Nevertheless

I have been sitting with the word joy these past two weeks while I was away on retreat.

I was pondering joy, not happiness. That's a different animal. Happiness tends to be circumstantial. It shows up when things go well. Joy is something different. It is deeper, stranger. The ancient Greek word chara (χαρά), the one the New Testament writers reach for over and over again, carries the weight of something that flows from deep within, almost independent of what's happening on the surface. And here is something I find beautiful: chara shares its root with charis (χάρις), the Greek word for grace. Joy and grace are etymological cousins. They come from the same place. I don't think that's an accident.

This is why the early church didn't just celebrate the Resurrection on Easter Sunday and then move on. They set aside fifty days, the whole season we call Eastertide, to sit inside the reality of a profoundly changed life and practice, and what it means to live from that place.

Fifty days of joy as a spiritual practice. Imagine that.

And… that feels countercultural right now. (And maybe that's exactly the point.)

As you know, we are not living in an easy moment. Many of us are carrying real fear: for neighbors who are vulnerable, for the direction of our common life, for people we love who are anxious and exhausted, for our children and grandchildren. There are days when joy feels almost irresponsible, like you're not paying close enough attention if you can still feel it.

But here is something I kept coming back to as I sat in silence and drove through the desert on my way back from the Pecos Monastery last week: the first Easter didn't happen in easy times either. The disciples were frightened, hiding, grieving, confused. And into that, not after it had all resolved, but right in the middle of it, comes the "nevertheless" of resurrection. Joy doesn't wait for the storm to clear. It shows up in the tempest.

Rte 80 between Salt Lake City and Reno. Snow and hail squalls the whole way.

Nevertheless....

So I want to name some of what I see happening in and around us, because I think we are actually living inside that word, maybe more than we realize.

While I was on retreat, a family reached out to the church. They had just been evicted. They had never been unhoused before, and they are still employed. They spent days calling every number they could find, and what they discovered is what so many families discover: the system that is supposed to help people in crisis is itself in crisis. Waiting lists are frozen. Shelters are full. And the options that did exist required them to split up.  This is what happened to the family who came to us for help. As Ashley Hamilton, the deputy executive director of the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency, said at the ARCHES Nest ribbon-cutting just last year: "No family should ever have to choose between staying together and staying inside." This family, like too many, had no choice. Thankfully, all three have found places to be inside until they can be together again.

What I want you to know is that Lily, our church administrator, did a brilliant job connecting them to every support she could find while I was away. And Ellmarie Parker, a chaplain at Church at the Park who was filling in for me last Sunday, welcomed them when they came to worship, sat with them, and kept following up. The family kept calling, kept advocating for themselves, kept moving through a system that, at nearly every turn, communicates to people that their circumstances are the result of personal failure. The assumptions about substance abuse, about "choices," about what kind of person ends up without a home, are dehumanizing in ways that compound the trauma of the crisis itself. It often takes people who are not actively being traumatized to help others find their footing again.

That is exactly what Lily and Ellmarie did. And that is koinonia (κοινωνία), that word we often translate as "fellowship" but which really means something closer to radical sharing and mutual belonging. It is the early church's practice at the heart of how the resurrection gets made real. We are doing that.

We notice when someone in our congregation is fragile, navigating illness, loss, the particular exhaustion of getting older or carrying something heavy. And we show up, most often quietly and without needing recognition for it. That is a resurrection act. Attentiveness is a form of love. Noticing is a spiritual practice. In a world that mostly moves too fast to slow down for one person, that kind of noticing and showing-up is not a small thing.

And when we pause to name, out loud, what we are grateful for in one another - the person who sets up chairs, the one who remembers your name, the one who just keeps coming back - we are doing something the dominant culture rarely makes time for. We are saying: You matter. Your presence here matters. I am glad you exist.

That, too, is joy-making.

Prickly pear blooming on the west side of Canyon Lands. It had snowed the night before.

I sometimes wonder if this is what the church is actually for, in this particular moment. Not as a refuge from the world's difficulty, but as a community that practices the things that make life livable, and sometimes luminous, even when everything around us is hard. There's a reason I have loved the tagline "Practicing Heaven Now" that we used a few seasons ago. It names something true about what we are called to do: not to wait for better conditions, but to embody God's way of love in this present, difficult, holy moment.

Nevertheless....

Marcus Borg used to say we need to "see Jesus again as if for the first time." I think that's what Eastertide keeps inviting us into. Not to have all the answers. Not to pretend we're okay when we're not. But to look around at this gathered community and notice where new life is already happening, in the welcome, in the showing up, in the gratitude we dare to speak aloud.

Nevertheless, joy is already here. It lives in what we do for one another. That is what makes it deep and strange.

May we keep practicing, all the way to Pentecost.

And then some more.

With Joy and Grace,

Pastor Robin

Just a few of the pictures I took on my trip.