Joy vs. Happiness (Senior Eucharist 2018)
Readings: Ezra 3:10-13; Psalm 67; 1 John 4:16-21; John 15:9-17
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
I’m going to begin this evening with a confession--since we have both a priest and a bishop here, maybe I can be absolved afterward.
I didn’t want a dog, really, but I thought I did. I would look at all the websites with various stories of shelter dogs, with cute pictures, cute names, cute stories, imagining how my own three children, now 3, 6, and 9, would react to having a pet. They talked about it all the time, and so, even though my wife and I were still a little underprepared and skeptical, we took the plunge. Bailey, a shepherd mix, promised to be a perfect pet for our family--a sweet four month old puppy, gentle and calm.
She is, really, a good dog--but there have been at least 10 times every week in the past few months that my wife and I have looked at each other and said, “what were we thinking?!” How could we have done this? It’s just too much!” After all, as good of a dog as Bailey is, she is still a puppy--with lots of energy, lots of mischief, getting into all sorts of things she shouldn’t on a daily basis. And so, my wife’s and my own frustration came to a head, and we called a family meeting.
“Guys, I think we may need to talk about Bailey spending some time at your grandparents’ house. I’m not sure that she’s right for our family right now,” we said, sensitively and calmly--and then the tears started. Not just normal kid tears, the kind that most children seem to be able to conjure up frequently. Real tears. Tears of sadness. “But wait,” we protested, “don’t you get tired of Bailey chewing up your toys, and jumping up on you, and making it so difficult for you to play?”
And my own children taught me a lesson in that moment, a lesson that I thought I knew so well at the ripe old age of almost 40: that joy and happiness are not the same thing. “It doesn’t matter. We love her!” they said. We love her. Despite frustration, despite not always being happy with Bailey’s actions, they love her, they find joy in her, they are connected with her. The imprint is complete; there’s nothing we can do about it now.
I will admit that I still struggle with having a dog, especially every morning at 5:45 as I walk this animal--so skittish and particular at times that I have to carry her out into the wet grass in the morning since she will not walk over to it--but she has become an object lesson for me. Perhaps it’s not too far off the mark to observe that dog is God spelled backward, because I know that the way I treat my dog is the way I treat God. Bailey is a somewhat unexpected gift, and if I know anything about God, it is that God’s gifts are often not what we expect. She does not always make me very happy, but can I find the joy in her existence, in my care for her, in my helping her to flourish as the creature of God I know her to be? I have a responsibility now to help her achieve peak dogness; just as we have a responsibility to each other for our mutual human flourishing, to help each other grow into the fullest, most complete, best version of our selves.
When we perceive that we are flourishing as human beings, that we are doing the thing we are supposed to be doing in that moment, then we have joy. It’s important to distinguish joy from happiness. Joy is tied to our sense of purpose; it’s something spiritual, having to do with meaning; while happiness is a feeling, often fleeting, and tied merely to our senses. We don’t, in other words, have to believe in anything in particular to be happy; but joy requires that greater sense of purpose that is itself based on faith.
And joy can often incorporate both happiness and sadness, as it will for your family and friends as they help you close this chapter of your life’s story. They will be deeply joyful because graduation marks a sense of purpose and meaning in your story; but their joy will incorporate a whole set of mixed emotions, including sadness, as they prepare for your departure to college.
This feeling is captured well in our first reading for this evening, from the book of Ezra. It tells of the return of the Jewish people from the Babylonian captivity, a period of great sorrow and trial. When the Babylonians had carried off the Jewish people in 587 BCE, they had destroyed the Temple, the center of Jewish life and faith; and only now, approximately 50 years later, had the Persians allowed the Jewish people to return and begin the rebuilding the Temple on its original site.
The text records that, as the foundation was laid for the second temple, a great sound of both weeping and joy was mixed together. Imagine the elderly people in the crowd who had themselves witnessed the horrible day on which the first temple was destroyed, such an incredibly dark and terrible time, a time from which they still bore the scars of trauma. And imagine as they saw the second Temple dedicated and built, indeed happy for the present, but sad for the past, and yet joyful, deeply joyful, for the purpose, meaning, and rightness of God’s House on earth that would enable them to flourish as human beings, as children of their Divine Creator.
Theologian and researcher Miroslav Volf, the leader of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, has been studying joy in a project called “The Theology of Joy and the Good Life.” It’s an extensive project with many deep thinkers contributing to a multitude of sermons, papers, interviews, and books; but the most common denominator of the entire project is this: gratitude, humility, and the labor of love. These are the three practices around which joy revolves.
Notice the way all three of these are connected in the following passage from CS Lewis:
God wants each of us to be able to recognize all creatures, even ourselves, as glorious and excellent things. God wants to kill our animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is God’s long-term policy to restore us to a new kind of self-love--a charity and gratitude for all selves, including our own. When we have really learned to love our neighbors as ourselves, we will be allowed to love ourselves as our neighbors.
The apostle John sees the life and significance of Jesus as breathtakingly simple, amid all the sophisticated theological and philosophical barriers we place around it: God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Those who say “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.
The Love of God is closely tied to joy, as we defined it earlier; not a fleeting feeling, but a deep sense of meaning, purpose, and rightness, as we learn to love our neighbors and our selves. We cannot see God except in each other; if we are a good friend to each other, we are a good friend to God; if we are good children and parents to each other, we are good children of God; if we are taking care of each other, we are taking care of God. As the writer Omid Safi says, “Here’s the whole goal of the path: To see each and every soul as the house of God.”
Dr. Safi has captured the essence of Jesus’s life and teaching about love: its recklessness, its wild abandon. Jesus places no limits on love and likewise liberates his followers to place no limits on love. Though love is challenging, difficult, and complicated, it is the way through which we are most human, the way we find meaning, purpose, and rightness--the way we discover joy.
I want to leave you with a final thought, beautifully rendered by another theologian, that gets at the heart of what I have been trying to say about love:
“We begin to reflect God, and to become truly human, only as we pull away from our own interests and attach ourselves to the interests of others. Humanness is not wholeness, self-mastery, self-containment: we are most human when we are cracked, when each self bleeds out into the lives of others.”
Though the image is stark, it is deliberately evocative of Jesus and the Cross--an example that teaches that the Way of Love is through openness, vulnerability, and transparency. It teaches us, too, that the Way of Love is ultimately redemptive, transforming our wounds into life, the common life that we share together.
Beloved seniors, families and friends, this graduation weekend, and always, I encourage you to pay attention to the love that is around you and in front of you and within you. Listen to those loves; they are the voice of God. And listen to the voice of God as you go from this place and begin this new chapter in your lives. Remember the lesson my own children taught me; that happiness is fleeting, but joy is everlasting. Amen.