Today is Guadete Sunday, which just means, “Sunday of Joy.” It’s the reason we wear these rose colored stoles – it’s a moment of celebration within what is meant to be a season of preparation and reflection. It’s the reason our NT reading today begins with the words, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice!”
This exhortation by Paul to the people of Philippi, to rejoice always, is one of those things that we can easily grasp on to when things are going well. But it becomes infinitely harder to maintain when things are going poorly.
I used to work with a pastor who loved telling the story about a young man who was moping about, and how an older pastor came up to him to ask him how he was doing. “Well,” the young man responded, “Not all that well, under these circumstances.” And then the old man got animated and told him, “Well there’s your problem son! What are you doing under the circumstances? As a Christian you should be living above the circumstances!”
Now, I’m sure the old pastor meant well, but it’s comments like this that have left people with the impression that Christians are supposed to be happy all the time, that nothing is ever supposed to bring us down. You may not have heard anyone say it quite so clearly, but the sentiment is one that you have most likely encountered at some point in your life.
So, what exactly is Joy? C.S. Lewis, in his book, Surprised by Joy, recalls the following story:
The first is itself the memory of a memory. As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from but of centuries, the memory of that depth not of years but of centuries, the earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation that came over me; Milton’s ‘enormous bliss’ of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to ‘enormous’) comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? …. – and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time, and in a certain sense, everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.
It was this experience, among a few others, that led Lewis to define Joy as “unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure.”1
In fact, Lewis realized that all the pleasures of this life were just poor substitutes for Joy, because you knew the end result of these pleasures – a bottle of port wine, after all, will make you happy – but this deep longing, this “unsatisfied desire” was a signpost to heaven. He wrote, “If we find in ourselves a longing which nothing in this world can fill, then we can make the assumption that we were created for another world.”
Created for another world.
Once again, I remind you that there is a dual nature to the Advent Season. We prepare ourselves not only for the coming of the Christ Child, but we prepare ourselves for the Second Coming of Christ – we prepare ourselves for another world. With the child, we prepare for Christ with Us in this world, and with the Second Coming, you can say, we are preparing for “Us, with Christ” in the next world. For the time being, both scenarios play themselves out in this world, as we live in anticipation and preparation.
Years ago, one of the pastors I knew preached on this dual nature of Advent, and said that the Second Coming of Christ is not so much something that happens to us, but something that happens through us. That is, then, that the Joy of the world, the Light of Christ, is something that is supposed to shine through us, and make Christ evident to the world, through our lives.
But if Joy is not happiness, and Joy, as Lewis writes, is actually a deep longing, an unsatisfied desire, then how does one share this “deep longing” and an “unsatisfied desire” with the world?
In Lewis’ recounting of that moment where he had the memory of his brother and of this deep longing, he realized that “everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.” Which is just another way of saying that “nothing else mattered but that longing desire.”
Meister Eckhart, a Dominican Priest and mystic of the 13th Century, was branded a heretic during his lifetime, because people did not understand his thoughts. He was known for making statements like “God is Nothing,” or the opposite, that “Nothing is God,” or even the more confusing statement that “In Nothing will you find God.”
One of the clearest examples of his thought had to do with St. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, where the bible passage states that Paul got up from the road after being blinded, and “saw nothing.” Eckhart writes:
“I think the text has a fourfold sense. One is that when he rose up from the ground with open eyes he saw Nothing and the Nothing was God; for when he saw God he calls that Nothing. The second: when he got up he saw nothing but God. The third: in all things he saw nothing but God. The fourth: when he saw God he saw all things as nothing.”
Paul saw, in all the created world, in all the things in and on this world, nothing but God. That is, Paul saw God, in everything. And the next idea is just as important, when Paul saw God, he saw all things as nothing. That is, just like C.S. Lewis, he saw that nothing else in this world mattered but God, and that everything else was insignificant in comparison to this unsatisfied longing for another world.
Eckhart called it detachment, Paul called it emptying, and Jesus said, “Die to yourself,” and all of them mean the same thing. That the Joy of the World is found in that glimpse of glory, that moment of unsatisfied longing, that rising up from a dirty road and seeing nothing – nothing but God.
When we have removed from ourselves all the cares and occupations of this life, and counted it all as nothing, that is when we catch the glimpse of God, and we experience that moment of joy in the “unsatisfied longing” that can only be satisfied in the world that we were truly created for.
The trouble, for too many of us, is that we see too much else but of God. That is, we see too much else, instead of God.
In the play Hamlet, Shakespeare said that “Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” That is, we attach meaning in our lives to events and things – things that will not last. And, we attach meaning to relationships and jobs and status and power. And we fear the loss of these things, or we yearn to have them. Because to us, having or losing means something. Or, said more bluntly, much of our suffering in this world is self-created.
That’s not to say that we should ignore difficult life events – aka “living above the circumstances.” We should not ignore difficult life events for the sake of trying to find God. Rather, we should recognize that even in the midst of these moments of sadness, grief, anger or deep yearning for things, for people, for happiness, we have a hope of something new, a hope of something greater, a hope that our deepest hurts and pains and longings might be filled with the salve that soothes them. Lewis said that “If we find in ourselves a longing which nothing in this world can fill, then we can make the assumption that we were created for another world.”
And that is where the rubber meets the road. Joy is intrinsically intertwined with Hope, and the two cannot be separated.
When Paul wrote the letter to the Philippians, he was sitting in prison, where he was not being treated well. And yet, he encouraged the people to Rejoice Always! He knew that nothing else mattered, but God, and he saw the hope of Glory for the people he was writing to. Rather than denying his own terrible situation, he pushed into the hope that is a new life with Christ, he pushed into that “unsatisfied desire,” and he lived his present life in the hope of another world.Even in the midst of our suffering, our anger, our sadness or grief, we push into the hope that is Christ, and we seek to empty ourselves of everything in this world, because nothing has meaning but God. In the midst of any anger, suffering, sadness, or grief, we recognize that our “unsatisfied longing” might be greater than it ever has been, but that if we continue in the hope that this longing will one day be fulfilled, we can live the type of life that can say, “Rejoice Always! Again, I say, Rejoice!”
- Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis
[This sermon was delivered at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Wickenburg, AZ on December 15, 2024.]
