Joy as Radical Resistance, with Rev. Dr. Steven Koski.

Joy as Radical Resistance, with Rev. Dr. Steven Koski. Series: A Braver Way A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon.

Join us this Sunday, either online or in-person, to hear an inspiring message about finding joy and beauty even in the midst of life’s challenges. Come explore “The Braver Way” with us. It could be just what you need.

About the Series, A Braver Way: Finding Calm, Wisdom and Courage in these Anxious Days

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At First Presbyterian, you will meet people at many different places theologically and spiritually. And we love it that way. We want to be a place where our diversity brings us together and where conversation takes us all deeper in our understanding of God.

We call this kind of faith “Spacious Christianity.” We don’t ask anyone to sign creeds or statements of belief. The life of faith is about a way of being in the world and a faith that shows itself in love.

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Keywords:

joy, god, despair, braver, gift, life, gratitude, presence, world, lilia, places, sorrow, suffering, beauty, hearts, grief, smoky mountain, grace, live, laugh, presbyterian, church, online worship, bend, oregon

Featuring:

Rev. Dr. Steven Koski, Brave of Heart, Guests

Transcript

Unknown: 0:20

Music.

Whitney Higdon: 0:31

Welcome to worship at First Presbyterian, we, at First Presbyterian practice a spacious Christianity, which means, no matter where you are in your faith journey, you belong and there is space for you at the table, there is space for your doubts and questions. We believe doubts and questions are a gift that invite us into deeper conversations and a more authentic faith. We believe diversity is a strength. Every story is sacred and everybody matters. We do our best to live the spacious and radical love of Jesus so that all might have a chance to flourish in this world. We are so glad to connect with you in this way. We would also love to worship with you in person if you're ever in the neighborhood on Sunday mornings at 830 or 10am and never hesitate to reach out to us to learn more about us or how we might support you. I hope you enjoy this worship service, welcome.

Steven: 6:41

One of my absolute favorite poems is called the peace of wild things, by Wendell Berry. Here it is when despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood Drake rests in his beauty on the water and the great Heron feeds. I come into the presence of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water, and I feel above me the day blind stars waiting with their light for a time. I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. So the poet's response to despair, to despair in the world, is to actually seek places of beauty and moments of joy. You know, beauty and joy do not, do not save us from the inevitability of heartbreak. Beauty and joy help us face the heartbreak without becoming broken. Strangely enough, when everything feels wrong with the world is when it's most important to notice and celebrate what's right. As my singer, Michael frante, said, We don't sing dance, paint play and laugh to escape the realities of life. We sing dance, paint play and laugh to keep life from escaping us. We're continuing our fall worship series on the braver way. Seeking beauty and joy when despair for the world grows in you. Is the braver way. It is an act of courage. Now, Joy doesn't trivialize or or deny the reality of life's pain and suffering. Joy courageously stares pain and suffering in the face and says, You're not winning today. You will not have the last word Jesus said, May my joy be in you and may your joy be full. Could it be possible that God's desire for us is to know and experience joy? We Presbyterians are nicknamed the frozen chosen. Could it be that God wants to defrost our hearts so that we might experience joy? God created us in joy. God created us for joy, and God promises there is no amount of darkness in the world that can separate us from that joy. The poet Hafiz wrote, I sometimes forget that I was created for joy. My mind is too busy, my heart is too heavy for me to remember that I've been called to. Dance, the sacred dance of life. I was created to smile, to love, to be lifted up, to lift others up. O sacred one, untangle my feet from all that ensnares free my soul that we might dance and that our dancing might be contagious. Joy is not, is not the absence of suffering. Joy is what emerges from a deep and abiding sense that there is a divine and sacred reality, stronger, stronger than your suffering. I have a good friend dying from cancer, who recently said to me, Steven, my cancer doesn't make sunsets any less beautiful. My cancer doesn't prevent me from receiving the gift of your love. Doesn't diminish the love that I have for you. He said, It is it is these moments of joy that actually make it possible for me to live with my sorrow. The braver way of living well in these anxious times is to hold our grief and our sorrow in one hand, and our joy and our gratitude in the other hand, and to allow both to stretch our hearts, because when our hearts are stretched, we actually have a greater capacity to love. Now, if we hold on to our to our grief too tight, we succumb to cynicism and despair and and our hearts can can become hardened, and if we hold on to joy and gratitude too tight, ignoring or denying life's pain, we've become kind of annoyingly pollyannish, you know, pretending everything's fine when it really isn't. Now, the braver way is to hold and in honor, both recognizing its joy that makes it possible to live with life's sorrow. Gary Hagan is a CEO of International Justice Mission, an organization dedicated to eradicating human trafficking and and the sex trafficking of children around the world. I mean, they do hard work. They do they do the hard and impossible work that places them in the pit of evil, places them and just places of devastation and just utter despair. Now, Gary Haugen has has been doing this work for 30 years. And he asked, How does he do it? How does he keep from getting burned out? How does he How does he keep doing it without managing to succumb to despair? How does he prevent just compassion fatigue? And Gary said, joy. He said joy is the oxygen we need for those places where the air is thin and the heartbreak of life has taken our breath away. Joy. Joy is the oxygen we need for doing Heartbreaking Work. What brings you joy? What calls forth joy in you now? Hagen said, spending time playing games and laughing with my grandchildren inhaling the gift and beauty of a sunset over the mountains, noticing that the flower rising in defiance and the cracks of the rocks to show off its beauty, the unexpected phone call from a friend just checking in, listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the kindness of strangers. Hagen said, a deep joy rises within me when I make room for these things, and this joy gives me the oxygen to keep doing the work I. That I believe I was placed on this earth to do so again. What brings you joy? We need to make room for joy to breathe, otherwise, the brutal realities of life will suffocate us. There's a big difference between joy and happiness. Now, happiness is the great feeling that you get when when everything's going great. Happiness is is attached to external circumstances. Happiness finds us when life is good. But we know all too well that life isn't good all the time. Life is hard, sometimes brutal. Joy is deeper water. Joy is not actually tied to the circumstances of our lives. We are happy because of our circumstances. We experience the gift of joy in spite of our circumstances. Have you ever noticed when you when you sit and you're you're weeping with someone, someone who's facing the the brutality of life's grief and sorrow and and you're weeping together. And have you noticed that eventually you usually end up laughing together? Amidst the sorrow, there's an unexpected joy that bubbles up and makes it possible to live with the sorrow. God created us in joy. Created us for joy. Promises no amount of darkness can separate us from that joy. I call that Grace, Grace. Is the undeserved gift of life, the gift of every sunrise, the gift of every breath, of every moment. Grace is the promise revealed to us in Jesus that suffering, darkness, even death will never have the last word. You know, grief is part of our story, but it's never the whole story or the end of the story. Grace is the love from which we can never be separated in life or death, Joy rises in our souls when we trust and become aware of that love and gratitude. Gratitude is the spiritual practice that opens our eyes and our hearts to that awareness. Psalm 100 says, shout triumphantly to God all the earth. Serve God with celebration. Come before God with shouts of joy. Know that God is good. It is God who created us in love. We belong to God. We are God's people. We are the sheep of God's own pasture. Enter into God's presence with thanksgiving. Enter God's courtyard with praise. Thank God. Bless God's holy name, because God is good. God's love endures forever. God's faithfulness lasts generation after generation. Did you notice the psalmist is saying that gratitude is the password that opens the door to joy. Now, what's remarkable about this psalm encouraging us to celebrate and to shout with joy is that these words were actually written by people who had very little to be joyful about. You know, most of the glorious psalms of Thanksgiving expressing joy were written during times of tragedy, exile, suffering and the Psalms were actually hymns sung in community, in worship. Joy was the oxygen they needed to live with their sorrow, they needed to remind each other in a community setting, singing these these psalms of joy, they needed to remind each other of a love that endures forever, a love that can be counted on, a love stronger than their circumstance. Census stronger than even death itself. You know, when I've traveled to places of extreme poverty and deprivation, I'm often startled by the presence of joy, the presence of singing, dancing, laughing, even though they possess very little of not next to nothing, and life is unbelievably hard. There is the presence of this deep gratitude and joy I remember visiting a place called smoking mountain in Manila in the Philippines. Now the mountain was actually an enormous pile of garbage that was constantly burning and on fire, and the smell was overwhelming. The smell was so bad that I had to have a handkerchief over my mouth. People lived in cardboard boxes makeshift tents on the edges of Smoky Mountain. They spent every day rummaging through the garbage hoping to find something they might be able to sell so they might be able to feed their families. We were hosted by sister Lilia, who who spent each and every day caring for the sick, caring for the children who lived at the edges of Smoky Mountain. Honestly, I can't even begin to describe the poverty and deprivation and despair that surrounded us. He had sister Lilia. Sister Lilia was the most joyful person, the most joyful person I have ever met. She was she was just under five feet tall, but she had just this giant presence exuding a joy that was contagious. I asked sister Lilia, how, how in the world she managed to stay so, stay so, so joyful. And it didn't surprise me that she she kind of looked at me like she didn't even understand the question, but she did describe her spiritual practice that she would do every single morning. Every morning she would begin with prayer, and she would imagine, she would imagine her life like a chalice, and she would start by by emptying the chalice, kind of imagining releasing and handing over God, anything, anything that might stand in the way of her experiencing the fullness of God's presence, the fullness of God's joy, so she would empty the chalice of her ego, her fears, her selfishness, her resentments, her grudges, her worries, her anxieties. And then she would bring to mind and begin to fill her chalice with gratitude. Each and every morning, she would take time to think about the things she was grateful for, the gift of the sunrise, the gift of every breath, every heartbeat, the gift of her community, the gift of the people around Smoky Mountains she serves. And then she would then imagine her chalice being filled to overflowing with the fullness of Christ's love. And Sister Lilias face beamed with joy as she was describing this, and she lit out this this hearty laugh as she said, and then I just spend the rest of my day doing the best I can to pour that love into the lives of those who need it the most. Gosh, we make life complicated, don't we? And maybe it's maybe it's simpler than we think. Joy is not the absence of suffering. Joy is the grace that emerges from a deep and abiding sense that there is a love stronger than your suffering, a love from which you can never be separated. Joy is what we need to live with life's heartbreak, without becoming broken. Joy. Joy is the oxygen we need when the air is thin, when despair in the world grows in you, choose joy. Joy for joy is The braver way. Joy. Joy is the oxygen we need when the work is hard and the air is thin. What brings you joy? We need to make room for joy to breathe, otherwise the brutal realities of life will suffocate us. Friends, go in the peace and the joy of Christ, and may you know the joy that comes when others experience peace because of your love. May it be so.

Whitney Higdon: 28:50

Thank you so much for joining us, and we hope you enjoyed this worship service. If you would like to make a donation helping make these podcasts possible or support the many ways. First, Presbyterian seeks to serve our community. You can make a financial gift online at bend fp.org, every week, we hear from someone thanking us for the gift of these broadcasts and what a difference they make. Your support makes that possible. Our church is committed to reach beyond our walls, bringing hope where there is despair, and love where it is needed the most. Your generous support helps us to be generous in love. Go to our website, bend fp.org, and click on the link. Give online. Your support is really appreciated and makes a difference in people's lives. Thanks again. I hope to see you next week. You