Rarely, if ever, do I begin a message with a quote, but this summer Chris Jankelowitz, who writes for Global News said:
This was a very visceral, very real sensation, a moment when you actually get it. It’s a camaraderie, a sameness, a moment of inclusion. You’re part of a bigger entity, one that is not discernible but it makes you wrap your arms around your buddies or causes you to wave a Canadian flag with more zeal than you have ever waved it before.
The occasion of that quote was not as most of us would think, during the Olympics. It was not the moment when we wanted to wave our flags and have our national pride and hug our buddies when Penny Oleksiak won her race and her gold medal in the pool. It was not when the Canadian women’s soccer team beat the Brazilians to get the bronze. What a moment that was. It was not when the men ran the 4 x 100 metres to a bronze and Andre De Grasse had such a wonderful time.
It was not during those moments of exaltation and joy that Chris wrote this. Rather it was written in the aftermath of The Tragically Hip’s last concert in Kingston, Ontario. The reason why I quoted it is because I thought it was real. Like one-third of Canadians, so the polls suggest, I tuned into that concert when it began (and I was in British Columbia and it was 5:00 in the afternoon). I was driving along listening to it, and I thought it must be raining outside because my eyes were damp I could hardly see the road. I was in tears.
We got to the hotel, switched on the television, I lay on the bed and despite the fact that the coverage wasn’t that great, I nevertheless found myself crying. I didn’t know why, really. On the surface The Tragically Hip weren’t exactly my favourite rock band of all time, although I have listened from time to time to “Ahead by a Century” or “Bobcaygeon” or “Courage” and there have certainly been moments when they have elicited responses in me.
But there was something much deeper going on. I think that’s why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said it was, “A bittersweet moment.” It was a bittersweet moment because it was the intersection of grief and exaltation. Grief, because if you don’t already know, the lead singer, Gord Downie, has been given, in a sense, a death sentence. His cancer will lead to his ultimate demise. This was his last concert with his band. He returned to the place where it all began and he sang his heart out, but you could see etched on his face the lines of pain and weakness from undergoing chemotherapy.
Yet he stood up there and he sang his heart out as if he’d sung any single concert. And when it was finally over and he kissed his band mates and waved good-bye to his adoring fans, he went offstage into the darkness and I simply cried again. It was, I think in many ways, a lament for a generation. Without elevating it to a status greater than it was, it nevertheless somehow seized our imagination. What other country really – certainly none that I’ve lived in – would ever embrace each other around the end of the story of a lead singer of a rock band? That was singularly a Canadian moment, and yet it’s one that we all felt deeply. In many ways it manifested what the Apostle Paul wrote in this magnificent passage from Romans Twelve.
For Christians there is a time to rejoice with those who rejoice, and to weep with those who weep. I know that there is a euphoria to rejoicing together. Why do people go to concerts? Why do people go to sports events if it is not to celebrate joy and the exaltation that it brings? There is also a time to grieve. There is something cathartic about grieving together. It’s very human. Surely that is why 9/11 is remembered. It brings a moment of cathartic grief and people can grieve and remember with each other.
Paul is talking about something more, something as this writer put it, more visceral, more to the core of our being, more to the nature of our faith. The Apostle Paul is talking about rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep in a way that transforms them and transforms the world.
In essence, what he is saying is that faith is a very public thing, that at its very core people of faith carry out their faith and live their faith in a very public way by rejoicing with those rejoice and by weeping with those who weep. Look who he was writing to, look at the context in which he was writing. He was writing in the midst of the persecution of the Roman Empire. He himself had been in prison. Members of the faith had been tortured. There was a wholesale rejection of religion and Christianity and Judaism in particular.
There was the cult of the Roman Emperor where everyone paid homage to one great man and his ideas rather than to one great God and his sovereignty. But it manifested itself in an oppression of the minorities and the small religious groups of which Christianity was one.
It was also a time of great intellectual fervour, a lot of which questioned the importance of a deity. Roman culture was no less intellectual than Greek culture, although Greek philosophers are always seen as being at the vanguard of thought and ideas. But Lucan, the Roman poet, was a wonderful literary figure who questioned whether there was a place for God. Quintilian was the great spokesperson for oratory and would speak in glowing terms about the emperor.
Seneca, the great stoic philosopher, was the tutor to the Emperor Nero and taught stoicism to Nero. Paul and the Christian community were therefore in a world that had this overwhelming sense of oneness to it, the power of the empire. This empire was the umbrella of everything. Paul was concerned that those early Christians who were being persecuted for their faith or treated either with ennui or with ignorance, did not retreat from their culture.
Paul was concerned that many of the believers would adopt that stoicism: We should not get too high, we should not get too low and we should not identify ourselves with the sufferings of others. We should in fact suppress emotion and just simply be at peace, and that the greatest good is to be at peace within yourself so that whatever happens within the world, good or bad, sort of washes over you.
This was the prevailing attitude at the time that Paul was writing to the Romans. Paul however, counteracts that. He says, “You should be embracing the other. You should engaging the world. You should be peacemakers. You should not repay evil with evil but overcome evil with the good. You should rejoice with those who rejoice and you should weep with those who weep.” Paul was concerned that the Christian faith could very easily turn into a form of spiritual narcissism, where all that we’re concerned about was us and our God, me and my Jesus and my own peace of mind and heart.
Is there not a temptation in any time, but particularly ones of uncertainty, particularly a time when we’re being bombarded by so many negative things, to simply turn off the switch, turn inwards to oneself and then turn upward to God as a solitary figure. It’s so easy to do that and to be that. I find Christians today doing exactly what Paul was concerned about in the first century, that me and my God has become the ultimate and only relationship that matters.
Paul would have none of it. In fact most scholars agree that that his passage from the Book of Romans is really his restatement of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount from Matthew, Chapter Five. The Sermon on the Mount, rather than being the retreat, is in fact a call to be peacemakers, a call to walk humbly with God, a call to mourn with those who mourn. A call to embrace and to engage the world with the good news of God.
For Paul this is a life of rejoicing, this is a life of happiness. This is the way it is to be, to rejoice with those who rejoice and to weep with those who weep. But what does this look like? How does it manifest itself? How does it become real? Well, Paul makes this double statement, this dictum to rejoice and to weep, knowing exactly what he is talking about. To rejoice with those rejoice is perhaps not as easy as people think.
The great Christian writer, Saint John Chrysostom, who came many years after the Apostle Paul, says that to rejoice with those who rejoice requires more, he says, of a high Christian temper. To rejoice with those that rejoice than it does to weep with those that weep. He wrote:
For this nature itself fulfills perfectly and there is none so hard-hearted as not to weep over him that is in calamity. But the other requires a very noble soul so as not only to keep from envying, but even to feel pleasure with the person who is being esteemed. It is indeed more difficult to congratulate another on his success, especially if his success involves disappointment to us.
I think Chrysostom is right. Having an innate thing sometimes, not to want to rejoice with those who rejoice but simply to retreat from their rejoicing. It’s hard for us sometimes to celebrate with others. Look, I’m not talking about this afternoon, going down to the ballgame and rejoicing with the Boston Red Sox fans, right? That’s not what I mean by rejoicing with those who rejoice. That would be very hard to do I think for any of us.
No, I’m talking about in a more profound way. Paul would perhaps use a caveat in this, maybe from First Corinthians when he wrote to them about love. “Love does not rejoice in the wrong but rejoices in the right.” Paul’s not suggesting that we rejoice in everything that takes place. You don’t rejoice in peoples’ triumphal violent overthrow of someone else, you don’t rejoice in untruth, you don’t rejoice in arrogance and pride, you do not rejoice in excessive ego. No, no, no, whatever is noble, though. Whatever is beautiful, whatever is holy, whatever is honest, whatever is upright, rejoice in those things, even if we are not the author of it.
I think Shakespeare used to capture the human heart probably better than any writer ever, and in his wonderful play, “As You Like It” there is a moment where the character Orlando is talking to Rosalind about his brother. Both Orlando and his brother had really, really wanted to have wonderful relations and wonderful marriages and wonderful love. But Orlando didn’t get it and his brother did. Orlando says this to Rosalind, he says:
They – meaning my brother and his fiancée – are to be married tomorrow and I will bid the Duke to the nuptial. But oh, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes. By so much more shall I tomorrow be at the height of heart heaviness, by how much I shall think my brother happy in having what he wishes for.
He can’t stand the happiness of his brother, he can’t stand it! But the Christian is different, the Christian rejoices with those who rejoice, celebrates with those who celebrate, honours those who should be honoured. After all, Jesus did this. He was at the wedding of Cana and he celebrated and turned the water into the best wine. He celebrated when Zacchaeus turned his life around. He celebrated when the woman poured perfume over his feet and wiped it with her hair, even though there were others who were begrudgingly hating this level of adulation and rejoicing. Jesus rejoiced with those who rejoiced. He lifted up the good when the good was done he said, “Hallelujah.”
How the world needs that! If there is one thing, honestly, that has troubled me over the last few months in the summer it has been watching the American election unfold. What has bothered me I think above all else, is this overwhelming – often overused word – narrative – overwhelming narrative of negativity, of character assassination, of bitterness and anger. There’s a heaviness to it because there is a lack of vision of anything beautiful or noble or glorious or good. The picture you would have is a world that is completely and totally at sea.
But to do that in a sense – and this is what Paul is getting at in Romans – is to deny the very existence and the power of God in the world. It’s as if God is Deus ex machina has just left it all, and it’s chaos and it’s dreadful. This does not mean there are not errors that need to be changed, dark places that need light. It does not mean there doesn’t need to be changes, it’s just a vision that has some hope to it and something redemptive about it. I think we’ve all felt the weight of it, and it’s not good.
There is a time when we weep with those who weep. My goodness Jesus did that. When Lazarus’ friend died, Jesus wept. When the widow at Nain came with her son to him and the son appeared to be dead, Jesus said, “Weep not, though, he will live.” When the lepers who were being rejected by society were being forced out into the wilderness, Jesus embraced them and wept with them and healed them. Jesus knew what it meant to weep with those who weep.
Maybe Christians have done this well. Maybe if anything we have done, it has held the hand of the mourning and the grieving. Maybe it is seemingly more noble to do this than to rejoice, as Saint John Chrysostom said. Maybe there is something powerful about weeping with those who weep.
Some years ago at a church in Massachusetts I had dinner with the great Christian writer, Henri Nouwen. Nouwen, who’d been a great intellectual, gave it all up as many of you might know, to work with the L’arche community, with those who are physically and mentally challenged, who live in community and do the work that Jean Vanier established.
We got around to the question of friendship. I don’t know how we got onto that, but we did. We talked about the friendships that many of the people who are mentally and physically challenged had. He said, “I came to the conclusion after meeting so many who had lived with many personal challenges, that they defined friendship – not necessarily by all the things that people did for them or all the fun times that they had with them – but he said they considered their true friends those who have wept with them when they wept, that a true friend knows how to do that.”
Maybe that’s what was going on when Gord Downie left the stage that night in Kingston. Maybe it was that there was a camaraderie or a friendship in weeping with those who weep, and watching a great man leave the stage. Maybe we feel that about many things in our lives where we weep and love to have others weeping with us, for it brings comfort. As Christians we weep with those who weep, but there’s more.
Paul knew that when you weep with those who weep and you rejoice with those who rejoice. There is that other dimension that makes the faith so powerful and so relevant and so true. Jesus articulated it in the Sermon on the Mount. He said, “Blessed are they who mourn. Blessed are those who weep, for they shall be comforted.”
It’s not just a simple matter of solidarity with people in their rejoicing and in their weeping, it is the recognition that through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ there is more. That there is hope, that there is the resurrection from the dead and that Christians in the midst of first-century Rome were to go into that world and to speak about the resurrection. Paul knew that.
Romans Chapter Twelve is written within the shadow of the resurrection. It’s all about living in the light of that resurrection. It’s about living in hope, and it seems to be that the Christian community and you and I and all those who really do, deep down in our hearts, believe in the grace and the power of Almighty God and Jesus Christ should be embracing the world with that hope. That the hope and the prayer for Gord Downie that this reality touches his heart. That the reality is that those who rejoice in their ecstasy and their pleasure may in fact find in their hearts the grace to thank God that those who mourn in the depths of their souls might be lifted up from it.
You see, it’s sometimes almost unfair to point fingers at politicians, to expect them to speak of this hope. No, maybe it is up to those who believe, to speak to them about this hope and to know that the great joy in life, the great passion in life is to know that in the midst of it, God is always sovereign. Whatever you encounter, whether you experience something noble and good and gorgeous or whether you go to the depths of the bottom of your soul in grief, remember this: Paul says, “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. For in both, through Christ, they are blessed.” Amen.