The Sixth Sunday of Easter Year B-Meditation on Joy

The Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Sixth Sunday after Easter-Year B May 6, 2024 In his long-goodbye to his disciples, in this second half of the Easter season where we focus on Jesus’s teachings around what intimacy with God looks like, Jesus says, “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” Part of Jesus’s final blessing or wish for us is joy. So I want us to reflect on joy for a few minutes here. And I’ll give you time to ponder the questions I ask. How do you define joy? When’s the last time you experienced joy? What did joy feel like in your body? Is Jesus’s joy different from ours? How? Our Wednesday healing service community reflected on these questions, and they observed that joy often bubbles up in them through connections with other people, God, or nature. It is often a brief feeling of effervescence, and it is often connected with gratitude in some form or fashion. They spoke about encountering joy in small, mundane ways, and they talked about how one you start paying attention to joy, then it seems to become more readily available. Sociologist Brene Brown writes about joy in her book Atlas of the Heart (after conducting thousands of hours of research around all the human emotions). It’s in her chapter titled Places We Go When Live is Good: “joy is sudden, unexpected, short-lasting, and high-intensity. It’s characterized by connection with others, or with God, nature, or the universe. Joy expands our thinking and attention, and it fills us with a sense of freedom and abandon.” “While experiencing joy, we don’t lose ourselves, we become more truly ourselves.” And finally, she writes about how research shows that joy and gratitude work together in “an intriguing upward spiral.” The two are interconnected and an increase of one leads to an increase of the other.i. So I’ll ask the questions again: How do you define joy? When’s the last time you experienced joy? What did joy feel like in your body? Is Jesus’s joy different from ours? How? This week, I invite you to pay attention to your moments of joy, and to lean into gratitude in those moments. i. Brown, Brene’. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connections and the Language of Human Experience. Random House: New York, 2021, pp 204-205.