May 24, 2026

Indianola Presbyterian Church

" Rejoice in the Lord"
Sermon by Rev. Trip Porch

May 24, 2026                                                                                                                         Based on Philippians 4:4–9

 Growing up as a kid in the nineties, my music and audio world was dominated by cassette tapes  then CDs.

But there was one day, I remember, a particular magical day, when I discovered high in a closet of my house
my parent’s vinyl record collection.

I found my parents record player in the attic and pulled down these treasures one by one and absolutely indulged in some phenomenal hits from the past…

Fleetwood Mac - Rumors,
Michael Jackson - Thriller,
The Beatles - St. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts club band.

One record surprised me and quickly became one of my favorites.

Steve Martin’s first stand-up comedy recording.

It had me rolling in laughter. 

There was one part of the stand up I remember particularly well, where he pulled out his banjo and incorporated it into his act. And then there’s a joke He’d say. Rather than me trying to interpret Steve Martin, I figure I’d just let you hear it from him…
“death... and grief... and sorrow... and murder…"

It just doesn't work on the banjo. The bright toned arpeggios refuse to carry it.
The audience loses it every time.

I've been thinking about that bit a lot this week, because I think Paul is making a similar argument in Philippians. Not about the banjo. But about what happens when you actually live close to God. 

Here's the theological claim I want to make this morning.

Delight is at the heart of who God is.

A former mentor of mine, Blair Moffett, wrote a paper years ago that I keep coming back to. He traces a Hebrew word through the psalms and the prophets. It’s the Word, Cha-fetz, which means literally “To bend towards” but is most often used figuratively to mean to be pleased with. 

In the Hebrew bibles its most often translated variously as delight, pleasure, purpose, will — and what he finds is that this word is everywhere, and it always points in the same direction.

"God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good." Creation begins with delight.
God looks at what exists and God takes pleasure in it.

The psalmist writes that God delivered him "because he delighted in me." Isaiah speaks to people in exile with every reason to believe they've been abandoned — and gives them a new name. Hephzibah.
My delight is in her. God's delight in us doesn't stop when things fall apart.

Moffett tells a story from his own life that I love. About how He and a friend drove across the country when they were in college, through the mountains of Montana and particularly Glacier National Park. 

He remembers entering the park and at every bend there was a new combination of peaks and sky and water, and the two of them just kept saying, "Wow. Look at that." Over and over. Laughing at themselves because there wasn't anything more adequate to say, other words never came.

He writes: their words weren't an attempt to capture or describe what they saw. The "Wow" was just to confirm that they both saw it, that they were both moved. They were audibly affirming their mutual delight in the presence of nature’s majesty.

And then he makes the move that I think is at the center of this whole sermon: That awe, that wonder, that delight… that expression of “wow, look at that” …this is what God is doing with us. 

That the chief end of human life — to glorify God and enjoy God forever, as the Westminster Catechism puts it — is not a transaction. It is a shared delight. Two beings looking at the same thing and saying wow together.

That is the God Paul is writing about.

So when Paul says "Rejoice in the Lord," the location of the rejoicing matters. He is not commanding a feeling. He is pointing us toward a relationship. Toward a God whose fundamental posture toward the world, toward us, is delight.

And here's what I think he's saying: when you draw close to that God, joy starts to show up. Not because you've earned it, not because your circumstances arranged themselves correctly, but because you are in proximity to that which is the source of joy. 

Delight is contagious. Joy is what it feels like to be near a God who looks at creation and keeps saying wow.

Now I think I should clarify what joy is and what it isn't, because I think we confuse this regularly.

Joy is not the same as happiness — the feeling that everything is going well. Researchers who spend their careers studying happiness keep arriving at the same conclusion: the things we are most convinced will finally make us happy almost never deliver what we expect. 

The promotion, the new house, the thing we've been working toward — each one gives us a real lift, and then slowly gets absorbed into the background of ordinary life. We end up chasing that feeling that is fleeting and reaching for the next thing.

Joy doesn't work that way. Joy is less something you catch and more something that accumulates when you keep turning toward delight, keep making room for it, keep showing up in proximity to a God who is already there.

And Joy is not pleasure. Pleasure is real and there's nothing innately wrong with it, but pleasure is something you consume. You chase it, you get it, you need more of it. That road, followed hard enough, is the road toward addiction. Pleasure is about acquisition. Joy is different its deeper, its quieter, its more behind the scenes.

Now, There are real barriers to joy. Depression is real. Anxiety is real. Grief is real. These are not signs that you are far from God, and if you are living with any of them, the last thing I want you to hear this morning is that you're doing faith wrong. God is in the sorrow. God is in the darkness. The same God who delights in creation is present in the places where delight feels completely out of reach.

A woman named Ann Guo told a story on the Moth Radio Hour that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. In 2008, after her son was born, she was diagnosed with postpartum depression. The depression lasted about two years. And when it lifted, it didn't lift all at once — there was no morning when she woke up and everything was restored. Instead, she described dragging around a huge emotional deficit everywhere she went. 

Life felt flat. Like she would experience something positive but it would get her back to her baseline, like she was just surviving, not actually being joyful. She found herself wondering: is this my new normal? Will I ever get back to where I was?

By the time her son turned five, she decided she had to do something. She realized just how much she missed experiencing joy, so She sat down and made a list of the most joyful moments in her life, looking for clues. And what she noticed was that a lot of them involved silly unexpected adventures. 

So she declared 2014 the Year of Adventures, and sent a mass email to friends and family making them a deal they couldn't refuse: She told them to dare her to do whatever they wanted, and if they donated to her favorite charity and she hit her target, she would do their dares. No matter what.

In her mind it was a win- win, her favorite charity would benefit and she’d get to practice little silliness in her life. The dares started flowing in.

Build a boat out of plywood and float it on the Charles River.
Speak only Shakespearean English for an entire week.
Walk 100 miles from Boston to Northampton without bringing any money or food and instead relying on
Her husband, who is Jewish, dared her to crash a bar mitzvah.

Ultimately… she met her fundraising target, so these dares would then become her adventures to do.

Before she knew it, there she was, pulling up to a hotel in Cambridge, a 38-year-old professional Asian mother, about to crash a 13 year olds party.

She walks in, scopes the room, nearly turns around and runs. She sits on a lobby couch pretending to text, taking deep yoga breaths. Then she pulls herself up, walks through the double doors, straight to the head table, and introduces herself as Ann from the catering department.

It turns out she has the wrong night. It's a dinner for out-of-town guests before the actual bar mitzvah. And the birthday boy is, in fact, a girl.

She still gets the selfie with her to prove it.

On the car ride home, she says, she was flooded with euphoria. 
And by December of that year — after walking across Massachusetts, floating a leaky plywood boat, speaking like Shakespeare for a week —
She said it was like her emotional bank was full again. She was happier than she'd ever been. 

Not because she'd chased that feeling of happiness. But because she had kept insisting on making room for silliness, fun, and delight in her life.

Paul might recognize all of this.

When he says "focus your thoughts on whatever is true, whatever is lovely, whatever is worthy of praise," I think he is describing exactly this kind of attentive living. Not a mood you try to manufacture. 

A practice of continually trying to fill your life with joy. A decision to keep looking for what is delightful, to keep making room for it, to keep noticing it when it shows up — because wherever joy is, the Spirit is.
Wherever delight is present, God is near.

A few years ago I bought a razor scooter. Like the ones made for kids that you kick to ride but this one is an adult one. And now instead of walking to meetings on campus which just feel monotonous and boring… I ride it, because it is genuinely more fun, and something about it makes the whole day lighter.

A friend of mine told me that whenever she has the option, she skips instead of walks because she says “it's impossible to feel distressed when you are skipping.”

Try it sometime. I dare you. Because its true… Just like its impossible to play a sad song on a banjo… it’s impossible to be sad while skipping.

…What are the little things in your life that you can’t help but delight in?

How might you prioritize those things more in your life?

We live in a world full of genuine pain and suffering, and we should not look away from that. We also live in a world that has figured out how to monetize our longing for joy — to package it, sell it back to us in smaller and smaller doses that never quite satisfy. 

Choosing to actually live in delight, to ride the scooter, to skip, to crash the wrong night of a bar mitzvah and come home flooded with euphoria — that is not escapism. It is a refusal to let the suffering have the last word. Its choosing joy as an act of resistance. 

Paul writes this letter from prison. He has every reason to be crushed.
And yet still he insists on the teaching…
Rejoice in a the Lord Always.
Again… I’ll say Rejoice
He says it twice because once apparently wasn't enough.

Joy, in Paul's hands, is not naive.
It is the claim that the God who delights in creation has not stopped delighting, that the Lord is near, that something in the fabric of things keeps saying wow — and that we are invited to say it back.

So here's what I want to leave you with.

Think about what brings you joy. Not what should. Not what a responsible adult is supposed to find meaningful. What actually makes something in you go wow.

Maybe it's a piece of music that hits you every single time when you’re in the car and you can’t help but sing it at the top of your lungs. Turn the music up and relish in it… because in that moment you are close to the heart of God.

Maybe it's a particular stretch of road on a bike where the trees hang just right. Maybe it's a child laughing, or the first tomato of summer, or a really good cup of coffee on a quiet morning.

Maybe it's something that feels almost too small and insignificant that it doesn’t even feel worth mentioning.

Mention it anyway. Name it as your joy. Because I believe that wherever joy shows up, God is already there. I believe that delight is the native language of the Spirit. And that when we actually let ourselves live in it — when we keep insisting on making room for it the way Ann Guo did, one ridiculous adventure at a time — we are not drifting away from faith.

We are rejoicing in the Lord.

And that is worth saying twice:
we are rejoicing in the Lord.

Amen.

WE GATHER IN AWE AND PRAISE

PRELUDE                                           "Breathe on Me, Breath of God"                                arr. J.B. Taylor

INTROIT                         “Bless the Lord, O My Soul”                Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov

WELCOME                                                                    Rev. Trip Porch

One: This is the day that the Lord has made

All: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

*CALL TO WORSHIP                                                                                

One: From the first light of creation, as the Spirit hovered over the waters, God looked at the world and said: this is good.

Many: God delights in what has been made. God delights in us.

One: And so we gather, to join a joy that was already here before we arrived.

Many: The Lord is near. The Spirit is present. We are not alone.

One: Rejoice in the Lord always.

Many: Again we say: rejoice.

One: Let us worship God. 

*HYMN 283                       “Come, O Holy Spirit, Come”   Sung many times                                  WA EMIMIMO

*PRAYER OF CONFESSION                                                           Jessica Riviere

Gracious God, you have made us for delight. You made us to find joy in you and in one another and in the world you called good. But we confess that we spend much of our lives looking for joy in places that cannot give it. We chase what fades. We grasp what doesn't last. We grow anxious and distracted and forget that you are near.

We confess, too, the ways we have let the weight of the world crowd out the gifts you scatter through our days: the laughter, the beauty, the small and ordinary moments that carry your fingerprints. Forgive us for the joy we have missed, and for the joy we have refused.

Restore us to yourself. Remind us that you are the source of all delight, and that you have not stopped looking at what you have made and calling it good. Amen. 

*ASSURANCE OF PARDON                                                          

*RESPONSE OF PARDON 582 “Glory to God, Whose Goodness Shines on Me” GLORY TO GOD

*PASSING OF THE PEACE                                                                       

One: The peace of Christ be with you!

       All:      And also with you.

WE LISTEN FOR GOD’S WORD 

ANTHEM                                 “If Ye Love Me”                                                  Peter Niedmann

GODLY PLAY

  Congregation: May God be with you there   

    Children: May God be with you here.              

CHILDREN’S RECESSIONAL       “Jesus Loves Me” vs. 1

PRAYER FOR ILLUMINATION

SCRIPTURE        Philippians 4:4-9      CEB                                                                                                                                         

Rejoice in the Lord always! Again I say, Rejoice!  Let your gentleness show in your treatment of all people. The Lord is near.   Don’t be anxious about anything; rather, bring up all of your requests to God in your prayers and petitions, along with giving thanks.  Then the peace of God that exceeds all understanding will keep your hearts and minds safe in Christ Jesus.

From now on, brothers and sisters, if anything is excellent and if anything is admirable, focus your thoughts on these things: all that is true, all that is holy, all that is just, all that is pure, all that is lovely, and all that is worthy of praise.  Practice these things: whatever you learned, received, heard, or saw in us. The God of peace will be with you.

SERMON                                                                                Rev. Trip Porch

WE RESPOND TO GOD’S WORD

*HYMN 837                                   “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”                                                   SHOWALTER

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE  followed by the Lord’s Prayer using debts and debtors.

Time of Offering   online giving is available at  www. indianolapres.org/give

OFFERTORY                           “Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart”                               arr. Judith L.  Maggs

*OFFERTORY RESPONSE  709              “God, We Honor You”                                   ABUNDANT BLESSINGS

*PRAYER OF DEDICATION 

Receive these gifts, O God, as our expression of gratitude for the abundance you have given. Use them to create what is beyond our imagination. May they be a sign of a community that trusts you with what it has, and finds in the giving another reason to rejoice. Amen.

*HYMN 667                      “When Morning Gilds the Skies”                                  LAUDES DOMINI

TIME OF COMMUNITY SHARING

CHARGE & BENEDICTION

CHORAL RESPONSE          “Lord, Let Us Now Depart In Peace"                        George Whelpton

POSTLUDE                             “When Morning Gilds the Skies”                                          arr. James Gilbe