Our Gospel lesson (John the Baptist] berating and threatening)
is ironic because we know what John didn’t know.
He expected Jesus to be like
himself,
lambasting sinners and bringing miscreants to justice.
Instead, Jesus was in the
line of the prophet Zephaniah
who gives us our Old Testament lesson.
Zephaniah said,
“Sing aloud, O daughter Zion;
shout, O Israel!
Rejoice and exult with all your heart,
O daughter Jerusalem!
the Lord has taken away the judgments against you . . . .”
Not as John the Baptist says,
“You brood of vipers,
who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”
– but “Sing aloud . . . . . Rejoice
and exult with all your heart,
. . . . the Lord has taken away the judgments against you .
. . .”
Jesus followed Zephaniah,
and his greatest follower, St. Paul,
gave us our Epistle lesson:
“Rejoice in the Lord always.
Again I say
‘Rejoice.’
The Lord is near. So don’t worry about anything.”
The voice of John the Baptist
has continued to echo
down through the centuries.
It’s a good text for those
who want to use fear
as a tool for power.
But orthodox Christianity
isn’t a religion of fear.
It’s a religion of hope and
joy.
That’s why our year begins
with Advent.
Advent spirituality casts off
gloom and despair
to open our hearts for Christ.
On Advent I our lessons were
about the future.
We heard about how hope
sustains us
through the hard times.
Trusting in God means hoping
for a better day coming.
On Advent II our lessons were
about the past.
We were invited to “take off
the garment of sorrow,”
to let go of our habitual misery
our old ways of looking at the world and ourselves.
Now, on Advent III, Joy
Sunday,
the lessons are about the present.
They call us not just to
forget the past
and hope for the future,
but to rejoice right now today.
They invite us to celebrate
and delight
in the day we have been given.
Who knew the Apostle Paul
would be bopping around
like Bob Marley to a reggae beat, singing,
“Don’t worry. Be happy.”
I said exactly that on Joy
Sunday several years ago;
so I’m not just quoting our new Presiding Bishop.
But he wasn’t quoting me either.
He was paraphrasing Paul.
There it is in black and
white:
“Rejoice in the Lord.”
When? “Always,” signed Paul.
But we are likely to say, in
the words of the Virgin Mary,
when she heard the first good news from the angel Gabriel,
“How is this possible?”
How can we rejoice in the
midst of . . . .
fill in the blank with your own particular hardships.
How can I rejoice when my
children are troubled,
when my marriage is troubled,
when my parents are sick,
when I am staggering under guilt and shame
for the things I’ve done or failed to do?
Or fill in the blank with the
sufferings of the world.
How can I rejoice
–
with strife in
Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Nigeria,
Kenya,
and Ukraine
-- street violence in Chicago, L A, and Ferguson
-- with 355 mass shooting in the United States this
year so far
– with poverty and sickness all around.
How can we rejoice?
The idea of rejoicing always
is absurd
until we understand what it means to rejoice,
until we get a better understanding of joy.
Christian joy is not a
limited conditional happiness,
celebrating because something has worked out well.
It runs deeper than our
emotions.
It is a fundamental yes to
life itself.
A yes to reality.
A yes to God.
Joy that depends on the
absence of suffering
is always a nervous sort of gladness.
It knows how contingent it
is. .
If we start with the
attitude,
“I will be happy only if this happens or that doesn’t
happen,”
then any relative well being
we feel will be fraught with anxiety.
Our happiness will always be
set on shifting sand.
Our joy isn’t
conditional. The prophet Habakkuk said,
Though the fig trees do not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the
produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
I will joy in the God of my salvation.
So what is Habakkuk
celebrating?
He doesn’t rejoice that his
crops have failed
or that his flocks are lost.
But when calamities happen,
he rejoices in God.
He rejoices in the God of his
salvation,
the God who will get him through this.
It is, in fact, in the midst
of disasters,
that we rejoice the most that God is God,
that God is bigger than anything that can happen to us,
and that God loves and creates,
God heals and restores,
God forgives and redeems.
St. Paul doesn’t say to
rejoice about everything that happens.
He says “Rejoice in the Lord
always.”
If joy depends on our
circumstances,
it will be a flimsy kind of joy.
But we can always rejoice in
God,
because God is always the God of joy, hope, and salvation.
God is the one who invites us
to cast off
the garment of sorrow.
God liberates us from old
misery.
So, maybe we have troubles
today,
but we had troubles yesterday and they are over.
We can rejoice that they don’t
just pile up.
Sorrow is not indelible.
It fades. It washes away in
the rain of a new day.
And even if things are hard,
we can rejoice that we have hope right now
of a better tomorrow.
Pain is still pain.
But pain without hope is
unbearable.
So if we have hope – and we
do have hope –
then we rejoice that we have hope.
And this isn’t just about
situations and circumstances.
It’s about who we are.
Very few of us are really
satisfied with ourselves.
A lot of us are painfully
dissatisfied with ourselves.
We are ashamed or guilty or
disappointed in who we are.
The most chronic obstacle to
happiness
is usually dissatisfaction with who we are.
Even here, there is space for
rejoicing.
We are already free of our
old identities.
Zephaniah says,
“the Lord has taken away the judgments against you . . . .”
All those judgments the world
laid on us are overturned.
90% of them were wrong to
begin with,
but right or wrong doesn’t matter.
They are over and we are free
to become new.
The old judgments are ripped
in two,
shredded, up the chimney in smoke.
1st John says,
“We are God’s children now.
It does not yet
appear what we shall be.
But when (Christ) appears, we shall be like him.”
Flower seeds and bulbs
usually aren’t much to look at.
But we know what they will
become.
Caterpillars aren’t much to
look at.
But we know what they will
become.
So even when we aren’t
satisfied with ourselves,
we rejoice at who we are going to become.
Advent III is called Joy
Sunday,
even though it comes at the darkest time of year,
when the days are short and cold,
the traffic is heavy, and the lines are long.
There’s a lot of stress and
bother,
there are a lot of family tensions.
But in the midst of it all,
God is still the God of our salvation.
God comes to heal us a little
every day,
and he is coming soon to heal us
completely and forever.
