Sermon, delivered online via Zoom | April 12, 2020 | Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon | Below you can listen, view, or read.
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READING By the author Barbara Kingsolver
“In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.”
SERMON
This world, especially lately, has often brought me to despair. Amidst that despair, I have sometimes been surprised by joy – and more often I’ve had to struggle through to joy. To train myself into joy.
Today Christians celebrate Easter. Not all of us are Christian, and yet I propose that the Easter story can hold wisdom for all of us… just as last week we considered the wisdom of the Jewish Passover story.
Sometimes UUs miss the wisdom of this story because we only consider the Easter part of the story – the joy and celebration, the springtime and life. It can be tempting to skip past the death and the waiting parts of the story. Good Friday and Holy Saturday come before Easter Sunday.
Our service today is, yes, about joy, but there’s a reason I don’t want us to skip past the despair on our way there… The ever-so-wise Brené Brown is going to help us with that…but I’ll get there in a bit.
The uncertain, fearful place we are now in our world probably feels a bit like Easter did to the very first Christians.
You see, the earliest account of Jesus’s death ends not with joy and triumph but with fear and confusion.
Their friend and teacher Jesus had just been brutally tortured and killed by the Roman Empire. Some of his closest friends – women – go to his tomb to do the customary rituals of anointing, of mourning – and yet they cannot. The tomb is empty. Even this small solace of going through the grief rituals, getting to see his body, getting to say goodbye, are taken from them. Instead, an angel is there who claims Jesus has risen from the dead, and to go tell everyone.
But the women are not overjoyed.
Instead, the story ends like this… This is the very last sentence of Mark’s story:
“So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
That’s it! That’s how it ends! Imagine if it were a movie, and that was the ending. The women run away in fear and the credits roll.
You’d probably put down your popcorn and say, “What?!”
My Bible professor in college said that it was as if the writer of Mark’s gospel ended the story not with a period but with an ellipsis: dot…dot…dot.
Likewise, right now we seem to be living in the ellipsis. Hanging in the in-between. Death and grief, loss and confusion abound.
We may hear confusing things from the mouths of angels saying: “A new beginning will come – a brighter day will emerge. Joy is even here before you, right now!”
Yet, standing alone in the empty tomb, do we believe it?
Can we feel the joy?
The poet Wendell Berry says: “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”
The researcher Brené Brown specializes in studying emotions and says,
“If you ask me what’s the most terrifying, difficult emotion we feel as humans…I would say joy.”
What? How can that be true?
But perhaps you know this to be true if, for example, you have been a parent and you gaze down at your precious baby and think “Oh my, I couldn’t love you more!” and then rising up right beside that comes the shudder-fear of something awful happening to them. Or, maybe you have thought to yourself, “Wow, everything is finally going really well for me right now…geez, when’s the next shoe going to drop?” Or… maybe you’ve been surprised into a moment of un-self-conscious joy, and then shamed yourself back into a more comfortable place of “Who am I to experience such happiness?”
Experiencing joy deep in our bones requires us to soften into vulnerability.
Brené Brown says, “When we lose our tolerance for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding… I’m not going to soften into this moment of joy because I’m scared it will be taken away.”
She found in her research that people who had the greatest capacity for joy… they feel those shudders of fear, too; they know their own vulnerability. But they also have a deep practice of gratitude.
I have learned this from so many of you all – You see, I can tend to despair and fear and feeling sorry for myself. But then I know someone like Sally, or Mike, or Shanda…and I see how gratitude and joy just tumble out of them all the time.
There’s a lot about now that makes us feel vulnerable and fearful – We’re in the dark, empty tomb, and no matter what some angel tells us, we might run away from them feeling confused and afraid.
Who are we to know joy right now? Why should we let our guard down?
And yet even amidst the despair there is so much to be grateful for…there is new life around us everywhere! There is hope and there is community. There is possibility and there is love. There is the pain but there is also the rising.
So this week I’m going to consider how a practice of gratitude might help me soften more often into joy.
I invite you to join me in that practice of gratitude – in that softening into a moment of joy.
We can begin that practice now! I found this video I want to play you that is joyful – despite all going on in our world, there is also still dancing, still love, still laughter, still connection. So right before you is a moment to soften into joy. Maybe you’ll even dance in your seat – hell – you can even rise up and dance!
And if now is not that moment for you, don’t worry, we will hold that joy for you until you are ready.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
