Joy Is Not Emotion

Propers: Gaudete Sunday, AD 2024 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice … and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

Happiness. Peace. Joy. These are things that we all seek and yet which prove elusive. Particularly at this time of the year, we feel a certain pressure, perhaps even a desperation, to seize seasonal joy while we can, to treat the holidays as our last bastion of childlike wonder. I mean, if we can’t be happy at Christmas, what chance do we have for the rest of the year?

As kids, the holidays are everything: presents and music and family and friends, warm crackling fires and way too much sugar, sledding and snowballs and time off from school. It’s bliss! You wait the whole year for it. Holiday memories keep a corner of our hearts forever young, even as we grow. Yet as adults, the stress creeps in. Cooking, wrapping, travel, bills—the peace up front sustained by all the chaos backstage.

We hope that by giving our children the same memories that we had, the same magical, miraculous joys, we might recapture some for ourselves. And surely we do. But it takes work, doesn’t it? Our holidays needn’t be perfect, but neither do they happen on their own. Not for adults. Happiness takes work. Wonders must be planned.

This goes against the grain, I think, because “happiness,” in English, derives from the same root as “happenstance.” It’s just something that happens to us, that falls right into our laps. So many of us are waiting for happiness to find us, for our circumstances to change. But do we stop to wonder what our happiness might be? What is it really, at root? It is pleasure, entertainment? The people who are selling us things certainly want us to think so. Is it ecstasy and excitement? Surely that would get old. One can’t be keyed up all the time.

Is then happiness freedom from worry? Well, that would be nice, but I’m honestly not sure that’s possible. I feel as though humanity has a baseline setting for anxiety, and when we can’t direct it toward big things—like saber-toothed cats or bubonic plague—then we reroute our stress into a gaggle of lesser evils, such as paying bills or dating. Happiness isn’t sustainable, not in the way that we think. That sort of happy comes from laughing at a joke, or eating a cookie, or getting a hug from your kid: sparks in the dark.

Our classical predecessors viewed happiness differently. For them, it was neither an emotion nor a sensation. Happiness wasn’t the same as simply feeling happy. Rather, happiness was a way of life, the concerted effort to become ever more human, ever more just, ever more wise. To be happy, in other words, was to have the strength and the freedom to do the right thing, the proper thing, whatever life would throw at you.

Paradoxical as it might seem to us, the Greeks expected happiness to be a struggle, a long and noble striving against adversity, a refusal ever to allow the world to dehumanize you. Happiness, in other words, was doing the right thing regardless of one’s situation. A Greek could look to Christ on the Cross and say, “There hangs a perfectly happy man.” I could see how some folks would prefer the cookie.

The Western Church calls today Gaudete, from the Latin meaning “rejoice.” That’s why we have a special rose-colored candle on our Advent wreath this morning, and why I get to sport a stylish rose stole. “Rejoice in the Lord always,” writes St Paul, “and again I 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.

You know, I read that, and my first thought is, “Fat chance.” Telling an anxious person not to have anxiety typically doesn’t do anyone terribly much good. We, as Americans, tend to equate emotion with authenticity. How we feel about something is our truth. Thus if someone does not validate our feelings, we consider ourselves to be under attack. Alas, this does not prove conducive to dialogue, nor to civil society.

And it bleeds into our religion. We think that feelings make our faith authentic. So if we go to a church that isn’t exciting, that’s not always happy, that doesn’t keep our heart-rate elevated, then we imagine that God must not be there, because we didn’t feel Him. God’s supposed to make us feel good, right? St Paul says that we should always be rejoicing, always be smiling, always be dancing in the aisles. Everyone wants to be happy.

The flipside of this is, of course, the pressure to fake it ‘til you make it. You’re hurting; you’re lonely; you’re mourning; you’re sad. Well, buck up, buttercup! You’re so much prettier when you smile! Jesus loves you, so everything ought to be hunky-dory all the time! I hope we all can see that’s problematic. If our faith is all about our feelings, then what must it mean when we feel bad? Where is there room to grieve, to confess that we’re hurting? Emotions are ephemeral, mercurial, unreliable things. Yet God is anything but.

Our faith lies not in feelings, not in thoughts, not even in the things that we might make our minds believe, but solely in God’s faithfulness to us. The Lord is with us. The Lord is near. And nothing we can do can make Him go. Sin can’t stop Him; death can’t stop Him; hell can’t stop Him. His power is His love; His love is Himself. And in the face of that there’s no escape. We tore the flesh from off His back; we nailed Him to a Cross; we ran a spear under His ribs and deep into His heart, and what did He say? “Father, forgive them! They know not what they do!” Fall on your knees!

You think that He gives a damn how you feel? Yes, He understands. Yes, He cares. Yes, He loves you. But nothing you can feel could stop His love! All it can do is draw Him closer unto you, because He knows exactly what it is to suffer, to grieve, to lose, to be betrayed, to have His Body broken, to have His life stolen. And so anything now that you suffer, He has suffered too. You are in His wounds and He in yours. Life is hard in this broken, fallen world, but nothing here can take you from His love.

Rejoice! Not falsely, not in fakery, not denying you’re in pain. But rejoice that God in Christ is right beside you. Rejoice that He will never go away. Rejoice that He upholds you, suffers with you, through whatever the cosmos might conjure to crush us. War, debt, cancer, poverty, homelessness, divorce? Addiction and depression, loneliness and rage? All impotent! Powerless to tear you from His hands! You are His and He is yours and nothing here can change that: not the devil, not the world, and not your sinful flesh.

Joy—real, potent, honest-to-God joy—is not an emotion. It isn’t a forced celebration. It is the fruit of the Spirit, the breath and life of God, dwelling deep within you, even in your wounds. It is the sure and certain knowledge of His promise, that He has died for you, that He has gone to hell and back for you, that you will never be alone, and you will always rise again. The world is full of suffering, which God has never willed. Yet His response to all our agony is not to send an army, not to force us to be good, but to join us in our brokenness and heal us from within.

Where is God, when we suffer, when we doubt? Where is God when we lose our loved ones, our purpose, our dignity? He is with you. He is near: closer than your jugular, deeper than your soul. And He is going nowhere. In your bones, in your flesh, there is Jesus Christ. He comes to you in Word and Sacrament, comes to you in bread and wine, comes to you in water and Spirit, and will not let you go, ever, for anything on earth or below it or above it.

Joy is having God with you. Joy is having God in you. Joy is having God as the steady point of peace within your warring, wicked heart. Lord knows I should know. And so I say to you, rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice. The love of God will outlive the world, the grace of God shall burn out hell, and you my friend will rise when all is lost. This is the promise of God. And God does not break promises.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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