In my first semester of seminary, I got the unique assignment to find three rocks from anywhere on campus and write one word on each of them to describe the foundations of my theology. One word per rock, three words, to sum up who I believe God to be and what I believe God most values and desires for God’s people. After some thought, I wrote Justice; Sabbath; Joy. These core tenets of my theology have not changed in the last decade, but joy has sometimes felt difficult to claim.
Lent might seem an odd season to focus on joy, on what British polymath John Ruskin and American Catholic Social Activist Dorothy Day called the Christian “duty of delight,” but in the Lenten lectionary passage Isaiah 55, delight is firmly established as a sacred spiritual practice.
Delight is our Christian vocation. When believers repent of those things that undermine delight, we work towards the building of God’s kingdom of justice on earth. Such justice empowers all creation to experience delight, making it both a mind-bogglingly simple and a mind-bogglingly difficult practice that can have mind-bogglingly world-changing results.
For a text that articulates God’s call for delight in our lives, it seems ironic that Isaiah 55 is believed to have been penned in Babylon. It is a text written for Israelites who found themselves in a foreign land with foreign gods. Their temple was destroyed, their identity was ruptured, and they had no idea when, if ever, they could go home. In this environment, God’s desire for delight and fulfillment and wholeness would have felt impossible. Yet Isaiah is audacious enough to proclaim that delight and fulfillment and wholeness are not only God’s desire, they are God’s promise.
Call upon God, Isaiah writes, even if you don’t understand God! Return to the Lord, even amid your suffering! Forsake those things that distance you from the Divine, and the One who made the covenant with David will return you to delight! But during the displacement and alienation and fear of exile, how can God’s people be expected to take this vocation seriously? What obligation do we have to joy when the world appears to be falling apart?
What obligation do we have to joy when the world appears to be falling apart?
I have recently become a disciple of the poet and essayist Ross Gay, who writes with gusto about delight and the incitement of joy — and who is also frequently challenged for focusing on this subject matter. In one such instance noted in Inciting Joy, a professor asked him,
“When all of this is going on” — he held his hands up as though to imply war; famine; people all over the world in cages or concentration camps, some of them children; disease; sorrow immense and unperturbable; it only getting worse and worse and worse (dude had big hands) — “why would you write about joy?”
Gay responds by reflecting on how it is dangerous to imagine that joy can only exist without sorrow or without pain — that perhaps some of the power of joy can be found in “what emerges from how we care for each other through those things.” He goes on to write, “What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what [flows] from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks?”
This brings us to the relationship between joy and Lent. Lent is not only about focusing on what breaks God’s heart and abstaining from it; it’s about reflecting on the question: How are we carrying each other’s heartbreaks? How are we helping each other?
Lent is a season in which God invites each of us to pause and explore the depths of God’s love so that we might be humble enough to rediscover the joy of our relationship with God. Because everything God does and will do and has already done for God’s people is motivated by relationship, by love. And Lent, when practiced wisely and well, invites us to experiment with using love as our motivation for our behavior.
For if love is why we do what we do, then the traditional Lenten expectation of sacrifice becomes an opportunity for joy. Yes, it is a sacrifice to give up a night of sleep to care for a sick child, but it’s rooted in love, which makes it worthwhile. Yes, it is a sacrifice to use one of your precious two weeks of vacation to chaperone a youth trip or go to Western North Carolina or Puerto Rico or Kentucky to serve others through disaster relief, but it’s rooted in love, which makes it worthwhile. Yes, it is a sacrifice to give a tenth of your earnings, a tenth of your possessions, a tenth of what the world ascribes as your worth, to support the work of the Church in the world, but it’s rooted in love, which makes it worthwhile. And healing, service, and generosity are always worthy of celebration.
We are called to be bearers of delight and inciters of joy, even and especially in such a time as this.
This passage from Isaiah and its inclusion in the Lenten lectionary invite us to see the liturgical season through the lens of love. It is a reminder that we can release the burdens of ego and materialism — and that such release offers freedom to share in Divine delight. And when we share in Divine delight, we draw others into God’s glory and God’s joy.
We cheapen Lent when we allow it to become another self-help challenge to better ourselves; that was never the point. Lent has always been intended as an opportunity for deeper fellowship with God — not for us to wallow in our failures and sin but so we might experience fulfillment and empower others to do likewise. We are called to be bearers of delight and inciters of joy, even and especially in such a time as this. In this last gasp of the Lenten season, may we all have the courage to do just that.
