So here’s my question for those of you with iPods or one of those portable music devices: Do you have a playlist for times when it hurts so bad that it feels good? Have you got songs that are just so deep with emotion that they make you cry and even so it feels right? If you’ve got a playlist like this, you know what I’m talking about.
When I was in college I worked part-time as a disc jockey in a country music station and that’s when I discovered the “hurts so good” song. I can remember days when I would come back to the house where I was living and throw a Ricky Skaggs record on the turntable. (For those of you too young to remember such things, a record was like a vinyl .mp3 file that you kept in a cardboard sleeve – very primitive). The needle would etch itself down into the groove of that record and there would be Ricky singing, “You got your heart broke and running from the reason.” Or maybe it was George Jones singing, “He stopped loving her today.” Man, it felt just like George knew what I was feeling and that needle was settling right into my soul to pick up every note.
Lisa Stevens knows about that kind of music. A lot of you have heard our own Lisa sing and she is a master of that soulful music that goes right into the heart of pain and finds the note of grace there. It’s impossible for me not to feel better after going on an emotional journey with Lisa through one of her songs.
I’m going here today because the theme of the day is joy and what I want to ask with you is: Do you have to be happy in order to be joyful and do they have to be the same thing? Because I don’t think that they are. Being joyful is about knowing that our hope, our promise, our life is in the God who comes to us in Jesus. No matter what our present circumstances – that is what keeps us looking around at the world in wonder. Joy is also one of those things that make us truly human.
Eric Wilson thinks we’re addicted to happiness. He’s an author who wrote a book recently and it’s called Against Happiness. You might think to yourself, “What kind of title is that? Against happiness? Who could be against happiness? It’s un-American! After all, the Declaration of Independence says that we’re all about life, liberty and the pursuit of…happiness! And if you don’t take Thomas Jefferson’s word for it, then take Bobby McFerrin’s. He’s the one who told us, ‘Don’t worry, be…happy!’”
Wilson doesn’t mind you feeling happy some of the time, but he’s worried that as a culture we’ve replaced some deeper, more difficult emotions with an emphasis on being shiny, happy people. He says we have “a collective yearning for complete happiness” and if we can’t achieve that state we will medicate ourselves to get it.
He doesn’t deny that there are mental conditions that require treatment. Depression and mental illness are devastating conditions. I’ve struggled with depression myself. But sometimes, Wilson wonders, do we neglect what we need to see just below the shiny surface? To put it in Christmas terms – do we put up an extra strand of Christmas lights and tinsel so that we don’t have to consider what’s lurking in the poverty of the manger?
Wilson points out that some of our greatest artists developed their greatest works in the midst of hard times. John Keats, the poet, wrote to his brother in 1819 and said, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?” George Frederic Handel wrote The Messiah, one of our favorite Christmas pieces, from a period of emotional distress. Wilson asks, “If we can only be happy, are ‘we merely trying to slice away what is probably an essential part of our hearts, that part that can reconcile us to facts, no matter how harsh, and that also can inspire us to imagine new and most creative ways to engage with the world?’”[i]
When I was in college I worked part-time as a disc jockey in a country music station and that’s when I discovered the “hurts so good” song. I can remember days when I would come back to the house where I was living and throw a Ricky Skaggs record on the turntable. (For those of you too young to remember such things, a record was like a vinyl .mp3 file that you kept in a cardboard sleeve – very primitive). The needle would etch itself down into the groove of that record and there would be Ricky singing, “You got your heart broke and running from the reason.” Or maybe it was George Jones singing, “He stopped loving her today.” Man, it felt just like George knew what I was feeling and that needle was settling right into my soul to pick up every note.
Lisa Stevens knows about that kind of music. A lot of you have heard our own Lisa sing and she is a master of that soulful music that goes right into the heart of pain and finds the note of grace there. It’s impossible for me not to feel better after going on an emotional journey with Lisa through one of her songs.
I’m going here today because the theme of the day is joy and what I want to ask with you is: Do you have to be happy in order to be joyful and do they have to be the same thing? Because I don’t think that they are. Being joyful is about knowing that our hope, our promise, our life is in the God who comes to us in Jesus. No matter what our present circumstances – that is what keeps us looking around at the world in wonder. Joy is also one of those things that make us truly human.
Eric Wilson thinks we’re addicted to happiness. He’s an author who wrote a book recently and it’s called Against Happiness. You might think to yourself, “What kind of title is that? Against happiness? Who could be against happiness? It’s un-American! After all, the Declaration of Independence says that we’re all about life, liberty and the pursuit of…happiness! And if you don’t take Thomas Jefferson’s word for it, then take Bobby McFerrin’s. He’s the one who told us, ‘Don’t worry, be…happy!’”
Wilson doesn’t mind you feeling happy some of the time, but he’s worried that as a culture we’ve replaced some deeper, more difficult emotions with an emphasis on being shiny, happy people. He says we have “a collective yearning for complete happiness” and if we can’t achieve that state we will medicate ourselves to get it.
He doesn’t deny that there are mental conditions that require treatment. Depression and mental illness are devastating conditions. I’ve struggled with depression myself. But sometimes, Wilson wonders, do we neglect what we need to see just below the shiny surface? To put it in Christmas terms – do we put up an extra strand of Christmas lights and tinsel so that we don’t have to consider what’s lurking in the poverty of the manger?
Wilson points out that some of our greatest artists developed their greatest works in the midst of hard times. John Keats, the poet, wrote to his brother in 1819 and said, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?” George Frederic Handel wrote The Messiah, one of our favorite Christmas pieces, from a period of emotional distress. Wilson asks, “If we can only be happy, are ‘we merely trying to slice away what is probably an essential part of our hearts, that part that can reconcile us to facts, no matter how harsh, and that also can inspire us to imagine new and most creative ways to engage with the world?’”[i]
Ann Robertson is an author and a United Methodist pastor in Massachusetts and she believes that Christians have a different way to look at this. The Bible doesn’t say, “Don’t worry, be happy.” The Bible says, “Rejoice.” And to take it a little further, Paul says, in the First Thessalonians passage for today, “Rejoice always.”
Robertson tells the story of a friend of hers who was going through a very difficult period in her life. She had a son in prison, another on the verge of a breakdown, a husband in the hospital and she herself was depressed. “But she never told a soul in her church and expended all of her energy putting on this cheery front at work because she thought that to reveal her depression would be a bad witness for her faith.”
That’s wrong, Robertson says, because it confuses what faith is and what Christians are supposed to do with those rough places in our lives. “Happiness,” she says, “is the great feeling that you get when everything is going smoothly. Joy is what God gives you in the midst of trouble when you put that trouble in God’s hands.” She goes on to say that when we put ourselves in the service of something bigger than ourselves, when we live out of the knowledge that we are in God’s hands, we know that life is bigger than the things we struggles with. As she puts it, “When it finally becomes more important to be an instrument of God’s peace than it is to be comfortable and have what we want for ourselves, we are on the threshold of joy.”[ii]
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that joy is one of those things that get richer as you get older. I’m sorry to tell that to you young folks, but I think it’s true. When I was younger I had a semblance of joy at times. A puppy’s slobbering greeting, a trip to the amusement park, a lover’s kiss, a road trip with good friends – all of these things were hints of what joy could be. Now I see that these things take on new meaning in the light of God’s love. Joy is knowing that those transient experiences can never be taken away. Joy is knowing, even in the depths, that God’s new day is coming.
Joy is also appreciating the incredible immensity of God’s love in the present instance…in the here and now. Friday night I was coming out of Machipongo onto Rt. 13 and I was not thinking of anything other than what the traffic was like and how I was going to turn into it. And I looked left down towards the Trading Company and then I turned right and, God have mercy on me, there, just above the gas station was the most amazing moon I have ever seen. Surely that moon had never been in the sky before. It was huge and orange and why every car on the road didn’t stop to consider it, I do not know. The whole character of the universe changed when I looked at that moon. It was joy – entirely unexpected and out of all proportion to the circumstances.
“Joy,” the theologian Karl Barth said, “is really the simplest form of gratitude.”[iii] It is the thanks our soul gives when it is aware that life is a gift. This takes us back to the difficult adverb that Paul gives us in the letter to the Thessalonians – Rejoice always. How is it that we can always be rejoicing? Is it any easier than the other things Paul asks of the Thessalonians? He also tells them to pray without ceasing and to give thanks in all circumstances.
I think they must all be related. We are made in such a way that our souls give glory to our God – to quote Jesus’ mother, Mary. If we had not been so dehumanized by the terrors of the world we would know that more fully. Rejoicing, praying, giving thanks – these are the things our souls do in their natural state. It takes an effort to close ourselves off to them, but we have all made that effort and have done it pretty effectively.
So when Paul is saying, “Rejoice always,” maybe it’s just another way of saying, “Remember who you are. Remember that you don’t just talk about Jesus because it’s a neat story to tell. Remember that Jesus was not just a great man like other great men. Remember that his birth was not just a remarkable scene fit for reproduction by Hallmark cards and bathrobe shepherds. Remember that Jesus was not just a great teacher, a great healer, a great storyteller.
“Remember that Jesus was the living Word come down from heaven. Remember that he was the one sent to restore us to the possibility of life, even though we had become accustomed to sin and death. Remember that he was the word made flesh, God become human, the hopes and fears of all the years met in this one unique, unrepeatable form. Remember that you are who you are, that you can become what God made you to be, that you can be truly human because of this Jesus. Remember that our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus. Rejoice always because you are always living in the light of what God has done in Jesus.”
When Suzanne and I lived in England for a year it was the first time I had ever spent Christmas or at least some part of the Christmas season, apart from my family. We didn’t have much that year. Our tree was about two feet high and we had decorated it with oranges and popcorn we had gotten from a bag at the grocery store. We didn’t pay attention when we bought it but it was actually white cheddar cheese popcorn which, it turns out, was really messy to string and really gross to leave on your tree long-term.
When Christmas Day came we gave each other small gifts and then we traveled to the house of some other Americans who were in England in the same church program that took us there. It was as simple a Christmas as I ever celebrated, but even in our homesickness, I experienced deep joy because I knew that we were there because of something bigger than any of us. We were there because of the love of Jesus and in that love we had confidence. I was confident that home was not just in Virginia. Home was in the God of Jesus Christ. In that confidence, in that joy, I will always rejoice. Thanks be to God.
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 (NRSV)
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil. May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.
[i] Eric G. Wilson, “The Happiness Addicts Missing Out on a Melancholy Miracle,” theage.com.au, 3/1/2008, http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/the-happiness-addicts-missing-out-on-a-melancholy-miracle/2008/02/29/1204226981533.html.
[ii] Anne Robertson, “Joy or Happiness?”, sermon delivered at St. John’s United Methodist Church, 1999, http://www.stjohnsdover.org/99adv3.html.
[iii] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III.4, [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1961], p. 376.
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