Fruit of the Spirit: Joy

John 15: 9-11; Galatians 5:22-26
Reverend. Terry Minchow-Proffitt

Paul’s Fruit of the Spirit are deeply personal gifts. There’s nothing abstract. Each gift can only be understood as we seek to live it fully. With Fruit of the Spirit we are what we desire: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We are being called to bear and share what we need most. Each fruit we hope to bear, is one we truly hope to taste for ourselves. Spiritual Fruit are a lot like cake. We’re being called to have our fruit and eat it too. Like the Hair Club salesman on TV, “I’m not only the President of Hair Club, I’m also a client!”

Last week we explored the Fruit of Love. We could go on for a while about the four different kinds of love in the New Testament. See? You’re already yawning. Jesus was way too engaged to lecture. He was too busy eating what he shared, living what he taught. For Jesus, it was personal. He lived love. He told stories about real love. Jesus knew that if we didn’t live love, and pay the price of doing so personally, we would never understand love. Love is personal for every last one of us. And so is joy, at least for the life Jesus invites us into: “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.”

I got a little up close and personal with you last week by talking a bit about my conversion story when I rededicated my life to following Christ as a freshman in college 45 years ago. What I didn’t mention is something highly unusual that happened to me. It was as if God “livestreamed” a joyous light into my very heart. I rode an unprecedented spiritual “high” for about six months. I couldn’t read and explore the Bible and God enough. I loved sharing my faith. I was, well, exuberant to be alive. When I returned home for the summer, I was shocked at how sad and fretful so many seemed in my family, in my church, in my hometown. I remember thinking, “Why are all these people, so many of them Christians, so sad?” Right before I returned to college for the fall, God infatuation lifted, and the Spirit helped me get my feet back on the ground. I feel back to earth. As I struggled to get my bearings back on Planet earth, I grew less judgmental of other’s struggles and more understandable of their worries. God’s joy became, well, quieter. Looking back, I see the gift of that great blast of joy as the ballast that got me launched.

God is not expecting us to be on cloud nine all the time. But joy is clearly a delightfully defining part of our journey! The Hebrew words that describe joy convey a sense of a bright and shining gladness, mostly as a response to God’s presence, as with Psalm 16: “in thy Presence is the fullness of joy.” What’s interesting, both in Hebrew Scripture and the New Testament, joy is intimately tied to God as our source and our object. In other words, we rejoice to realize how, like a tree, we are both rooted in God and we are drawn toward God as the sun. Another way of saying this: Christ is our Alpha and our Omega, our beginning and our end. The fruit we bear between the roots that 2 anchor us and the sunlight that nourishes us is called joy. This deeply personal sense of having our lives held between these two great hands, of living and moving and having our very being in Christ, issues forth into a kind of awe and wonder.

Happiness comes and goes. It can be as fleeting as a great meal or dessert. It’s as circumstantial as time. Feelings are not final. But Christian joy is eternal. It runs deeper than happenstance. Sometimes it can be the result of faith’s triumph over adverse and trying circumstances, even present in the midst of such adversity. As Paul once said, “I have learned to be content regardless of my circumstances.” I believe he means joy, not happiness. We can be happy or sad and still rejoice in God. That’s because our joy is not centered in our ego, but in the Spirit. This is an abiding Spirit that dwells, and sometimes swells, within our hearts. And when we get still and quiet and realize that the center of gravity is not in us, we are likely to let go and let this joy flow.

As Quaker Thomas Kelly puts it, We can count upon this as the only secure dynamic, an all-potent factor in world events. For the Eternal is actively breaking into time, working through those who are willing to be laid hold upon, to surrender self-confidence and self-centered effort, that is self-originated effort, and let the Eternal be the dynamic guide in recreating, through us, our world (A Testament of Devotion 74).

I guess what I’m trying to say is that we can get tied up in knots chasing happiness and miss out completely on the juicy fruit of joy. This fruit is a gift grounded in God. It is apt to surface when we’re prayerful, but not always. It is apt to surface when we worship, but not always. It is apt to surface when we are most faithful, but not always. It is apt to surface when we quieten down and are less fretful and feverish, but not always. Joy is a gift, not something we earn or conjure, but we can trust joy, even when we don’t feel it. Whether it surfaces or not, it is always present, whether we feel it or not. God enjoys you always, you are blessed in God’s eyes whether you’re a winner or a loser, whether you behave or misbehave, and sometimes, at the strangest times, when you’d least expect it and the wheels come off, even in the midst of grief, this joy, like a shy child shows its face. It’s that personal. And that eternal. And as you would with a shy child, you’re called to take it in.

When this happens, I hope you’ll follow the direction that poet William Blake once offered in his short poem “Eternity.” I was introduced to it as a sophomore in college, during that dark time I mentioned earlier when it felt as though joy had left me:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise

So, let us not try to ignore joy, nor try to control joy, but “kiss it as it flies,” knowing that God’s world is always dawning within us. We are not joyless. We need not be more impressed by the world’s problems than by the power of God. Everything does not depend upon us. The Spirit of God dwells and swells within us. Let us enjoy God—through these trees, this sky, these birds, this 3 masked friend across from you at lunch, this child, this song, this prayer, this church this very silence . . . just as God enjoys us. Amen.