Sermon: Joy as ordinary courage
Text: Psalm 91, Luke 10:25-37
Our first reading, Psalm 91, has inspired many beautiful hymns such as On Eagle’s Wings and There is Room for All - the one we just sang. No wonder it’s so inspiring - this psalm is about hope. What confidence can we have in God? What makes our mind fearless? The psalm offers great words and images that praise God as our protector - “fortress, stronghold, dwelling place, shelter.” It assures us that with faith in God, we are moved to be courageous, sustained by a sense of real security: seeing our life secured and nurtured in “The shadow/shade of the wings of the Lord”, rather than believing that we are at the mercy of the brutal, harsh aspects of life, caught helplessly in life’s predicaments. After all, God wants us to know, we are called to accept life, embrace life as a gift, not as a burden or curse. For some of us, this realization, this acceptance, is tough. At certain bends on the road of our life, it takes courage to celebrate something that can feel more like painful work than a blessing. God’s promise is that, in the ink-black, tunnel of our life’s challenges, we are moved to learn that faith is not assurance of worldly security. Faith becomes equivalent to having the courage to ask the right question, which is not (asking in despair), “Now, what’s gonna happen?” but (engaging with a thought process), “Which alternative routes are God showing me, and how can I get from here to there?” This thought process inspires hope.
The well known “Good Samaritan” story, our second reading of the day, also teaches us about courage. Jesus did not teach us the parable to make us feel guilty when we ignore a homeless person. A parable shouldn’t become a cliche. It should inspire in each person, in each community, in each different context, genuine wonder, authentic questions. No one can claim that she or he has the single, right answer, the one true interpretation of a parable. Jesus puts a question to the listener: what does it take to truly live a life that embodies the hope of good news? Our life’s journey is not just from womb to tomb; it is an odyssey that moves people from birth to rebirth, from partial life to abundant life. The traveller needs a map in their heart to guide them as they journey in a dangerous world, especially when life’s ultimate goal is not arriving at a specific destination, accruing wealth, building achievements, but learning letting go.
On the back page of your bulletin, I put a picture of David Giuliano and his words. David served as the moderator of the United Church of Canada from 2006 to 2009. During that time, he found out he had a malignant cancer that had been misdiagnosed for years. He said, in his recent interview, “I don’t like the cancer ‘battle’ metaphor. I prefer ‘pilgrimage.’ We meet other pilgrims and come to understand ourselves.” (The full interview: http://healthydebate.ca/faces-health-care/cancer-religion-philosophy)
When I first read that, I wondered what kind of courage he was exercising, as he believed in and lived what he just said, especially in a very scary part of his life (in actuality, he said, it was the most sacred part of his life). In the midst of a time when anger, despair, or even blaming others would be an understandable response, he chose compassion. He chose to not hide his illness and disability. He chose to trust in the process which would let him vulnerable, to show his imperfection, and to allow people to journey with him and understand his persistence.
We call people like David, ‘ordinary heroes of faith’. I think, truly, we all are ordinary heroes of faith as each of us is a survivor of a different kind of life’s tests. But there are also those whose lives clearly witness a distinctive wholehearted living. Wholehearted living has many different definitions, which are intertwined and interrelated, and only with all the definitions together can we fully describe what wholehearted living might mean. Yet - here’s one definition I would like to share, today: Wholeheartedness is about embracing our tenderness and vulnerability. This definition must be paired with the following: How much we know and understand ourselves is critically important, but there is something that is even more essential to living a wholehearted life: loving oneself (p. xi, in Preface, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who We are, Brene Brown)
The faith that the Psalmist writes about in Psalm 91 and the teaching of faith that Jesus imparts to the young rich ruler when he asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” tell us about the essential center of becoming truly human, and what is our call: Wholeheartedness. Its quality is well tuned with courage, trust, rest, worthiness, hope, authenticity, love, belonging, joy, gratitude, creativity. The warmth of wholeheartedness exists in contrast to the qualities or attitudes of perfection, numbness to new experiences, certainty, exhaustion, self-sufficiency, judgement, and scarcity. (Brene Brown, p. x, in Preface). Brene Brown started her career as a researcher of human behaviours and patterns; what she has discovered through her research is very inspiring: To paprahrase her words, those who are fully engaged in wholehearted living are not so very different from others; they experience all the struggles and pain that others do. What makes their life different is that they are aware of the dangers of numbing themselves, and have developed the ability to feel their way through highly vulnerable experiences. It becomes clear that faith is not the agent in our life that enables us to be perfect, or to protect us from necessary or unnecessary pain, or to rescue us from them. …
In my opinion, having faith doesn’t change the outer circumstances of your life. Salvation is God’s work, and salvation is more about our life, our self, becoming whole. Faith is God’s companionship in which God sustains you and goes with you as you go through your highly vulnerable experiences and life challenges. (If you would like to understand what ‘being vulnerable, staying vulnerable’ or ‘vulnerability’ mean, I highly recommend that you read “The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You are” written by Brene Brown.)
Things happen to us - bad things, good things. The only choice we have is how we accept them, how we interpret their effect on our lives. It’s God’s will for us to do it, and God’s gift: our free will to make choices. I ask you, and encourage us all to choose joy. In a recent sermon, I shared with you that, at the recent retreat I had at DUIM, I encountered something at a deeper level of myself - which was quite a lot of anger. Some people shared with me that the quote on joy I shared in that sermon still resonated with them. They see that uncertainty about the future, life’s essential unknowability and fear interferes with our potential to live life with joy, or have joy lead our life. (The summary of the quote would be ‘joy’s opposite is not sadness, but fear. The full sermon - Uncovering Anger and Joy: http://peacemama3.blogspot.ca/2016/06/sermon-on-1-kings-19-uncovering-anger.html)
So, what choices should we make to insure that joy leads our life’s energy and it becomes the way we welcome ourselves, the world, and our future? There’s no such thing as Joy 101, or The Dummy’s Guide to Joy or a Joy how-to-class. The ancient Greeks said, joy is something that is found only in God and comes with virtue and wisdom. That means joy is not a thing that we can schedule, manage, harness to serve us at any time when we want. Joy is a gift of grace - not something you can put on your credit card. Gratitude is a spiritual practice, and joy is the light that only gratitude can help grow. Joy and gratitude can be very humbling and intense experiences. We embrace them, when we can say, “I am feeling vulnerable. (I am feeling… (your words) ) And that’s okay. I am grateful for…”
Joy can be our choice. I would dare to say that joy is the ordinary courage. By ‘ordinary’ I mean, first, this courage doesn’t requires us to become heroic. Second, joy must twinkle in our daily lives, in and between our daily struggles and daily triumphs (Joy ‘Twinkles', it’s not a constant beam.) It comes to us in moments. And with God’s help, we must seize it in the right moment, in the right, ordinary moments before we miss it: a blessing along the way. A celebration along the way. A success along the way. I believe a joyful life is made up of joyful moments gracefully strung together by trust, gratitude, inspiration, and faith. By ‘ordinary’ I also mean that we must trust the value of ordinary. We often equate ordinary with boring, or even more dangerously, ordinary almost has become synonymous with meaningless, in our vocabulary. But no. Joy is the ordinary courage that enables us to see our world, ourselves, our friends, our family members, our neighbours, as a place of grace, as a connection of grace, by togetherness that creates in the here and now the home of God for all, the home full of gifts to celebrate, and the home where we find belonging (not just fitting-in) and the reason to live, … The reason to absolutely live and live life abundantly, as it is freely given to us by God.
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