Lost in Wonder, Love, and Praise

Sunday, July 30, 2023
The Rev. Dr. Meghan Gage-Finn

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Romans 12:9-18

Tomato Onboard…Umbrella in the Café…The Sanctity of Trains…Pulling Carrots

These are just a few of the 102 “delights” in Dr. Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, a series of essays in which he reflects on the daily snapshots of his habits and pleasures. Some delights are memories, some are things that surprise him, but most are the delights that connect him to something outside of himself. Dr. Gay is an English Professor at the University of Indiana, and several years ago, he set about recording delights. He describes his process this way, “I came up with a handful of rules: write a delight every day for a year; begin and end on my birthday, draft them quickly; and write them by hand. The rules made it a discipline for me. A practice.” For Dr. Gay it was simple: “Spend time thinking and writing about delight every day.”

Quickly, he found that the practice of writing these essays occasioned what he called a “delight radar,” or “the development of a delight muscle.…A month or two into this project,” he says, “delights were calling to me: Write about me! Write about me!” He goes on to say, “I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned…that my delight grows- much like love and joy- when I share it.”

I found myself continuing to come back to Gay’s Book of Delights. The whimsy and wonder of someone else’s curiosity seemed just the escapist binge called for at the end of the day. As a professional hazard, of course I found myself thinking about his daily musings from a theological perspective. But I also found myself asking the question: How can I immerse myself in a theology of delight and joy when so much in our world speaks to the contrary? Standing up here preaching on this must mean I am oblivious to the struggles of individuals and communities, the groaning of God’s good creation under the weight of our damaging and wasteful ways. Surely it is a privilege to ponder daily delight. A sermon on delight and joy and their reverberations could only be insensitive or frivolous.

And yet, here we are. Ross Gay convinced me when he said that it is a “negligence if people don’t take the time to honor the things that they take delight in, but more importantly, that they share the things that they take delight in. And if you don’t do that, there’s a loss there. You have to do it to achieve humanity. You have to share delight.”

In his next book, Inciting Joy, he makes the point further that we often think about joy as a state of being that is “without pain” or “without sorrow…which our consumerist culture has us believing is a state of being that we could buy.”

Ross Gay asks:

“What happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks?”

Okay, so now I am thinking that maybe this practice of finding joy and delight is not so far removed from the terrible we know is all around us, and maybe to some degree, it can feel like it might be within us at times.

For Ross Gay, joy and delight and hardship and the terrible are all intertwined.

His “delight radar” opened him up to the great wilderness, the true wild of the human experience, and to consider how we might join our respective wilds together. Hardly frivolous. In his mind, our very survival depends on joy, wonder, and delight, mixed together with sorrow, hardship, and brokenness. Inviting this in, inciting joy and practicing delight, leads us to what he imagines as, “unboundaried solidarity.”

As people of faith, might a posture of joy and delight connect us more deeply to God and community? Perhaps it could not only lead us into the mysteries of our faith but help us enter into the complexities of the world around us. Or as Ross Gay asks, “What in our lives prepares the ground for joy?”

And what if we didn’t stop at joy and delight, but allowed ourselves to get lost in something even bigger and deeper in our journey of faith?

For those gathered near the Water Gate to hear Ezra read from the book of the law, something was stirring among them, they became lost in what unfolded that day. This public reading described took place on the day that was known as the new year, understood now in Judaism as Rosh Hashanah.

Ezra and his companions read from the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, for about six hours, and despite that length of time, all the people were rapt with attention. The Torah includes the story of the whole of Israel, and God’s instructions so that the people of God can live together in a wholesome and joyful community. And did you notice who was gathered? Laypeople are sharing in the leadership of the service, and even more so, women and children join the group of listeners to participate in this reading and teaching, and this teaching leads to great understanding and even greater joy. Ezra made clear that this was a day considered holy and set apart by God, a day to be joyous. He charged the people not to mourn or cry, instead urging them to celebrate, for there was to be no bitterness on this day. Here we see Ross Gay’s supposition, that joy is the best antidote to grieving. Joy in God is the people’s strength, and it lifts them up as individuals, and binds them together as a community.

Here the people have gathered for the start of the new year, which in Judaism, is a process that starts with the blast of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah and stretches ahead for the next 12 days, which make up the High Holy Days, ending in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. That stretch of time is known as- the Days of Awe.

Writer Molly Conway notes that the Days of Awe are, “a time of repairing relationships, reaffirming commitments, rededicating [oneself] to righteous action.”

These days are “an urgent reminder that in a world full of factors we cannot control, it is still up to each of us to master ourselves, and to devote time and energy to doing so. To find time for awe.”

What would it look like to take up a holy practice of finding joy and delight, to follow a sacred calling to live perpetually in something that looks like the Days of Awe? What if joy and delight offered followers of Christ an awe-filled conviction to repairing and recommitting, to redirecting ourselves to righteous action?

In his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life, psychology professor Dr. Dacher Keltner approaches the importance of awe in the same way Dr. Ross Gay does delight and joy. So much of life is sacred, and joy, delight, and wonder are all around us, he says, and embracing and practicing an awareness of that can lead to awe. He believes that awe can transform our relationship with the world. Throughout the book he repeats the same invitation and command:

Find Awe.

To open ourselves up to this kind of wonder and awe can be a scary thing. In fact, most instances of awe in the Bible are accompanied with fear, trembling, being overwhelmed, or feeling terror. To experience joy, delight, and wonder leading to awe means we are giving over control, we must acknowledge how fragile and insignificant we are.

Keltner and his fellow researchers define awe as, “The feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world…It is an awareness of and an attunement toward vast mysteries that we don’t understand.” He goes on to pose the questions: “Why would I recommend that you find happiness in an emotion that is so fleeting and evanescent? A feeling so elusive that it resists simple description? That requires the unexpected, and moves us toward mystery and the unknown rather than what is certain and easy?”

But isn’t that part of the crux of our faith, the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not yet seen?

Here is Keltner’s answer to his own questions: “Because we can find awe anywhere. Because doing so doesn’t require money or the burning of fossil fuels- or even much time.” Keltner’s research on awe suggests that just a couple of minutes a day will do. Because we have a basic need for awe wired into our brains and bodies, finding awe is easy if we just take a moment and wonder.”

For anyone who has spent even a short amount of time with a small child just discovering their surroundings, most things are amazing to them. This is due somewhat to the newness of experiences, but more so it is because that basic wiring in our brains and our bodies hasn’t been overridden in children yet. The ease with which following the path of a bubble or butterfly, stomping in a puddle, dancing to a favorite song, or watching an excavator dig a hole widens their eyes and instigates giggles in ways that take no practice or discipline. We recognize that children need this as part of their growth and development, but so, too, do we when we tend to age out of the default for joy and awe.

Last Sunday, a church member texted me after her walk home from worship along the Greenway. She shared that as Westminster’s bells rang out into the city at noon, someone walking near her looked up at the bells, set down the bags they were carrying, sat down on a bench, and bowed their head in prayer.

Find Awe.

The joy of God is your strength.

Dr. Keltner argues that his research shows that when they looked for it, people were experiencing awe two to three times a week, every couple of days. His study looked at speakers of 20 languages and 2,600 narratives, rich narratives from around the world that could be classified into a taxonomy of awe, as he calls it, into eight wonders of life.

He found what most led people around the world and across so many different cultures to feel awe was other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming. Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty.”

Keltner is making the declaration that we need awe now more than ever, that it activates our inclination to create and support strong networks, and that it can transform our relationship to the world. The letter to the Romans argues the same thing, as it describes a heightened awareness of solidarity, of being part of a community, of embracing and supporting others, and being embraced and supported by others. Keltner believes that in our twenty-first century life, we have lost occasions for collective awe.

But we can feel awe as our “default self,” as Keltner describes it, gives way to a sense of being part of an interdependent collective. When we hear God’s Word read and proclaimed in new ways in our life, we are transformed. When we embrace the belief that collective joy in God is our strength, we are transformed. When we love one another with mutual affection, we are transformed. When we commission young people to go forth and serve, lead, and partner, they are transformed, and the world is transformed. When we rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep, we are transformed. When we accept that a peaceable life for all depends on us, we and the world are transformed.

One final point from Dacher Keltner: He says, “Awe arises when we perceive change. When we sense a sunset changing from oranges to deep purplish blues, how clouds transform as they move across the horizon, how a knee-high two-year-old one day is speaking to you in sentences when only a moment ago they were babbling and cooing, how a nonviolent march can transform history.”

We perceive change all around us, and that can be scary and overwhelming, but we can also just as easily perceive delight, joy, and wonder all around us, and that feeling of awe can change us and change the world. We can lose ourselves in the noise and the doom and gloom, but what if we were just as tempted to lose ourselves in the awe of it all- to get lost in wonder, love, and praise?

As a congregation, we are approaching a season of change and transition, with much to celebrate and much unknown. How might we experience this approaching time of change with a sense of awe at the movement of the Spirit among us, at the new things God will do in this place and through this body of believers? We have incredibly gifted leaders who will guide the congregation through the necessary steps and processes of the liminal space, as Margaret referred to in her sermon last week, but perhaps just as important as procedures and plans might be a readiness for awe, an openness to collective wonder.

Zachary Lee, a contributor to Sojourners magazine, further makes the case for awe: “To be in awe is to not numb oneself but to instead feel fully our smallness and our creaturely-ness. Awe fully engages one’s senses. Rather than a distraction, awe is a call toward right relationship, showing spectacle to be a tool of the empire. Awe is never self-serving. Its purpose is to recalibrate who we are before God and galvanize our work of justice…Awe…is what is needed to restore the world that God intends. Experiencing and leaning into awe, which demands from us more than mere spectacle, opens the human heart to God’s prophetic imagination.”

If we rejoice in hope and delight in living in harmony with others, we will be ardent in spirit in serving God and serving God’s people. If this leads us to believe that our lives and the lives of others depend on it, our awe can challenge systems that oppress and help in healing what is broken. Practicing awe can lead us into the unknown, connecting us more fully to God, our neighbors, and one another.

What if we lived as followers of Christ prepared to be amazed, prepared to find delight and joy all around us, prepared to be in awe? I wonder if we might find that God will not disappoint. I wonder if we might realize that awe is everywhere. I wonder if we might find that we can be part of restoring the world God intends, working actively for “God’s Hope for the World, as a joyful community called by God to embrace differences and affirm commonalities, rejoicing and finding hope in the change that comes with God’s ongoing creation and revelation, seeking and giving thanks for the well-being of all.” I wonder if we will find that we are recalibrating who we are before God, galvanizing the work for justice to which Jesus calls us.

May it be so. Amen.