speaker-1: ⁓ Our first reading is from ⁓ book of John, ⁓ chapter 15, verses through 11. ⁓ My Father is by ⁓ that you bear much and become my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my father's commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you, so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. The word of the Lord. Thanks before.

speaker-0: do that let's ⁓ listen for the word together from Nehemiah ⁓ chapter eight and verses through twelve. ⁓ And Nehemiah, who was the governor, this is when all the people are coming back from exile in Babylon. And Ezra, the priest and scribe, and the Levites who taught the people, said to all the people: This day is holy to the Lord your God. Do not mourn or weep. For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law. And then Nehemiah said to them, Go your way, eat the fat, drink sweet wine, and send portions of these to those for whom nothing is prepared. For this day is holy to the Lord. And don't be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength. So the Levites stilled all the people, saying, Shh, be quiet, for this day is holy. Don't be grieved. And all the people went their way to eat and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them. word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. Gracious God. By following in your ways. By ensuring that our hearts are oriented toward you and the ways of your spirit, may you grow the fruit of joy within us. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our heart be pleasing in your sight, O Christ, our rock, and our redeemer. Amen. I don't know if you have noticed, but it seems to me that joy and happiness are sometimes pitted against one another in pop talk. Happiness is painted as something that's rather vague and ethereal, coming and going at whims uncontrollable, impossible to grasp and hold on to, and almost always the result of something circumstantial. The Pittsburgh Pirates win. Excitement. Happiness. Elation. The Pittsburgh Pirates blow another lead to the Braves because their bullpen is crap. Why does God hate me? Right? What did I do to deserve this? Sorrow, gnashing of teeth. You know how this goes, but with the Rangers. Your time is soon to come with the cowboys. It's always our year, isn't it though?

speaker-1: Mm-hmm.

speaker-0: Now, on the other hand, joy is described as something that is unshakable. Happiness comes and go, but joy, joy is unshakable. It comes from a place that is deeper than the win-loss record of your favorite team or the serious circumstances of your life. Joy is durable. It endures through difficult seasons and isn't necessarily the product of those circumstances. It might not be exuberant, but it's sustaining. Does that sound how these two realities of joy and happiness have mostly been described to you? At least again in pop talk. What's interesting to me this week, anyhow, is that the scriptures, I have found, aren't really interested at all in thin-slicing joy and happiness like this. Neither as a fruit of the Spirit or an experience based off something good that happens to you. Mostly, these two things are comprised of the same resulting reality. Something good happens, and you have an experience of gladness. A desire to praise God or kiss someone, to jump for joy or throw a party, or you are blessed or happy because of how you are positioned in life. For instance, all of the ⁓ Beatitudes are a good example of this. Blessed are, that's the group, the Hebrew equivalent there is happy ⁓ or joyful. Blessed are the peacemakers. So you have positioned yourself as a peacemaker and therefore you're happy or blessed or joyful and that blessing comes in being known as being the children of God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be known as the children of God. But what's so unique about the ways that joy and happiness both are presented to us in our scriptures for this morning is that instead of being the product of an experience, joy is offered as the result of a practice. Did you catch this? Of course, this whole series is about the fruit of the Spirit. And I'd like to make the point and to remind you that while it might look easy to us, trees are doing a lot of hard labor to make fruit, right? And they prep for it all year long. During the winter, I don't know, you y'all need to l read a ⁓ what's her name? Robin Wall Camera's book. she goes through and puts it in plain words, j braiding sweet grass, how trees empty themselves of sugars during the winter and then add like the they are storing up in their roots all winter long, getting ready to make some fruit in the spring. And some sometimes that comes out in a juicy pear, sometimes it comes out in maple syrup, right? That all maple syrup is is sugar Sugar stores that trees have been working on for a long time. It's a lot of work for trees to do that. And Paul's whole point in offering this analogy of the fruit of the Spirit for us in the first place is that it takes work. He says in Galatians that living in the flesh, the works of living in the flesh, which is Paul's shorthand for evil desires. He says, the works of living in such a way are obvious, but so are the fruit of the Spirit. If you are living a life oriented toward God, that fruit is going to be obvious as well, but it is the product of something, right? And those fruits are love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faith control, and or faithfulness and self-control. As the song goes, these are the results of a life lived oriented toward God and led in the Spirit, led by the Spirit. In the same way, Jesus says in our passage this morning: a conditional clause: you will have joy if you keep his commandments and abide in his love. Which is a framing that I adore, because it paints joy as the product of love. And anyone who has been in love will know that it is the best and sometimes hardest work that you will ever do. We love ourselves because we know ourselves to be loved by God.

speaker-1: Do you think that's

speaker-0: This love sustains us, and this love grounds us. And as James Finley, the contemplative teacher, says God protects us from nothing, but sustains us in all things. And I can think of few more sustaining realities than joy. Not as an exception to all the hardships of life, but as a meaningful, life-giving companion in the midst of all the hardships of life. So we might just say that joy is happiness that's seen some things. You know what I mean? Doesn't go away. It's seen some things. Nehemiah's story is exactly this, I'd say. Nehemiah tells a weary people who have just come back from generations away from their homeland in exile in Babylon, not to be sad when they hear the law read in the shadow of temple ruins. The place that centered their love of God, the place that reminded them of God's power and goodness for them, is in shambles, and of course they're crying. You can understand their tears. They had just finished rebuilding the walls of their city that were destroyed. But the text includes this line in chapter seven, just before where our reading starts, it says this the city was wide and large, but the people in it And no houses had been built. It's an interesting detail. And I think it helps us imagine the weight of the moment. They're back home, a home that they never really knew, and it doesn't feel very joyful. In fact, The shadow of the shared memories are so heavy upon them that it brings them to tears as they stand looking around at a vacant, half-repaired homeland, something that their parents and grandparents told them was this thing of of glory and of godliness. But it's all foreign and kind of broken now. And Nehemiah has the audacity in this moment to tell them not to weep, but instead to celebrate and to rejoice, to drink sweet wine and to throw a party, to eat the good portions of meat, and don't forget to share with those who don't have anything. It's it's like Nehemiah was giving the people permission. to be honest about what had happened and also permission to move through that pain by putting a practice in place, to remember the goodness of God, when the life that they are living is in shambles around them. And also to remember that goodness with other people, to share in this time of need their resources of heart and home. He's encouraging them not only to look back at the past seriously, but also to take seriously the vision that God had put in their hearts to rebuild their city. And then, Nehemiah says. When they eat the the fat and drink sweet wine and share together and remember that God is good and remember what God is going to do for them, then the joy of the Lord would be their strength. Depending on where you live on the internet and media today, this is either the worst of times and everything is bad, and if you ever feel good about anything, you're an idiot or naive or completely out of touch. Or, on the other hand, everything is great. And there's no reason to feel bad about anything. And if you just stop thinking about all the bad things, everything is good. And let's just keep it light. And we don't want to sully our joy with all the bad stuff. We've got irascible cynicism on one side. And we've got toxic positivity. On the other side. And neither of those things feels like a gift of God or the fruit of the Spirit to me. As a matter of fact, that they kind of turn my stomach. But there is another way. I think it's being offered to us this morning. And it is much more palatable fruit. And that is a way where we live our lives together, steeped in honesty. But much more deeply rooted in trust. It is a way that knows what is good and what is spirit-led, and stubbornly continues in those ways. It is a way of life that is convinced that the love of God is so deep for us, no matter what is happening around us, no matter what seems to be against us, and knows that we cannot be plucked from the faithful hands of God, no matter what. This is the honest, forward looking faithfulness as an expression of God's love that cannot help but to produce joy. It is a life empowered by the very Spirit of God. It is a joy with scars and healed bones and a sly smile on its face because it knows that it is safe. That at the end of the day, God wins, good wins, love wins. God is with us. And I can tell you what that might look like, actually. And those of you who are, I don't know, 40 and over, will know exactly what I'm talking about. On September 29th, and the rest of you kids can learn something here. On September 29th, 2001, SNL debuted its 27th season, 18 days removed from the 9-11 terrorist attacks. And the classic, if you know anything about SNL, you know they always do some a cold open, right? A sort of a sketch before anything happens. But that night they scrap it. And instead, the show opens on the face of New York's mayor, America's mayor at the time, Rudy Giuliani. And the first words of the show belong to him. And he's flanked there by the New York City Field or Chief of Police and the Fire Commission, and he's standing in front of dozens of NYPD and NYFD and Port Authority officers. And he speaks first, as you'd expect somebody to speak in that moment. He focuses on the heroism of the day more than the terror of it. He offers a litany of heroes, including those who have survived and maybe most importantly those who haven't. Like Nehemiah, Rudy's standing on ground that doesn't look the same in the midst of a people who have been changed and traumatized. And giving the audience a story and a practice to anchor themselves in, he says, our hearts are broken, but they're beating. And they're beating stronger than ever. New Yorkers are unified. We will not yield to terrorism. We will not let our decisions be made out of fear. We choose to live our lives in freedom. And then Paul Simon grabbed his guitar and he sang The Boxer. And if you know this song, it doesn't take long to figure out why he chose to sing it when the last lyrics are ⁓ You want to sing with me? In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade, and he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down, or cut him till he cried out. It is anger and his shame. I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains. And then it's a lot of la la laws. ⁓ I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains. It's a call to resiliency in the face of hardship, to fearlessness in the face of terror. It's all incredibly somber. And the entire time Paul is singing, the camera is sort of panning back and forth between Paul and the faces of all of the first responders until the end of the song when the camera ⁓ sort of pans back to to Rudy and all the rest. And Lauren Michaels, longtime SNL producer, stands up next to Rudy. And they share some thanks. And then Lorne asks sincerely, Can we be funny? A genuine question. And Rudy quips back. Why start now? And with that, you can feel, I watched it again last night, you can feel the fresh air rush back into the room. Chests heavy with grief explode in laughter, and eyes that were already filled spring forth again, but with tears of joy this time. Maybe this is just another example of America's penchant for macabre humor. We love to make fun of scary things. But I really don't think so. I think just like Nehemiah, Lorne, and Rudy. And Simon gave their audience permission to take their grief really seriously, and also to be reminded that in the midst of grief there are other true things at work in the world. And they gave them a practice. Try to be funny. Try to laugh at the jokes tonight. They allowed those gathered that day in hard stadium seating and on couches around the nation to hold two competing realities at once. Bad things happen. Blessings still remain. And they rooted that in an identity. You are New Yorkers, Americans, you're fighters. You're gonna make it through. That's what we do. And if I might be so bold this morning, my friends, our story gathered here today is even deeper and even stronger than the one that Rudy and Simon and Lauren gave to their audiences that day. The joy of the Lord is your strength, and the joy of Jesus is yours because you belong to God. And you follow in his ways. The fragrant, joyous fruit of the Spirit grows in your life because God's own spirit flows through the cambium of your days, and your roots, the roots of your life, are held secure by the rock of unchanging, undying love. The joy your life produces doesn't have to be pretty. It can be like the fruit that keeps getting advertised to me from misfit fruit misfit markets. That's what the fruit of your life can look like. Your joy might have seen some things. But I don't think that that detracts one gram of its sweetness. God's got you. And that can put a smile on your face. That can put durable hope. And durable joy in your heart. So go forth, my friends, into whatever life throws at you, holding tightly to Christ, and knowing even more importantly still that He holds tighter still to you. And may we be sustained by the very fruit of joy within us. Thanks be to God. Amen.