met in the mountains of India for a week of conversations about joy. Specifically about how to be joyful in the midst of adversity.

Like Paul, both these men know something about the obstacles to joy: they have personally experienced exile and war, oppression and revolt. And they share with you and me the stress and anxiety of snarled traffic and canceled planes, the physical pain of illness, the grief and pain of loss.

And still these are two deeply joyful men.

Writer Douglas Abrams, preparing to turn their conversation into The Book of Joy, asked them how we find joy, maintain joy – how we rejoice – in the face of bitter adversity or troubles we can’t solve.

The answers they gave kept returning to themes of compassion and connection; the truth the Dalai Lama repeated that “I am one of seven billion; a human being among human beings.”
It is essential, they agreed, to care about the humanity of those around us; to see and connect with both the pain and the happiness of others in order to be joyful oneself. To be able to love the other as yourself, the two spiritual leaders agreed, is one of the key ingredients of joy.

They also agreed that the experience of adversity – of grief and loss, frustration, stress, and pain – is essential to our capacity for joy, the two leaders insisted, because it brings us together. Adversity develops generosity of spirit like a muscle, Bishop Tutu says, (154) and reflects that illness, grief, pain force us to depend upon and connect with others, unable to isolate ourselves.

The Dalai Lama spoke of Tibetans imprisoned for decades in Chinese forced labor camps, who survived not by strength or force of will, but by “warmheartedness” – the ability to extend compassion, their sense of shared humanity, to their guards and torturers as well as fellow prisoners. (147; 155-6)

That same sense of compassion and connection – with the guy who cuts you off in traffic in his expensive luxury car; the doctor muttering frightening possibilities while she pokes and prods you painfully – is what shields you and me in our own daily lives from envy, anger, loneliness and despair, and increases our capacity for joy.

John the Baptist prescribes practices of connection and compassion to those who come to him in fear and uncertainty, anticipating God’s judgement. Share your coats and your food – whatever you have – with those who have none. Resist the isolation and hard-heartedness of everyday graft and greed so common it’s not noticed in many professions; refuse to use your power over others to enrich yourself at someone else’s expense.

And Paul tells his beloved friends in their beleaguered community in Philippi to let their gentleness be known to all. A gentleness that can also be understood as “consideration for others” or “forbearance,” a compassionate patience. And he reminds them to practice gratitude, giving up worry and anxiety; turning everything to God in thankful prayer.

That last is good, familiar advice. And I know it’s harder to do – to make stick – than it sounds. Paul knew it. The Philippians knew it. John the Baptist probably did, and Archbishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama certainly do – telling stories of how they failed at forbearance and have to keep turning to gratitude and prayer.

Two men who exude the peace of God – a joyful calm, a healing vibrancy – know all about the challenges and obstacles, and demonstrate in their very being the power of compassion and connection to create and sustain a deep, rich, resilient joy. A joy entirely different from the pressure to be and appear happy that peaks in December but stresses our culture all year round.

That’s why we need the invitation to joy; need Paul’s imperative command to “Rejoice!” in the midst of our “happy” seasons and in the painful, angry, or tearful times. And in the days and months when the work of being happy is too hard to maintain. Because deep joy – radiant, resilient joy, the incomprehensible peace of God that Paul invokes – is rooted in our honest acknowledgement of grief and pain, stress and failure, and how we are connected to one another by our shared weakness and need as well as our strengths. This joy we are called to is the opposite of – and the only true antidote for – the anxiety and stress of a world that demands happiness.

And that joy is also rooted in the truth that the Lord is near; the truth we celebrate in this Advent season: that the presence of God is close among us now, and the judgement to come is meant to restore us in joy.
Our connection and compassion with God is as true and as essential as our connection and compassion with other human beings in filling our hearts with that peace that passes understanding. That peace which is also the deep and radiant joy Paul commands and invites from his prison cell, the joy shared by two wise and holy survivors of oppression and exile.

And living in the peace of God – in the midst of anticipation and exile, trouble or loss or excess – is both how we prepare for the coming of God, and how we know that the Lord is near.

So as you feel the pressures of the season of happy, or as you live with grief and pain, listen to Paul, and the Archbishop, and the Dalai Lama:

Rejoice in the Lord always.

Again, I will say, Rejoice.