Joy
“Joy” by Pastor Rosanna
Good morning! It is a great day to talk about joy, and specifically about how joy is related to our relationship with God. If you have been tracking, or even just paying attention to some stuff which is printed in your bulletin, Joy is the second fruit of the Spirit which Paul lists in Galatians 5:22, and the next fruit to consider in our sermon and Bible study series. You can probably figure out what the next one will be when we are next together on July 5.
Joy is a concept which gets a fair amount of airplay, in the church and elsewhere, most often in the month of December. We often talk about joy as we light the third candle of Advent; it’s usually pink because that’s a bit brighter and more joyful than purple. The verb form of joy, Rejoice! Is what we encounter in the passage which Anne read from Philippians, but you can find that word or other forms of it scattered throughout the psalms and other Old Testament writings, and in the New Testament as well. Here are some of the words which you shared last week which you associate with Joy.
[Slide Word Cloud] Let me read a couple of them to you: happiness, fellowship, euphoria, serenity, deep. There’s more fun here than I remembered from last week, but that was a word you shared also. This is a pretty happy set of associations.
It was interesting for me to read in our Bible study material by Mary Sue Rosenberger that in the Bible, the word “joy” is always and only used when describing a relationship with God. Rejoice in the Lord always, or the joy of the Lord is my strength. If you think about it that way, would you modify any of the words on the screen? Do you find ‘fun’ in your relationship with God? That is certainly possible, but might not have been a word which would have occurred to me to describe my Christian walk. [Slide Down]
This raises an interesting question: if joy happens in relationship with God, and Jesus was the person who had the closest and most complete relationship with God, did Jesus feel joy? I think the answer has to be Yes, don’t you? When I was in college and for the 8 years or so afterward, I worked for a greeting card company called the Joyful Scribes. Its founder, Patricia Helman was a big proponent of joy, and she loved this image
[Slide Jesus Laughing] which was created by Canadian Willis Wheatley in 1973. We sold this — with permission — on greeting cards and as 8 x 10 prints. You may have seen it before; I think it hung in the home of John and Janet Berkebile. You may be surprised to hear that we got some push-back about this image. At least one person contacted the Joyful Scribes to complain that the Bible never mentions Jesus laughing, so this image was at best incorrect and at worst some kind of heresy. I have to say I disagreed with that at the time and I still do. Jesus was human, and I believe laughter is a human expression of joy. And being human, there may have been other bodily things which Jesus did regularly which gospel writers did no note specifically. Being human can be messy, but there are also opportunities for joy. [Slide Down]
The Bible has some unlikely juxtapositions about joy. The setting for the verse, The joy of the Lord is my strength in Nehemiah 8:10, is a people returning from exile in Babylon, hearing the law of Moses read for the first time in a generation, and being grieved at how they have fallen short of observing the law. The joy of the Lord is encouragement in time of despair. The familiar passage which we heard today from Philippians was written by Paul from prison. Rejoice in the Lord always! Really? And James 1:2-3 says My brothers and sisters, whenever you face various trials, consider it all joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. I find this a challenging teaching, but reflecting on my own experience and experiences I’ve shared with others has helped to shape my perspective about what it means to be joyful in difficult times.
I have a good friend who is going through a difficult time right now. She had a rough winter and a terrible spring. She is a person of faith who is resourceful and resilient, and she is struggling. She continues to find little bits of joy and light in the kaleidoscope of dark and shifting circumstances. She has to work pretty hard to see and be aware of those moments of joy, and we who care about her try to affirm those moments when she reports them to us. I don’t believe that joy is something we manufacture for ourselves, and we certainly can’t manufacture it for other people. It would be shallow and trite for us to say Just be happy! Everything will turn out alright to our friend. We don’t even know what alright might look like — different than it did 10 months ago for sure. And yet we have to be open to the possibility of joy and actively look for it when things are difficult, because those are the times when we most need to lean on our relationship to God for strength.
It’s obvious to me that suffering, trials, affliction, anxiety, whatever form hardship takes for you that it do not cause us to rejoice. Why would we be rejoice to get something which no one wants? But joy is a gift of the Spirit which can co-exist with hardship. It may not take that suffering away — whatever it is — from us, but it helps to give us the strength to get through difficult times, even if we have to work hard to see tiny bits of joy in the midst of pain or sorrow. I believe that the commitment to look for joy in the midst of pain is a form of faith. This comes more naturally to some people than to others, but it is a discipline which anyone can cultivate, through prayer, through awareness of God’s presence and goodness, through gratitude for the care we receive from other people. You would be surprised — or possibly not — by how often I meet with people who have been through or are in the midst of a terrible time, grieving the death of a loved one, in the hospital, whatever, and they tell me about how kind people were, or how a nurse prayed with them before their surgery, or a beautiful card which lifted their spirits. That may not be joy, exactly, but that is the attitude and the discipline which leads us to a deeper experience and awareness of joy.
No one can do the work of finding joy for you; and you don’t have to wait until conditions are just right in order to choose joy. If you are unhappy because you don’t think people appreciate you, or they expect too much of you, or Pastor Rosanna’s sermons don’t make you feel good, or whatever, there may be things that need to change, but that doesn’t have to keep you from feeling joy. Our circumstances are not perfect — they never are and this is universal, as far as I can tell — other people are not perfect (you probably knew this), and we are not perfect. God and God alone is perfect, and our connection to God and God’s spirit is the source of our joy. Finding that joy may be a challenge; you will never find it if you don’t believe it exists. If you have faith that the joy of the Lord is your strength, then that strength and joy is available if you commit to seek it, and the more you share it, the easier it is to find.
So this week, I am sending you on a scavenger hunt. You know what that is, right? A list of items that individuals or small groups search for — at home or someplace else — and see who can find the things on the list the quickest. You are going to be playing for yourself, or for the small group of your choice; if you complete this scavenger hunt, regardless of when it happens, you are a winner. This is a scavenger hunt for joy at Creekside. Are you game? There are three items:
- Find something positive in your life that you would not have if you were not part of Creekside. Give thanks to God for that.
- Find something joyful which you have done as a ministry at Creekside. Consider who you could tell about that ministry and how rewarding it is, or whom you could invite to be part of it.
- Find a person at Creekside whose generosity, friendship, expertise, teaching, care, whatever has brought you joy or comfort. Tell them — either in person, or with the little note which says Joy, or some other way. You don’t have to do it today, but I’m going to check in the next time we’re together.
Commit to be the person who expresses gratitude and joy to others, because the more we do that, the more we become aware of how much joy God gives us access to. Remember that next week is Annual Conference Sunday. There will be no in-person or livestreamed service on June 28. If you are not traveling to Fort Wayne, you are invited to join us at Creekside in-person at 6:30 p.m. and watch the livestream of the opening of Annual Conference either from here in the Gathering Area, or at home on Creekside’s livestream beginning at 7:00 p.m.
May God bless you and give you joy until we meet again on July 5.