Philippians 4:4-8
“Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
“Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”
Rejoice! In the Lord! Always! I will say it again: Rejoice!!! = )
Now, if you’re like many other people here this afternoon, you just sank a little bit further back in your chair, the corners of your mouth turned down ever so slightly, and a skeptical, if not outright worried, tenseness fell upon your face in response to this injunction. I myself, who take these words deeply to heart, could not proclaim them publicly without trembling.
This reaction is, I think, to be expected, but I always find it endlessly amusing. Sometimes I’ll put on my brightest expression of joy, just to see how many frowns I can get back in return. Sometimes people will go so far as to say some of the things they’re thinking when they see my smile. “What are you so happy about?” “What makes you think you have a right to be so hopeful?” Sometimes I’ll catch myself occupying such a perspective, and my mind offers up something like, “Didn’t you get the memo? That the world is collapsing?!?”
Sometimes it seems the moment you start to show a sliver of hopefulness, you become a target for everyone else’s hopelessness around you. For example, Liz and I recently got engaged. As people see us around, glowing, they take every opportunity to tell us: Get out while you still can! Don’t do it! You’ll wish you hadn’t! What they’re actually saying is, I was once idealistic too, and I’m discouraged now.
We often have a bit more tolerance for unfettered joy when we see it in a young person. It might even bring us to smile for a moment, before we catch ourselves and return to our standard, cool calm and collected flat affect.
I think all of this is very understandable. Most of us as little ones, at least for a while, were pretty good at rejoicing. If you’re lucky, you might have a few memories of when you were three or four and jumping up and down with excitement about your day, sure that you owned the world. I remember strutting down the streets of my town belting out La Bamba at the top of my lungs. But often it was just when we were most enthralled with everything—as Paul says, “excellent or praiseworthy” in the world— this was where we got the message from the people around us to tone it down, keep it under control, not be so happy and hopeful. It was when we were boisterously dancing through the kitchen that we got the message that we should really be more subdued. And this happened over and over again.
We had big dreams as little ones. When we first learned about war, we committed ourselves to ending it. When we saw our parents struggle, we swore we’d set things straight. But the people around us didn’t always understand our dreams. And sometimes things didn’t work out just the way we hoped. Bit by bit, discouragement seeped in to our rejoicing. It seemed maybe not so safe to let our gentleness be evident to all. It got harder to keep our minds on all the things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely and admirable.
For some of us in this discouraged state, we found that not only had no one understood our rejoicing, but no one understood our pain either. Not only could we not laugh at the top of our lungs, but we couldn’t share our brokenheartedness either. That’s where we started pretending. If you listen very carefully, you can hear this phrase about twelve thousand times a day across the Dartmouth Campus: “I’m fine…” The smile of pretense is not unfamiliar to me. It got me through some tricky times. This is the “Hakuna Matatata” attitude from the Lion King. Things are dandy on the outside, but we lose touch with the very real struggles in ourselves and in the world. “Everything’s fine.”
If you’re in this room, whether we show our discouragement or cover it up, we don’t let it stop us completely. But it does slow us down. We’re going against the wind.
But here’s the good news.
All of your discouragement, every last little scrap of it, it’s all old. All of it is about the past. All of it is about what went wrong, what didn’t work out just the way you wanted it to- in the past. Our discouragement is just a big pile of old hurts that we never got a chance to unload. It is not about the present.
This gets confusing for us, because we are pulled to view the present through the lens of the past. But if you’ll think about it with me, our discouragement cannot possibly be about the present.
Take anything you’re discouraged about. Anything! Pick something and hold it in your mind. Now what is the discouragement actually about? Why are you discouraged? Invariably, you’re discouraged because something in the PAST didn’t work out the way you wanted it to. It’s not because it’s impossible in the present.
Right now, you know more than you’ve ever known in your life. You have a broader understanding of the world, more experience, you’ve met more people to work alongside you, than at any other point in your life. It’s true some of the things you faced in the past were too big to handle, but you’ve learned something from every one of them. And the challenges we face today are not the challenges of yesterday. There may be some resemblances. But the present is a state of reality that has never existed before. I invite us to start noticing this.
When we can see this clearly, we can begin to notice, along with Paul, the incredible opportunities at our fingertips even in the most desperate of circumstances. My uncle Jim puts it this way: “If you’re breathing, you’re way ahead of the game.” I think there’s something to that. But now if you’re not only breathing, but have a mind and body created in the image of God, you’re really doing pretty well. I think that if you’re alive and thinking, you’ve got the two necessary ingredients to change things. It’s helpful to have allies and support- that makes bigger things possible. But all you need is your mind to change things. And if you can change things, well that’s what hope is all about. It’s knowing, as Paul expresses a few lines down further in his letter from prison to the Philippians: “I can do all things through him who gives me strength.”
Just as our hopelessness is about the past, hope is merely the act of being present.
So I’ll say it again: Rejoice! And notice all that is wonderful right now. And notice that you have everything that you need to change the world around you, to bring about God’s kingdom of love and peace and justice.
Let us ask ourselves: if we didn’t feel hopeless, what would we take on? What wouldn’t we take on?
I’ll leave you with a brief poem written by a dear friend of many dear friends of mine.
“If I could be granted but one wish, it would be:
To be alive in a universe like this one
At a time like the present
With friends like those I have now
And be myself.”
Amen.
