9/20/20 “The Promise of Joy” by Nancy E. Petty

Nehemiah 8:10, Psalm 30:5b

I couldn’t believe the words I was reading. In fact, I had to read them three times before they actually sank in. At first, it wasn’t so much the words as it was the person from whom the words came. From a recent interview, Pope Francis is quoted as saying:

“The church has condemned inhuman, brutish, vulgar pleasure, but has on the other hand always accepted human, simple, moral pleasure. The pleasure of eating is there to keep you healthy by eating, just like sexual pleasure is there to make love more beautiful…the pleasure of eating and sexual pleasure [comes] from God.”

It seemed that the Pope himself is encouraging us to find joy in life’s simple pleasures – eating and making love.

The Pope went on to speak of one of my all-time favorite films, Babette’s Feast saying it represents his thoughts and ideas on pleasure. In his 2016 apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, the Pope writes: “The most intense joys in life arise when we are able to elicit joy in others, as a foretaste of heaven.” He continues: “We can think of the lovely scene in the film ‘Babette’s Feast,’ when the generous cook receives a grateful hug and praise: ‘Ah, how you will delight the angels!’ It is a joy and a great consolation to bring delight to others, to see them enjoying themselves. This joy, the fruit of fraternal love, is not that of the vain and self-centered, but of lovers who delight in the good of those whom they love, who give freely to them and thus bear good fruit.”

In these disturbing and disorienting days of the racial injustice in our nation and living through a global pandemic there is very little talk of pleasure, much less joy. It’s understandable. 2020 hasn’t felt like a very joyful year; and if you go looking for joy it’s easy to come up empty-handed. The weight of the burdens, the injustices we are experiencing right now are so heavy and depressing. Death is all around us. Scenes of violence pop up on our screens daily. Wildfires burn out-of-control taking with them beautiful landscapes, the lives of animals and humans and treasured possessions. For so many of us, weeping comes in the night and day right now. Joy, in these day, is like that one missing piece to the puzzle that you have been working on for months.

How audacious is it to speak of joy in these times? I would argue pretty audacious. But then again, our faith is an audacious faith – for ours is a faith that speaks to hope, peace, love and joy – yes, even joy – in the midst of violence, destruction, and injustice.

I have always heard, and have said myself that joy is different from happiness and pleasure. C.S. Lewis teases this out in our contemporary reading. Listen again to his thought:

“I call it Joy, which is here a technical term that must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again…I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it [joy] would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and Pleasure often is.”

I have often thought of the distinguishing factor being that happiness and pleasure is external and joy is internal – meaning that things/situations/events bring us happiness and pleasure but joy is inherent in our soul and either we find ways internally to experience joy or we don’t. This kind of thinking was shaped in me early on in my faith formation. Joy, my Sunday school teachers taught, meant: Jesus, Others, You. Which meant if you put Jesus first, others second and yourself last you would experience real joy. It took a better part of my early adult life to heal from the wounds of that teaching – a teaching that sets up a dangerous way of caring for one’s own soul. But here’s the thing I can say at this stage of my life: there is a kernel of truth in this little acronym. It’s just NOT what I was taught. It’s NOT about an order of who is more important. It is NOT about ignoring one’s on well-being at the expense of others. It’s not even about putting Jesus first. It is, however, about how we build relationship with ourselves and others based on the values Jesus embodied and find joy in those relationships. And when we seek to build authentic and just relationships we become present to joy.

But what of this joy? Recently one of my wisdom teachers and spiritual mentors said to me that we don’t create love. Love is present already. Love is an energy that spins in the world constantly. We either join in that love, partner with it, get in the flow of it or we don’t. When we do, when we partner with the love that is already present extraordinary things happen. The point my spiritual teacher was making is that we don’t create love. We join with love in loving. Love is bigger than us. We are a part of it and love needs us but it is beyond us. We don’t have to create it, we simply have the sacred privilege of joining it.

So I am wondering if it is the same with joy. Joy is already present in the world and in us from the very beginning of creation – God created and all was good, very good. In all that goodness there had to be a sense of joy. Our role, our sacred privilege is to join in that joy that was in the beginning, to partner with it so that it expands and deepens and widens in the world to do extraordinary things. Like Love, Joy is beyond us; and we are a part of it. Joy needs us to be present with it in the world. We don’t have to create it, God created it, we simply have the sacred privilege of joining our energy with it to expand its energy field.

So that raises two questions: What blocks us from joining in joy? And what invites us to join in the promise of joy? Generally, I wonder if one of the primary things that blocks us from joining in the energy field of joy is chasing after things we think will bring us joy but instead leaves us feeling empty. I think some of those things are just that – things. No need to list them, you know what they are for you. And, I think it’s more than material things. I think sometimes it ideas and thoughts and expectations and feelings and pictures in our heads of what things “should” look like that we chase after expecting to find joy but are still left feeling like we are still missing the most important piece of the puzzle – that final piece. This is not to say that all material things are bad or having certain expectations or hopes of how something could be are bad. I am simply wondering out loud if those things can often block us from experiencing, being present and joining our energy flow with the promise of joy.

So that leaves the question: What invites us to join in the promise of joy? After studying both the Hebrew and Greek words for joy and their meaning I have come up with my answer to this question. So let me lay the biblical foundation for my answer.

First, there are several Hebrew words for joy. The one most commonly cited is, simcha. In the Hebrew Scriptures this word means joy, gladness, mirth. Another Hebrew word for joy is, chadoth. Hebrew words often carry a spectrum of meanings depending on the context they are used in. Words mean things, and the proper way to understand scripture is context – we must always consider the context the scriptures are presented in and the audience they were spoken to. The word for joy that is used in Nehemiah is the word chadoth which is really the word for pleasure – as in the “pleasure of God is our strength.” This understanding goes to my point that joy is not something we create, joy is inherent in all of creation. God created us with joy – joy is the pleasure of God; and when we partner with God we partner with joy and when we partner with joy, we partner with God. This is where our strength comes from.

In much the same way, the Greek word for joy, chara, describes a feeling of inner gladness delight or rejoicing. In the Greek, joy is a feeling of inner gladness or happiness grounded in a deep seated spiritual pleasure. It is not an experience that comes from favorable circumstances, but is God’s gift to creation. Joy is a part of the very essence of our being. And in that sense, we are joy’s receptors in the world. Where we partner with joy, joy grows and deepens and widens.

So now, with that foundation laid, let me get to my emerging understanding of joy and how we join our lives in the promise of joy. I am calling my emerging understanding the Francis-Lewis Rule of Joy – a blending of two wisdoms.

It is time, at least for me, to let go of the old idea that we have to untangle and parse out from one another the concepts of pleasure, happiness and joy. If I am understanding the biblical meanings of the word joy, pleasure and happiness are a part of the package. This is the wisdom of Pope Francis: that it is, in part, God’s desire that we experience pleasure and happiness – that pleasure arrives directly from God; and that the Hebrew scriptures affirm this truth. Furthermore, it is time to let go of the church’s “overzealous morality” that has for too long denounced pleasure and happiness and see that teaching for what it is, as a wrong interpretation of our sacred scriptures. We are not called as God’s people to be sticks in the mud, denying ourselves pleasure and happiness. We don’t have to eat lean chicken and lettuce every day. We can also enjoy Ashley Christensen’s tomato pie and the ooy gooy cheese bread my friend Ala in the Republic of Georgia makes.

At the same time, I am ready to hold the truth of C.S. Lewis: that all the pleasures of the world, all the happiness we can create is not a substitute for the inherent joy that comes not from favorable circumstances but is rather a profound grace and gift from God. The Psalmist knew this wisdom when she penned the words: Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes in the morning. No matter the external circumstances, joy is the gift, the grace, the promise that is bestowed upon us at the dawn of creation.

This promise of joy was never intended to deny us pleasure and happiness as so many of us were taught in church. To deny ourselves pleasure and happiness is, in part, to deny ourselves a gift and a grace from God. The one thing we must always remember, though, is that God is the originator of joy and thus our pleasure and happiness in always centered in and grounded in our relationship with God. We are the receptors of God’s joy. And receptors are the things that allow something to flow through them. As receptors, we are thus transmitters. Think of your computer. It is a receptor that carries information from the outside to you. You receive information. But you also disperse information through that same device.

And so it is with joy. We don’t create it. It is already there, been present from the beginning, and is always being given to us from God. Our role is to receive it, join with it and send it back out. As Pope Francis has reminded us: pleasure comes from God.

And as C.S. Lewis has reminded us: whoever has experienced it [joy] will want it again and again and again.

So the next time you ponder pleasure or happiness or joy remember the Francis-Lewis Rule of Joy. And above all, remember that joy is a gift to unwrap, a grace to be experienced, a promise from God to take hold of; and our role is to participate in it. Have the courage, especially in these times, to open your life to the promise of joy. Dance, shout, shake your tambourine, delight in your Babette’s feast, enjoy the pleasure of intimacy, keep RBG’s joy alive as you work for justice, act compassionately and walk humbly. And in doing so, in C. S. Lewis’ words, you/we might just find ourselves surprised by joy.

I will close with these words from Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “So often in life, things that you regard as an impediment turn out to be great, good fortune.” “Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”

May we be a people who turn our weeping into joy, the kind of authentic joy that invites others to join us on the journey for justice and equality and joy for all.

Statement of Worship

The Psalmist writes: “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!”

In joyful times and in sad times, I am glad to be with you, my Pullen family. Our worship today meets us in the tension between gratitude and grief, joy and sorrow.

For several weeks now, I have been working on a sermon on joy. In these days where there is so much sorrow, I wanted to lift up how our faith calls us to joy – even in times of despair. And for once, I had completed my sermon early in the week – a very unusual occurrence given that I set Saturday’s aside to write. While I am writing my sermon all week long, I put words to paper on Saturday’s because a lot can happen in 24 hours; and it has always felt important to me for our worship and the sermon to speak words of relevance to the moment.

You can imagine how I felt Friday evening, after having finished my sermon on joy on Thursday, when I heard the news of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. How could I preach a sermon on joy as our nation mourns and grieves the loss of such an iconic American heroine? Should I regroup and write a new sermon? Or stay the course with the one I had written on joy? I decided to sit with my dilemma and listen – to listen for that still small voice to guide me.

Here’s what I heard: We, as a nation, cannot simply reduce the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to political maneuverings and political commentary. Sure, her role in our legal system and democracy has been and is inimitable. And, the stakes are clear as to who will replace her on the Supreme Court of the United States. And, her life was more than Supreme Court Justice. She was a mother, grandmother, loyal and dedicated friend, trusted mentor and respected colleague. For all I have read about her, she was also a joyful person who delighted in pleasure and nurtured happiness among those closest to her. At 95 pounds she delighted in a delicious meal savoring every morsel until her plate was empty. Her one glass of wine a day brought her pleasure. And she enjoyed the entertaining banter of good friends.

Our worry for what her death means to our highest court is appropriate. And yet, must we not hold more sacred our sorrow for the loss of such a great human being – on the bench and off. Must we not hold most sacred her life that championed justice and equality and human rights for all while being a wife, mother, grandmother, and devoted friend? Must we not hold most sacred the joy she brought into the world through her work for justice and equality? In doing this, we hold the grief and gratitude, the sorrow and joy together.

And so it is in that spirit that our worship this day honors the joy of both our faith and that of the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.