Together in Love and Service – Yay! A Living Picture

Each week, Rev. Johanna shares a message called Together in Love and Service. If you’d like to receive these messages in your email, please contact the office and ask to be added to the parish mailing list. The letters along with the Trinity Tidings are also posted on our website on the Tidings page.

Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,
so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
– Psalm 90:14

This Sunday we’ll recite Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17. Verse 14 of the psalm is quoted above.

And, I’m wondering, did you notice that little word in the middle of it? “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.” That little word ‘so’ tells us that rejoicing follows satisfaction. The psalmist prays first to be filled with God’s love, and gladness follows, just as morning light follows the night.

In other words, we are not asked to manufacture joy on our own or squeeze it out of a hard week through sheer willpower.

I find that wonderfully freeing. Often, I listen to the voice in my head that tells me joy has to be earned. Maybe you, too, think you can rejoice only once the worry is resolved, the schedule calms down, and everything is in order. But the psalmist turns that thinking around.

The psalmist reminds us that joy is not the price of admission. Rather, joy is what happens when we let ourselves be loved. That little word, so, allows me to hear this verse as permission: permission to be glad, permission to rejoice, not because everything is neat and tidy, but because God’s steadfast love meets us each morning.

One of the privileges of my priestly vocation is that I am given the gift of seeing what that looks like up close, at the communion rail every Sunday. This past Sunday, I saw it in James as he knelt at the altar rail.

You see, I knelt so that James, who is a young one, and I were at eye level. I placed my hand gently on his head, and offered him this blessing: “James, I bless you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, that you may continue to grow in grace and God’s love all the days of your life. Amen.”

And James answered, not with a quiet “Amen” or a shy nod, but with a bright, exuberant, wholehearted “Yay!” His joy electrified my heart. He has no hesitation, he doesn’t hold anything back, he doesn’t wonder whether he has earned it or deserves such a gift. James simply receives. The blessing goes in, and the joy comes straight out. Sometimes, the joy comes out before the blessing even goes in!

I can’t stop thinking about James’s “Yay!” I’ve been thinking about it all week. And, in my thinking, it seems to me that James is the psalm made visible, a living picture of what it looks like to be satisfied in the morning with steadfast love and to rejoice because of it. James receives God’s love completely, and gladness is his natural response.

I wonder if that is what Jesus meant when he said we must receive the kingdom of God like a child, not with a childish lack of understanding, but with a child’s open hands, a child’s readiness to receive something good, and a child’s freedom to celebrate it out loud.

Here is something I did not expect: since blessing James last Sunday, his joy has stayed with me. His joy has followed me into the week, turning up in the car, in the kitchen, and in the middle of ordinary tasks. His “Yay!” has overflowed into my own life. And that, I think, is what the glory of God looks like.

We often picture glory as something distant and dazzling, all thunder and trumpets. But the glory visible at the communion rail is quieter and closer. The glory experienced at the communion rail is love spilling into joy. God’s steadfast love fills us so completely that it cannot stay put; it spills over onto the person next to us and into the week ahead.

I suspect James’ joy is not really about the circumstances of his day. I imagine his joy comes from being loved, loved so wholly that nothing else needs to be settled first. That is exactly what the psalmist is praying for: to be so satisfied by God’s love that gladness becomes the shape of our days.

I love how my blessing and the psalm echo one another. I pray that James may “continue to grow in grace and God’s love all the days of his life.” The psalm asks that we may “rejoice and be glad all our days.” All our days, not only the easy ones, and not only on Sundays. God’s love reaches into every day, and God’s glory is revealed whenever that love spills over into joy.

So here is my invitation: carry a “Yay!” with you. Say it out loud if you dare, or quietly in your heart if you prefer. Let it be your answer to the love that has already met you. When you pour your coffee: “Yay!” When you notice a kindness: “Yay!” When you find yourself held by something bigger than your worries: “Yay!”

We do not have to wait until everything is in order. We are already satisfied by God’s steadfast love, and that love is enough to make us glad.

And the people said, “Yay!”

Pace é bene,
Johanna+