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Karen Hollis | December 15, 2024 Advent 3
Isaiah 12:2-6 I will praise you, O God. For though you were angry with me, your anger turned away, and you comforted me. Surely God is my salvation. I will trust and not be afraid, for you, O God are my strength and might, you show yourself my saviour. With joy we draw water from the wells of salvation. Give thanks and call on God’s name. Make known God’s deeds among the nations. Proclaim that God’s name is exalted. Sing praises to God, whose work is glorious; let it me known in all the earth. Shout for joy, you who dwell in Zion, for the Holy One of Israel is majestic among you.
Philippians 4:4-7 Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be reflections of your word to us today, in Christ’s name we pray. Amen
What brings you joy? (people said: grandchildren, sunrise, full moon, I have a dog named Joy, etc)
There are many things that help me connect with my joy, still, I have a funny relationship with joy . . . the emotion, not my dog . . . because I’m kind of a moody person. I’m a real feeler and sometimes my emotions have to knock around inside of me for a while before I can locate for them an exit door. I know that joy is in there, but it feels like I have to do a big housecleaning first of stuff that’s not bad, but needs to move through to make room for joy.
The popular ideas about joy agree that joy is not the same as happiness. Happiness, it seems, is based on what is going on around and outside of us. Happiness is more based on our current circumstances. Joy, on the other hand, comes from within. We can find joy deep inside us, regardless of what is happening around us.
It makes sense, then, that Paul would be writing from prison: Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. While the people of Philippi are distracted by things that don’t matter and have conflict among them, he encourages them to access their joy, still. Even though things are difficult, rejoice in our source.
As I was beginning to think about joy as the theme for today, I let my mind wander a bit about where I have seen joy in the world. My mind rested on an image of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. I have this memory of seeing the two of them giggling together . . . when I looked for a picture of the two of them, I found that they actually collaborated on a project, called The Book of Joy.
Have you ever had the experience of reading something or talking to someone and it’s as if your soul or the holy spirit is speaking to you through those words? Reading the book for me is like that. And it suddenly clicked in for me that we need joy as a resource in the coming days, just like we need hope and peace from our previous two weeks in Advent. This season is gifting us a basket of tools and resources for these times ahead . . . so let’s dig into joy . . . the barriers, but more the sources of joy.
ANXIETY
I’m just going to touch a finger gently to the surface of what can block our joy – there’s so much there. As I read the words of these remarkable humans, the Archbishop and the Dalai Lama, it made sense why I have such a funny relationship with joy – they talk about joy being blocked within us, for example, by stress, anxiety, grief . . . and these are not bad, though they tend to get stuck within us . . . finding ways of honouring and releasing them, makes a path for the joy within us to rise once again.
I hear from people a lot these days about anxieties, especially around what is happening in the world. About what may happen, what we can’t possibly anticipate. Our imaginations can take us far from our centre. Some might find it helpful to name our fears, naming what worries us, especially the things we can’t control, and even adopting a prayerful practice of letting go.
I imagine Paul knew how spun up we humans can get about the things that are beyond us. He says, the Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything . . . but come back to God again and again and again in prayer. Name what is happening and name your relationship to it, then ask for what you need. God is with you.
While there are enough barriers to joy to fill many sermons, perhaps more important are tools and practices for increasing our joy, for widening and deepening those pathways for joy to emerge and be of service to us and the world. We have people and activities that help us access our joy . . . and there is more. In their book of Joy, our great spiritual leaders invite us to look to the mind and heart as primary sources of joy and offer practices that can increase it. Mind practices, such as perspective and acceptance. Heart practices, such as gratitude and compassion. With these offerings, I have Paul’s words dancing in the back of my mind . . . And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
PERSPECTIVE
Let’s begin with practices of the mind: a while back a colleague of mine was doing a program at her church that involved receiving a word for a season and reflecting on it . . . my colleague gave me the word: perspective. I loved it. Our spiritual masters share that “while changing our emotions is quite hard, changing our perspective is actually relatively easy . . . the way you see the world, the meaning you give to what you witness, changes the way you feel.”1 So, it’s difficult to change the emotions, themselves, but changing our perspective, the way we think, naturally changes the emotions.
Perhaps for that reason, I love the freedom perspective offers – to see things from multiple sides, receive additional information. Perspective gifts us with ideas, points of view, insight into where our situation sits in relation to a much bigger picture.
I think about Paul writing from prison about joy. His imprisonment is not his ultimate reality . . . his chosen perspective is that God is near . . . no matter what, God is near. That perspective gives him the freedom to make his primary focus God’s love and helping the church at Philippi – and others – live into God’s love.
ACCEPTANCE
Paul had another powerful inner tool at his disposal . . . acceptance. According to our spiritual masters, “acceptance . . . is the opposite of resignation and defeat.”2 In the latter two, I sense overtones of resentment and despair, while with acceptance there is peace and the possibility of healing. From an emotional processing perspective, after anger and sadness, bargaining and denial all run their course, what is left is acceptance. Rather than suffering in the reality that things are not as we they were, joy is available in the acceptance of what is.
GRATITUDE
With a breath in and out, we move from our minds down into our hearts to explore the heart practices that can increase our joy, beginning with gratitude. Paul writes: everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. Gratitude is one of those words that is beautiful and rich . . . and also can get kind of glossed over . . . (yes, yes, everyone is talking about gratitude these days, we know it’s important).
I was participating in a guided meditation where the leader invited us to offer our authentic gratitude . . . that felt like something I couldn’t gloss over. What am I really grateful for right now? I had to reach down deeper and get curious about the gratitude I actually felt . . . so I could offer that back to God. In the words of our spiritual masters, connecting with our authentic gratitude “moves us away from the narrow-minded focus on fault and lack to the wider perspective of . . . abundance.”3
In their book, they tell the story of “Anthony Ray Hinton [who] spent thirty years on death row [in the states] for a crime he did not commit . . . he said ‘One does not know the value of freedom until one has it taken away . . . people run out of the rain. I run into the rain. How can anything that falls from heaven not be precious? Having missed the rain for so many years, I am so grateful for every drop. Just to feel it on my face.’”4
COMPASSION
Finally, we come to compassion. “The Buddha supposedly said, ‘What is the one thing, which when you possess, you have all other virtues? It is compassion.’”5 Compassion literally means suffering with . . . it connects our feelings of empathy to acts of kindness when we see someone suffering.6 There are two pieces of compassion that I want to lift up here. One is the idea that when we move to relieve the suffering of others, our own suffering is reduced.7 We’re wired for being with others, companioning each other through the stuff of life. We are wired for reciprocal gifting in that. Equally as powerful and important is self-compassion. We are SO hard on ourselves. The same idea of compassion for others can be applied to compassion for ourselves. I read something the other day that said the part of us that knows we’re sad is not sad. From the perspective of that observer (who knows we’re sad), we can hold space for our sadness, affirm that who we are and how we are is ok . . . even if we are still a work in progress (which we will always be). That observer is always available to us to provide compassion for all the human stuff of our days and lives.
I will close with these wise words from Archbishop Tutu: “Discovering more joy does not, I’m sorry to say . . . save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.8 A person who struggles, he says, is a masterpiece in the making.
There are many challenges today, and we may have a mixture of emotions and anxieties about the world, the stuff of our lives and our families. This morning, we receive from these spiritual masters of our day tools that we have inside of us to support us as we walk forward together. We have among us and within us everything we need. Thanks be to God.
1 The Book of Joy p. 196
2 Book of Joy 224
3 BOJ 242
4 BOJ 244
5 BOJ 252
6 BOJ 252
7 BOJ 254
8 Book of Joy, p. 12