“Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again: rejoice! ...Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” From Paul the Apostle’s Letter to the Philippians, chapter 4, verses 4 thru 7.
In the Name.
This Thanksgiving Day, November 26 in the Year of Our Lord 2020, is a year of pandemic, and a year of disturbing, dangerous politics. Here we are, between the end of one church year and the beginning of another. In this liminal space, in this in-between time, we are aware of the choices before us; political change is in the offing, we believe for the better. The promise of vaccines is making people more confident and relaxed; approaching political change is adding to this confidence. But, at the same time, medical and government authorities are telling us not to travel, not to gather, not to celebrate this occasion, this “Thanksgiving”. Millions of people are ignoring the advice of authorities, putting themselves and others at risk, and why? We so eagerly want this crisis, this plague to be over, so we can celebrate without worry. People gather and celebrate, thinking that that will end the crisis, by creating herd immunity, or some other magical solution. It’s very American, especially in this time of fake news and disinformation and blatant manipulation of social media and so on, to think that we can create any reality we like just by imagining it, and ignoring the reality we’re actually in.
Anyway, I don’t want to be too gloomy here. I want to turn to Paul the Apostle’s teaching, which is pertinent to our situation. “Rejoice in the Lord always!” he says. There are no exceptions to this instruction. “Always!” he says. “The Lord is near!” he says. In other words, the crises we’re experiencing are not the whole story; the Lord is present, he is bigger than these crises. We can rejoice because he is near. I don’t think that the instruction to “Rejoice” means “pretend to be happy when we’re not!” Paul goes on to tell us what this rejoicing is, and how to attain it. Rejoicing, in Paul’s understanding, is much deeper than that; it is not mere emotion, but awareness of divine presence, divine peace.
“By prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests made known to God.” When we do that, our anxiety can drop away. By prayer to God, the Lord, who is near, we hand our anxiety over to him. That allows the “peace of God that surpasses all understanding” to flow into us. By prayer and petition we remove the blockage that prevents that peace from reaching us. And that peace surrounds, guards our “hearts and minds” That peace is the rejoicing that Paul is talking about. That peace “surpasses all understanding!” In other words, it is beyond human creation, beyond human limitations; it is divine. That peace, that rejoicing, that confidence, will enable us to recognize, to make right choices in the current crisis, make good decisions in the pandemic. Paul lists the right choices in the Letter to the Philippians: whatever is true, honorable, just, lovely, excellent, praiseworthy. All these become available, become visible, when we accept that the Lord is near, when we make our requests made known to God with thanksgiving. “Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again: rejoice! ...Have no anxiety at all.”
In the Name. Amen. (26.XI.20 Adv.)
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