"REJOICE IN THE LORD ALWAYS!"
Fr. Peter Andronache, HOLY TRINITY, Clearwater, FL

St. Paul exhorts the Christians at Philip¬pi: “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say: Rejoice!” (Phil. 4:4). Twelve years ago, Fr. Stanley Harakas looked at this expression and tried to understand what St. Paul was calling his fellow Chris¬tians to do. His conclusion was summa¬rized in three short sentences. “Joy is not pursued for its own sake. Joy flows from a life lived in harmony with God. Joy is a gift”
“Enter into the joy of your Lord,” (Matt. 25:21) the master says to the faithful servants who have multiplied the talents left to them. Fr. Alexander Schmemann says that “the Eucharist is the entrance of the Church into the joy of its Lord”. The Eucharist is the ultimate gift that God has granted humanity: it is God, present with us, offering Himself to us, so that we may live in Him and experience life with the Creator of life. The Lord’s invitation to us, then, is to experience the unfading joy that is found in union with God.
Our response to God’s invitation makes a remarkable difference in our Sunday mornings. We can come to church simply because that’s part of our routine, because we meet our friends there after the service, or because we think that is our duty towards God. These in themselves are not bad reasons. Having church as part of a routine, for example, can help us continue to come to Church on those occasions when we do not feel like coming and we often find ourselves drawn closer to God when we have made the extra effort to remain close to Him. However, if one of the above is the primary reason for our coming to church, chances are that the service will seem long and we will be restless and bored; we will not be prepared to “lift up our hearts unto the Lord.”
Second, we can come to church because we like the music, the priest, or liturgical Greek. If our main reason for coming to church is something like this, we may well enjoy our Sunday mornings. But it is an uncertain enjoyment. If, for example, the choir has an off day, we can very easily end up impatient, distracted, missing the peace for which we pray so often in the Divine Liturgy.
Third, we can come to the Lord’s supper as to a great banquet (cf. Luke 14), to be moved towards heaven in worship in a “liturgy of ascension”. It is only with this mindset that we can comprehend the service; that we can pray for the peace of the world, for our leaders, both ecclesial and political; for the sick, the suffering, and the captives. These petitions are not just words, not just the priest’s, but they are the prayer of the Church and, individually, your prayer and mine. Having prayed for the world, we can then focus on the kingdom, as the Cherubic hymn asks us to set aside—temporarily—our cares, in order to receive the King of all.
I remember a friend who had become Orthodox a few years prior to our discussion. He told me that ,when he first started attending Orthodox services, they had seemed really long. UntiL he realized that it took him about half an hour until he could stop thinking about work and start paying attention to the service itself.
Few people have that sort of realization the first time they attend a Divine Liturgy and even fewer can instantly feel the joy of the service. For most of us living in this fast-paced world, it takes time to fully immerse ourselves in worship. Each Liturgy, therefore, is a new opportunity for us to grow closer to Christ and to rejoice in the Lord’s supper.
When we have our hearts set on the kingdom, we can receive God’s joy—a joy that transforms and sanctifies us, a joy not based on the ignorance of the troubles that we encounter in our lives, but on Christ’s admonish¬ment: “Take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). This joy has its source in God Himself. Therefore, there will be no time when we will be unable to partake of it. Christ tells us the “heaven and earth will pass away” (Matt. 24:35). Our troubles, likewise, have an end. Christ also tells us that His words will not pass away and that He is with us until the end of the age (Matt 24:35 and 28:30).
Christ, as incarnate God, knows our troubles, has Himself overcome them, and promised to help us over¬come them. And through everything, He invites us in the joy of His resurrection to partake of His Body and Blood. He knocks on the doors of our hearts at each Liturgy and I hope that we are able to put aside our troubles and cares for that little while in order to hear Christ’s knocking and to wel¬come Him into our hearts. Then we will enter into the joy of our Lord and we will be able to bring that joy to those around us as well.