Paul encourages the church in Philippi to rejoice in the Lord – and rejoice “always”! Which leads one to ask the question: what is he smoking? I know that it’s Thanksgiving weekend in Canada, but when you look at the world, the “real” world as many call it, what is there to rejoice about?

 

Simultaneous election campaigns both here and in the U.S. do not exactly inspire joy. Campaigns in both countries are in the final stretches, when the mudslinging and attack ads are employed because they are so “effective” according to the pollsters. Elections do not bring out the best in the human species.

 

Rejoice in the Lord, always? I have no problem rejoicing when the score is going my way. But when the odds against winning seemed stacked against me…rejoice?!

 

We’re about to head into what is likely to be a prolonged worldwide recession caused by foolishness and greed and market ideology run amuck. First it was tulips, then technology, and now housing. We call them “bubbles” – but to change the metaphor it’s really about trying to build a skyscraper of wealth upon a very narrow and shaky foundation. The Bible calls it idolatry – imbuing visible, tangible objects, with divine power to deal with feelings of insecurity and the human condition of impermanence: a bundle of toxic mortgages gains talismanic power over the entire global financial community. And as the value of our investments and the hope we have placed in our own homes plummets, our own Prime Minister suggests on national TV that there are bargains to be had in the stock market – what, with all our spare money? Rejoice always…hmmm..

 

And then, there are the mountains of daily worries and concerns that preoccupy each of us in our own individual lives. I’ll stop there, before we descend into a collective depression we can’t climb out of. But you can see that Paul’s teaching to rejoice could be interpreted as a kind of Pollyannaish denial of reality. Is it a kind of “don’t worry – be happy” escape from reality? 

 

Well, actually, I think it’s just what the doctor ordered for the times we are living through. And remember, the basis of his admonition to rejoice – in spite of it all – is not naïve optimism. It’s his deep conviction that “the Lord is near”. And don’t think Paul had it any easier than we do. Life would have been incalculably more difficult. He was frequently arrested for his beliefs. He was thrown out of cities where he proclaimed the gospel; he endured sickness. But through it all he never lost his inner conviction of being in Christ – that the Lord was near. 

 

Paul knew that there were two Paul’s in a sense. There was the Paul that was subject to the ups and downs of everyday life, the betrayals of friends, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. This Paul needed to have his wits about him and make wise decisions and do as best as he could in the midst of the storms that blew him about. But, as a mystic, Paul was grounded in a deeper identity that was untouched by the storms of life. “It is no longer I”, he wrote, “but Christ who dwells within me”. He moved and lived and had his being within an ocean of love and joy and compassion that in our tradition we call the Christ or Christ consciousness. At the deepest level, we are all one with this ocean of Being. The housing market goes up, the housing market goes down, but this divine part of us retains equanimity, a watchful peacefulness.

 

Our portfolio goes up, our portfolio goes down, but this Center of Wholeness or Holiness is pure joy. Our moods swing wildly in any given day, reacting to this or that, but our essential Self is untouched by these moods; knows that we are not our financial wealth; knows that most of the ways that we’ve come to identify ourselves – parent, son, professional, unemployed, smart, stupid, strong, weak – all these are absolutely real and absolutely partial. These partial identities are created in response to genetics, the families we grew up in, and our life conditions. But these blessed identities emerge from a deeper Source, that is the heart of God from which we are born and into which we return. Most of us have forgotten this – the spiritual journey is all about remembering it and settling into it. It is not a place outside of us, for we are always in the heart of God. It is a level of awareness. Here is a storehouse of joy that can never be exhausted.

 

The spiritual journey is all about developing capacity to shift in and out of these two identities – our partial, ever-shifting sense of who we are, and our essential nature, which participates in God’s own being. I’ve talked before about these two parts of ourselves as the part of us that is becoming and that part of us that is being. When Paul encourages us not to worry because “the Lord is near” it’s my understanding that we are to take this mystically. The “nearness” of the Lord isn’t meant to be a temporal or a spatial metaphor – as though “the Lord is out there somewhere in space and we’re waiting for him to show up. Paul isn’t talking about space and time – and he’s not talking about a being totally distinct from us. All it takes is a shift in awareness, of what we choose to focus on. Take the time to shift your focus from the external world to the interior world and you will discover that God is nearer to you than the air you breathe – nearer because if we removed the air, we’d still be in God and God would be in us.

 

Sometimes people just come to this awareness spontaneously – this is what happened to Eckhart Tolle; sometimes people come to his awareness after years of meditation; but Paul suggests another way that I find equally compelling. The focus remains on the external world – there’s no meditation going on. But you consciously shift your attention to those people, experiences, and events in the external world that reflect the same quality of being as this interior condition that he calls “the Lord” or Christ. In this practice, the portal into the essential Self is these outward experiences. Here’s the practice:

 

“Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever in honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, and anything worthy of praise, think about those things (Philippians 4:8).

 

I love this because it’s so simple. Spend some time thinking about good, positive, edifying things, and in his words “the peace of God which passes all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ” (4:7). This suggests we need to actually guard or defend ourselves from a way of seeing the world that is excessively negative. It’s almost like Paul has been watching our evening news! As you discipline yourself to think about these things, you are actually entering into a level of divine consciousness, because these good, honorable, commendable, excellent, praiseworthy things, reflect the heart and mind of Ultimate Reality. They become a portal into God’s heart – and we experience God’s nature.

 

So, let’s do this together shall we? I’m going to come out there and ask you to “think about these things” with me. (Bruce goes out into congregation). We’re going to create a field of consciousness this morning that reflects the heart of the divine – that reflects our essential selves.  Can somebody help us to think about an experience of what is just? It could have happened yesterday, or anytime in history. Anybody? Ok, how about something, or somebody, that captures the quality of purity? How about commendable? Excellent? Pleasing? Worthy of praise? It takes a while, doesn’t it, for these things to come to our mind. That’s interesting in itself, is it not? Why does it seem so much easier to focus on the negative?

 

There is a whole new field of positive psychology these days. Researchers are measuring the brains of those who are flooded with positive images and thoughts. What they are finding is consistent with what brain scientists called neural plasticity – we can change our brains and the way our brains function through the thoughts and images we take in. Positive images and thoughts are correlated with higher levels of serotonin – a hormone our body produces that makes us feel good. This is also consistent with the findings of quantum physics. It turns out that at the quantum level, reality is participative. In other words, the world that comes into view for the scientists is influenced by what they are looking for. If they want to measure the location of an electron, a particle pops into being. If they want to measure the momentum of an electron – where it’s going – it appears in a wave-form. What we call “reality” is the world we choose to focus on.  The world we see is the one we have called into being.

 

Now, obviously, if we go around wearing rose-coloured glasses and chirping to our neighbours about how wonderful life is when they’ve just lost half the value of their portfolio, we’re not only insensitive; we’re out of touch with reality. Every Christian creed that has ever been written includes the line, “Christ was crucified”. And so we affirm that Good Friday is one of the days of the week we observe – bad things happen.

But, let’s also remember that it’s only one line in the creed, and it is always immediately followed by: “On the third day he was raised from the grave”. Bad things happen in God, and God happens in the midst of bad things.

 

What Paul is teaching us is that we need to add to our tool kit of spiritual exercises the capacity to think on positive things. And let’s remember, we do this not just because we need a psychological boost, and not just because we’re feeling a little down. We do it because “thinking on these things” is a portal into the heart of the divine. These “things” are reflections of God’s heart. In bringing them to mind we are reminded of our essential natures – This divine nature, or essential self that is not tossed about by falling stock markets or housing prices or the thousand and one daily things that can knock us of our feet.

 

“Keep on doing these things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the peace of God will be with you.” Happy thanksgiving, friends. May the joy of Christ be with you.