Dancing with Joy

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Luke 24:36b-48:

When my 9-year-old nephew died ten years ago from a blood clotting disorder, his parents made the decision to donate his organs, which also included taking skin grafts to be used for burn victims. As it turned out, another member of our church had a close family friend living on the Navajo Nation whose grandson received critical burns on the same weekend and who was flown to UNM hospital where he ended up receiving skin grafts in treatment. Now we don’t think that he received any grafts from Wyatt, but for her it brought some potential joy, and I don’t use that word advisedly, out of a terrible situation for both families. That in the midst of tragedy and trauma, perhaps a little good could come out of. That there could be a little glimmer of light, hope and yes, even joy, in the midst of darkness. And that’s the thing about joy, that perhaps it might not be what we tend to think of it at all, and that is what we deal with today as we think about learning to dance with God in joy.

Now last week, after we talked about dancing in peace, and I said that we were doing joy today, someone asked if we were going to do all of the themes for Advent, which are hope, peace, joy and love. I responded that we weren’t because we weren’t going to do hope, although we might have been able to do so, but that it didn’t really come up in the lectionary readings for the Sunday’s after Easter, which is what I was using to find the themes. And I hadn’t really even thought about them being related to the themes of Advent, but there are, but I hadn’t really thought about them also being fruit of the Spirit, which they also are. So, I can’t say if it’s just coincidence, or the movement of the Spirit, or simply the thoughts swirling in my head, that led me to them. But they are connected, and they also connect with hope, joy especially, but joy itself stands out from those advent themes in particular. If you remember the candles that we light at Advent, there are four of them. Three are purple and one is pink. It is the pink candle that represents joy. And that stands out against the purple candles, a color which represents royalty, and also repentance. It gets those traditions from the much older traditions of the season of Lent, which ends with the celebration of Easter. Lent too is a time of preparation and repentance, although Advent has lost many of those characteristics, but the fourth Sunday in Lent is known as Laetare Sunday, which comes from the traditional Latin introduction to the mass from Isaiah which says Rejoice, O Jerusalem! The word rejoice is an imperative, a command, so comes with an exclamation point. And so, the temperament of Lent, changes in that service, and the color changes from purple to pink, or more technically, rose, which is why it is also sometimes called rose Sunday.

And so, it is a day of celebration different from the other Sundays of Lent, a day of joy. An older tradition also called for people to return to their “mother church”, meaning the church in which they were baptized, as part of this celebration, and it was the only day in which weddings were allowed during the season of Lent. And so, this joy is found not in being happy, and we’ll come back to that, but the joy comes from being connected to God and with God. For the sake of this series, it’s about celebrating this dance in which we are engaged with God. And yet, joy is still a peculiar emotion, and we’ll come back to it when we look at the Pixar movie Inside Out this summer, one of whose main characters is joy, although I have to say I’m partial to anger voiced by the incomparable Lewis Black.

Henri Nouwen, a Roman Catholic, priest, theologian, who taught at Harvard, as well as at Yale, that’s for you Don, and one of the most influential spiritual writers of the last century, wrote and this is the heart of today’s message: Nouwen said “The great challenge of faith is to be surprised by joy.” Let me say that again, “The great challenge of faith is to be surprised by joy.” I read that line more than 20 years ago, and it stood out for me so strongly, and I keep coming back to it again and again. And what leads up to that statement is him saying “are we surprised by joy or by sorrow? The world in which we live wans to surprise us by sorrow.” And then recounting the doom and gloom that gets reported to us, he says “by making us think about ourselves as survivors of a shipwreck, anxiously clinging to a piece of driftwood, we gradually accept the role of victims doomed by the cruel circumstances of our lives.” And it’s so easy to do, and Nouwen could occasionally himself turn to melancholy for many reasons. But, if you know anything about Nouwen, you probably know that he spent the last ten years of his life living and working in the L’Arche Daybreak community outside of Toronto, which was a home for people with severe physical and mental impairment, sometimes profoundly so. This was a place where being seen as victims of circumstances could easily be found and seen, and yet it wasn’t. Instead it was a place of joy. He was assigned the care of a man named Adam, which had severe mental disabilities, and Nouwen said of this relationship “It is I, not Adam, who gets the main benefit from our friendship.”

And so, this is then when we have to return to the reality that joy and happiness are not the same thing. Happiness is dependent upon what is happening around us. It is circumstance dependent, and usually associated with positive life experiences, and found in a state being content or fulfilled or being satisfied, which means happiness is temporary. While joy can overlap with happiness, it can also exist outside of those times we are content; joy can exist in those moments when we might say that we are anything but happy, because, as Nouwen says, joy and hope are intimately connected. And, as the apostle Paul says, we don’t need hope when things are going well, or we don’t hope for the things we can see or already have, we hope for what we can’t see, and so hope then is a choice we make, the same as joy then is a choice we also make. And it is most needed and the bigger surprise in those moments in which we don’t think that joy is present or even possible.

We definitely see that in the resurrection story. In Matthew’s account of the resurrection, the women at the tomb, who Matthew has as Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, his words, after they encounter the angel, but before they see Jesus, we are told that they flee from the tomb with “fear and great joy.” That phrase has always stood out to me because those seem so disconnected from each other, fear and great joy, and I think that fear here is both fear fear, Afterall they have just encountered an angel who talked to them, but also fear in the sense of great awe and wonder. But that still seems strange, and as I’ve thought about that over the years, my best other example for fear and great joy is at the birth of a child. There are so many fears that go into that moment, will everything be okay, will the baby be healthy, will the mom be healthy, will I be a good parent, man I hope I don’t screw this up, and so many other fears we have, and yet there is that sense of expectation and excitement and joy almost unlike anything else. Both combined there. And we see that in the account from Luke of Easter as well, that when Jesus appears to this crowd that has gathered together, and Jesus shows them his feet and hands, and even tells them they can touch him, and then another interesting statement that “in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering.” I also think we could flip that and say that in their disbelieving, and let’s be honest that I think we’d be in that same place as well, as this is not something we encounter every day. But in their disbelieving, they also had joy. And I’m guessing that that joy was naturally occurring to them, and sometimes joy comes on us like that, like with the birth of a baby, but sometimes we have to choose joy, to seek joy out, especially in those times that it’s not expected, but so desperately needed. That’s that hope connection.

And sometimes we have to choose joy not just for ourselves, but to choose it for others as well because just as anger and grumpiness are contagious, so too is joy. I’m sure that most of us know someone who is just naturally joyous, and that does not mean that they have a better life, or have fewer bad things that happen to them, it simply means they don’t let those things bring them down. Instead they have chosen joy, and they choose to be surprised by joy. And when they are around you just can’t help but have some of that joy rub off on you. And I’m sure you also know someone who is the opposite, who just seems to such the air out of any room they enter into, that their grouchiness just changes the energy and you can’t help but want to get away from them. And so, if we have a choice with which emotion and energy we want to dance with, which would you rather have? It’s to choose joy.

And this is not to then poopoo on people who are experiencing trauma in their lives and to say that it doesn’t matter or not important or to say that the sun will come out tomorrow. That’s to try and push it to happiness. Joy is about being present in the moment and joy is also about what is to come. In Psalm 30 we read “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” Which comes after a celebration that the psalmist cried out to God and God answered. And so, joy definitely has a lot to do with our relationship with God. To return to Nouwen again, he says, “joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved and that nothing – sickness, failure, emotional distress, oppression, war or even death – can take that love away.” And so joy, unlike happiness, is not dependent upon circumstances, in fact it has nothing to do with us at all, and everything to do with God. Why do the women and the disciples experience joy at Easter, because it comes from God. And so, our dance with joy, is really dependent upon connecting with God, so that God’s joy can flow and be present with us and for us. And so, part of choosing joy is the act of choosing God, is choosing to dance with God; of seeking to follow God’s lead and of trusting in God’s promises most especially that we belong to God, that God cares for us and that nothing, including death, can separate us from that love, from that joy, because God will indeed, as Revelation says, wipe away every tear and joy will come in the morning.

We do not and cannot control most of the circumstances of our lives, but we do get to choose how we approach our lives and the world. We can focus on the clouds and the rain, or we can focus on the sun which makes the clouds and the rain visible. It’s been said that those who talk about the sun, who focus on the sun, under a cloudy sky are the true saints of our day, because they are messengers of hope. They are the ones who are most dancing in joy. Because rain will happen, not because we are good or bad, because, as Jesus says, the rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous, but what Jesus says is that he has come to give us not just life, but life abundant, or that while we will find troubles and difficulties in the world, that we should have courage, or have confidence, or in some translations, be filled with joy, because Christ has overcome the world. And to that, Nouwen says, that it is in some of his darkest moments, the most painful moments, that he has found the greatest joy, and “the surprise is not that, unexpectedly, things turn our better than expected” he says. “No, the real surprise is that God’s light is more real than all the darkness, that God’s truth is more powerful than all human lies, that God’s love is stronger than death.” And that is why joy is a fruit of the Spirit, because it is gift of the Spirit, a gift of God, a gift from learning to dance with God.

And that leads us back to the metaphor of birth. Because Jesus, as does Paul, calls out the pains of the world as labor pains. And they hurt, but they are not the end, they lead to something more, something better, they lead to new life, life abundant, life eternal, they lead to joy. Or as Jesus says, “when her child is born, [the mother] no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. 22So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.” Although I might add that we can take it from ourselves, but refusing dance with joy, by refusing to dance with God, or by not being open that joy being present for us in the darkness. Are we being surprised by joy? Are we opening ourselves up to that joy? Are we sharing that joy with others? Because joy is contagious, just as love is contagious and hope is contagious, and those come to us from God, and they begin with the understanding that nothing in all of creation can separate us from the love of God. Easter is a celebration of joy, and that joy becomes even more powerful because it comes from the darkness of the tomb, not because joy isn’t present there, because it is, just as hope is, because of the promises of God. And so, to be surprised by joy, to choose joy, we simply have to choose to accept the love of God, to believe in that love, and to act in that love by engaging in dancing in joy with God. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.