In place of the Psalm or Canticle, I sang Breath of Heaven (Mary's Song) by Amy Grant [click here]
Let us pray.
Joy to the world, the Lord is come.
Joy to the world, the Lord is come.
Let earth receive her king.
Let every heart prepare Him room.
Let every heart prepare Him room.
And
heaven and nature sing.
Joy to the world, the Savior
reigns.
Let folks their songs
employ.
While fields and floods, rocks, hills,
and plains repeat the sounding joy.
While fields and floods, rocks, hills,
and plains repeat the sounding joy.
No more let sins and sorrows
grow.
Nor thorns infest the ground.
He comes to make His blessings flow.
Far
as the curse is found.
He rules the world with truth
and grace.
And makes the nations
prove.
The glories of His righteousness.
And
wonders of His love. Amen.
Gaudate, dear ones.
Rejoice! Today, we celebrate with
JOY. Joy that Jesus has come and will
come again. We celebrate that Jesus is
with us AND we prepare for the celebration of his birth AND we wait for him to
come again. Gaudate! Rejoice!
These weeks of Advent are kind of strange when we think of
Jesus as already here, but at the same time, not quite here … yet. Do we sing our favorite Christmas hymns with
the radio, or do we wait until Christmas Eve?
Through the words of the hymn, Joy to the World, penned by
Isaac Watts in 1719, we hear just what it means to celebrate the reign of
Christ on our hearts. If we pay
attention to those words, we might hear a familiar theme, much like what we
heard from Isaiah a few minutes ago.
In that lesson, we hear how the people who are weak,
feeble-kneed and faint of heart will receive strength. We hear how the dry land produces
abundance. We hear of transformation. But if we close our eyes and imagine the
scene, we might call it: joyful transformation!
Joy.
Jesus talks about transformation in today’s Gospel,
too. About how the marginalized: the blind, the lame, the deaf, the poor, the
sick are all healed of their infirmities.
He asks, “What do you see?”
Joyful transformation!
More joy!
Sometimes joy is hard to understand. It is an emotion that can fit in the midst of
grief and sorrow and loss just as easily as in the midst of happiness,
fulfillment and abundance. Joy is a
sense of being in this world that tends to live inside people who trust that
God is in this life with them.
I have a friend whose motto is always, Choose Joy! And I didn’t always understand how she could
live with this sense of peace that truly passes all understanding when so much
of her world, and the world of her nearest and dearest loved ones was
exceptionally complicated. She had every
reason to rail at God and wallow in pity due to circumstances that would cause
most people to fall into despair or depression.
But not this woman.
Nope. She chose and chooses joy. And it emanates from her like a beacon.
I met her in seminary, and in our time together, her
husband was hit by a car and severely injured, her older son was addicted to
drugs and her young daughter was floundering between her parents’ homes. I would listen to her talk about all these
complex situations and I could hear her joy, even in the face of it all.
I didn’t really understand how her disposition could be so
joyful and mostly sunny until I was reading The Peaceable Kingdom by Stanley
Hauerwas for my Ethics class.
In two pages of that book I understood that joy is so much
more than an emotion. It is a state of
being. It can truly co-exist with all
the other emotions we may encounter.
The best way for me to explain it is to share some snippets
of what Hauerwas wrote. To begin: "...our joy is not that for which we
hope, but is a present disposition that pervades our whole life.” I love that.
Jesus asked the people in the Gospel this morning: What did you
see? He challenged them to see beyond
the circumstances and to see the hope and joy that resides in all of them.
Hauerwas
spoke of the Christian life in this way: “... Our joy is the simple willingness
to live with the assurance of God's redemption.” Thinking about the lesson from Isaiah, I
wonder if we can see that redemption in the blooming of the dry land, filling
it with colorful blooms.
He
goes on to say, “... The joy that characterizes the Christian life is not so
much the fulfillment of any desire, but the discovery that we are capable of
being people who not only desire peace but are peaceable. Joy thus comes to us
as a gift that ironically provides us with the confidence in ourselves which
makes possible our living of God's peace as a present reality.” Jesus came to bring peace to all of us. My friend emits peacefulness in her life, but
it’s bigger than that. It is joy that
gives her the capacity to live into God’s peace.
I’m
especially taken by this one, because it is, in my opinion, the best definition
of JOY. He wrote: “...joy is the result
of our facing what we otherwise wished to avoid and discovering that our
willingness to confront the difficult or the unpleasant helped us discover that
we possessed resources we did not suspect. For joy is the result of our letting
go of the slim reed of security that we think provides us with the power to
control our own and others' lives. But such a letting go is not something we
can will, so much as it is learning to accept the whittling down that the
difficulties and tragedies consequent upon our frantic search for power force
on us.”
That
is so like my friend! I know that her
biggest resource is her faith in God.
She has lived through desert times and instead of dwelling on the sand,
she finds the oasis that gives hope and promise to her life.
And
finally, Hauerwas writes, “...joy is the disposition that comes from our
readiness always to be surprised; or put even more strongly, joy is the
disposition that comes from our realization that we can trust in surprises for
the sustaining of our lives." (pages 147-148)
Isn’t
that amazing to consider? What would
happen if we lived our lives open to being surprised by God?
Mary
was open to that surprise. She might
have been afraid. She may have asked,
“why me?” But she was open to the
possibilities that God presented to her and she was open to being the
God-bearer. She was open to experiencing
JOY, deep, abiding joy, even knowing that her life would be more complicated
and more tragic than most.
In
this time when every heart prepares Him room, and heaven and nature sings, I
invite you to also welcome JOY into your hearts and minds and souls. Let’s prepare the way of the Lord with
expectation for our worlds to be transformed with JOY.
Let us pray.
In one of Mary Oliver’s poems
she wrote: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as
they are in the same body.” Give us the
capacity to embody joy in our lives, Jesus, as we come to know how much you
desire us to live in this complex world, the world you came to save and protect
and transform, like water in a drought.
We thank you, Jesus. Amen.