Oy and Joy

5-6-18

Grace and peace to God our creator, and from our crucified and risen Lord Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

What comes to your mind when you hear the word “Joy”? Perhaps you think of the character from the Pixar movie a few years ago called “Inside Out.” Joy, along with Disgust, Sadness, Fear, and Anger, are personified emotions inside the head of an eleven-year-old girl named Riley. According to the movie, Joy is a blue-haired, green dress wearing person of unlimited optimism and the voice of Amy Poehler. And honestly sometimes she just seems kind of annoyingly upbeat.

But is that what being joyful really looks like?  How would you describe what Joy is to you? Would you say something like this….?

Joy is… spending time with the people you love, like having dinner with the whole family around the table.

Joy is… working at a job that pays the bills AND provides a sense of meaning… or getting accepted into your dream school or program.

Joy is… hearing a child call your name for the first time.

Joy is… a cat on your lap with a good book and a cup of tea or coffee on a rainy day (like today!).

Sometimes joy is… just getting the laundry finished, or getting a good nights sleep!

Joy is… also my sister’s middle name. We used to tease her about it sometimes when we were kids, and some days say that she should have been named “Katie Not-A-Joy” instead. I hope she might have forgiven us by now. Perhaps if we had grown up on the East Coast, surrounded by so many of our Jewish brothers and sisters, we could have teased her by calling her “Katie Oy.”

The world around us, especially lately, seems to contain so much more “Oy” than “Joy.” Just yesterday, Hawaii experienced historic earthquakes and volcanic activity, and in the last few weeks other things have happened like increased violence and unrest in Syria, superstorms in India, local train derailments, and the sudden bombardment of political candidate leaflets in our mailboxes telling us what is bad about the other candidates running.

This is not to mention the personal tragedies and struggles we each experience every day – depression, fear, betrayal, worry, pain, abandonment, and illness, just to name a few. Exhaustion rules, event-crammed calendars reign, and energy recedes ever faster. Just what IS joy in a life full of all these troubles?

“Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus told his disciples. He said this back in John chapter 14, at the start of his goodbye speech, his “last lecture” if you will, on the night that he was betrayed.  He had a lot to say about joy and love, and the disciples desperately needed to hear it - since this would be just hours before they would scatter in fear, abandoning Jesus to be arrested, falsely tried, and sentenced to die by crucifixion. On such a night, talking about love and joy seem terribly out of place.

Love and joy seem terrible out of place when your rabbi and teacher says things like he’s leaving you, and that the world will hate you in his name. Love and joy seem nowhere to be found when Jesus tells you that the greatest love, which he commands you to emulate, possibly might mean laying down your life.

Is Joy just a “churchy” word that we use to decorate Christmas ornaments and hear in grand Easter hymns? Or is there a possibility that Jesus might be on to something, that joy can also be found in the everyday, mixed up together in the pain and troubles of the world?

In the movie Inside Out, as I mentioned a moment ago, Sadness and Joy find themselves on an adventure inside of the brain of a girl named Riley to save some of her most beloved memories. You could not have had a worse pairing of heroes, really. Sort of like those mismatched roommate comedies! At every turn, Joy is frustrated by Sadness’s… Well, sadness. Joy refuses to believe that Sadness can teach her something about experiencing joy … that is, until… Joy finds herself trapped in a dark place called The Memory Dump. There, Joy discovers that our most joyful memories only got that way because sadness was part of them too. She learned that even in a dark and sad place, she can find joy, that joy can come from even the saddest nights.

This is the joy that Jesus has given to us, the kind of joy the world cannot give. Joy is… that on the darkest night that Jesus ever had, the savior of the world chooses to break bread with US - rich AND poor, the power-full AND the power-less, with the healthy AND the sick, with insiders AND with outsiders, with men AND women, old AND young children.

Joy is…that Jesus chose to be his disciples a rag-tag band of perfectly flawed human beings, though they be betrayers, deniers, and abandoners.

Joy is…that Jesus chooses US to be his disciples too, also flawed and imperfect human beings.

Joy is… being chosen as children of God, and through us our faith is conquering the world in a revolution of peace and love and understanding.

Joy is… having your sermon interrupted by the Holy Spirit and with a crazy, loud, spontaneous baptism of a whole bunch of people, as we heard that Peter experienced in our first reading. Or, as what happened last week right here, joy is also getting your sermon interrupted by our littlest disciples showing off their artwork in the new word they learned, “abide.”

Joy is… the fact that our synod, the South Eastern Pennsylvania Synod is one of the most diverse synods of the ELCA.  Joy is that our synod assembly, which happened this last weekend, contained 17% voting delegates who are people of color, and that together we made history by electing the first ever African American female bishop in the entire ELCA. 

Joy is … seeing the beautiful image of God in the faces of people of all faiths, races, cultures, languages, and sexual orientations.

Joy is… just when you thought that death had won, joy is that NEW LIFE HAPPENS.

Our joy… is not complete without Jesus.

It may have appeared a little odd to still be back to the night that Jesus was betrayed during the celebratory season of Easter. But we know that you cannot have one without experiencing the other. New life cannot happen apart from death. Resurrection cannot happen without crucifixion. Easter cannot happen without Good Friday. Joy cannot exist apart from being open to the possibility of pain. Love cannot endure without anything less than everything you have.

The reason that we have no need for troubled hearts in this troubled world and in our troubled lives is not because Jesus makes the lives of his followers into cupcakes and lattes. Just look at the lives of Peter, Mary Magdalene, Paul, and the rest. Their preaching of the joy of Jesus brought them prison, ridicule, and persecution. Nor does Jesus call us to willfully ignore the troubling realities of the world around us, or when tragedy strikes in our lives.

Instead, we know and trust that, as the psalmist says, “Weeping may linger for a night, but joy comes with the morning.” (Psalm 30:5) Or put another way, by the musical Les Mis, “Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.” 

Welcome to a new dawn and a new day. Thanks be to God. Amen.