In these months of pandemic, we have lost so much. How, in the midst of that loss, do you find joy? Here's How.

It happened over forty years ago, but even now, I remember the paralyzing fear, the despair of those terrifying moments.  When I was 14, a bully at my school, Hutch, as we called him began to focus on me.   I got tossed out of windows onto the ground, and various and sundry other humiliations that I’ve long since forgotten.   But I’ve never forgotten the day that Hutch held me by my ankles out of a second story window.  I acted like it was a big joke even though I was terrified.   But God forbid, I show any fear or weakness.  That would have made it worse.  

Going to school in those days, I felt so alone.   I never knew when Hutch would strike or what he would do.  For years, I carried with me the humiliation and pain of that year.   Then several years ago, something changed.   In a seminar I attended, the facilitator asked us to remember a time when we felt utterly powerless.   Immediately that year of bullying came to mind. 

Then he asked us, without judgment, to honestly ask ourselves if we could have made different choices.   Did we ask for help?   If we were younger, did we seek support from our parents?    So, I asked myself that question.  The answer stunned me.  Yes, I had hoped a teacher would help me, but honestly, I had never asked one.  I had never told anyone, not even my parents what was going on.   And knowing that, didn’t make me feel bad at all.  Instead, it gave me a sense of power.  I had choices that might have changed things.  Now, back then, for a lot of reasons, I didn’t act on them, but I could have.   I had had more power than I realized.   In fact, discovering that has given me a greater sense of my power to this very day. 

Now those moments of shame, of sheer terror hold no power over me.  I even tried to reach out to the bully to initiate a conversation (I still haven’t been able to find him).  But do you see how all of that changed?  It changed because I simply answered one simple question. 

But what that facilitator did with that simple question, God was already doing thousands of years ago in the words we’re about to read.   How do you find your way through these difficult almost post-pandemic days?  How do you deal with the continuing uncertainty, with the sense of loss, with just the emotional weariness?  Heck, how do you face whatever troubles life brings you with peace, confidence, even joy?   In these words, God shows you the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

I Peter 1:6-9

How do you move through these challenging days as this pandemic wanes?  How do you deal with all the emotional fall out of the last year?  How, in whatever struggles that life brings you, do you move through them in strength, even in joy?   Here God tells you.   You let God's big picture frame the smaller picture of your life, even if your suffering.  Why?  Because God's big picture gives you the perspective you need to not only experience peace and power, but even joy.  

You see, that’s exactly what Peter is doing in his letter.  Remember, these Christians are facing all sorts of troubles, including most terrifyingly of all, an all-powerful state that has moved from tolerance to hostility, from passive acceptance to often violent persecution.   But what does Peter say as this passage begins?   He says: “In this you greatly rejoice….”

Now, what is this?   Peter is simply referring to the big picture that he painted as he opened the letter, that we talked about last week.   Just to give a quick refresher on that big picture.  It went something like this.  God has chosen you even before you were born and sealed his commitment to you with his very life in Jesus’ death.   More than that, Jesus rose from death.  And when Jesus did, in that resurrection, God literally re-conceived you.  You have become different, radically, wonderfully new.   And now you have a living hope.  You know.  In the end, God has the victory.  Love has the victory.   You already know the final score.  God wins.  

Do you see how that bigger picture gives perspective?   You know, whatever you face, God will not walk away from you.   You know, that ultimately, those who persecute you will not write the end of your story.  No, God will do that.   Do you see what power that gives you in even the most powerless of situations?

When the Nazis came to Vienna in the 1930s, they ripped apart the life of the Jewish psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl.  They seized his home.  They destroyed his career.  Then they took his family.  His parents, his brother, and his wife all died in the death camps of the Nazi’s.  They sent Frankl himself to Auschwitz.  There they beat and starved him.  They brutalized and humiliated him.    Yet in the midst of that horrific experience, Frankl began to notice something. 

He noticed how some prisoners, even in their starvation, offered their bread to others.   He saw, how in the most undignified of places, certain prisoners exhibited dignity, even honor.   One day, as he stumbled along on a forced march, he began thinking about his wife.  As he described it, “I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.”      Frankl realized.  His Nazi captors could control everything around him.  They even had power over his body, his very life.    But he had power too.   In the end, he and he alone decided how it was going to affect him.  Yes, he could become bitter or depressed.  He could become even as evil as they were.   Or he could choose to rise above it. He had the power to redefine the suffering, to reframe it, as something that would never defeat him, that could never defeat the love of God in him. 

In the power of that love, even in that horrific place, he could be free.  His captors might be able to leave the camp, walk where they choose, spend what they wanted.  They might have more liberty.  But Frankl had more freedom.  The Nazis tried everything short of death to destroy Frankl.   And they completely failed.  Why?  Frankl had found a new frame for that horrific place.   In that frame, he found freedom, even power.   And after the war, he not only wrote a brilliant book on what he faced, Man’s Search for Meaning, but founded an entire method of treating others’ emotional pain based on what all that loss and suffering had taught him.

And in that same way, Peter says when you get the frame of that bigger picture, it gives you a perspective that gives you power, no matter what you face.   But notice too, what it doesn’t give you.   It doesn’t mean all is now sweetness and light.   Peter, yes, talks about joy, but he also talks about grief.   Here is how he puts it exactly.   “In this you greatly rejoice, even though just now you are….grieved by a variety of trials…”

Now honestly, this word grieved only begins to touch on the actual word in Greek.  This word means not simply a grief that comes and goes, but one that lingers, that leaves you deeply distressed or troubled.   It’s likely why the King James version of the Bible used the word heaviness here.   Peter is talking about a grief that holds on to you, that won’t let you go. 

And certainly, if you walk out every day into a world that has, seemingly overnight, turned increasingly hostile to you, even dangerous, simply because of what you believe, well, that’s a pretty big loss.  The folks to which Paul is writing have suffered loss after loss, even the death of friends, simply because of their beliefs.   And that grief is holding onto them.

And ironically, our very different situation holds striking losses that aren’t altogether different.   For quite different reasons, our world turned upside down seemingly overnight too. Kids couldn’t go to school. We couldn’t even count on even grocery stores or restaurants to be safe.  Life became scarily uncertain.  Our relatively safe world became dangerous, deadly even, from an enemy we could not see or detect.   So, when Peter talks about this sort of heaviness, this lingering grief and sadness, we get it.

But here’s the point Peter is making.  You can feel both that grief and experience the joy.   Why?   Because that sentence from 1 Peter I quoted, I didn’t finish.  Here is the full sentence.  “In this you greatly rejoice, even though just now you are….grieved by a variety of trials…for a little while.”   Yes, this grief lingers, but it won’t stay forever.  It will end.  And if you know that, if you know the final score, then even as you grieve, you can rejoice.

I’m fond of an old preacher’s joke.  The preacher asks one of his members, his favorite scripture verse.  And the man, a farmer, thoughtfully replies, “Well, Pastor, my favorite verse is, “And it came to pass.”  Puzzled, the preacher asks “Why that one.”   And the man replies, “Well, the Lord said it came to pass, not to stay.” Do you get both the pain and the wisdom behind that joke?   If you do, it will give you power.  

When this pandemic first hit, I read the book that gives the definitive history of the last one in 1918, The Great Influenza by John Barry.   It helped me first realize that this virus, as deadly as it is, could have been much, much worse.   More than that, it helped me realize that this pandemic, like the last one, will pass.  In fact, when the 1918 pandemic ended, the creativity and vibrancy of the Roaring 20s followed right behind.   This too shall pass.

But even when it does, even when other losses come that bring you grief, you can still hold both the sadness even as you rest in the joy.  You can hold both.  And when you do, the trials you face don’t defeat you, they refine you.  They create in you a beauty, a preciousness that is greater even than gold, that leads to the salvation of your souls. 

Pretty much every day, I take ten minutes in silence with God, and when I do so, I center myself with an ancient prayer that Christians have been saying for 1500 years.  The words are simply, Jesus Christ, Son of God have mercy on me a sinner.  Now, you might think.  Gosh, that’s a little depressing, that prayer, but I cherish it like no other.  Why?  It leads me to experience the grief so that I can embrace the joy.   You see when I start repeating those words into the silence, I feel the grief, the heaviness of my life, the brokenness of the world.  In many ways, I’ve been avoiding that grief, but in the silence, it hits.  It hits hard.   And I let myself feel it, with all its heaviness, all its weight and substance.  But as the words of the prayer fade away, as I rest in the silence.  Something amazing happens. 

Joy comes.  Joy comes in the middle of the grief!  I feel the mercy, the love, the companionship of Jesus.   I experience, as Peter describes it here, “an indescribable and glorious joy.”   And just to clarify, glorious means weighty, heavy, substantial.  I experience an indescribable, a weighty, substantial joy.   I get what the Catholic mystic Mother Janet Stuart meant when she said.   “Joy is not the absence of suffering but the presence of God.”

And when you let that big picture in, when it frames your troubles, it not only gives you perspective.  It not only gives you power.  It opens you to the presence, to Jesus’ presence.  And in that presence, you find joy.  No, that’s not right.  In that presence, the joy finds you. 

For, who is Jesus?  Jesus is the One who came for you, who has welcomed and loved you, who offered up everything for you.  Jesus is the One who went to death and beyond for you.  And Jesus knows, oh, he knows both suffering and joy.  

I love the way Hebrews 12 puts it.  Jesus, the leader and finisher of faithfulness, who for the sake of the joy that lay before him, endured the cross, disregarding its shame.”  Why did Jesus endure that cross?  For the sake of the joy that lay before him.  Do you get what that joy was?  It was you.  You were that joy.  I was that joy.  We were the joy that lay before him, the joy of bringing us his beloved sisters and brothers home, the joy of freeing us to become the children of God.  And when you know God loves you like that, then yes, joy can come even in the face of great grief and loss.  For in that love, you have a picture of God so big, so wondrous, so amazing, so breathtakingly beautiful that nothing, not even death itself, will defeat it.