On Christian Joy
Paddy Cavanaugh
St. George’s, Arlington
5th Sunday of Easter, Year B (Shrine Mont)
5/5/24
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.
Good morning St. George’s, it is so good to be back with you after being away for our Shrine Mont retreat and a few weeks of vacation this past month. Now it is Rev. Shearon’s turn to take some well-deserved time off for her sabbatical which began this week. She will be back with us at the end of the summer on August 20th and I hope you’ll join me in lifting her up in prayer while she’s away resting, traveling, and re-grounding herself in God’s love.
That’s also to say, you’re stuck with me this summer! And what a summer it will be! Friends we have so much to look forward to together in the coming months. From Youth Sunday on May 19th, to our fantastic preaching series, to the start of our outdoor services on Memorial Day weekend, to a parish dance, to our Youth Service Trip to the beach in June. I can tell you we are going to have an absolute ball together this summer. I like to think that during Rev. Shearon’s sabbatical, us here at St. George’s will be able to take a mini-sabbatical in our own way. That’s not to say we won’t continue the important work of worshipping God and carrying out the various ministries we have been called to, but in the midst of this I also want us to have fun and simply be together. In our culture summer is a season of fellowship, rest, and restoration for a reason and I don’t think any of this is frivolous or self-indulgent.
As a matter of fact I take having fun together very seriously. In a culture that is so hyper-focused on deadlines and productivity, it’s easy for us to get caught up in the current of over-working ourselves, even, and especially, when it’s for good causes. It’s easy for us to neglect God’s commandment for us to pause and rest and enjoy the fellowship we share together. In fact, I personally believe that sharing in rest and joy together is an act of worship in itself that glorifies God. Jesus reminds us in the Gospel this Sunday that abiding in the love of God together is a critical part of keeping God’s commandments – God’s guidelines for living in right relationship.
Jesus says that he wills for his joy to be in us so that our joy may be complete (John 15:11). So this summer my hope for us is that we may claim what it means to have and to practice a theology of joy together. Because joy is one of the fruits of any healthy Christian community.
I first learned about joy as a spiritual practice from my time as a social worker with the formerly homeless and working poor in Boston before I entered the priesthood. My job was to go and visit people who had recently transitioned into public housing after living in shelters or on the streets. Unsurprisingly many of them were still struggling to overcome the circumstances, either personal or systemic – often both – which led to them becoming unhoused in the first place. Circumstances such as addiction, mental health struggles, and the general lack of affordable housing in our country. As their caseworker, I was tasked with the job of helping them try to overcome these seemingly insurmountable barriers to living what many of us, who have been dealt a more favorable hand, would consider a joyful and fulfilling life.
It was the kind of work that when you shared with others during customary small talk, would often elicit well-meaning responses of concern or pity, directed either towards my clients for their difficult circumstances, or towards me, for my lack of career savvy.
And I certainly don’t want to sugarcoat the immense difficulty, pain, and sorrow that so many of my clients had courageously endured; but to reduce their lives to their hardships would paint a wholly incomplete picture of their full humanity.
The reality was that I expected to encounter the hardship of their lives, that was no surprise to me. But what did surprise me, was the tremendous and uncommon capacity for joy that many of my clients possessed and understood in ways that were foreign to me.
Let me tell you that I heard far more raucous laughter in the waiting room of the housing office than I ever heard in the break room of my office. Day after day I would meet clients in their humble public housing units or in court or in rehabs and hospitals, bracing myself for yet another difficult conversation. And as often as not, I would leave these visits shaking with laughter from the jokes and stories my clients had shared with me, often times about the same difficult circumstances they found themselves in on that given week. With other clients I’d have to budget extra time in our visits because I knew I’d been in for at least thirty minutes of them sharing stories of their faith journey and their assuredness that God was there for them and that they could rejoice in the goodness of God’s blessings, even when it was difficult to see those blessings in the present moment.
And to be perfectly honest, it took me a long time to understand the reason for this abundance of joy coming from people who had every reason to feel the opposite of joy in this life. For them, joy was no laughing matter, no frivolous thing. In fact, joy was an act of grounding and an act of resistance. Grounding in the hope that the force of goodness, the force of God, was more powerful than the forces which kept them down in this life. And joy was an act of resistance to the forces of sorrow, self-pity, and hopelessness which sought to overcome them.
Whether they were aware if it or not, and believe me many of them were very aware, their habit of joy was an active fulfilment of God’s will that the joy of Christ be within us, so that our joy may be complete. The poor were my teachers in this spiritual lesson.
And I share this story with you because God invites all of us, regardless of our lot in life, to share in this habit of joy. Practicing the joy of Christ as a community is not a naïve joy; it does not mean we are to turn a blind eye to the hardships of this world. How can we? Christ certainly didn’t, for even in the joy of the resurrection he still bore the wounds of the crucifixion in his body.
Rather, practicing the joy of Christ means living together in such a way as to give others contagious hope that the hardship and difficulties of our broken world do not have the final say. God does.
And our God is a God of life-giving liberation and joy.
So friends, my prayer for us this summer is that we can worship together with joy, serve together with joy, eat together with joy, and yes, dance together with joy! So that the joy of Christ may be in us, and our joy may be complete.
Because the joy of Christ is an act of grounding, it’s an act of worship, and an act of resistance. Amen.