• A command that cannot be performed by trying
• The asking is not a concession to the weak
• What the peace actually does
• One rose morning inside a violet fortnight
• Who this lands on
• A list in a stockroom
• The Gospel is nothing but speaking
• Two Lessons that meet in the middle of a chapter
• Where this leaves us

Start with the sentence everybody knows, because the trouble is in the half that never gets finished.

Rejoice in the Lord always; again, I say, rejoice.

That line is on greetings cards. It is quoted at funerals and painted on kitchen walls, and it is one of the most portable sentences Paul ever wrote. What almost never travels with it is the instruction that arrives two verses later in the same paragraph, from the same man, in the same breath: let your petitions be made known.

So we are going to spend this morning on the half that gets left behind. Let your petitions be made known is not a footnote to the rejoicing. It is the only part of Paul’s sentence that anybody in this room can act on before lunch.

A command that cannot be performed by trying

Here is the difficulty, and it is worth stating flatly rather than smoothing over.

You cannot obey rejoice the way you obey stand up. Gladness is not a muscle. Not one person in this room can produce joy by deciding to produce joy, and anybody who tells you otherwise is describing a performance rather than a feeling. If the Church had left us with verse four on its own, it would have handed every reader an order they had no means of carrying out, and a fortnight later it would have handed them the guilt as well.

Paul does not leave us there. Two verses on he gives a second imperative, and this one is entirely performable: let your petitions be made known. Say what you need. Out loud, to God, in every thing. That is a thing a person can do this morning at eleven o’clock regardless of what they feel, and it is the only instruction in the passage that has an action attached to it.

So read the two together, because the Missal reads them together. The Introit sang them as one sentence before the Lesson had even been opened, joining the rejoicing and the asking with nothing between them but a comma’s worth of breath. The Church has never treated rejoice as the whole instruction. It has always sung it with let your petitions be made known trailing directly behind.

Let your petitions be made known is not a pastoral softening applied afterwards to a hard verse. It is what the hard verse was attached to in the first place, in Paul’s own hand, two verses apart.

The asking is not a concession to the weak

Now the ordering, because it matters and it is easy to get backwards.

A person could read verse six as a climbdown. Rejoice always—and, all right, if you cannot manage that, you may at least ask for help. That reading makes the petition a lesser thing, a fallback for people who could not reach the first bar. It is not what the sentence does, and let your petitions be made known is not the consolation prize.

Paul writes in every thing. Not in the hard things, not when the joy runs out, not as an exception clause. Every thing, which includes the mornings you were glad and the mornings you were not, so let your petitions be made known belongs to the whole of a life and not to its worst days. The asking is not what you do when the rejoicing fails. It is what the rejoicing is made of.

And the object of that asking is unrestricted, which is the part congregations quietly edit. There is no list of permitted subjects, no scale of seriousness a request has to clear, no suggestion that some needs are too small to bring and others too shameful. In every thing. Let your petitions be made known covers the thing you would be embarrassed to say to a friend. It covers the small and faintly ridiculous request as well as the enormous one, because let your petitions be made known has no sorting office standing in front of it.

What the peace actually does

Then verse seven, and the verb in it is a soldier’s word.

Verse seven does not offer to replace what is inside a person. The peace of God, which surpasseth all understanding is promised as a garrison round it instead. The word is keep—to hold, to guard, to stand at the door of—and you do not post a guard on an empty room. Let your petitions be made known, and there is something left inside worth guarding.

That is a very different promise from the one people are usually handed. It does not say the trouble will be removed, or that what you brought in will be gone by the end of the hour. It says something will stand around it. Let your petitions be made known, and the peace takes up its position; the petition is not cancelled by the peace arriving.

Last Sunday we were told to receive one another, and the point there was who gets to hold a verdict. This morning is narrower and lands on the person themselves. That day asked what a room owes the one who turns up with a question; today asks what the one who turns up is actually permitted to say. Let your petitions be made known is the answer, and it is addressed to the asker rather than to the room.

One rose morning inside a violet fortnight

A word about the colour, because the day makes the argument in cloth before anybody opens a book.

Twice in the year the Church is permitted rose, and this is one of the two mornings. The vestment is lighter, the tone lifts, and tomorrow the violet goes back on and the season carries on exactly as before. The Church does not pretend that the fortnight behind us was not violet, and it does not claim the fortnight ahead will be rose. What it asks on both kinds of morning is identical: let your petitions be made known.

That is a liturgy which declines to treat gladness as a continuous obligation. It schedules a morning for it, in the middle of a long wait, and then puts the brighter colour away again. On Friday we sat with Paul asking a whole congregation to abound in hope, and heard that every verb in that prayer was a word about amount rather than about likelihood. This is the same instinct in a different medium: quantity varies, and the instruction underneath it does not. Let your petitions be made known holds on the rose morning and on all the violet ones.

Who this lands on

Here is the harm, and the passage has already supplied the tools to take it apart.

There is a use of rejoice in the Lord always that functions as a clock. Somebody carrying something heavy is told, gently and often sincerely, that the always is the point—that a person who has been sad this long is no longer grieving but disobeying, and that the continuing weight is now itself the spiritual problem. Nothing is said about the thing that happened. Everything is said about how much time has passed since. A room that has begun counting has already stopped hearing let your petitions be made known as an ordinary sentence.

I am naming who that lands on hardest. People who were assaulted, and who have discovered that a room will carry them warmly for a season and then start counting the months. The kindness has a duration, and when the duration runs out the sympathy turns into a diagnosis, and the person learns to report themselves as fine because the alternative is being treated as a case that has failed to close.

That reading cannot survive the sentence it comes from. Paul’s always attaches to in the Lord, not to a required emotional weather, and two verses later the same man tells the same people to bring every thing they have—which is not language you use with a congregation you expect to have finished needing things. Let your petitions be made known is not a clause for the first six months. It has no expiry on it at all.

The sixth of this month is not the ground here either, though it lands on the same people. On the sixth we sat with a Lesson from Hebrews and asked which way an account is owed, and named the same people on that question in according to his proper ability. That was about direction—who is obliged to render an account to whom. This morning is about duration, and the two are independent. A room can get the direction exactly right and still, eighteen months in, begin to wonder aloud how long this is going to go on.

Weigh that habit by what it grows, and weigh it against our own record, because ours is the record we are obliged to examine. It grows congregations where the second year is lonelier than the first. It grows people who have learned the acceptable answer to how are you and give it fluently. It grows a prayer life edited down to the requests a person believes they are still entitled to make, which is the exact opposite of in every thing. And it grows silence in the pews, because a room that has set a deadline has told everybody in it to stop asking before the deadline is reached.

None of that survives contact with verse six. Let your petitions be made known carries no second clause about how recently the trouble began, and nothing in the four verses of this Lesson adds one.

A list in a stockroom

There is a story sometimes told of five people who have eaten together every Sunday for nine years in the stockroom above a hardware shop, because one of them has the keys and it is the only room any of them can get for nothing.

They are not related to one another in any way a form would recognise. They are on each other’s paperwork as the person to ring, they know which of them cannot manage stairs, and one of them has done the shopping for the other four every week since the second winter. On the wall by the paint tins there is a sheet of paper with a pencil on a string, and anything anybody needs goes on it—milk, a light bulb, somebody to sit in a house while a boiler is seen to.

The woman with the keys had never once written on it. She had bought the milk, kept the list, sharpened the pencil, and stayed off the sheet for nine years. What happened was very small: one Sunday in November she wrote lift on Tuesday, morning in the middle of the list, between two other lines, in the same hand as everything else. It was not remarked on. It was crossed off on the Tuesday like the light bulb was, and that is what it costs, in a good room, to let your petitions be made known.

That is the whole story, and it is what let your petitions be made known amounts to in a room where the asking costs nothing. She did not earn the line by being sad enough or by being useful enough for long enough. She put it in the middle of the page, in the same pencil, with no explanation attached to it.

Three things I want to be honest about. It took her nine years. She wrote lift on Tuesday and not what the Tuesday was. And she has not written on the sheet since.

I am not going to tell you it became something. The shop changed hands the following spring and the room went with it, they eat at each other’s houses now and it is not the same, and none of them would use the word family out loud about the arrangement. What there is, is a sheet of paper on which somebody who kept the list finally appeared on it—because let your petitions be made known is not advice for the people at the bottom of a room. It is for the one holding the pencil too.

The Gospel is nothing but speaking

Now the Gospel, because it is doing the same thing in a different key and the two readings belong together.

Read what actually happens at Bethania. A deputation is sent, a question is asked, an answer is given, three more questions follow, and the passage ends. Not one thing is done in this Gospel. It is ten verses of people saying things out loud to other people who will report what they heard, and even the baptizing is mentioned rather than described.

And John’s answers are almost all negative. I am not the Christ. I am not. No. Three refusals before a single positive claim.

When the claim finally comes it is not a title but a job: I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness. A voice exists only while it is speaking. He describes himself as the least permanent thing in the passage, and he says it plainly, on the record, to men who are writing it down. That is the whole cost of saying a true thing out loud, which is all let your petitions be made known has ever meant.

Then the line the whole morning has been walking towards. There hath stood one in the midst of you, whom you know not. Not hidden. Not far off. Standing in the middle of the room.

The failure named in that sentence belongs to the people in the room rather than to the one already standing there. The Lord is nigh, says the Epistle, in the same words the Introit sang an hour ago. So let your petitions be made known to somebody who is already present, which is a very short distance to send anything.

So both readings this morning are about opening your mouth. John will not let the deputation write down anything but what is true, and Paul will not let a congregation carry anything it has not said. Let your petitions be made known is the Epistle’s version of what John does in the Gospel: say the true thing out loud, to somebody, without dressing it up as something more presentable.

Two Lessons that meet in the middle of a chapter

One more thing about the Lesson, because the Missal has done something quietly satisfying with it.

On the sixteenth of last month the Lesson ran through the end of Philippians chapter three and stopped at the third verse of chapter four, in the Mass we called thoughts of peace. This morning’s Lesson begins at the fourth verse. Four weeks apart, in two different seasons, wearing two different colours, the Church has read that chapter straight through without a word missing in the join.

What Paul says in the half we heard in November is that our conversation is in heaven. What he says in the half we have heard this morning is that the Lord is nigh. Those are the same claim from two ends, and the instruction sitting between them is let your petitions be made known.

Where this leaves us

So here is what I would ask you to carry out of this room.

You are not going to be able to arrange your feelings before Christmas. That was never the assignment, and the Church put a fortnight of violet either side of this morning precisely because it knows better. What you can do, today, is say one true thing you need, to God or to somebody in your own kitchen, without first qualifying it as reasonable. Let your petitions be made known, and let the gladness take care of itself.

Take the Offertory with you as well, because it says the same thing from the far side. Thou hast blessed thy land: thou hast turned away the captivity of Jacob. Thou hast forgiven the iniquity of thy people. Every verb in it is in the perfect tense. The asking we do this morning is done standing on ground that has already been given, which is why let your petitions be made known is not begging.

And take John, standing in the water with no title, telling a room of officials that the one they are after is already among them. He does it by saying it out loud, which is the whole of what let your petitions be made known has ever asked of anybody.

If you came in this morning with something you have stopped mentioning because you have had it too long, you are not behind. You are exactly where the Epistle expects you to be, holding something in every thing was written to cover. Let your petitions be made known, and let the peace come and stand round it.

↑ The order resumes below.