If we were to go around the sanctuary and try to describe joy, we’d get answers as different and unique as each of us. Some of us would talk about experiences or times in our lives when we were filled with joy – when our kids were born, when we got married, when we had a wonderful experience. Others of us would talk about the joy we have when we listen to music or when we find ourselves lost in doing a project or doing a craft that we enjoy.

In the fruits of the Spirit that Paul describes in his New Testament letter to the Galatians, joy is the second fruit of the Spirit, second only to love. That it is second might indicate how important joy is in the Christian life and also how connected love and joy, and joy and peace (the third fruit of the Spirit) are. Here is what I mean: can there be joy if there is no love? (The answer is probably not.) Can you know peace if you do not know joy? (It seems unlikely.)

I think we often like to think of joy as a feeling. To be sure, joy is a feeling. It’s happiness, contentment, love, pleasure, and hope all wrapped together. But if we treat joy as any other feeling, we are tempted to think that joy is something we need to feel all of the time and that if we don’t feel joyful all of the time, there is something wrong with us.

Here is where the Scriptures help us with something really important and help us grow as human beings – they help us be able to have multiple emotions, multiple feelings, multiple thoughts at the same time. Think about joy and its opposite sorrow. We can know both things. You can be familiar with joy and also be familiar with sorrow. In fact, sometimes you can experience both at the same time. I’m thinking here of when someone is dying or has died. When someone dies, especially when it’s someone we love, it’s a time of profound sorrow, even if their death comes after a long, good life. Death reorders things for us. When someone dies, it is scary and painful and hard and it can feel like you are the only one who is said that that person has died. 

But as true as all of that is and as real as the sorrow is, joy doesn’t completely go away. If you are able to be with someone in their final moments, as sad as that is, there is also a profound sense of love and joy and peace that can come. You hug one another, at the funeral you remember with fondness who they were and how they made you laugh, you thank God for their life.

Here is what I am trying to say: being sad does not mean that there is something wrong with your soul. Joy and sorrow are both parts of the Christian life. And like most things in our faith, it takes a combination of God’s work in our life (God taking the initiative) and us being open to God’s work in our life (you and I taking the initiative). The image of the fruit of the Spirit implies that a master gardener (the Lord) is tending our lives so that we bear fruit. But we’ve also got to want to let the Lord do his thing (be open to it) so that we can bear fruit. 

The real spiritual danger is not sorrow, its joylessness. Joylessness is an indicator (sort of like a canary in the coal mine) of bigger spiritual issues. Joylessness in a family, in a church, in people indicates that things like love, neighborliness, tolerance, generosity are no longer there. Paul hints at some of the issues in the church at Galatia that prompted him writing his letter. He writes, “For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.” You can imagine the situation among this group of Christians – biting and devouring one another and the fear, mistrust, and hurt that was festering among them.

Paul’s response to their behavior is a command: “Live by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.” Don’t give into our natural, fallen tendencies as humans to gossip, slander, take the low road, take an eye for an eye. “Live by the Spirit,” is the instruction.

The Spirit is the third person of the Trinity. The Spirit is the one who brings the risen Christ to us and who brings us to the risen Christ. Put another way, it is the Spirit’s work to help us to know Jesus Christ, to be in Christ, to find who we are, and what we think, and how we act, in the spirit of and in friendship with Jesus of Nazareth. You are in Christ. And because you are in Christ we live by the Spirit.

That’s the message of the fruit of the Spirit – you are in Christ, you live by the Spirit, and the Spirit bears in us things like love, joy, and peace. Be open to God’s Spirit working in you, working among us, changing us, challenging us, reforming us.

Thanks be to God. Amen.