Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene on October 9, the 17th Sunday after Pentecost: Philippians 4:1-9, Luke 22:1-14
Always Have Joy
Always have joy in your
relationship with Jesus. I have to say it again, Have joy! Be gentle and accepting of everyone. It is not easy, but Jesus is near you, so you
can do it. Strive not to be
anxious—that’s the opposite of joy. Pray
and give thanks to God always—don’t be afraid, let God know everything. When you are open to God, you will know peace—a
kind of peace that is anything beyond your understanding—and through your
relationship with Jesus God will protect your heart and your mind.
It
is about joy or it is about nothing.
Paul’s
Letter to the Philippians is the letter of joy.
More than a third of the times Paul uses the word and its relatives in
his letters are in Philippians. This is
in spite of the fact that Paul wrote this letter from prison, probably the
imprisonment in Rome that would lead to his death. It is also in spite of the fact that he is
writing to a very troubled community, a community experiencing persecution, a
community that is experiencing teachers that are trying to turn the good news
into bad, and a community that is experiencing serious disagreements among
members, as he mentions this morning.
Yet
Paul says to this same community, “Rejoice always.” Always have joy.
Back
in Epiphany you may remember that I preached a series of sermons on
evangelism—trying to reclaim it and redefine it for our tradition and our
day. One of the things I said was that
evangelism was the “proclamation of joy.”
I quoted the great 20th century Orthodox theologian Alexander
Schmemann, and it is well worth repeating that quote.
From its very beginning,
Christianity has been the proclamation of joy.
Without the proclamation of this joy Christianity is
incomprehensible. It is only as joy that
the Church was victorious in the world, and it lost the world when it lost that
joy, and ceased to be a credible witness to it. Of all the accusations against
Christians, the most terrible one was uttered by Nietzsche when he said that
Christians had no joy.[1]
In fact,
Frederick Nietzsche once said,
The reverse side of Christian compassion for the suffering of
one's neighbor is a profound suspicion of all the joy of one's neighbor…[2]
I
do not know about you, but that sounds painfully familiar to me. How many
people believe that Christians take all the fun out of life? That we believe if it is fun or pleasurable,
it must be sinful? And, of course, this
is not a belief that somebody made up out of whole cloth. We have in the past been a pretty grim lot.
And
it started early on. The letters
ascribed to Paul that most scholars consider to be second or even generation
letters[3]
only contain the word joy once as opposed to 47 times in the undisputed letters
of Paul. We lost our joy fairly quickly
it would seem.
Indeed,
joy is not a major word in The Book of
Common Prayer. As an example, on
only three or four Sundays of the year will you hear the word “joy” prayed as
part of the Collect of the Day (the opening prayer of the liturgy). If Schmemann is correct and Christianity is
incomprehensible without the proclamation of joy, than we should not be
surprised why people keep not understanding us.
Of
course, it may be that we just got realistic.
Joy in this life is not an easy thing for a large number of people,
especially the kind of consistent joy of which Paul seems to be speaking. Isn’t it unrealistic of Paul, perhaps even
cruel, to insist that we rejoice always?
Paul
is not, however, asking us to put on joy as a kind of mask over strife or sorrow. He is not asking for false smiles and “happy
clappy” religion fervor no matter what.
Paul was nothing if not realistic.
What
did he mean by joy that we could have always? What do we mean when we proclaim
joy as one of, if not the, central purposes of Christian faith?
I
think we mean three things. First of all
we mean the absolute confidence that God is for us. We call Jesus “Emmanuel,” “God with us, God
for us.” “Nothing can separate us from
the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” Paul taught (Romans 8:39). That confidence
produces joy no matter what the circumstances of our lives.
Second,
we mean freedom from anxiety and defensiveness.
That’s what Paul means when he says, “let your gentleness be known to
everyone,” or, as I put it, “be gentle and accepting of everyone.” The Greek word translated “gentleness” is a
very rich word that means something like “I can let you be who you are because
I am confident in who I am.” Earlier in
Philippians this is how Paul described Jesus, who “emptied himself” and did not
feel the need to grasp at equality with God.
Again, this freedom produces joy.
Third,
we mean that death is simply not the last word for us. Death does not end life, nor does it end
joy. We say at the grave of everyone who
dies, “Even at the grave we make our song, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia” (BCP,
p. 499). This fearlessness of death
produces joy.
Joy
for us is about confidence that we are loved by God, the ability to be free
from anxiety and defensiveness as a way of life, and dismissal of death having
any real power over us.
We
do not come together week by week in order primarily to be told how to behave,
or to be reminded of how bad we are in the first place, or to have all the fun
kicked out of us. We come here to renew
our joy, to be grateful for its gift to us, and equipped to pass it on to
others. We come to practice rejoicing
with others. We come to practice
confidence in God’s love, we come to practice freedom from a defensive life,
and we come to practice fearlessness of death.
In
my reading about joy this week I came across this great quote from a 20th
century German biblical scholar named Hans Conzelmann.
Joy is the actualization of
freedom, which takes concrete form in fellowship.[4]
Without
preaching another sermon, that’s what is going on with the guy without the
wedding garment in Jesus’ parable this morning.
He could not put on the joy of the community that had gathered because
he did not know he was free.
You
are free, and loved and you need not be defensive about who you are or afraid
of even death.
That’s
the message. It does not kick all the fun out of life. It is, rather, a kick in
itself. Always have joy, my sisters and
brothers!
[1]
“The Proclamation of Joy: An Orthodox View,” in The Living Pulpit, October-December 1996, p. 8. The article is an
excerpt from Schmemann’s book For the
Life of the World.
[2]
Frederick Nietzche, Daybreak (or The Dawn), trans. R.J. Hollingdale, p.
80.
[3]
There is a significant consensus that the following letters were not written
directly by Paul: Ephesians, Colossians,
Second Thessalonians, 1 & 2 Timothy, and Titus. The undisputed Pauline letters are Romans, 1
& 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, and Philemon.
[4]
Writing in The Theological Dictionary of
the New Testament, IX:369.
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