Abundant Joy In Life

Do whatever he tells you.

Today, we read from the Gospel of John

and it is very different than the other gospels.

It is its own genre, with layers and layers of meaning.

In John’s Gospel there are only seven miracles,

and they are not even called miracles; they are called signs.

What they are pointing to is some aspect or attribute of God.

Every time we hear a sign, we should ask,

“What is the evangelist trying to communicate?”

And in John’s Gospel, there are layers of meaning

that we have to pull back the covers a little bit to find out each sign.

If you had run out of wine, it was considered a social faux pas.

You would generally have lots of cheap wine available

so just when people have been drinking for sometime you would say,

“Oh yeah, just go ahead, have more” and serve the cheaper stuff.

In Old Testament times and in ancient times,

wine was a symbol of joy.

Now it does not take a rocket science to figure out why, right?

A little bit of wine is meant to equal to joy!

Jesus turns everything around.

He takes six stone jars fills them with water

and turns that water into wine.

These jars would have held 20 to 30 gallons each.

Just to give you an understanding of

how much wine we are talking about.

He produced 600 to 800 bottles of wine!

That is a lot of joy!

We do not know how many people were at the wedding

but even if you had three hundred people,

that was two extra bottles per person at the end of the evening.

That is a lot of wine!

So what the evangelist is trying to communicate is

that an abundance of joy comes from God’s grace.

That God’s kingdom is overflowing with good joy.

This is the first aspect that John communicates,

the purpose of life is joy.

The purpose of life is joy and we are called to be joy filled in our life.

Let’s face it, we might know that intellectually,

but in practice, it is kind of hard to always hold onto.

Because life has a way of coming at us,

and it does not always feel so, well, joyful.

There are a lot of things that happen,

whether it happens to us

or happens to someone else whom we love,

that steals our joy away.

What steals our joy is a good question to ask ourselves.

But here is what is important.

Let us just focus on attaining joy,

then the question is how do we attain joy?

How do we reach that?

How do we curate joy in our life?

What we will go on to hear from John’s gospel is

that it is about being open to God’s grace.

That we have to be open to God’s grace first,

and then we have to leave space for it.

We have to leave space for God’s grace in our life

so that we can then receive the joy.

Now, the real answer today,

is from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.

In this part of Paul’s letter to Corinthians

he talks about all the different gifts that people are given.

You have this gift, and you have that gift.

All those are gifts are great.

But we will not read the next section of Paul’s letter,

until next week, and it says that the greatest of all these gifts is love.

We are all familiar with that portion of Corinthians

that is all about love.

Love is patient, love is kind, love is etc.

That is what we are going to hear.

Paul is saying that you can have all the gifts in the world,

and if you do not use them lovingly,

then they will not produce any joy.

They will not give you joy

if you are not using them for their intended purposes.

In the end, what we are called to do is love one another.

And that is where the joy comes.

Years ago there was a phrase I always loved.

My father and my mother used to use it all the time.

A sorrow shared is half the sorrow.

A joy shared is twice the joy.

It is an old phrase

but now they have science that says it is actually true.

How the brain and the heart work together,

once we share a joy or a happiness,

it is called “The happiness Study.”

Once we share a happiness, it actually gets magnified.

If we share a loss or a sorrow, it gets diminished.

They have actually connected

that is physiologically in the brain.

It actually decreases the suffering

or increases the actual happiness.

Now, why do I bring this up?

It is because we are called to do that in community.

We are called to build this joy.

And on earth, we can not successfully do this without community.

Here is how it works:

if I am joyful, if I do something that is good for me,

but if you, whom I love, have something that makes you joyful,

I actually get a bigger rise out of that.

I get more joy out of seeing you joyful than I would for myself.

We all know tinstinctively

that when things go well in our family,

when our children succeed in doing something,

we are delighted more than as if it was for ourselves.

When our grandchildren do something

that is enlightening or just wonderful,

we get so much more joy out of it

than as if we had just done it ourselves.

See, this is how joy works.

Last night for example,

we had a volunteer reception for all the people in our parish

that volunteer in different capacities.

And you could feel the joy in that room last night. It was palpable.

People were delighted to serve one another.

They get joy from sharing their joy with with one another.

That was what we were celebrating and we were recognizing.

That is what I am trying to communicate to you.

If you really want to be joyful,

then you have to serve somebody else.

It is about giving yourself away.

You have heard me mention this book called

A Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

I want to reflect on one more aspect of it,

because it highlights this very thing.

There are four pillars of the joy, for the mind and for the heart.

The four for the the mind we have done before,

but the four for the heart are these:

forgiveness, gratitude, compassion and generosity.

But these last three actually come together:

gratitude, compassion, and generosity.

And here is the way it works.

The authors highlight it well, and so does Pope Francis.

It is when we share, we share out of love;

when we realize how grateful we are for what we have,

then we are willing to share what we have with others.

And that is called compassion.

We we are sharing it and then we are generous.

And when we are generous,

that completes that flywheel of joy in our life

that we celebrate with others,

and then we give ourselves away.

If we want to partake in the wine of life, the joy of life,

we are called to serve one another.

We are called to give ourselves away.

And the promise is that the grace in our life will be so abundant,

it will be overflowing.

Once we do this, we will give it away

and other people will be joyful because of it.

Today, as we, we come to the table

to receive the grace of God in this Eucharist,

we come to share in it,

but also come to give it away,

to give that joy away by serving others in our life

so that we can continue this life of joy.

Remember to “Do whatever he tells you.”