Joy Hidden Under the Cross

Transcript (edited for readability).

Finally, the nature of Christian joy — the joy that's given to us, the joy that we experience. I've been speaking in some exalted terms; this is down-to-earth, practical stuff. St. Paul tells us this in Philippians chapter 4, verses 4 and 5. Rejoice in the Lord always — now, "always" could be daily, regularly, as well as always. Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.

Rejoice in the Lord always is not a command, but an invitation. It's encouragement — the encouragement we need to do what should be obvious to us but comes so hard to us. Rejoice. And that requires a certain amount of discipline. It's connected with prayer, it's connected with thanksgiving, but most importantly, two things: it's a communal thing. It's a plural imperative, not a singular imperative. You, congregation in Philippi, rejoice always. So it's communal joy. And the reason for joy is that the Lord is at hand. The Lord is near. The Lord is with you, and that is the source of joy and rejoicing.

So it's an invitation to the congregation to rejoice, and that's primarily a matter of doing rather than feeling. Of course it involves feeling, but you can rejoice even when you don't feel any joy. Rejoice in the Lord always. Then Paul goes on to say that this is God's will for us. Joy is not only the purpose of Jesus — one of the purposes of Jesus' incarnation, his life, death, resurrection, ascension, and the giving of the Holy Spirit — but it's also the will of God for you.

Evangelicals will speak very much about the will of God and discerning the will of God, as if it's hard for us to discover. Let me tell you, it's quite easy — just go to the scriptures and you have the will of God. But if you want to sum it up, what's God's will for you? Number one is rejoicing. It's for you to have joy and rejoice. So Paul says, "rejoice always," and notice that comes first. I would expect it to come second. "Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus."

The clinic principle of exegesis, the clinic principle of Bible study, is to look for the unexpected. Look for the unexpected. Paul's got the order "wrong." He should start off, "give thanks in all circumstances, pray continually, rejoice always." But notice the order: rejoice always — and what comes out of that? Praying regularly, continually, and giving thanks in all circumstances. Notice it's not giving thanks for everything, but in all circumstances. Why? Because wherever you are, in whatever circumstance, at whatever stage of life you're in, God wants to give his good gifts to you, and he wants you to have joy. That's God's will for us as Christians. Those three things — rejoicing, praying, giving thanks. We are a rejoicing community first, and that makes us a praying community, and that makes us a community of thanksgiving.

Most importantly of all, there's a close connection — not just between joy and Jesus, the source of joy — but the empowerment, the ability to rejoice, to receive joy, comes from the Holy Spirit. Joy is one of the first and greatest fruits of the Spirit. Fruit of the Spirit — it's what the Spirit gives to us, it's what the Spirit produces in us. And if it's the fruit of the Spirit, then if you don't have joy, what can you do? You can pray that God will give you his Holy Spirit, and that he will give you joy through the Holy Spirit.

I've told you already, yesterday, that the devil is a killjoy. That's one of his basic aims in life: to destroy joy — joy within the order of creation, joy within the order of redemption. He wants to destroy the joy in your family, the joy in your marriage, but also the joy in your congregation, the joy with your brothers and sisters in faith. The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, is the Spirit of joy. I've given you a number of passages there that you can look at. He is the joy-maker, the joy-enabler, the joy-energizer. So if you've got a joy problem, it's not a matter of trying harder or being more disciplined. "Ask and you will receive," Jesus says, "and your joy will be full." As for the Holy Spirit — ask for the Holy Spirit to give you joy, and you will receive joy. That's not rocket science. Joy, prayer, joy, Spirit — they belong together.

There's a wonderful hymn from the great Lutheran hymn writer Paul Gerhardt, "Only in Our Lord Thy Temple." There's a verse in it that's not in your hymn book, sadly, but it's in the old ELH — not even the other one, the red one, but the ELH. This is really fantastic. There, Paul Gerhardt gets us to pray: "Thy gift is joy, O Spirit; thou wouldst not have us pine" — that's, be sad — "in darkest hours, thy comfort doth ever brightly shine, and oh, how soft thy voice hath spread its sweetness o'er me, and opened heaven before me, and bid my heart rejoice." The gift of the Spirit is joy. And where does the Holy Spirit give us the greatest joy? It's where you'd least expect it — in the darkest hours of life. That's where we experience the joy of the Spirit most obviously. And the joy of the Spirit opens heaven before us — not in our peak experiences, the mountaintop experiences, but in the valley of the shadow, of the darkness of sadness, the dark hours of life.

Next, Paul tells us — he encourages us; this isn't him laying down the law for us, this is encouragement to do what should be obvious to us — he says that we are to rejoice in what we hope for. Now that sounds, to my ear, and with the years that I've — thought, "okay, rejoice in what you will have when you're in heaven." But when he tells you to rejoice in hope, or rejoice in what you hope for, he means: rejoice in what you will have in heaven, because you already have it by faith now. You don't rejoice in a future possession, but you rejoice in a present possession. Everything you hope for, everything that God has, he wants to give to you as dear children, and you already have that by faith, and that means you already rejoice in everything that you hope for.

We'll be needing that in the years to come, when people around us lose hope, and we will be tempted too to join them in losing hope — hopeless societies. The mark of a pagan society, Paul says, is that they are not only without God, but they are without hope. So, rejoicing in what we hope for.

Next aspect of joy: joy is always communal, and it's contagiously so. Sorrow, sadness, isolates us; joy unites us. In fact, you can't really rejoice by yourself — somehow the joy is short-circuited unless you can share your joy with others. So we share our joy as Christians by rejoicing in our fellow Christians and with our fellow Christians. It's easy enough to see that God gives me Jesus to give me joy. It's easy enough to see that God gives me the Holy Spirit to give me joy. But that God gives me you guys to give me joy? I mean, you're all very nice people, because you're here at Doxology. But what about the troublesome people — Christians, I'm not talking about non-Christians, I'm talking about people in the church, the troublesome people in your congregation — and, in your sin, paradoxically, Jesus gives them to you for your joy. Now, there's something that's hard to get your head around. "Oh, no, you'll find it easy" — it's just me that finds it hard. Hmm? So do I — join the club, okay?

Remember that I spoke about the cycle of joy: God — that Jesus rejoices in us, so that we rejoice in him. Now it gets enlarged, so it goes outward: Jesus rejoices in us, so that we rejoice in each other. And the more we rejoice in each other, the more we rejoice in Jesus, and his joy doesn't just flow in and through us, but includes others in its circuit, and it keeps going out and out — it overflows. I'll come to that wonderful term in a minute. It overflows, but it's communal.

There's a lovely little phrase, a sentence, in Philippians chapter 1 that's come to be something of a motto of mine. Philippians 1, verse 25 — I should have marked this, shouldn't I? Paul says, "Convinced of this" — Paul's talking about writing to the Christians in Philippi, and he doesn't know whether he's going to remain in this life or whether he's going to lose his life. There's the prospect of martyrdom. Half of him wants to go to the Lord, the other half wants to continue in this life. And he's convinced that his time has not yet come. So he says, "Convinced of this, I know that I will remain alive and continue with you all for your progress and joy in the faith."

There's a connection: Christian life is a matter of progress. There's progress in faith, but progress in faith is also progress in joy. Paul wants to continue alive because he wants to lead his people deeper and deeper, more fully into the faith, because by doing so they progress — not just in faith, but in joy. So your task as pastors, as people in the church, is to lead people deeper and deeper into faith, and by doing so, to lead them to progress deeper and further into joy. Now, you have the idea that you start off with little joy — what does Jesus want to do? Expand it, increase it, maximize it. And your ministry, your work, is to do that for other people.

Sadly, however, it seems that much of our behavior is geared toward giving other people grief instead of joy, and we do that quite often to the people who are closest to us — our spouse, our children, the members of our congregation, the leaders of our congregation. Progress in joy. And Paul goes beyond — he says that the joy we have increases, so we're led from joy to joy as we go until we reach the final joy of heaven. But then also, the progress in joy is so that joy will overflow. So he talks about overflowing joy, abounding joy — it fills us and then spills out from us into other people, and from them into other people. And so it spreads, in the church and through the church, into the world.

Question from the floor: "Is progress in joy something about the way of reading the change from Ecclesiastes and birth, and joy, toward the New Testament vision?"

Yes. It sounded great — but now, when we hear about the heavenly joy that our Father takes in us, it makes you wonder why I haven't spoken about that already.

Question continued: "But is that partly showing our progress in joy itself within a path?"

Yes, because it's interesting that even though the Bible distinguishes between earthly joy and heavenly joy, it doesn't totally disconnect them. And it's not obvious — we can't obviously see that in this life you go from joy to joy to joy. What's the problem, as we touched on this morning? You end six feet under. And that casts a shroud over everything. Now, in the light of the new covenant, in the light of the work of Jesus in the church, it transforms not only what we experience in the church, but also the way we experience life in the world. As I said yesterday, all the earthly joys that God gives us in this life are a foretaste, or a pointer, an inkling, a sign, an encouragement, to the far greater joys that lie for us in the kingdom of God, the joys of heaven. And those joys come to us, paradoxically, in a strange way that I'd like to touch on — if we have time, we can pick it up a bit further, because there's a lot more there in that question than I've been able to tackle.

Now, here comes the most puzzling, profound, and wonderful reality of heavenly joy — and that's the fact that heavenly joy does coexist with sorrow. Paul says, "We are sorrowful, and yet always rejoicing." Now there are two things here that I want to touch on, and this is very difficult from an earthly point of view, and contradicts all popular psychology. There are two aspects: within God's realm, within the church, joy and sorrow coexist. And it's even better than that — sorrow, in fact, heightens joy. It not only coexists, but it deepens joy and heightens joy. I'll come to that directly.

So Jesus tells his disciples, right from the beginning, in the Sermon on the Mount — and it's echoed all the way through the New Testament — that when Christians are persecuted, they are to rejoice. They are to rejoice. And that's hard to believe, and we could meditate on that for a long while. But on its most obvious level: if we are persecuted, it means that the devil is trying to get at us; it means that we belong to God. We are persecuted in the name of Christ. People can't get at Jesus, they can't get at God, so they get at us. And what does that prove for us? It proves that we are children of God. It proves that we are saved. It proves that we are justified. It proves that God is pleased with us and the work we're doing. Otherwise we would be left alone, we wouldn't be persecuted. Joy — when we are persecuted.

Now, this is not masochism — like, "oh yes, I enjoy suffering." Some people enjoy suffering; we're not talking about that perverse psychological condition. We're talking about rejoicing in the name of Jesus when we are persecuted. And then Paul says we are to rejoice in something that all of you experience. He says that he rejoices in suffering together with Christ, because in that way he completes the afflictions of Christ for the sake of the church. Completing the afflictions of Christ for the sake of the church — Jesus' sufferings don't end on the cross. In some way he sympathizes with us, and he sympathizes with the people of the church, and he suffers whenever the church is attacked and people in the church are afflicted. And we then are called to join with Jesus in his suffering in and for the church.

Now, all of you pastors know what I'm talking about — that suffering that comes because of the church and because of Christ in the church, that's part of our lot. And it's hard to accept it, because very often we get attacked, but really people don't want to get at us — they want to get at Jesus, they want to get at God, and we're the lightning conductor. And so we cop it sweet. And very often we're tempted to bail out, because it makes life too difficult for us. Paul sees it differently. When that happens, he's joining with Christ, and he's suffering with Christ in and for the church, and he rejoices in it, because Jesus is working out his salvation in and through the church, and we are part of that pattern.

Now, most wonderfully, this side of heaven, joy always coexists with sorrow. I read already, before, 2 Corinthians — Paul says, "We Christians" — he, apostle, pastors — "we are sorrowful, yet always rejoicing." The two belong together. Joy coexists with sorrow, sorrow coexists with joy. They don't exclude each other, and in fact they interact with each other in a remarkable way. Joy transforms sorrow, and sorrow heightens, increases, completes joy. Now, some of you here are living testimony to that. Strange mystery — the mystery of the cross. The greatest joy is always hidden under the sign of the cross.

Just listen to what a colleague of mine, who did his thesis on Luther's pastoral care of depressed people — a man by the name of Stephen Peach, who did his doctorate and now has a book called Of Good Comfort — this is what he says about Luther's help to people who are depressed: "Christian joy is therefore primarily this: the Holy Spirit's gift received by faith. While we certainly participate in it, we cannot create or realize it for ourselves, and it does not ultimately depend on what is happening in our emotions, moods, or situation in life. If, in our despondency and depression, we cling to God's promises and engage in joyful behavior of some kind, this too is faith receiving and using God's gift. Joy is therefore available to us in the midst of unhappiness and misfortune, even in deep depression. It is perhaps most readily recognized and received in the midst of suffering, in the shadow of the cross. Suffering and pain do not necessarily diminish life's richness and joy, but may indeed deepen it. We may, at times, need to let go of our attempts at self-constructed well-being in order to experience joy, because our human ideals get in the way of God's real gifts."

Deepening joy — what paradoxically happens is that it is through the cross that our capacity for joy is enlarged, enhanced. God remakes us, God changes us, God transforms us, so that we become more and more receptive to the deeper joys of heaven. So the New Testament says that we have joy in affliction, and even joy in temptation. That's the strangest one of all, and I've already touched on that. What joy is there in temptation? Well, Luther puts it most clearly: he says that when we are tempted, we are attacked by the evil one, and that's a sure and certain sign that God is pleased with us and what we're doing. Otherwise the devil would leave us alone, and we wouldn't be tempted.

So, paradoxically, we may have joy in our weakness. Now that turns the world upside down, because most joy in the order of creation comes from our health, our strength, our well-being — joy and strength. Paul turns that on its head: joy in weakness, because in our weakness, the power of God is made perfect in us. It's in our emptiness that we are most open to receive the gifts of God. It's when we are weak that we are strong. Also, Paul could say, when we are weak, we can best rejoice. So Paul says — not only joy in our own strength, but also in our own weakness, but in the strength of others. That's the hardest thing of all — joy in the strength of other people. This is what Paul says in 2 Corinthians: "We rejoice when we are weak but you are strong. We pray that you may be made complete, fully equipped, so that you become stronger and stronger in faith, even if that means that we become weaker. We rejoice in your strength."

Now, most obviously, there's a connection, an inseparable connection, between rejoicing and prayer, and particularly thanksgiving and praise. And there's a kind of circuit: if we're filled with joy, we will be filled with praise, and we will become people of prayer. And we pray in the name of Jesus, and by doing that our joy is complete. So we pray, we're filled with joy, we praise, we give thanks. And as we give thanks, we become more and more open to seeing the good things that God gives to us and to other people, and we therefore rejoice more and more in the gifts that God gives to other people, and we praise God more and more, and the joy increases. So it goes round and round and round — and it's not the same circle, it's not a vicious circle, but it keeps on overflowing. So there's overflowing that comes.

Lastly, joy in ministry — and I could spend a lot of time on this, but I just want to touch on a few obvious things. Paul — and Luke in Acts — Paul sees, and Luke in Acts sees, Paul's ministry basically as a ministry of joy. So it's a ministry of the gospel, sure, but by bringing the gospel to people, Paul brings joy to people. He doesn't bring the gospel to make people miserable or unhappy, he doesn't bring it to put them down, but he brings the gospel to people to bring joy to the people. So everywhere in Luke, everywhere in Acts, wherever the gospel comes, what do people do? They rejoice. So joy is spread, in the book of Acts, as the gospel comes all the way from Jerusalem to Rome.

When he writes his letter to the Christians in Rome, whom he hopes to visit, he asks the Christians there to pray for him, so that he may come and visit them with joy. What's the purpose of his visit? He wants to visit them with joy. And that works two ways: he comes there to bring them joy, but he also comes there in order to receive joy from them. So his ministry is a joy-bringing, joy-receiving ministry. And then he adds something that's rather fascinating. Very often New Testament language, biblical language, is bowdlerized — sort of sanitized, because there's a little bit of an edge to it. Here's one case in point: he says he wants to come to them with joy, and the purpose is so that they may be refreshed, or find rest, with him. Now, the verb that's used there — for those of you who are interested, I won't go into all the details, but if you look it up in your lexicon — is used, in the literature that we have, almost exclusively for what happens in marriage. What happens when a husband and wife who love each other go to bed to be together? So, to be refreshed by finding rest with each other — the idea is lying down with each other, sleeping with each other — but the most important thing is just being together.

Now, the edge is being together in bed, and he doesn't mean that Christians should practice group sex or something — no. He uses that rather daring picture, which is used in that context, because he wants to bring joy to the people in Rome and receive joy. And the greatest joy is not by doing or saying anything, but just by being together and enjoying each other. At its most fundamental level, joy is a state of being. It can issue in speech, it can be experienced emotionally, it affects actions very profoundly, but at its deepest level it has to do with being. We are in joy, we are full of joy. It's the joy of the Lord — being in the presence of God the Father, who loves us; being in the presence of Jesus, who loves us; being in the presence of God's people, who share our faith and our hope and our love. And that's where the rubber hits the road: being together with, and enjoying, our fellow Christians.

There's a interesting thing that Dietrich Bonhoeffer comments on: how does the church differ from all other societies? He says there are a number of different ways that this is so, but most obviously, all other societies depend on getting together with people who are the same as you — the same ethnic group, the same social group, people of like mind. But Jesus does something quite different in the church: he brings unlike people together, people who otherwise have nothing in common. The only thing they have in common is Jesus and faith in Jesus. He brings unlike people, because I don't need people who reflect me exactly — I need people who are different to me, opposite to me, people that I don't necessarily feel comfortable with, because these are the people by which God can give me what I lack. And by means of these people, God opens me up, extends me, renews me, changes me, sanctifies me. Because to live together with them, to be together with them, means that both they and I need to change, and we need to be together and give and receive to each other. There has to be giving and taking.

But at its most profound level, joy is a matter of being — being with Jesus, who brings us so that we are where he is, in the presence of the Father. We occupy the same place in the Holy Trinity as Jesus does — "where I am, with the Father, there you shall be also." And being in the church together, not with some people, our chosen clique, but being together with all the members of the church.

Finally, in this, Paul makes this remarkable claim. He says that he and his coworkers work with you — notice, collaboration. Paul doesn't talk about himself as a pastor alone. So, we pastors work together with you — and that's an inclusive "you" — for what purpose? Your joy. So what's the aim of Paul's ministry, and he says this should be the aim of all pastors: to work together with each other and the congregation, for the congregation's joy. So he says, "We work with you for your joy, because it is by faith that you stand firm." So that makes sense of something that's quite interesting — Paul has a lot of troublesome congregations, but what comes through most of all is Paul's joy in every single one of his congregations. His congregations are his joy and his crown. And every time he remembers his present congregations, as well as the congregations that he founded, he remembers them with joy. And that's sometimes the best we can do with difficult congregations — we can remember them with joy and thanksgiving in prayer.

But last of all — in earthly terms we can't see Jesus face to face, and if joy is a matter of being, of being together with the people that you love, the best thing is just to see them face to face. I'm looking forward to getting back home in order to see my children and grandchildren, and Claire can't wait to get home so that she can see them. So, John, in Paul — Paul, in Philippians, and John, in his second letter — speaks about the joy of face-to-face contact with fellow Christians. What's the greatest joy that I've had in being with you? What's the greatest joy that I've had in this visit to the USA? Quite simply, it's to see you guys — just to see you, and to be with you.

Conclusion. Yeah, that's a foretaste of heaven. Pretty good, that. Okay, how are we going? Are we finishing at quarter-to? I think — yes. Okay, let me wrap up, and there might be some room for questions.

This is what Augustine says about joy and the sharing of joy, the fact that joy is always communal — he says this: "When many rejoice together, the joy of each individual is richer, since each inflames the other, and the warmth spreads through all." Or Luther, in his commentary on the Magnificat, the song of Mary — "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior." And Luther here touches on something that's very profound and not necessarily obvious. The point is that we do not create, we do not conjure up, our own joy. Joy not only comes from God, but joy is worked by God. We don't do rejoicing, but God does joy to us. We suffer — meaning, in the sense that we experience it as something done to us — the work of God, which creates joy in us.

This is what Luther says: "For to praise the Lord with gladness is not a work of man; it is rather a joyful suffering." That means it's not something we do, but something that we suffer, something that's done to us. It's a joyful suffering, and the work of God alone. "It cannot be taught, but must be learned in one's own experience." It's something that nobody can teach you — you can catch it from others. You learn it in the school of life, the school of the church. It's part of the wisdom that comes from above, and wisdom always comes from experience. And that means that some of the most unlikely people are the ones most filled with joy. By and large, theologians are a miserable lot, but little old ladies who've had no theological education, old people who are close to senility — they are the ones who rejoice most in the Lord.

There's a contrast here, for Luther, between self-generated joy — you know, the kind of thing that happens, and I mean this as a bit of a criticism, in Pentecostal services, where you whip people up with praise singing so that they feel joyful. That self-generated joy — that's joy that comes from the flesh rather than the Spirit. So he contrasts self-generated joy with God-generated joy. He says joy is the work of God alone. It's the result of what God does and says, rather than what we say and do. His rejoicing in us and over us is the foundation, the cause, of our joy, ultimately. He rejoices in you, and that's the cause of your joy, your greatest joy.

And joy is experienced, but we don't experience it by turning in on ourselves, but by being saturated with the divine sweetness of the Holy Spirit — that's Luther's language. It's ecstatic joy, meaning joy that comes from outside of us — we receive it from outside of us. It's joy that isn't based on our feelings about God, but rather faith in God's feeling toward us. Can I say that again? It involves feeling, to be sure, but it's not based on our feeling. So we can have joy even if we don't feel anything, even when we feel sorrow. So your own feeling is not the measure of joy. What matters is not what you feel, but what God feels about you, and the fact that he demonstrates that to you. So it's God's feeling toward you that matters. And hence Luther speaks about joyful suffering — it's joy in the passive voice, grammatically speaking, before we go into the active voice. So it's joy that's done to us. God rejoices in us, which then evokes and empowers the joy that we have in the Lord and in each other.

Two final things. Listen to what Luther says about perfect enjoyment: "While we are living on earth, our joy cannot be perfect, like the angels'. Through faith we are beginning to feel some of it, a piece of it. In heaven, however, it is so great that no human heart can grasp it. But when we get there, we too shall feel it. Meanwhile, we don't look to our feelings, but we look to the promises of Christ," which show us how God feels toward us and how Jesus feels toward us. Luther implies here that we have a limited spiritual intelligence, and that means we have a limited capacity to receive joy, to enjoy, and to respond in joy to the joy that God has in us.

So, as I said, one of the things about suffering is that it deepens our enjoyment, it enhances our capacity for joy, it takes our small-mindedness, our little-heartedness, and makes us more magnanimous, great-minded — not only toward each other, but it enlarges our capacity to receive the gifts of God. And that means that this side of heaven, we won't experience perfect joy, even though that's what Jesus wants to do for us. But in heaven we will have perfect joy, pure joy, mirth. Now that's an interesting word, which some of the old Lutherans loved, and people in the early church — pure mirth, which is the joy of heaven. Mirth is unalloyed joy, which is no longer mixed with sorrow. Meanwhile, this side of heaven, joy and sorrow walk together hand in hand — how they track together. And it's very important that they track together.

Now, watch out how you minister to other people. Don't minister to them psychologically. Let's say people who are grieving because they've lost somebody whom they love — and the implication is that they should get some psychological kind of counseling, that they've got to move on, that they need to let go of it. There's no reason for Christians to move on from where they are with their grief. If you've lost your husband, that's a permanent gap that nothing will ever fill this side of heaven, and that needs to be acknowledged, and there's nothing wrong with that. Very often we give people the impression that it's a sin to be unhappy, it's a sin to be depressed, it's a sin to grieve. There is godly depression, there is godly sorrow, there is godly grief. That's news to our generation.

Let me end with a verse from a hymn that you know well, and a blessing. "Now Sing We, Now Rejoice," the hymn: "Oh, where shall joy be found? Where but on heavenly ground, where the angels singing, with all the saints unite, sweetest praises bringing, in heavenly joy and light? Oh, that we were there! Oh, that we were there!"

Now, to God the Father, who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to present you blameless in the presence of his glory with exaltation, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time, and now, and forever. Amen.