Essay
Creed
Joy
10 min read

Dreaming a world

When we dream a life, we dream a world. One of love, peace and joy. Such flourishing is a life led well, going well and feeling as it should.
Marketer stall traders and customers reach out arms and hands to exchange fruit and money above piles of produce.
'It is in the context of this whole world at peace that the true value of material goods becomes clear.'
Renate Vanaga on Unsplash.

Dreams are rarely modest. They don’t stay neatly in the compartments we make for them. Let’s say you have a dream job. Well, if you dream of working as an engineer or a baker or a teacher, you are also dreaming of clients, ingredients, or students and a school. Or maybe you have a dream home. Well, that home can’t exist in a vacuum. It requires a neighborhood, various political communities, a natural environment, and countless other people.

When we dream a life, we dream a world.

When Jesus preached, he announced a transformed world. When Christians dream a world, his is the world we ought to hope for. Jesus called it the “kingdom of God,” which is just to say, the world as God would have it be. That, however, only gets us so far. What kind of world would God want, after all?

Almost two-thousand years ago, some Christians in Rome were having trouble agreeing about this. Trying to help them out, Paul, the travelling preacher wrote them a letter. In it, he offered a “definition” of this ‘kingdom of God’. The Roman Christians were in danger, he thought of placing too much weight on a minor question about what food they should or should not eat. In response, Paul advises them to permit various different eating practices in their community: “For the kingdom of God is not food and drink,” he says, “but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”

A life worth dreaming, Paul is saying, is not merely about the means of life— what keeps us alive – things like food, drink, money, safety, health, and the like. Flourishing includes these things, but it orients them toward life led well (righteousness), life going well (peace), and life feeling as it should (joy).

If we look at each of these three things in turn, we can glimpse a compelling vision of what it means to flourish and what kind of world we might dream of (and live towards) today.

Life Led Well: Righteousness

Righteousness, to be honest, is a strange word. It has a rather musty aroma to it: overly formal and more than a little out of date. These days, we hear it most often in the context of self-righteousness, which is decidedly not part of leading one’s life well.

So what on earth does Paul mean by it? Paul was writing in ancient Greek, and the word he uses could also be translated as “justice.” It’s an important word in the Jewish scriptures that Paul read. It means something like being in step with God’s law, which had been laid out in God’s agreement, or covenant with God’s people. This covenantal relationship is, according to Paul, the context in which our lives flourish. To lead our lives well is to act in line with the good intentions of this covenantal relationship. This is what “righteousness” means for Paul.

We might do all sort of impressive things, even things that look like moral heroism, but if we do them without love... they’re deeply flawed.

When Jesus was asked how to sum up the law that defines righteousness, he answered: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. So a “righteous” life is a life of love. Whatever we might do, Paul says, if we do it apart from love, it lacks value. We might be a religious virtuoso with all sorts of nifty spiritual gifts, but if we lack love, we are “nothing.” We might do all sorts of impressive things, even things that look like moral heroism, but if we do them without love, Paul insists, they’re deeply flawed.

Some of the most famous words ever written about love give us an idea of what love looks like in practice:

“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

This kind of love isn’t just any kind of love. It’s God’s kind of love. It’s the love that God has shown over and over again in faithful care for the world and in particular for God’s people. It’s the love, above all, that we see in the life of Jesus, who was willing to die for us as an expression of love.

God’s love is faithful even in the midst of the world’s brokenness. This fact offers a profound sense of assurance. God is for us. And “if God is for us,” Paul writes,

“who can be against us?” If God gave God’s own Son for us, what would God not give?

“Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

To be sure, the love of God does not guarantee that our lives will go well. Jesus faced misunderstanding and violent opposition. If we love like he did, we could face the same. In Jesus, the power and wisdom of God’s love looked like weakness and foolishness. Ours should too. In Jesus, the cost of love was death. We ought to be prepared for the same.

In a fully flourishing world, none of that would be the case. Love would not suffer but dance with joy. But our world is not yet fully flourishing. (Obviously.) Love, however, spans the gap between the world we have and the world we hope for because it’s how we should live on both sides of the divide. To love well is—always and everywhere—to lead one’s life well.

Life Going Well: Peace

Paul defines life going well as peace. Peace is primarily about right relationships, which are the most important of life’s circumstances. They’re the context in which the value of other circumstances (food, money, etc.) becomes clear. For Paul, life is going well when we live at peace with God, with one another, and with the whole creation.

The foundation of life going well is peace with God.  Against all the odds, God has made this peace for us, having “reconciled us to himself through Christ.” Ultimately, when Christ’s purpose is fully realized at the end of all things, the world will be filled with God’s presence and become the home of God, entirely at peace with its creator. This fundamental peace flows in and through all the relationships between creatures. We and the world come to be at home with one another when God is at home among us.

Captives should be set free. Needs should be met. Honor should be extended to those on the margins, in fact to everyone.

Paul thinks this kind of peace should start to show up here and now among those who have taken up Jesus’s way of life. In this community, “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Unity in diversity and mutual belonging are foundational principles for the way of life Paul advocates. Captives should be set free. Needs should be met. Honor should be extended to those on the margins, in fact to everyone. This is how the Church is supposed to live. All too often, history shows us, it does not.

The good news is that Jesus’s peace is not trapped in or dependent on the church. Ultimately, it extends beyond the bounds of the human community entirely. Full human flourishing is bound together with the full flourishing of all humanity and the entirety of the creation.

It is in the context of this whole world at peace that the true value of material goods becomes clear. As part of a world loved by God and destined to be God’s home, the fruit of the creation and the products humans craft are valuable. And because they are valuable, it is important that they be equitably distributed. This is an essential component of true peace, one that is plainly lacking in our world today.

Because of the unjust distribution of material goods and the broken relationships it reveals, peace is not always possible, or even good. It would be wrong to live fully at peace with a wealth-obsessed vision of life or within an economic system where some starve while others waste nearly as much food as they consume. While we ought to pursue genuine peace, we ought to beware of false peace.

In this life, all is not at peace—and it will never be. Flourishing life in this world is lived for the sake of a peace that we will never find in its fullness this side of a renovation of creation that we cannot bring about for ourselves. Nevertheless, we should live as peacemakers. We should work to reconcile ruptured relationships among humans, between humans and God, and between humans and the rest of the natural world. We should also accept that we may be hated precisely because we are peacemakers. Sometimes leading our lives well results in our lives not going well.

Life Feeling as it Should: Joy

Paul offers us a vision of flourishing in which (1) a life led well is one of righteous love and (2) for life to go well is for there to be peace. How would it feel to live such a life? One word could never sum it up completely, but Paul’s best shorthand is joy.

Joy is an emotional response to something that we recognize as good. We don’t simply rejoice in the abstract; we rejoice over something that we take to be good. In the context of a fully flourishing life, joy is the “crown” of the good life: joy is the appropriate response of the righteous person in a world at peace.

Solidarity like this requires us to resist modern tendencies to weep over those who rejoice (Instagram’s FOMO) and rejoice over those who weep (Twitter’s schadenfreude). In a broken world like ours, not all joy is worthy of the name.

This world, however, is not at peace. Consequently, there is much over which we should not rejoice. Love must regulate what gives us joy: love, Paul writes, “does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.” Our emotional lives, Paul is saying, ought to be indexed to the truth of the world as it is. In short, it is more important to feel rightly than to feel good.

Another person’s suffering, for example, should elicit compassion, not joy. “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep,” Paul writes. Solidarity like this requires us to resist modern tendencies to weep over those who rejoice (Instagram’s FOMO) and rejoice over those who weep (Twitter’s schadenfreude). In a broken world like ours, not all joy is worthy of the name.

There is, however, an omnipresent cause for good joy, even in this life: God. Even when life’s circumstances are plainly not as they should be, there is still God, whose loving presence can and should be the cause of joy. That’s why Paul can command joy: “Rejoice in the Lord always.”

How does Paul expect us both to “rejoice always” and to “weep with those who weep”? Note that the command is to rejoice always, not to only rejoice. In this life our joy often must be mixed with sorrow. Rejoice in God, but lament over injustice. Rejoice in God, but weep with a neighbor in pain. Even our joy over genuinely good aspects of the world—the small joy of a sweet wild strawberry or the large joy of reconciling with a long-estranged friend—ought to be tinged with sorrow over the fact that this precious thread is not yet woven into a tapestry of fully flourishing life. In the world as we know it, joys are also always longings. They reach for a world in which they would extend into an unending web of joy. Our joys, Paul insists, ought to be as immodest as our dreams. They ought to reach for a whole world. 

To sum up: in this world, flourishing life is

  1. always and only a life of love,
  2. always but not only a life of joy
  3. neither always nor only a life at peace.

In the end, all three are woven together, but in this life, in which there are circumstances with which it would be wicked to be at peace and over which it would be evil to rejoice, love must come first.

When we dream a life, we dream a world. A world of love, peace, and joy, in harmony with one another. This is the world Jesus’s life summons into being. It lies beyond this immature and evil-stricken world. And yet it summons us. We hunger for it.

Paul affirms this hunger. It is a sign that we were indeed made for more than the lives we experience here and now. And yet it also points to the fact that some foretaste of that life can be discovered here. In little pockets of peace in communities marked by love, there are yet grounds for joy. Grounds that help us see every good thing around us as a gift from God.
 

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Have our worries changed over time?

A pep talk to teachers reveals whether our fears are age-old or not.
In an egg box sit two eggs with faces drawn on them with marker pen. One looks worried, the other looks on.

‘You’re not going to mention the psalms!’ my colleague said. ‘Are you?’ 

She was doing alarmed eyes at me, the sort which show white all round. I could see why really. We were on our way to give a talk at a big secondary school in Birmingham – multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-faith. The sort where praying had been banned as divisive, and the wearing of crosses discouraged. Hijabs too, for that matter. Not the kind of place where you chat lightly about a part of the Christian bible, on the whole, unless you’re trying to be provocative. 

I did mean to mention them though. ‘I can’t think of another example,’ I said. ‘And anyway, it’s too late now – I sent the slides through last night.’ Deep breaths. 

Just to explain a little, as counsellors, my colleague and I had set up a programme of talks and workshops for schools in the area, aimed at improving mental health in the aftermath of the pandemic. We’d seen all the warnings about the ‘tsunami of mental health issues’ threatening to deluge the country and decided to take action. Recognising that we couldn’t get to every individual child who might need help, we’d focused our efforts on the adults in the schools. Steady the grown-ups and you steady the children, was our thinking. The young take their wellbeing largely from the pattern set by their elders, even in this age of smart phones and social media, and the levels of despondency were very high among teachers and school staff in our experience. Lots of people burning out and leaving the profession. Not a steadying influence then. Hence our topic for today: ‘How to feel better in difficult times’. 

I was nervous as I stood in front of the large hall full of people. Several hundred of them, all ages and stages. Some looking attentive, many expressionless, a few sleepy. I could see my colleague at the end of a row near the front. She had one hand up to the side of her face and was making herself small. Great, I thought. Very reassuring. But too late now, so on we go… 

I introduced myself. I introduced my colleague. I introduced our work. And then I mentioned the thing that needed no introduction. It was already familiar, a regular inhabitant – present here in the room, but also everywhere else we went: our homes, our classrooms, our friends’ houses, the streets, the supermarkets. Fear. Horrid fear, drifting through the air like smoke. I gave them some awful statistics I’d found, about the rates of anxiety and depression. About the levels of self-harm, about the fact that suicide is now the second biggest killer of children between 10 and 15. I let these sink in a bit. 

Then I asked, ‘So what are we afraid of, exactly?’  

It is accepted practice in all mental health disciplines to try to identify the causes of fear and face squarely up to them as that’s the only real way to defuse their power, I said. I was going to read them a list of potential causes – and while I was doing so, I’d like them to try and guess where the list had come from. Call out your guesses please. 

‘Getting old,’ I started. ‘Drinking too much. Tyrants swooping on other people’s countries. Teaching our children to be better than we are…’ 

‘Twitter!’ someone called out. 

‘Cutting down the forests. Loss of friends. Waking up sweating in the night. Other people saying awful stuff about us…’ 

‘This Morning!’ came another voice. 

‘Feeling very alone. No sign of things getting better. Envying the rich. Death. Food being short…’ 

‘The news this lunch time!’ 

‘Plagues and pestilences. Being in despair. Cruel words. The evils of the class system. Not having work. Feeling low. Feeling weak…’ 

‘It’s got to be The Daily Mail,’ someone else shouted. Laughter. 

I looked up. ‘Good guesses,’ I said. ‘All of them, thank you. Only they’re a bit out of date. By about four millennia, give or take!’ 

Surprise fizzed through the room. 

I had wanted to find out what people used to worry about, I explained. To see how that differed from our current worries. I hadn’t known where to look though, until I suddenly remembered the psalms. ‘Some of you might be familiar with the psalms,’ I said, ‘but for those of you who aren’t, they are 150 ancient songs full of moaning.’ They varied in age, but the oldest were thought to have been written the best part of 4,000 years ago – making them older than the pyramids. I’d taken twenty of these songs out of the middle of the book – Psalms 60-80 – and listed the things they were moaning about… as just demonstrated. 

A lot of the sleepy faces were looking more alert now.  

Since this ancient list is more or less identical to our own, we can draw two conclusions, I said. Both very good news. The first is that, clearly, these are the things we worry about – if we’re human. People from a totally different culture/ period in history/ part of the world/ ethnicity/ stage of economic development/ political system/ level of education and so on and on, worrying about the same things as us? Doesn’t it show that… er, it’s normal? For living, breathing, average, sentient human beings like us? 

And secondly it proves, surely, that we’re designed to survive this kind of worrying. We’re wired to cope. Our brains are built for it. Because – ta da! – here we all are, FORTY CENTURIES later, still moaning about exactly the same stuff! 

I looked at my colleague again. Not only were both her hands now down in her lap, but like a lot of the rest of the room, she was smiling. 

‘If we can clear fear out of the way, it’s much easier to get on with sorting out problems,’ I finished. ‘So now, shall we talk about where we can get started?’ 

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