“Rejoice in the Lord always: again I will say, Rejoice. Let your forbearance be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand. In nothing be anxious; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, shall guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
‘Rejoice in the Lord always”, says St Paul, “and again I say ‘rejoice’!”
It’s curious, I think, that St Paul has often been depicted as quite a dour figure, particularly as compared to Jesus and the other Apostles. I remember British comedians, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, talking about how the Corinthians were having a wonderful time, cavorting and carrying on, until they received the dreaded letter from St Paul – “Dear Corinthians. Stop having fun!”
I think history has been unfair to St Paul (or at least the history of British comedy) for the impression we get here, in one of the last letters that Paul wrote, is that he was (at least most of the time) an irrepressibly happy man!
‘Rejoice! Rejoice! Be not anxious. Be at peace!’ That was St Paul – a man who never knew when to stop smiling, so it seems. And I’m sure we’ve all known people like that. The disconcerting thing, in my experience at least, is that all the irrepressibly happy people I know tend to be less than 10 years old!
I’ve read that the average four-year-old laughs 300 times a day whereas the average 40-year-old laughs only four times per day. I don’t know how true that is but what I am convinced of is that children tend to not only laugh louder and more often than us adults but that they have the gift of being able to laugh at just about anything!
I’m not like that. It’s hard to squeeze a laugh out of me nowadays. I fear I’m heading towards becoming a grumpy old man! After all, what is there to laugh about?
* We are on the brink of a third world war!
* Australia society seems to be falling apart at the seams!
* We are being rapidly stripped of all of our civil liberties
* And we’ve each got enough problems with our jobs and on the domestic front!
I know I come across as a prophet of doom sometimes but things are not looking good, so when Paul walks in, saying, “Hey, why don’t you turn that frown upside-down?” I feel like saying, “Oh … go away!”
You know the saying; ‘misery loves company but only if it’s miserable company’, and the last thing I feel I need, when I’m busy feeling sorry for myself, is Paul waltzing in, singing, “If life seems jolly rotten, there’s one thing you’ve forgotten, and that’s to laugh and smile and dance and sing!”
I find Paul hard to identify with at this point. I feel like saying, ‘what would you know? You laugh like a child because you are a child! You don’t know how cruel life can be!’ And of course I know that’s rubbish!
“Five times I received the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure…” (2 Corinthians 11:24-29)
Yes, if there was one thing Paul understood well it was human suffering! He might not have had teenage children to worry about but he certainly knew how to pastor tougher churches than I’m ever going to see, and he certainly knew the difficulty of making ends meet financially, and he certainly knew what it was like to have people working against you to bring you down, and yet he seemed to remain cheerful even at the worst of times!
At the time of writing this letter Paul was in prison, awaiting a trial that would determine whether he was to be executed. You wouldn’t think he had a lot to be joyful about! Even so, he says, ‘rejoice’! What was his secret?
Was Paul a masochist of some sort? Did he revel in the pain?
The question has to be asked, for Paul’s writings do suggest that he was almost obsessed with his own suffering. He talked about it all the time, and he lists his persecutions like a series of proud credentials!
I think it’s beyond debate that Paul does get preoccupied with his struggles and that he does devote a lot of thought to the subject of human suffering, but no more so than does the rest of the New Testament!
I remember when Mel Gibson’s movie, “The Passion of the Christ”, first came out, the most prevalent criticism I heard was that it was obsessed with suffering. My response was that this reflected the focus of the New Testament, and the Gospels in particular.
The Gospel of Mark, people often say, reads like a crucifixion narrative with an extended introduction. The mystery of the suffering of Christ is a focal point of the New Testament and of the Christian faith, and part of Paul’s preoccupation with his own struggles, I think you‘ll find, is that he can only ever see his own pain in the context of Christ’s pain.
There’s a lot more that could be said on that but it will take us away from our text. Let it suffice today to say that Paul did indeed see significance in his own suffering in the light of the sufferings of Christ, but this did not mean that he enjoyed any of it. On the contrary, just as we see Jesus praying for relief in the Garden of Gethsemane, so Paul tells us how he would often pray to God for relief.
Paul was no masochist. How then does he rejoice in the midst of his struggles? Was it all a bit of an act, perhaps? Was he putting on a brave face and showing that British stiff upper lip (even though he was Jewish)
This would certainly be consistent with his exhortation, “Let your forbearance be known unto all”, which sounds a lot like what we tell our boxers as they prepare for a fight: ‘Never let them know they’ve hurt you’. That’s an important part of the game.
Forgive me for slipping into another boxing analogy but, as most of you know, I fought twice last weekend in Adelaide, and I took some pretty hard knocks, particularly in the first bout. I remember very well the big left rip I took in the ribs, the uppercut to my chin, and the right hook to the side of my noggin!
Did I let my opponent know that he’d hurt me? Of course not! On the contrary, I did my best to respond with that wistful smile that says “is that the best you can do?”
Experienced fighters never show a reaction. You might be in agony with a broken rib, and you might be seeing three of your opponent, but you keep a poker face, and if the referee stops you and puts a count on you, you look askance at him with an expression that says “why did you stop me? I was just about to unleash hell on him!”
‘Never let them know they’ve hurt you!’ ‘Show that British stiff upper-lip’. ‘Suck in the pain and carry on as if nothing has happened!’ Is that St Paul? Not at all! On the contrary, when you read the way Paul chronicles his history of suffering, he speaks very openly about just how much people did hurt him!
Paul was no stoic, hiding his true thoughts and feelings behind a mask of inscrutability. On the contrary, Paul was an openly passionate man – passionate in his warmth and affection towards those he loved, and passionate in his expressions of pain. Like his Lord Jesus, he wept and he bled and he did not try to conceal his humanity.
So how was it that he rejoiced in the midst of all this? A third possibility is that he knew it was doing him good – building his character.
This is what you hear from modern motivational speakers all the time – that ‘tough times don’t last but tough people do!’ and that it’s tough times that produce tough people. Paul does indeed take that line in Romans 5, telling us that “suffering prod-uces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope”
I don’t think that’s what he had in mind though when he wrote to the Philippians, where he was likely facing imminent execution. It doesn’t make much sense to speak of the character-building value of suffering in that context. Battling with difficult people may indeed make you a stronger person who can handle things better in the future. Getting your head cut off does not improve your future prospects (not in this life anyway).
Even so, Paul will rejoice, and, whatever the circumstances, Paul calls on us to rejoice. Not because pain is fun and not because it doesn’t hurt, and not because it always makes us better people.
Rejoice! Why? He tells us: ‘because the Lord is at hand’, which means that in the great scheme of things, everything is going to be OK!
We rejoice in the Lord, always, because the Lord is at hand and so in the Lord we have a firm hope that the evils of this world will ultimately be overcome. We believe that the Lord is at hand, and so we rejoice.
* Yes, there are terrible things happening in Syria and Iraq at the moment. Monstrous injustices are being perpetrated and innocent people are being killed and yet the Lord is at hand and so the time is coming when “He will judge between the nations and settle their disputes. They will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore” (Isaiah 2:4)
* Yes, there are deepening divisions within Australian society. There is increasing alienation and fear, and as our government responds by tightening its grip on us so grows the potential for a real culture of violence. Even so, the Lord is at hand and so we know that the day will come when “the wolf will lie down with the lamb … and the lion will eat straw like the ox. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11)
* And yes, we struggle even with the everyday things of life. We struggle to hold on to our jobs, to pass our exams, to pay our bills and to keep our families together, but the Lord is at hand and so “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well” (Julian of Norwich).
This is our hope in Christ, and this is the ground upon which we can learn to laugh again. That’s not to say the laughing in this day and age is easy!
In Romans chapter eight Paul says that “The whole creation is groaning like a woman enduring the pain of childbirth”, and if you’ve given birth you know what that pain is about. Paul’s point is that the pain of labor resolves into joy once the baby is born, and that is generally true. Even so, when you’re experiencing the pangs of childbirth it is very hard to feel that joy!
Midwives and supporters talk to you about the baby that you’re about to give birth to and they do try to help you put your pain in perspective but I’ve become convinced, after having been present at four births, that it is easier to get that perspective when you are one of the midwives or supporters than when you are the person actually giving birth!
It is hard to look forward in faith when you’re in pain. It is hard for us to lift our eyes above our immediate struggles, and it is hard to believe that things are about to get better when all human logic suggests to us that things are only going to get worse. And yet, St Paul encourages us that with prayer and thanksgiving comes ‘the peace of God that surpasses all human understanding’ and this is something I truly believe in!
It doesn’t make a lot of sense – our hope that things are going to turn out OK – but we base our lives on this!
“The arc of history is long but it bends towards justice!” – that’s how Martin Luther King put it. It’s that counter-intuitive understanding that God puts deep in your heart that in the end “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well”
It doesn’t make much sense to hold on to this sort of hope when all the evidence suggests that things are only going to get worse BUT it’s not supposed to make much sense. This peace of God surpasses all human understanding!
And with that peace we can become little children again, lifting our laughter average from four per day back to something closer to 400/day – rejoicing in the Lord always, and again I say ‘rejoice’!
First preached by Father Dave Smith at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, on Sunday the 21st of September, 2014.
Rev. David B. Smith
Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of four. www.FatherDave.org
