October 11, 2020
/Proper 23
Isaiah 25:1-9, Psalm 23, Philippians 4:1-9, Matthew 22:1-14
The Rev. Bradley Varnell
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Paul’s letter to the Philippians is different than his other letters because he’s not really addressing a problem or conflict among the Philippians. The general tone of his letter is one of encouragement, support, and joy. This is remarkable considering that Paul penned this letter while he himself was locked away in a dark, damp Roman prison. Hardly the kind of place that produces joy. And yet the entire letter is teeming with a wonderful joyfulness on Paul’s part. A joy not derived from any earthly source, but from Jesus Christ.
Though chains can keep Paul from loved ones, from freedom, from good food and fresh air, chains cannot keep him from Jesus Christ. Now, by this I – and Paul – don’t mean Jesus as some solution to a religious problem, but Jesus as a living and active agent in the world. Paul, even in prison, knows Jesus Christ personally, intimately. Paul, we might well say, is friends with the Lord. And this friendship, like all good friendships, produces joy. As we come to the close of this letter, Paul encourages his friends in Philippi to claim this joy for themselves: rejoice in the Lord always; - he writes - again I will say, Rejoice. To rejoice in the Lord is to find our joy in the person of Jesus, not as a model of the religious life or a good example to follow, but as a friend. To rejoice in the Lord is to receive the joy that comes from knowing Jesus.
Of course, as Paul’s life attests, to know the joy of Christ is not to escape the sufferings of this life. It is not an easy pass out of hardship and disappointment. But the joy of Christ, the invitation to rejoice always in the risen Lord, is a joy that can ground us, moor us, and uphold us even when the disappointments of this life threaten to wash us away. The great theologian Karl Barth has said that the joy of the Christian is a “defiant ‘nevertheless’” in the face of bitterness. The joy that comes from knowing Christ allows us to face prison and peril knowing that “nevertheless,” Christ has conquered.
All of us are working to discover joy in our life. You can boil down a lot of what we do as humans to a quest for joy: we work, we marry, we sacrifice, we have kids, we make friends, we move, we study, we stretch ourselves in the hope that these things – directly or indirectly – will help us experience joy in some way. We imagine that more money, or more sex, or more recognition, more something will bring us deeper joy. And these things do often bring us joy – but after a while the sources of our rejoicing disappoint or turn sour or simply don’t work – so the search for joy continues.
The audacious claim Paul makes – in his letter and his life –is that Jesus Christ in the ultimate source of joy. That in Jesus Christ our striving after joy can come to an end. We are invited to “rejoice in the Lord always” because the joy that comes from knowing Jesus Christ never runs out. Now, it’s not that other joys go away when we meet Jesus, it is simply that they are relativized, they are put in their proper place. See, Jesus is the ultimate source of joy, Jesus is the one who fulfils our deepest desire for joy in a way that cannot be exhausted. This frees everything else in our world – relationships, food, work, beauty – to be a source of joy, but not the source of joy. The pressure is off your spouse or your kids or the bottle to provide you with boundless joy, because that has been found in Jesus.
So, rejoice in the Lord always! But how? How do we rejoice in the Lord? We can only rejoice in the Lord by coming to know him personally. And we come to know Jesus by speaking to him in prayer, hearing from him in Scripture, and encountering him in the Eucharist. The knowledge we seek isn’t like the knowledge we find in a textbook, it’s the knowledge we discover as friendships deepen and relationships mature. It’s the intimate, personal knowledge that only comes through time spent with a person. The joy of knowing Christ is ours to claim and ours to share. So many of the joys which our world promises do not fulfill. But the joy of Jesus Christ is sure and trustworthy.
Friends, I think Christianity has little to offer other than Jesus Christ. As Christians, we don’t have much to share other than Jesus Christ, and the joy which comes from knowing him. Sadly, I think we have often gotten so lost in our rites and rituals, in the business and work of being a church, that we have forgotten that all of this exists in order to help us come to know Jesus more deeply, so that we might come to know his joy more fully.
So, friends – let’s us rejoice in the lord. As we begin gathering back together in person, as we continue navigating a pandemic, as we live with the stress of an upcoming election, as we wonder when life will return to normal again, let us rejoice in the Lord. Amen.