Rejoice always!

When the Bible appears to be ridiculous sometimes its for important reasons.
Paul’s command to Thessalonians ‘Rejoice always!’ seems a silly, even offensive, suggestion.

When I tell you more about the people Paul wrote to at Thessalonica you will agree with me. This is probably the earliest document, the first to be written in the New Testament, some twenty years after Jesus’ crucifixion, or around 50-51 of our common era.   There are no individuals singled out for mention by Paul, because this first Christian community did not have distinguished leaders; they were poor manual workers and artisans.  We have Roman cults and worship of the Emperor.  Being Christian was suspect, different and liable to attack.  Being Christian was a bundle of trouble.

Things are not joyful at all in the Isaiah reading, not if you realise why talk of liberty to the captives and release of prisoners was needed, and yes people mourned, and ancient ruins of former glory needed building up.   Things are so bad, that only a utopian vision of a new promise is hopeful, something like getting married again, like spring coming upon people not just plants and gardens.

Then there was the message of John, lauding the importance of his cousin Jesus.  John the Baptist,was causing a stir, such as stir Jewish leaders go to meet him, from Jerusalem because they know he will not come to the City and Temple.  They know they are the target of John’s cries of repentance.   He is against the compromise they live with, but who does he claim to be?Could he be the person to lead their people to fulfilment?  They still hope –  can they rejoice ? No, he refuses their hopes, categories and thinking, and declares them blind.  No rejoicing for Jewish leaders, nor in the sudden arrest and execution of John at Herod’s command.

And Paul knows all these things; he saw how being a Christian was life-changing and perilous.  He saw how God would not save faithful people from death because they were Christian, like the first martyr Stephen, stoned to death while he held peoples coats.

This peril has always been the case and still is, think of Martin Luther, the German Catholic priest behind the Protestant reformation, who wrote the verse: 
spite of hell will have its course;
and though before our eyes
all that we dearly prize
they seize beyond recall…God’s kingdom ours remaineth,

And how can we rejoice, this time above all, with the experience of a pandemic, millions of people dying through a virus, millions more losing jobs and security, shattered dreams, lost homes, and the selfishness and lack of care it has revealed in our neighbours?

And how can we rejoice in this small church, as Christians when so few people are left who follow Jesus and commit to his church, at least here in Westmount, Montreal and Quebec?  The collapse of the central place of churches, and synagogues too, in community life, is sad.  We all get older and see no replacements, how can we rejoice?

But the command remains, and second word is the clincher, always, Rejoice Always!
Impossible.
To which I have four points.
1.  It was never an ordinary command
2.  It is the state of Grace, being joyful depends on the love of God
3.  It is not wishful thinking, but a daily practice.  You can do something joyful now with me, so stand up and let your body take you to joy.  This is inspiration from Dr Milton Trager,boxer and therapist and his mentastics, a movement that connects body and mind and spirit.   Take your one arm and let it swing small, gently at first, rising to chest then shoulder then head then over head height, and do it again, again, again, and ask yourself, asyou are doing this with me how can it be freer.  Do this and you will find you connect, to what? to whom? – leave this to oneside, just do it.  And you arrive at a place of stillness, and joy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-QBI4Y-ARUThere are all sorts of ways to get there, but they each provokes a sense of bliss, light, joy.

What is your joyful practice? 
4.  Rejoicing is profligate, Paul wrote to Christians, but all may rejoice, always! (all may hook up with Milton Trager)The film, Life is beautiful, epitomises this through Jewish experience, in showing how a father protected his son from the worst of concentration camp horrors by humour, inventing a game for his son to play, and this humour came out of the joy of love.    It is a beautiful film that places a defiance of joy through humour, against the awfulness of hatred and inhumanity.

I do not want to labour my four points, but to offer three different sorts of illustrations.
One from a Spanish monk, made a saint, a rather austere man, whom I think I would have found too hard a teacher, but from a safe distance of five hundred years his poetry speaks; his mystical writings of the ascent of Mount Carmel came to mind, because despite my very different world view, I know what he is talking about and it is about joy and how that joy comes from a place of stillness.   It comes from the being that we have in God, and this explains how Paul dared to suggest we Rejoice Always. It is from St John of the Cross.

The commentary is, These stanzas are a song of the soul’s happiness in having passed through the dark night of faith, in nakedness and purgation, to union with its Beloved.  I do not need nakedness and purgation, I can be pretty dark contemplating the state of the world.

One dark night,
fired with love’s urgent longings
— ah, the sheer grace! —
I went out unseen,
my house being now all stilled.

In darkness, and secure,
by the secret ladder, disguised,
— ah, the sheer grace! —
in darkness and concealment,
my house being now all stilled.

On that glad night,
in secret, for no one saw me,
nor did I look at anything,
with no other light or guide
than the one that burned in my heart.

This guided me
more surely than the light of noon
to where he was awaiting me
— him I knew so well —
there in a place where no one appeared.

And the key in this stanza for me is the line, my house being now all stilled. Remember my first two points.   Rejoice always was never an ordinary command.  It is the state of Grace, it depends on the love of God.

Now our awareness of the love of God can come unexpectedly but as your minister, I tell you its best to place yourself in the way of this love.Have a practice, as well as being open to surprises. 
C S Lewis wrote his autobiography, describing himself as ‘the most reluctant convert in England’.  He rationally resisted commitment and rationally accepted it, begrudging his change of belief.
His journey was a daily struggle of reflection.What did he call his book?
Surprised by Joy.  Because he did not expect to experience joy through belief, it speaks of how joy is more than the mind, it’s the whole self, the whole self loved by the Grace of God.

My third illustration is more personal to me.  I am finding it tough to be joyful.   Once I took up this theme, I was more aware of myself, and I lost joy too many times this week.   Now admittedly, I am fragile mentally, I suffer seasonal adjustment disorder and it makes me irritable and over sensitive.  But its not just that, its is hard to be joyful as I said with pressures on our little church and so much wrong in the world.   So, I have been more aware of the loss of joy than having it, and then there were moments I went deeper, reconnected, knew, and rejoiced.

An image came to me out of this experience, of this being like a boat trip, when I am in a small boat in very rough seas.  Only its not about finding Jesus in the boat with me, but of getting home safe, getting to the harbour I came from.  Being able to see the harbour even.  This experience if you have ever had something like it, is that in rough seas you lose sight of the harbour, you can lose sight of land entirely, only to see it again briefly, and be reassured its there; it gives you joy to see it, only to lose it again and experience despair and fear.  This is such a contrast, you wonder if you saw the harbour or imagined it, and what use is it if you are overwhelmed in the present storms.

Rejoice Always becomes frankly offensive.
But then remember joy is a daily practice and joy is profligate all can rejoice;
It was seeing the calm of Christians in an Atlantic sea storm, that so disturbed John and Charles Wesley, as they realised their faith was lacking. They ended back in the UK, and joined a holy club, with strict spiritual practice, and John famously found his heart ‘strangely warmed’ when he had gone reluctantly to a church meeting and out of somewhere Luther’s, preface to the Romans struck home.Home like the harbour.

So back in the stormy seas, do not count yourself out, from being joyful, because you are not a very good Christian, or a believer of much at all; this joy is available to all.   The film love is beautiful was fiction partly based on the authors family experience; but let put to you that a parent does not realise the extent of their love for their child until this child may be taken from them.  And playing the game was the creative joyful genius of the father’s love, to protect and care.   The love within all of us, takes us to joy and joy takes us back to love.  Rejoicing is profligate like God’s love.

All this, I find captured in the beauty of George Herbert’s poem, Come, my Way.

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life :
Such a Way, as gives us breath :
Such a Truth, as ends all strife :
And such a Life, as killeth death.

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength :
Such a Light, as shows a feast :
Such a Feast, as mends in length :
Such a Strength, as makes his guest.

Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart :
Such a Joy, as none can move :
Such a Love, as none can part :
Such a Heart, as joys in love.

Rejoice Always! is the command to digest the love of God.

Amen.

From Rev. Paul Glass 2020
God of big things and small. God of baby’s fingers and cold night air. God of history and God of tomorrow, hold me this day in my tiredness and my joy, in my good moments and in my bad and open up a small crack where I might glimpse your perspective on my days. Amen.