Joy as Resistance

Last week Pastor Rich talked to us about what joy isn’t, and what it is. This week I want to talk about why we have it. What’s the purpose of joy, if it isn’t just to feel good about the world all the time?

So we’re going to start this morning by talking about the Devil. I know this is not a popular topic for progressive Christians; I suspect there aren’t a whole lot of people in this room who even believe in Satan, let alone the idea of hell.

I do believe in hell. I’ve been there.

The best definition I’ve seen comes from W.E.B. Du Bois, a civil rights activist who was only intending to describe his own experience of being Black in America but whose words resonate across every spectrum of the human race:

“It is a peculiar sensation,” he wrote, “this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

Now, there are two manifestations of that. Maybe, like Du Bois, you measure yourself against that tape and you feel deficient. Or maybe you’re busy holding that toxic tape up to others, and feeling contemptuous when they fail to meet your standards. Most of us end up on both ends of that spectrum at various times in our lives, and both ends are rooted in the lie of comparison; the idea that there’s some way we’re all “supposed” to be, and some of us just don’t measure up.

Spoiler alert: none of us measure up 100% of the time. God loves you anyway.

So I absolutely do believe in Satan – not as some caricature of a red guy with horns and a pitchfork, obviously, but as that funhouse mirror that distorts our perception of our own belovedness and causes us to judge ourselves or each other with that terrible unreal measuring tape.

Think of Satan as the opposite of Christ on the cosmic scale of the universe. On one side, Christ is the force of salvation: life, love, truth, forgiveness, liberation, healing, accountability, creativity, wholeness. On the other side, the Devil is the force of damnation: death, hate, falsehood, shame, captivity, rigidity, powerlessness, loneliness.

Can you feel the difference in your body between those two sets of words? Our bodies know evil. There’s a recoiling in us, a constriction. Long before my thinking mind has evaluated a situation my body knows whether that situation feels like life, or feels like death.

My favorite name, or title, that commonly gets used for Satan is the Father of Lies. We see this one in action right from the beginning of the Biblical story: in the Garden of Eden, the serpent lies to Eve, convinces her she’s deficient without the knowledge she’d have if she just ate that apple. Eve & Adam buy the lie, and what’s the result? They feel naked, another word for that would be exposed, and they try to hide their vulnerability from God.

They don’t seem to us like they’ve committed any atrocious acts themselves. But through their child Cain, they bring a legacy of resentment and fear of scarcity into the world, and that legacy eventually murders the other part of their legacy, the child who trusts God and delights in doing what God asks.

My point here is that evil isn’t some character flaw inherent to the human race. It’s a spiritual power, far beyond us, rooted in lies that have been at work on us since we came into being. This is important to remember when we’re tempted to judge someone; that person probably isn’t evil. They’re probably a good person who’s being held captive by a lie they’ve been taught to believe.

So what is the purpose of joy, in all this talk of evil? Why is joy a gift of the Holy Spirit? How could something that seems kind of frivolous and inconsequential help us to confront something as serious as child abuse or racism or domestic violence?

Joy is the ultimate soul food.

It is the spiritual nourishment that powers us in the fight against evil. Picture it as an Energizer battery pack that keeps us going even when the evidence of our own experience wants us to believe there’s no end to the evil in the world.

Because the truth is, there isn’t – not during our lifetimes, anyway. We are unlikely to see Christ’s kingdom arrive personally. Humanity has a long way to go before the Kingdom of Heaven is fully embodied here on earth.

And that is what Jesus teaches us to pray for. When we say the Lord’s Prayer, we don’t say “rescue me from all this suffering and whisk me away to thine kingdom in the sky.” We say, “Thy kingdom come ON EARTH as it is in heaven.”

Heaven comes here. To us. That’s the ongoing work of God in our world, the work for which we as Christians have been elected to labor as it grows from that tiny mustard seed into a vast tree that shelters all creation.

The Father of Lies would love it if we believed that we have to wait for that tree to bloom before we can experience joy. That we have no right to have joy one moment before everyone else on earth has it too. The Devil wants us to believe we have to bring Heaven to earth on our own, that we must force it into being by sheer effort, that there is no God to help us in this labor and we must grind ourselves into the ground fighting until our last breath.

What happens in your body when you imagine having to wait that long for joy? Do you feel exhausted? Do your shoulders droop? Is it hard to take a breath?

Meanwhile God’s word of life to us through Jesus Christ is that we can rejoice always. All of us, all the time, everywhere, no matter our circumstances.

We have cosmic permission to be joyful.

Because joy isn’t a superficial state of false positivity we have to create in ourselves. It’s the soul food, the lifeforce that bubbles up irrepressibly inside us the more we listen to that still small voice of the Holy Spirit. It’s pure gift. God wants us to have all the joy we can possibly hold. Not just so that we can be happy, although sometimes that’s a nice side effect. But so that we have the energy to fight the lies at the root of all the injustice in our world.

Lies like “white people are superior.” Lies like “men are stronger, smarter, and better than women.” Lies like “children are property.” Lies like “trans bodies are unnatural.” Lies like Manifest Destiny. Lies like, “Your value as a human being is measured by your bank balance,” or your productivity.

This is what’s at stake if we don’t let joy into our lives. These are the lies that start to distort our perceptions until before you know it we’re holding up that tape measure and judging anyone who doesn’t fall into line.

To put it another way, love is the desire for justice. Joy is what fuels our ability to act on that desire.

There’s a great example of this that comes from the Old Testament in Ezekiel chapter 37. Ezekiel is out in the wilderness. He’s wandering in unknown territory. He’s in a liminal space. He’s in a valley – a spiritual low point, overshadowed by these looming peaks.

And he’s following God around this valley and it is full of bones. Not corpses, not even skeletons, just bones, picked apart and scoured clean by the desert. Everything is dry, desiccated, used up.

And God asks Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?”

And Ezekiel’s just like, “Lord only knows! You tell me! I can’t make ‘em do nothing. They’re dead! What do you want from me?”

And that’s how we feel a lot of the time, in the face of injustice, isn’t it? We know there’s more to be done but we feel all dried up. Exhausted. Nothing left.

And so God tells Ezekiel, “Prophecy to these bones. Tell them what I will do for them. Tell them that I will restore their tendons - I will restore connection between them, they will no longer feel alone.

“Tell them that I will restore their flesh, that they will once again have muscles that give them movement and strength. They will no longer be powerless.

“Tell them that I will restore their skin, that I will shield their vitals and their tender nerves with this protective layer. They will no longer feel raw and exposed.

“And tell them that when I’ve done all that, I will breathe my spirit back into them. And they will no longer be dead. They will no longer be at the end of their hope. They will no longer feel cut off.”

This is a resurrection of joy.

When we find ourselves at the end of our hope, when there’s nothing left of us but dried up bones scattered across a darkening valley, God calls us to remind each other that these bones can still live if we let the joy of the Holy Spirit breathe into us.

“I will put my Spirit in you and you will live,” says the Lord.

But there’s one last piece to that Ezekiel story that’s important:

The people who come back to life are an army.

That’s another word progressive Christians don’t like to use because it has echoes of violence and colonialism, and we’re right not to want those terrible things to continue. But what does an army look like, in the hands of the resurrected Christ? What does an army look like when the leader is the incarnation of Love itself?

The warriors of Christ have only one enemy, and that enemy is the Devil. Any time I think another human being is my enemy, I have fallen into Satan’s trap. I’m measuring someone by that funhouse mirror, that ugly contemptuous tape.

I have forgotten the truth that that person is a beloved child of God every bit as much as I am.

People are never my enemy. My only enemy is the lies. Racism, sexism, nationalism, all the violent -isms that destroy human community rely on us to stay exhausted, numbed out, dead inside. They rely on keeping us focused on problems and blind to possibilities. As long as they can do that, we stay trapped in the hell of a world based on fear, control, consumerism, and shame.

But no matter how many times we end up in that desiccated valley, God never wants to leave us there.

The breath of God, the Holy Spirit of Christ, brings us back to life through joy. It breathes movement and creativity back onto our scattered and rattled bones. And what it brings back to life is an army whose only weapon is the radical, earth-shattering, death-defying love of Christ.

Remember what Pastor Rich said a few weeks ago about incarnation leading to epiphany?

When we discover in our bodies that we are that radically loved, we cannot help but love others the same way – and it won’t feel exhausting, it won’t feel like effort, it will just happen like it’s the most natural thing in the world, because it’ll be Christ’s loving Spirit who gives us that power through joy.

So how do we actually DO any of this? How do we engage in joy as resistance?

Because joy is a gift, it isn’t something we can make happen in ourselves. What we can do is engage with practices that clear space in our souls for God to plant the seed of joy. It’s not a guarantee – God is not a vending machine, we don’t insert X number of prayers to produce Y effect in our lives. We simply surrender some of our time and attention and trust God to work in it.

Pastor Rich will be talking to us more about this next week but for now, let me offer us three simple practices for this.

The first one is immersing ourselves in God’s word. Reading our Bibles. If this isn’t part of your everyday routine, I get it. You’re in good company. But it’s really hard, when the daily news is constantly turning up the volume on everything terrible in the world, to remember that the human story has a happy ending.

We are not there yet. But God is. God has promised we’ll get there and God is faithful. Reading Scripture, or listening to other people share their stories of what Jesus has done for them, these things make space in us for the hope of the eternal to take root, that there is something bigger going on here than what I am experiencing in this small moment.

The second thing we can do is play. Yes, really. Play is actually essential to justice. Do something silly and fun for absolutely no productive reason. Singing, scrapbooking, gardening, jigsaw puzzles, ice skating, roadkill taxidermy, whatever! Play is anything that makes you lose track of time and self-consciousness. Time out from self-consciousness is critically important for giving us some distance from the Devil’s funhouse mirrors. It restores our perspective on reality. Play strengthens our problem-solving muscles and trains our brains to look for possibilities as well as problems.

So first, we can read our Bibles; second, we can make sure we’re making enough time for play. The third thing we can practice is making something.

We tend to think that the opposite of helplessness is power, or control, or agency. But just like happiness isn’t joy because happiness relies on our outside circumstances where joy is an interior orientation, agency or power is also a question of outside circumstances. We don’t have power in every single situation. Can any one of us wave a magic wand and stop the war in Ukraine? We have no power there.

So the opposite of helplessness isn’t power. It’s actually creativity. It’s imagination. This is the interior orientation, like joy, that can’t be taken away from us no matter what our circumstances.

Imagination isn’t just about making art. Imagination is the method by which things like justice and mercy are made manifest. These things have no physical components in the world. There’s no elemental particle of justice or mercy. These things don’t exist until we embody them, and we do that by first imagining them.

We invent a world inside our own minds that doesn’t yet exist in the physical world, and then we find ways to make that imaginary just world real.

So making things is a practice of joy and justice because it literally re-wires our brains. Even if what we’re making doesn’t seem like it has any connection to justice – even if what we’re making is a pie, or a new business, or a game to keep the kids occupied on a long road trip, or a craft project during Open Space! – it’s the act of imagining that builds new neural pathways in our brains.

The better we are at imagining anything, the better we are at imagining a more just world, and the more likely we are to act in a way that brings that world into being.

Joy is the soul food that fuels the transformation of our terribly wounded, deeply beloved world.

Cultivate practices of joy, and you will find God resurrecting your dry bones and breathing life back into your exhausted soul.