Don’t worry, be happy – 9 October 2020

 

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.  Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.  Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.  And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:4-7)

This is the Epistle for next Sunday.  But first, a problem: Let your gentleness be known to everyone.  The Greek epieikes (ἐπιεικὲς) might mean gentleness, but Paul means more than that: declining to react, reluctance to engage in a dispute, willingness to let it go.

The emphatic verb here, however, as you heard, is Rejoice!  Double rejoicing, in fact… Paul writes, Again I say, rejoice!   I have a memory of Music I at Auckland University, 1954, Professor Holinrake, and he made us sing this whole text in Henry Purcell’s The Bell Anthem… with decidedly mixed results.[1]  Rejoicing is what happens when you know that everything that can be right, right now, is right.  Other things may be far from right.  But you are held at this inner space in love and in order.  Rejoicing is when the heart and not merely the liturgy says sursum corda, you may lift up your hearts… as when Etty Hillesum writes from Westerbork on her way to Auschwitz: There is a really deep well inside me.  And in it dwells God.  Sometimes I am there, too …  And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.  Rejoicing is not feeling happy – it is finding the inner place where all is well.

Then Paul writes, Do not worry about anything.  Some people worry about everything.  Some observe a kind of law which says that the amount you worry tells everyone the amount you care... but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.  I really don’t think this is going to God with a shopping list.  Our needs are known.  Wisdom however includes a keen sense of what is not going to change… and so we begin the process of letting go.  Everyone knows what the alcoholics call the Serenity Prayer – not everyone knows that it was written by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and what he wrote was this:

God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things which should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time,
accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it,
trusting that You will make all things right, if I surrender to Your will,
so that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
and supremely happy with You forever in the next.

Paul goes on: And the peace of God… the shalom of God… which surpasses all understanding…  That word “understanding” in Greek is nous (νοῦς) which has entered the English language as nous[2], meaning mind, intellect.  God’s gift of peace/shalom is just as likely to be despite events and the state of things, as to be because of them.  It is not cause and effect, so it is not accessible to our understanding -- it is grace, not a matter of achievement or deserving, but a gift of love. 

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[1] You can find The Bell Anthem sung properly on You Tube.

[2] The Greek rhymes with loose, the English rhymes with louse.