by Martha E. Stortz

The kids next door decided that they lived in a "happy house," and they put a smiling yellow face on their mailbox. For a few weeks the face retained its vivid color. Then the rain and sun took their toll. Now the mailbox stands with a weathered white circle on it. The children’s house is still a happy one. I hear their laughter floating out over the street. But I also know how quickly happiness fades, just like the face on the mailbox.

"Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice" (Philippians 4:4). The apostle Paul is not talking about happiness. Rather, he is pointing the Philippians toward the more settled disposition of joy. He urges Christians then and now to rejoice. We latter–day Philippians long to comply — if we could just figure out how. What’s the difference between happiness and joy? And how can anyone command a feeling like joy?

Happiness and joy: What’s the difference?
Children are happy when they get what they want, and the neighbor kids are no exception. At the moment, they have bikes, video games, and the best backpacks on the playground. But I can remember an afternoon not too long ago when a pair of squirt guns made them happy for hours. Happiness is tethered to desire, and desires change. Desire reaches out for something in order to grasp it. It runs like a rain–swollen river that carves a course toward the sea. But desires can be as erratic as they are intense. The rain stops; the river runs dry. Because their objects change, desires can be unstable; they are predictably unpredictable.

Actress Judi Dench tells the story of herself at age sixteen on holiday in the Côte d’Azur. She was window shopping and found herself transfixed by a pair of shoes that she just had to have. Nothing would make her happier. Her father demurred. It was noon, and he suggested they ponder the purchase over lunch. Passing the seafood buffet, she just had to have shrimp, the most expensive item on the menu. Her father relented; she devoured the shrimp, and afterward he looked at her fondly: "You just ate your shoes." Desires alter — sometimes quickly. But when the heat is on, the desire consumes us.

What’s your disposition?
Happiness is tied to desire, and desires drive us. As a disposition, joy is more steady and constant. A disposition is something for the long haul. More settled and less focused than desires, dispositions are general tendencies that move us in predictable ways. For example, someone with a generous disposition behaves with generosity in every season, while a mean-spirited person is predictably catty and uncharitable when magnanimity or simple silence might be more helpful. When Paul commands his community to "rejoice," he commends to them a disposition of joy. Joy undergirds everything they do, sustaining them in good times and in bad.

In the good times, joy uncouples happiness from a desperate attachment to its object. Happiness reaches for something in order to grasp it: "This is mine!" Joy, in contrast, approaches life with open hands and wonder: "This is yours!" Liberated from the need to possess something, the joyful person is unconcerned about possessions and outcomes. What someone has — even what she wants to have — matters less, because her life is rooted in joy.

The settled disposition of joy is like a magnet. The joyful person always finds something to be joyful about. Jesus describes this person when he says: "to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance" (Matthew 25:29). The joyful person always feels blessed with abundance. In contrast, the ungenerous person battles the constant threat of scarcity. She feels that her possessions are under constant siege. She has to hoard them, lest "even what [she] has will be taken away." He sounds punitive, but Jesus simply states a fact of human nature: Joyful people live with abundance.

Joy anchors us in the midst of suffering. A friend’s husband was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, and in four months he went through surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. The horizon appeared foreshortened, but the couple approached it with open hands. He maintained that their life together would be condensed: "We will have everything we hoped for, but it will happen more quickly and more intensely." She agreed, saying: "I refuse to live without joy."

Neither of them had chosen the journey they found themselves on: "I feel like I had plane tickets to Paris," she told me, "and the plane landed in Amsterdam instead. I miss Paris — but Amsterdam has its charms." Then she laughed in that rich, hearty way I remembered from the good times. The two of them leaned into this tragedy with the disposition that marked everything they did: They simply went "on their way rejoicing."

Psychotherapists and other gurus of grief might diagnose my friends as being in deep denial, mistaking their joy for that forced happiness some Christians feel obliged to muster even in the worst of times. But my friends were not sporting smiling yellow faces like the one pasted on the mailbox next door. Their happiness was not shallow, nor did their sorrow tumble toward despair. Laughing and weeping, they drew from a deep reservoir of joy.

Clues in Paul’s invitation
"Rejoice in the Lord always!" How could this be? The apostle Paul gives two clues in his letter to the Philippians: "Rejoice in the Lord always!" He gives his first clue in the words "in the Lord." While happiness depends on having something, whether shoes or a squirt gun, joy rests in Someone. For Christians that Someone is not just anyone, but Someone whose image we bear. Because we are fashioned in the image of God, joy is hard-wired into our very being.

Children carry their parents’ genetic package. In the kids next door, I discern the dispositions of both parents: their father’s generosity and their mother’s quicksilver intellect. We Christians also bear traits of the God who made us, and one of the most distinctive is joy. We rejoice in the Lord, precisely because the Lord rejoices in us. The apostle Paul’s counsel to his beloved Philippians is finally no command, but an invitation: "Be who you are — and you are made for joy!" Martin Luther captured this genetic fact in his commentary on Genesis. Adam was created to be "intoxicated with rejoicing toward God." Adam delights in God, because God delights in him.

But Christian joy describes more than a mutual admiration society. Nothing can contain joy: It is contagious. Like a drop of blue dye in a vat of clear water, joy infuses everything it comes in contact with. Before a talk I gave a few years ago, a former professor introduced me by saying, "It gives me great joy to present to you... ." His use of the
J–word struck me: He had taught me a great deal, and there was no way I could return the favor by teaching him something. I could not pay back the debt — but I paid it forward by teaching others. I began my remarks with great joy, and our mutual delight spread through the audience.

Christian joy is supposed to be contagious. Until it touches others, joy is somehow unfinished and incomplete. The apostle Paul rejoices in the Lord, and he delights in his friends. In turn, he encourages them to rejoice in the Lord and in him: "I am glad and rejoice with all of you — and in the same way you also must be glad and rejoice with me" (2:18). And he encourages the Philippians to spread their joy to others, which alone will "make my joy complete" (2:2). Joy shared is joy completed, and Paul regards his community as a vessel of joy, brimming with divine abundance. Joy should be contagious.

Of course, there are a lot of other contagious "bugs" out there. Fear is one of the most deadly contagions we face in the twenty-first century. If you doubt this, listen to the nightly news: progress reports on the War on Terror, augmented with a daily litany of murders and burglaries, body bags and casualty counts. In the news media, "If it bleeds, it leads." If we take our cues from the evening news, we risk being sucked into a whirlpool of fear, anxiety, and paranoia. How do we tamp down negative dispositions like fear? How do we cultivate the disposition of joy?

The apostle Paul answers by counseling us to "rejoice in the Lord always!" We can rehearse our fears and nurse our grudges or we can embrace habits of rejoicing. Paul recommends a few in his letter to the Philippians. "Prayer and supplication" (4:6) lay our burdens on God — rather than on another nation or people. Grudges vanish when we refuse to feed them a daily diet of negative thinking and focus instead on "whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable" (4:8). We rejoice in the Lord always when these practices become part of our daily life. The beautiful African American hymn invites us to "take it to the Lord in prayer" — and that includes our hopes and fears, our grudges and thanksgivings. We may expect to meet a God who judges us, but over time we meet the God who delights in us as children and heirs. To borrow words from C. S. Lewis, we are literally "surprised by joy" — the God who rejoices in us.

Martha E. Stortz is professor of historical theology and ethics at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, Berkeley, California, and the author of A World According to God (Jossey-Bass, 2004).