Rejoice! (Philippians 4:4-7)

Despite the genocide in Dafur, where some 450,000 people have apparently been killed in the last couple of years, and continue to get killed off at a rate of more than 100 per day, still we believe that the Lord is at hand and so we rejoice.

Despite what’s happening in Gaza, where parents struggle to find clean water for their families and where military attacks continue to destroy homes and innocent civilians on a daily basis, still we believe that the Lord is at hand and so we rejoice.

Despite the failure of the church worldwide to make the sacrifices necessary to truly reflect the love of Christ to those who are suffering, still we believe that the Lord is at hand and so we rejoice.

Despite our own struggles - in our families, at work, with people we can’t endure and with situations we can’t deal with, still we believe that the Lord is at hand and so we rejoice.

And this is why, I think, the peace of God, Paul says, ’passes all understanding’ - because He gives us this comforting sense of hope that flies in the face of all the evidence to the contrary!

Things don’t look like they’re about to get a whole lot better, but we believe that they will, and deep down within our hearts God gives us that assurance that He is indeed at work in our world and that in the end all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

Perhaps it doesn’t make much sense to believe this? If people ask you to give them some external evidence for your conviction that the Lord is at hand and that things are about to get a whole lot better, you may well have trouble arguing your case. You can point to Christ of course - to his death and resurrection as a foretaste of what is to come - but even then, you’re not likely win the argument on logic alone.

But beyond all understanding, the eye of faith sees what the mind cannot comprehend - that one day soon the lion will lie down with the lamb, people will turn their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks and study war no more, and the earth will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea ... and so we rejoice!

As I confessed at the beginning though, I still struggle to rejoice. Why? Because, like all of us I suspect, sometimes I get so engulfed by the struggle that I lose sight of the big picture. And sometimes, like when you’ve got a toothache, I get so overtaken by the pain that I just can’t see beyond my own misery, even to notice the looming figure of the dentist!

There’s another great saying of St Paul’s in Romans 8 - ‘that the whole creation is groaning like a woman enduring the pain of childbirth.’

If you’ve given birth or even if you’ve been present at a birth, you know what that pain is about. And if you focus on the pain, it will engulf you. But if you can focus on the new creation that is about to come to birth, even in our pain we can rejoice.

That’s what distinguishes Christian joy from glib naivety, I believe. People who are glib simply deny the pain, or minimize how serious the situation is - ‘oh, things ain’t that bad!’ St Paul, I believe, would say, ‘yes, things are very bad, but they will get a whole lot better soon, for the Lord is at hand’.