The Depths of Joy
“The Depths of Joy”
Third Sunday of Advent, Year C December 16, 2018
Zephaniah 3:14-20 Isaiah 12:2-6 Philippians 4:4-7 Luke 3:7-18
First Presbyterian Church of Sandpoint, Idaho
Pastor Andy Kennaly
This morning’s scriptures take us on a tour through church history, but they also hint at the multi-dimensional quality of spiritual awareness and our ability to perceive God’s presence in the depth of joy that dwells inside us. If we allow our spirituality to be dynamic and healthy, our understanding of the nature of God grows and develops. This morning’s scriptures each have a context in this arch, and together they inform faith and increase our joy.
Zephaniah calls Jerusalem to sing, shout, rejoice, and “exult with all your heart” as “The LORD, your God, is in your midst.” Here we have a prophet sharing words of life with a city that has struggled. What is Zephaniah’s immediate description of the LORD in your midst? “…a warrior who gives victory.” This “warrior” removes the disasters, deals with oppressors, and restores the people and their fortunes. The shift from being victims to freedom, restoration, and liberation by the power of God is called, “salvation.”
Salvation of God’s people is also a theme in Isaiah, inviting trust and to live without fear. “Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.” The LORD “has done gloriously” among the nations. Similar themes, but this time even more than the city of Jerusalem but we Zion as a people among nations.
A model has been developed that helps provide a framework for spiritual growth and cultural evolution, recognizing stages, each with their own qualities. This model is called Spiral Dynamics. (If you Google Image that term you will find a lot) Designed originally to help businesses, this theory of growth, change, and awareness has expanded to include spiritual aspects as it charts out human development through the dynamic motion, not of a linear process or a circle, but a spiral. Starting out with a basic need for survival, for example, early cultures were based on clans, gradually becoming tribal as people sought safety in numbers. These tribes formed alliances, combining into nations, and societies developed, bringing some sense of stability, which allows for commerce, and safety.
Notice in the news that much of our current struggles involve nations, systems, and identities which are promoted, defended, or shifting as new needs arise. As history, culture, and faith development continue to mature and grow, this movement is illustrated by that image of a spiral. Basic levels are near the bottom and higher levels are farther up. Some levels are community-based, and some are more individualistic. Each level has a value system, such as power, stability, achievement, or harmony; and each has weaknesses. For example, human potential that creates a system leading to prosperity may have a detrimental affect on nature. Profits can be had, but the earth is destroyed in the process. Kind of a mixed bag. There are difficulties involved, like people at lower levels not being able to see the higher levels; they just don’t compute. Like Jesus on the cross saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” as a recognition and loving acceptance of people at lower levels who just don’t see beyond where they’re at on the spiral. Jesus, being at a very high level, far ahead of his time, is able to hold the tension and live in the paradoxes as he lives in joy.
With Spiral Dynamics, the trick is to focus on the strengths, minimize the weaknesses, and help people to potentially take the next step to reach higher levels. One of the exciting things with the passage from Luke seen through this type of lens is that John the Baptizer represents the fullness, the positive aspects, the culmination of several of the lower levels. And he is proclaiming the coming of another, and this person represents those higher levels on the spiral. “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” What a transition!
There’s a sense that with John there is fulfillment of all that has come before, and with Jesus there is something new, a New Covenant, taking the world by the hand for the next step, further into God’s purposes. Paul writes to the Philippians about the mystery of this process and our participation in it. This mystery involves a deep joy, an imminent Presence, unceasing prayer, and God’s peace surpassing all understanding, given as a gift which guards our hearts and minds, in Christ, and Jesus shows us this in action. Joy is such a part of this experience, that Paul says it twice, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.” This dynamic process leads to gentleness.
How do you spell JOY? J-O-Y. So, if you were to write that down,
J-O-Y, you would have joy. We could hand out slips of paper, and make sure everybody gets one. JOY for each of us on this Third Sunday of Advent! As easy as that, it would be proven, right on the page, written evidence that we each have J-O-Y, Joy.
Then again, that page with the printed word would be flat, paper thin with only ink on it, so basically two-dimensional. Simply writing it down in printed form probably limits the effectiveness of this joy. We need a better image! Especially in an age of despair.
Suicide rates have increased, even in demographics where this doesn’t typically happen. A despair is permeating society as people struggle with economic imbalance, endless war and a society that profits from violence, racial and gender biases, corruption and scandals of political leaders, greed, environmental degradation, a whole list of devastation that simply brew together in a stew of despair. The limitations of post-modern culture and the mentality that continues to ignore existential threats of global warming and the sixth mass extinction taking place in real-time with an average of 200 species disappearing every day; and people settle for headlines dominated by the Dow Jones and the latest scandal in Washington, D.C. People are doing very little to bring about the rapid change needed to avert catastrophic climate disruption that is especially impacting the world’s most vulnerable species and populations as the level of carbon in the air increases.
Thankfully, this Third Sunday of Advent we’re reminded that JOY is more than we typically recognize. It’s more than happiness, beyond emotions, not lost in despair, and a reality that is deeper than our feelings. But just like an onion has rough skin and layer upon layer, Christian joy lies pretty deep. That’s why a piece of paper and a printed word doesn’t get it.
A picture is worth a thousand words! The other day, for example, when my wife, Shawna was riding the chairlift up the ski mountain, she took a selfie and texted it to me. I could see by the picture that she was riding the chairlift, above the tree tops, the foggy background showing Schweitzer getting some weather. The chair framework was behind her as she sat there in her blue ski jacket, part of the uniform instructors wear, so I knew she was ‘on the clock’, working. She also had her helmet on and goggles too. I could just see through those goggles, and see her eyes, and they matched her smile. But those goggles actually had more of a reflection, so I could also see what was in front of her: the cable from the chairlift going out ahead, the next lift pole holding those cables, the top of the mountain coming up, with trees and the horizon, all in that reflection.
On my phone, I zoomed in on that part of the photo, looking at the reflection even closer, and it showed her hand holding the phone, taking the selfie picture. In the reflections, her phone had the display of what her picture would look like, showing Shawna sitting on the chair, with her goggles making a reflection. If we could zoom in even more, to a tiny little focus, we’d see another image in that image of the phone and a reflection, and on an on. That selfie picture contained a perpetual image, a reflection that bounced back and forth, deeper and deeper into the photo.
Here we are today, and as we gather with each other right now, this is three-dimensional living. We are right here, in this room. If we look outside we can see the town, and we know we are in the State of Idaho, on North America, floating on the Earth’s crust and our planet spins it’s orbit around a sun that’s part of a galaxy that resides in this universe. But just like that two-dimensional picture hinted at perpetual depths, so too our three-dimension living goes much deeper and there are layers beyond what’s visible. For we live as reflections, as images and the depths of our being, our soul, our life-energy, is even deeper than a beating heart and organs used for digestion and muscles that help us move; our inner-presence cannot be limited to a mere two-dimensions, and even three dimensions now are lacking in expressing something as deeply intricate and largely effective as JOY.
JOY is more than three-dimensional. It is perpetual and powerful. It is something we have, deep within us, given as a gift. Joy doesn’t come and go and no one, no-thing, or any circumstance can remove or destroy joy. Joy is always there; whether or not we are in touch with that can vary.
It may feel as if we’ve lost our joy, but our feelings cannot be trusted that way. Joy doesn’t depend on our feelings, for its rooted in God, even deeper than despair. If we’re despairing, this is an invitation to go deeper, which is another of saying JOY is rooted in LOVE, and everything else is contextual, floating on the spiral of life giving expression in limited ways to larger mysteries. Love and joy, at the core of our being, give life.
Thomas Merton puts it like this:
“God is near to us at the point that is just before final destruction. Take away everything else down to that point of final destruction, and the last little bit that’s left […], a little kernel of gold which is the essence of you – and there is God protecting it….And this is something terrific. / The real freedom is the freedom to be able to come and go from that center, and to be able to do without anything that is not immediately connected to that center. Because when you die, that is all that is left. When we die, everything is destroyed except this one thing, which is our reality and which is the reality that God preserves forever. [God] will not permit its final destruction. / […] the freedom that matters is the capacity to be in contact with that center. Because it is from that center that everything comes….[But] we don’t normally get into that center unless we’re brought to the edge of what looks like destruction. In other words, we have to be facing the possibility of the destruction of everything else to know this will not be destroyed.”
(Merton as quoted in Cynthia Bourgeault’s book, Mystical Hope, Trusting in the Mercy of God, Cloister Books, Cowley Publications, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001, pg. 70-71)
Meditation is the spiritual discipline that simulates putting ourselves on the edge of final destruction as we set all things aside, even our own sense of self and our thoughts, to focus on God in our midst, as we “rejoice and exult with all our heart,” and claim “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,” trusting this peace “will guard [our] hearts and [our] minds in Christ Jesus.” Meditation is very biblical.
In an age of despair where culture seems determined to self-destruct and settle for a model based on winners and losers, in Christ we are given awareness of a deep, abiding joy, that transforms life itself at all levels. This joy sustains us, and gives us focus to help us through life’s journey, for great in our midst is the Holy One, deeper than any depth, the core of life and love. May we live from the depths of joy, NOW, even as forever. Amen.