The final week of my daughter’s elementary school the whole 5th grade went to a camp together. She had heard about this trip since kindergarten, and was looking forward to every part of it, most especially the night walk with the science teacher, the slugs and snails class, "stream studies" and the ropes course. The bus would pull away from the school at 6:50 am on Monday morning and she couldn’t wait to be on it. All her stuff was packed and by the door and the excitement was so great that it was hard to fall asleep the night before.
But in the middle of the night, Maisy awoke with terrible ear pain, which turned out to be a full-blown ear infection. When Monday morning came there was no way she could go on the trip; she’d be seeing the doctor instead.
I drove to the school to let her teacher know, and spent the next two days with a devastated daughter, feverish and heartbroken. But by the second night, the antibiotics had kicked in and she was almost back to 100%. I told her we would wake up early and I would drive her up to camp to finish the we'ek with her class.
On Wednesday at 4:30 am I gently shook her out of bed, and by 5:00 we were backing out of the driveway, preparing for our 4 ½ hour drive, which I would repeat in reverse after dropping her off.
Around 5:30 or so, Maisy, who up to this point could hardly keep the smile off her face and the wiggles out of her legs, got quiet and still.
After a few minutes she said, “Mom, I feel really bad that you have to drive me all the way up there.”
“You do?” I said. “Well, Maisy, I wonder if you can let that bad feeling turn into gratitude instead. Listen to me carefully: I am so excited to drive you up to camp. I know how much it means to you, and it makes me so happy to be able to do this for you.”
Her eyebrows shot up and she looked at me in wonder. “Really?” she asked.
“Really.” I answered, unable to keep the tears from my eyes or the grin off my face.
Her whole demeanor lit up, and gratitude oozed from her until she was practically bursting.
“Mommy! Thank you so much!” she exclaimed.
I marveled at the sudden shift in her, from feeling bad that I was doing something for her, to pure gratitude; the difference was dramatic.
These are both ways to greet a gift. But one kept her (and me) captive to a system of judging, measuring, unworthiness and transactions. The other set her free to receive not just the gift of a ride up to camp, but the whole rest of the week.
Every moment ahead of her, this child was ready to absorb with delight, far more, I suspect, than she would have if she’d boarded the bus alongside everyone else.
This experience was precious. It mattered so deeply to her, so it mattered deeply to me. I was willing to sacrifice a whole day driving for her to be there, and when she received that as a gift, she received her own life, all that was before her and within her, as an utter gift.
The joy that we both felt right in that moment could have powered the car.
I feel like it might be time to reclaim joy. Before the pandemic, we had reached a point in our culture where it felt like joy was almost a violation. If you have too much contentment, you must not be paying attention. There is so much to be worried or angry about, so much suffering, we could spend all day every day only dwelling on that, and many of us did.
But the past two years have really knocked the stuffing out of us. And maybe we don’t see joy as quite so gaudy, naive, or thoughtless any longer. Maybe we’re willing to let go of the idea that it’s more polite, or appropriate to hide our joy, or temper it with caveats, so it doesn’t make others feel bad. Maybe we’re willing to quit thinking that if one person has too much joy, they must be hogging it from others, and should feel guilty, or at least have the self-respect to hide it from the rest of us. Maybe we’re willing to stop seeing joy as an accidental weapon, or a limited commodity.
Maybe we’re ready to let in a little more joy.
Because joy is the word we use to describe the energy of being fully alive, connected, awake. And we have felt what it is to need joy. To crave joy.
When we are fully at home in love, that feels like joy. We want to be fully at home in love.
Jesus said that the point of all his teaching is that we have his joy. The inner life of Christ’s own complete belonging to God and belonging to the world is for us. God wants us to be fully at home in love.
That sounds super good to me. But how in the world do we get it? Because right now we’ve got a climate in crisis, democracy hanging in the balance and racism to dismantle, along with somehow making sure we’re raising our kids right, and eating sustainably, and exercising enough, and, oh yeah, we are still in a tiny, little global pandemic, and NoMowMay was awesome, but on June 2 that shaggy, overgrown source of civic pride suddenly turned to shame, and yard work was added back onto the list of things that make up the arbitrary standard of enough that we will never, ever reach.
So I ask you, Who has the time or energy to add joy onto their to-do list? Or pile “gratitude” and “wonder” onto the mountain waiting to be folded and put away?
But that’s where we’ve got it wrong. We don’t produce joy, or even pursue joy. Joy doesn’t come from us. It comes upon us. Jesus wants to give us his joy. Jesus wants our joy to be complete.
Abide in my love, Jesus says. Abide is not a word we use much today. I confess, at first, what I hear is, “the dude abides.” In the Big Lebowski, Jeff, “the dude” Lebowski, ‘a Los Angeles slacker and avid bowler,’ played by Jeff Bridges, abides. He says so himself 160 time in the movie. What he means is, ‘the dude lives in his unperturbable state of dudeness.’ He simply is. He abides.
There is no striving in abiding; nobody says, “I was abiding so hard.” It’s a relaxing into, hanging out, lingering kind of word. So abiding in Christ is just being. Like the dude.
I occasionally go on retreat to a Catholic retreat center nearby, Pacem in Terris. When you book your retreat, they send you a welcome video orienting you to your hermitage, and one of the things they say in this video is how people often ask what they should do. You’re not there to do anything, the man on the screen assures you – you are just there to be. If you’re tired, sleep. If you’re hungry, eat. If you want to walk, walk. If you want to sit in the chair and rock and watch nature out the window, do that. You aren’t here to accomplish anything, he says, you’re here to abide in the love of God.
But the video goes on to say something interesting. Once we finally settle into accepting we don’t need to do anything, we turn that doing energy onto God. I’ll just be, God, but you need to do something for me. Give me an answer, some insight, a mystical experience, a message. But that’s not what this time is for either, the video says. You are here just to be with God, who is being here with you.
Abide. Linger. Be. Be connected. Be alive. Be here with God because God is here with you.
In scripture, this word “abide” is actually not used for humans nearly as often as it is used for God. God abides. This is God’s word first: God loiters with us. God hangs out with us in and through it all. We abide in Christ because God abides with us. We abide in Christ’s abiding in God.
The crux of our faith, as Christians is this mindboggling story that that the Almighty came into this world as a helpless a baby, into the arms of those he came to save, to share this life with us, to be with us.
And then Jesus died, taking all that separates us from God, all destruction and brokenness, even death itself, into God’s very being. God abides all of it, God abides in all of it, with us and for us.
Then Jesus rose from the dead, and everything we thought was real about the power of death and division is exposed as utter fraud by the unquenchable light and incarnate love of the world, and there is nothing, nothing, nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
It’s settled and final: We belong to God, we belong to each other. All of us. No matter what. Forever. This is what Jesus trusted, and embodied, what he died for and rose into, and referred to again and again as ‘The Kingdom of God.’ This is what God is always doing, always bringing this reality ever more into fruition into the world. This is the final verdict over all creation, where it is all heading, and the place it all ends up – our belonging to God and each other.
We get to share in that. We get to join in that. Our lives get to be part of that.
And yet… and yet we choose sin. Which is to say, we choose self-protection and division and destruction and existential forgetting. Instead of abiding, we strive. Instead of resting, we strain. Instead of love, we see one another with suspicion and competition. Instead of gratitude, we greet the gift of our own lives with judgement and measuring, instead of receiving our existence here with joy, we furrow our brows and tense our hearts and burrow into the cold comfort of worry and guilt, and fear.
But here is the free gift of salvation, friends. Right here: You belong to God. You belong to all the rest of the people in this whole big world. And they belong to God, and they belong to you. Fact. Done. All that is needed is to accept that. To receive that. To abide in that reality.
When we surrender into trust that we are held in God no matter what, it makes us brave to risk, and bold to speak up, and willing reach out, and ready to let in. We will find ourselves participating in hope, contributing to peace, experiencing joy.
St. Theresa of Avila said, “Every face is an icon of Christ discovered by a prayerful person.” When we abide in Christ, we will find ourselves living our unique personhood alongside the unique personhood of others, alive and connected, contributing to life and connection for others. We’ll receive others, linger in life’s pleasure, and share life’s pain with others, standing by others and finding them doing that for us.
The purpose of life not to achieve, accomplish, prove, fix, or earn anything. The purpose of this life is to abide in love. Life is for joy.
This is my commandment, Jesus says. Love each other. Receive love.
God’s love is embodied in us, between us; God uses our voices, and our arms and our eyes and our hearts to love.
But lest we slip back into thinking that right after we’re finished cleaning the gutters we need to make ourselves into loving people, we’re invited to stop and just be. When in doubt, stop and be. When you find yourself straining, stop and be. No agenda for you. No agenda for God. Just let life in. Come back to the abiding, the resting in trust, the being loved already and completely by God.
It’s not even our love, after all, it’s Christ’s love we are abiding in. We’re recipients and conduits – we are just sharing it, breathing it and passing it around; we are just learning to hang out in the love of God that sustains us all. We are all just here to help each other enjoy the ride and take in the words of our heavenly parent who says from the driver’s seat, “It means so much to me to be able to do this with you. Sharing your joy brings me joy.”
Howard Thurman famously said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because the world needs people who have come alive.”
In a world of dire news, exhausting commentary, unrelenting evil and a frenzied, breakneck pace, what radical and powerful antidote is a community of joy-filled and joy-oozing people? What defiant and reorienting force is even a single person fully at home in love? When we make our home in love, when we live in the joy of being connected to God and each other, it remakes the world.
God is loitering in this life with us.
Let’s hang out here with God, and receive this astonishing gift of a life.
Amen.
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