Like every Sunday in Advent, we have started our service by lighting our wreath and as you are probably aware, there is a theme associated with each candle we light. The first candle is hope, the second is peace, the third, as of today, is joy, and the last, next Sunday, will be love. Now today we use a pink candle to symbolize joy, we take a break from the penitential season, always symbolized by the color purple, because we have made it halfway through Advent, Christmas is coming soon, and it’s of course time to get excited! We actually have just read a passage from Paul’s letter to the Philippians where he tells them to: Rejoice in the Lord always (…) again Rejoice. And so joy is the invitation.
Now I don’t know how it is for you, but each year, when we light the pink candle, I have those thoughts popping into my mind: It’s Christmas already, Christmas is really coming soon, and the joy and excitement I am supposed to feel often leave room to anxious feelings about being ready for the big day. But I guess that Advent has been invented at a time where people celebrated Christmas with much more simplicity. I have a sense that these days there may be a little too much excitement around Christmas, an excitement that often turns into anxiety. I had much fun recently reading a book about an older couple who decide that they are fed up with creating Christmas magic every year for their family and friends and they announce they are going to “elope” to Hawaii on December 25th to just chill and get some rest. You may know the story as it had been turned into a movie as well. What’s so funny about it is this running joke about all the friends trying to talk them out of “canceling Christmas”, trying to force them into celebrating, even putting up a giant inflatable reindeer on their roof, and all in all trying to force them into making Christmas merry. And I guess a reason why we laugh is that we can somehow relate to those feelings. There is somehow around us this unacknowledged pressure to be happy and to make everyone happy at that time of the year, and it’s not that easy.
So my question for us this morning is the following: Will the church add to this pressure by asking us to be happy, or, on the other way around, does the church has something different to say about the way we should be rejoicing, making joy maybe, more accessible, more sensible, more meaningful? Then how are we to be joyful?
Well, I think this is interesting (honestly I find it even quite fascinating) that we are told about joy by following in the steps of John the Baptist. If you want my opinion, John the Baptist isn’t the person that comes to my mind when I think about joy. As we listen to him today preaching to the crowds, he seems more angry than cheerful, welcoming the crowds with calling them names and threatening them with fire and doom. And we know how he looked like, living in the wilderness, eating locusts and wearing camel hair. Doesn’t seem like John was a lot of fun. And yet. Yet if we go backward a little bit, the first thing Luke tells us about John in his Gospel is that he was this person filled with such joy it manifested even before he was born. When pregnant Elizabeth receives Mary in her home, she recognizes the mother of the Messiah because she could feel her baby leaping for joy in her womb. That’s a very touching story isn’t it? And so we know what was the secret of John’s joy, don’t we?
John didn’t find his joy in wearing pretty clothes, he didn’t find his joy in eating fine food, he didn’t even find joy in practicing his religion in the Temple, after all his father was a priest but he decided to live in the wilderness, which also makes me say that John didn’t even find joy in socializing, it looks like he wasn’t that great at social interactions anyway, no, John found his joy in Jesus, in announcing Jesus’s coming, in testifying about Jesus, in serving Jesus, in helping people know and love Jesus. John is not that angry he is passionate, he preaches the fire because he is on fire for Jesus.
Wow. So it looks like this is what the Third Sunday of Advent has in store for us: Find your joy in Jesus. Rejoice in the Lord always. Now how do we do that, you may want to ask?
I guess an easy answer would be to say well, let’s celebrate, worship and sing and we can certainly find that in the Scriptures, this is indeed what our psalmist seems to have in mind: Sing the praises of the Lord / Cry aloud / Ring out your joy. But if again we follow John, we see that joy comes not just in making ourselves merry, even merry for the Lord, no, joy comes with a life of repentance, through a life of repentance. And it’s interesting because we have started by noticing that in this penitential season, we sort of take a break from penitence to rejoice on this Sunday, and that’s a way of interpreting our liturgy, but yet another way to see it is to understand that joy is part of the circle of repentance, part of the wreath of repentance. John invites the people to prepare for the coming of the Messiah by repenting and not just with their mouths, saying they’re sorry, but repenting with their lives, in actions. So how does it look like?
– First of all, John invites the people to live with courage
We don’t know exactly what’s going on, but it looks like the people came to John because they were afraid. John talks about “the wrath to come” and it may not be about God’s wrath. Maybe people were looking for the Messiah to be protected from the Roman oppression or the social uprisings. When John calls them vipers, we often interpret that as if he was telling them they were “sneaky”, but he’s comparing them to snakes fleeing the fire as vipers used to do when the chaff in which they nested was burned in the fields at the end of the summer. John is inviting the people to look for the Messiah not for safety reasons or comfort but to serve him, as he himself does, even if he isn’t even worthy “to untie the thing of his sandals”, what slaves used to do for their Masters. The Messiah will baptize them with fire, indeed, an unquenchable fire until they are purified from sin, but that’s the way suffering and martyrdom has often been understood in Christianity, especially in early Christianity. We can flee from our suffering, or we can accept our suffering to come closer to God, to grow in faith. We know how John lived courageously to the end.
– Then John invites the people to live with generosity
This season is often about getting more, and we have a way of perceiving happiness by having more, but John sees it the other way around. Joy is in giving, and even more than that, we find joy in sharing: Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none, and whoever has food must do likewise. It is a little sad that we try to do something good for Christmas by giving away some of our old stuff or sending a check to some charity, when the purpose is to share what we have so we form a community, so we rely on each other and so we enjoy life together. It does not have to be big things.
We were talking in Bible study with George and Kaye about those who volunteered to help after the hurricane in NC and how people found joy together in sharing the simple things in life: warm blankets, hot soup. They told us how it seems that in the midst of disaster, people found their way back to one another and how surprising it was to see joy born in the midst of such tragedy.
– John also invites the people to live and work with integrity
We may imagine that we will have special joy if we do something very special, unique, if we manage a specific skill. On the other way around, John invites people to live the life they already have doing their best where they are, being honest, respecting people, not taking advantage of their little power. To the soldiers and the tax collectors, he says: Collect no more than the amount prescribed to you / Do not extort money. It’s an invitation for all of us that what we do become more important than the profit we make out of it. John does not say to people to live like him in the wilderness. He tells them they can find God and please God in their everyday activity if they do it for the purpose of being fair to others. I often hear that from the people who really love their job or activity: Money matters but it’s not the reason why they do what they do. If we put our heart, not our interest, in what we do, we will also find joy.
All of this is also the way I understand Paul’s invitation. When Paul tells the Philippians to Rejoice in the Lord always (…) again Rejoice he then adds: Let your gentleness be known to everyone. And I think that this is right: There is a joy in being good, in being gentle with others, a joy we find in making others happy. Now it has little to do with making Christmas magic happen, but we all long to be treated with kindness, respect and honesty. That’s what repentance is all about in the end. Repentance is not for the sake of torturing us, punishing us, it’s for the sake of opening our hearts to receive joy. True joy comes from God, and the closer we come to God, the more reasons we have to rejoice. It does not make our lives easier, it does not necessarily make them successful or devoid of suffering, but there is something inside of us that will keep carrying us through a life worth living.