Big Feelings - Happiness

Transcript of a sermon preached by Pastor Shawn Coons on March 5, 2023

Good morning, friends. Here we are on week two of our Big Feelings series where we are taking a deeper look at our emotions, our emotions as gifts from God, and how we can honor that, and how we can understand our emotions in that way. We talked last week that every emotion has a story. And we like to think there are good emotions and bad emotions, but we wanted to reframe that a little bit in terms of there are challenging emotions, that are maybe emotions we welcome more, but all of our emotions they just happen. They are part of who we are as God's being and so we don't want to say that these emotions are bad, they shouldn't happen, we shouldn't feel them.

Every emotion has a story to tell, and when we feel an emotion, something important is happening, and we need to listen more carefully to that emotion. Too often we don't want to listen to the stories that our challenging emotions tell us. If we're sad, if we're angry, if we're scared, something bad is probably happening, and that's not something we want to focus on. But this morning we're talking about happiness, but I want to suggest that sometimes we don't want to listen to the stories that happiness is telling us, that happiness isn't always a welcome emotion or maybe as welcome as it should be.

I learned a new word, a new fear this morning, cherophobia, C-H-E-R-O phobia, which is an irrational fear of being happy, which made me wonder if there's a rational fear of being happy, I hope not. But it's about rejecting opportunities that could lead to positive life changes often due to the fear that something bad is going to happen. And so I want to ask you to assess yourself this morning. Are any of these statements true for you? I worry that if I feel good, something bad could happen.

Do you ever think, "I don't deserve to be happy. I'm too frightened, I'm too scared to let myself be happy." Do you often think that, "Well, disaster often follows good fortune." Or maybe you think, "I'm too old now to really be happy. When I was younger, I could feel that joy and happiness, but now just too old. Or maybe if I'm happy, if I'm in too good of mood, people are going to want things from me, they're going to expect things more from me. Or maybe everyone else around me, they're not happy so it'd be wrong for me to be happy too."

Now, maybe there's some truth to some of these statements or some cautions in there that we can listen to, but I think too often we are reluctant to be as happy as we could be. We are reluctant to be happier when we're happy. We're just worried, "Okay, everything's going right, now the other shoe's going to drop. Something bad's going to happen," and so we don't allow ourselves to really feel that happiness.

So this morning the first thing I want you to do is I want to give you permission to be happy. I want to give you permission to be really, really happy. I want you to give you permission to feel your happiness. But I'm going to say that permission actually doesn't really come for me, I'm just a messenger of that permission going to say God wants us to feel happiness. God created us to feel happiness, and maybe that doesn't sound like a very radical message, but I want to explore it a little bit, but we're going to do that through a particular passage in John chapter five starting with verse one. And this is a healing of Jesus as He comes up to Jerusalem.

After this, there was a festival of the Jews and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now, in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool called in Hebrew, Beth-Zatha, which has five porticoes and in these lay many invalids, blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for 38 years. And when Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, "Do you want to be made well?" And the sick man answered Him, "Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me." Jesus said to him, "Stand up, take your mat and walk" and at once the man was made well. And he took up his mat and he began to walk. This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

All right, so let's talk a little bit about the setting of what's going on so we can understand this passage a little bit more. It says it's at the Sheep Gate, which is a particular gate in Jerusalem, particular area that we know kind of where it is. And in this area there were pools of water, think maybe cisterns, kind of bricked up pools not naturally occurring. Maybe there was a spring there at that time.

And supposedly every now and then the water would be stirred if you will, kind of roiled a little bit. Later manuscripts actually of this portion of John add a little explanation about the Lord troubling the water. If you have ever heard that song Wade in the Water, the Lord's going to trouble the water, that song is partly an illusion to this scripture. And when the water was troubled, it was thought that the first person down there, maybe the first people down there would be healed of whatever illness they were afflicted with.

And so people would gather here, they wait for the water to be troubled, and they try and make their way down. And so we had this person who had been there for 38 years, a man who had been there for 38 years, and who was afflicted, and sounds like he wasn't very mobile, and that was probably part of his affliction. He couldn't get down to the water in time. And Jesus comes along and asks him, "Do you want to be made well?" Do you want to be made well?

Let me ask you, how would you feel if you're suffering from something and someone comes up to you and says, "Hey, do you want to be made well?" How do you hear that question? We don't know what tone of voice. We don't know the particular emphasis Jesus put on it, but I can imagine that man in this situation, I can imagine me being asked that question and hearing kind of an accusation in that question hearing kind of one unspoken word. Do you really want to be made well?

Almost feeling accused like somehow my condition is my fault, like I'm not doing enough to be better, to make myself well. I don't think that's what Jesus is doing here. I don't absolutely think that's not what Jesus is doing here. We have other points in scripture where Jesus says people's affliction, people what they're suffering it's not their own fault, they didn't do anything to deserve this. But I can see how that question could be heard in that way.

So you would think that the man would answer, "Yes, I want to be made well," but maybe he's a little defensive at this point. Maybe he hears, "Why aren't you well?" And so he offers this explanation. He doesn't say, "Yes, I want to be made well." He says, "Well, I can't be made well because I can't get down to the water fast enough. I've got no one to bring me down there, and so this is why I'm here, and I've been here for 38 years, and this is probably where I'm going to be until I die."

He didn't hear Jesus' question, do you want to be made well? He heard what keeps you from being made well, not do you want to. Jesus was asking about his desire. Jesus was asking about his wants. What do you want? It reminded me when Carrie and I first moved here, we had a realtor, his name was Roger Howard. He's the brother of our retiring handyman we have here, brother of a former associate pastor here. Roger is a bubbly, just jovial person. And I remember we were visiting a one house and looking at it, and there was a neighbor next door, and Roger called the neighbor over. He was always talking to folks, and Roger said "Here, and he held up his hand, nothing in his hand. He's like, "I'm going to give you something."

This is a magic wand and he like mimed giving it to her, and she was like, "What's going on?" He's like, "This is a magic wand and you can change anything about this neighborhood you would like. What would you change?" Yeah, and it was Roger's way kind of learning a little bit more about the neighborhood, but it was like, "Here's your magic wand. You can have anything you want," and I feel like Jesus is saying here, "What do you want? You can have it."

Jesus says, "Imagine there are no barriers. What do you want? What do you desire? Do you want to be made well?" This is a good time to mention that this word well can also be translated as whole. Do you want to be made whole? Do you want to be made whole? Do you want to be made healthy? I'm going to suggest do you want to be made happy? What would you say if Jesus asked you this question? Do you want to be made well? Do you want to be made whole? Do you want to be made happy? Would your mind immediately jump to the reasons you can't? Mine kind of mind kind of does. I would like to, but.

It would be great to be happy but. I mean, and maybe, well, you don't even answer yes. Maybe, but I can't because. Jesus is asking, "Do you want to be made well? Do you want to be made whole? Do you want to be happy?" Jesus asked that of the man because he wanted the man to be whole. He wanted him to be healthy and happy. And God wants us to be whole, and healthy, and well, and happy.

There's a man in the Hindu tradition guru Paramahansa Yogananda who says, "Happiness is the greatest divine birthright. It is the buried treasure of the soul." This is a good time to mention that happiness is one of our emotions, and it happens, and we just can't choose to be happy. That would be wonderful if at any moment we could say I'm going to be happy right now, and we were. We can choose to do things that generally make us happy, but happiness, it happens. But we are all created as emotional beings. We are all created with the capacity for happiness. We are all created and there will be moments and times where we are happiness, where we are happy, and we feel happiness.

Not all the time, not to the exclusion of all the other emotions, but God has designed us to be happy. And so when happiness comes and it will and does, we need to embrace it. We need to listen to the story that happiness tells. We need to sit with happiness, and part of that is to embrace it, and not stop ourselves. Not say, "Okay, I'm feeling happiness, but I'm not sure I should or what." Just feel happy. Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up and while I'm making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.

I think there's something key here. I have no one else to help me. Happiness so many times, if you think about it, the moments when we've been really happy, the moments when we are happy, how many of them involve other people? I'm willing to bet a whole lot of them. There was a study that was done, kind of a depressing study. It was people who had completed suicide and they looked at the writings, the notes they had left behind, and so much of their writing was that first person singular I, me. This is how I feel. This is my life. This is what's going on. And they didn't use a lot of we, they didn't use a lot of us.

Being with other people, sharing your happiness with other people, putting yourself in relationship and community. It allows us to be more happy. It allows us to sit with our happiness. Sometimes we also want to delay our happiness, I think. I ain't got time to be happy. Too much to do. Notice that Jesus asked, "Do you want to be made well?" And the man put Jesus off, didn't he? Jesus didn't wait though, did he? And the man said, "Well, I can't be well. I can't be whole ..." and Jesus said, "Not listening," and He made him well right then and there. He did not wait. Now was the time for that man to be whole. Now was the time for that man to be happy.

There were some Jewish leaders if we read on in this passage who were there. They didn't think now was the time for that man to be whole and healthy, and they didn't like what Jesus did. This was the sabbath. Not only did Jesus heal on the sabbath, which was seen as a form of work, which you weren't supposed to do. Then he says to this man, "Take your mat, stand up, walk away." And in some interpretations of what you could do on the sabbath, that was work. That act of picking up the mat and carrying somewhere was work.

Jeremiah 17 says, "Thus says the Lord for the sake of your lives, take care that you do not bear a burden on the sabbath day." Do not carry a burden out of your house on the sabbath. There are still some Orthodox Jews today who follow these strict rules I don't want to say strict rules, that makes it sounds bad. Who follow these laws, these gifts as they see it from God for honoring the sabbath. I was looking on TikTok the other day, and there was this TikTok about what does a Jew do if they're riding in an Uber and the sabbath begins?

And then in this tradition of Judaism, the rabbi said, "Well, here's what you do. You need to ask your Uber driver to carry your phone and your keys in your house for you because you're not supposed to carry that burden." That's what they're getting from Jeremiah. That's what these folks thought Jesus was telling this man to do to break the commandments of the sabbath. Like Jesus, you should have waited. You could have waited until the sabbath was over for this man to be happy, for this man to be whole. Jesus said no. He said the right time to be happy is now.

There's no reason to delay our wholeness, our healthiness, our happiness. Jesus did not wait for that man's happiness. Why do we sometimes want to put our happiness off? Finally, we tell ourselves, "Well, I can't feel happy right now because I'm still sad about this. Can't feel happy because I'm grieving the loss of a loved one." We tell ourselves we can't feel two emotions at the same time. We view happiness and sadness on a spectrum and we can be only at one point of the spectrum, like happiness is over here, here's the happy side, and sadness is over here.

Okay, well, I've recently lost a loved one, I am sad so I'm going to be sad, and there's no way I can be over there until I am done respecting this loss. And so when we are over here, we're like, "Oh my gosh, that means I don't feel sad anymore. I'm not grieving this person and that feels wrong, and that pulls us back." It's not a spectrum. You can feel two emotions at the same time. You can feel lots of emotions at the same time.

If you ever gathered for a funeral and enjoyed the time with family as they get together, you can grieve, and feel sad, and be happy at the same time. Allowing ourselves moments of happiness in times of profound or not so profound sadness, it doesn't lessen our loss. If you ever seen the movie Inside Out, that's one of the wonderful important lessons from that movie, and we're going to talk about that next week when we talk about sadness a little bit more.

So we've talked about, last week especially, sitting with our emotions, attending to our emotions, attending to our inner lives by naming them, and naming how they make us feel physically. And so I invite you to do that with happiness. The next time you're happy say I'm happy. Think it, articulating it and then say, "How does this make me feel? Oh wow, my jaw is unclenched for the first time in I don't know how long. My muscles, they're not tight. I'm bouncing a little bit. This is nice." Recognize that, embrace it.

It's easy to think when we say listen to our emotions, that we mean just the challenging ones, but we mean the welcome emotions as well. God's invitation to us is for us to sit with our happiness, name it, name it how it makes our body feel. And if you want to go a step further say, "Why am I happy? Maybe I should do that again" if it was something that caused you to be happy.

So let me just leave you with this simple once again message, God wants you to be whole. God wants you to be well and healthy, most of all, God wants you to be happy.