JOY, JOY, JOY

I’m always intrigued by stories of churches using gimmicks to get people’s attention. While it might be nice if the culture paid a little bit more attention to the church, I usually get uneasy with most of these attention grabbing stunts.

The gimmick, however, that I thought was interesting and might have some relationship to this morning’s Scripture passages happened at a megachurch in Nebraska. The minister was preaching an Advent sermon on joy and feeling joy in life. So for a dramatic illustration of joy, the church distributed helium balloons to all the people coming into the sanctuary for Sunday worship. Almost a thousand bright red balloons were handed to people that morning. And the instructions were for people to let go of their balloons when they felt joy sometime during the service. It was pretty nifty to see the balloons rising to the top of the high arched ceiling, as they were let go at different times during the service, sometimes during a song, or at the playing of a video clip on a big screen. But the illustration didn’t quite work out like the minister had intended. What would have been nice would have been seeing a thousand red balloons gathered at the top of the ceiling. But more than a third of the congregation hung on to their balloons. When the time for the benediction and the end of the service came this large group of the people were still holding on. It did make a dramatic point. Joy is not always easy to come by, even for Christian folks.

Unfortunately, the pastor decided to scold the people who were still holding on to their balloons. He preached, “You’ve got to let go of your balloons. Be joyful! Let your hearts be joyful! Let go of your balloons.” Of course this didn’t help. The natural human reaction to being lectured into joy by another human being is to turn around and go the other way. People started clenching tightly to their balloons. You can’t force someone into letting go of a balloon when they don’t feel like it. Better to ask what is it that helps us to genuinely let go of our balloons. What makes for joy?

The third Sunday of Advent is always the Sunday of JOY. We light the pink candle, the joy candle on the Advent wreath. The Epistle reading for this morning gives us the well-known words of the Apostle Paul, “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice.” We may remember the children’s song using these very same words. But this joy of Paul’s is a surprising joy. He expresses this joy over and over again to the Christians in Philippi, even as he is writing them from his prison cell. He shares his gift of joy with these fellow Christians. But it is surely more than a command. Because we know that sometimes Paul was on the other pendulum swing of human emotion as he said, “groaning with all creation and its travail.” There is certainly always reason for joy. Yet joy is not reason. Joy is not only the decision of the human will. Joy is at the very same time a human emotion from the heart. It cannot be turned on and off like a light switch. It is a gracious and lovely gift. We receive it through faith. But we do not control or possess it. The joy he shares comes from beyond his present circumstances and ultimately this grateful, hopeful expression of heart, soul, mind and will comes from the God in whom he trusts.

We also hear a song of joy in the Gospel reading, the Magnificat of Mary. The young, soon to be mother, sang “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” She sang this joyful song after visiting with her cousin Elizabeth. Elizabeth helps Mary to welcome the news that came from an angel. The angel told Mary that she was to conceive a child. That news in and of itself wouldn’t have been that great. For Mary was only engaged. The customs of her day meant that her life would now be at risk as an unwed mother. The social pressures and stigmas would have been horrible and isolating. But the angel said that the child was not just any child. He would be called the Son of the Most High. This child, the angel said, came as an unlikely gift of the Holy Spirit. This child would grow up to be an amazing and surprising King. Mary received this news with faith. She trusted the promise of the angel. She decided not to run away and hide from what was now beginning to happen to her. She trusted that God was literally at work within her. And now God had given her work to do. Mary had nine months of demanding work that was coming her way. She had the new purpose of a mother with the news that she would not only bear but also raise a child. Receiving this news with faith and trusting the God’s purpose within it, she sang, “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.”

In Mary’s experience we see that joy comes in very down to earth and hands on ways. Having work to do, understanding one’s meaningful place and purpose that is connected to the grace and work of God brings joy.

One of the wonderful, often overlooked stories of joy in the Christmas story is the story of Simeon and Anna. They were both well advanced in years. Luke’s Gospel tells us that Anna was eighty-four years old. Their work, their heavenly purpose at the end of their life was simply to hold Jesus as a baby. They were in the temple when Joseph and Mary brought the enfant into the temple to be named and presented. Simeon came first to hold the child and then Anna. They claimed that this newborn would be a light to the world. And they rejoiced and praised God. And we remember their story two thousand years later. Anna, Simeon, Zechariah and Elizabeth and Mary all rejoiced – their circumstances were not always easy or likely experiences for joy, but in the midst of them they had discovered God to be present with them and God making them a part of what God was doing.

A favorite writer of mine is also a farmer. Wendell Berry tends the family farm on which he grew up in Henry County, Kentucky. He shares these reflections in his collection of writings entitled, What Are People For?

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces with health. It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it, we lose loneliness:

we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other's arms,

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.

That is a surprisingly joyful description of work learned from farming. I’ve known numerous farmers over the years, enough to know that farming is hard work. Yet Berry knows that his work is also a gift, imbued with purpose and meaning beyond his own efforts. Berry’s observations connect with the insights of young Mary and the Apostle Paul.

The message of Christmas gives us every reason for joy. Yet the way that we experience that joy …. the way that we feel it comes in down to earth and hands on ways. When we have good work, when we have meaningful things to do and when do them with faith in the God of Jesus Christ these become the occasions for joy in our lives. The work that we see in these Scripture passages is very different for each individual like Elizabeth, Mary, Simeon and Anna, and the vast array of people of every age and walk of life in Luke’s introduction to the Messiah’s birth. The work and purpose that each one of us as individual Christians find in our own lives is as different and unique as God has made each one of us to be. Yet as the body of Christ, as the church, we all share the gift of unique work to be done together. Worship is the work of the gathered people of God; the work we do together We have good and meaningful and worshipful work to do as we come to sing praise to God, to attend to the Scriptures and to lift up prayers for the world. It can be easy to lose sight of this most basic and central purpose of the church. Our technological and media age sometimes challenges the worth of this most basic work that the church has to do. Isn’t there something else that would make a bigger splash? Something to capture the news media’s attention. Why not try something else – maybe a Christian reality t.v. show – something like Presbyterian Survivor? I can see it twelve Presbyterian elders left on a deserted island with nothing but a Bible and a communion bread and grape juice.

Worship may not always be popular but it is always needful. There is nothing else like it. God calls and gathers us together. And the work of worship reorients us to God. It turns our perspective around from the ways of the world. We wake up and realize that we are not the audience in worship. We are the actors and God is the audience. For God is Creator and we are creature. And in this sense worship restores us to who we are, human beings created in the divine image, made for relationship with God and each other. And this memory that comes through the work of praise, prayer, song and Word becomes the opportunity for joy. Because we remember who we are and who God is. For only in being oriented to an eternal God do we find the possibility to transcend the anxieties and fears of the world and to fully know the experience of joy.

Frederick Buechner, from Whistling in the Dark

Have no anxiety about anything," Paul writes to the Philippians. In one sense it is like telling a woman with a bad head cold not to sniffle and sneeze so much or telling a lame man to stop dragging his feet.

Paul does not deny that the worst things will happen finally to all of us, as indeed he must have had a strong suspicion they were soon to happen to him. He does not try to minimize them. He simply tells the Philippians that in spite of them—even in the thick of them—they are to keep in constant touch with the One who unimaginably transcends the worst things and also unimaginably transcends the best.

"In everything," Paul says, they are to keep on praying. Come hell or high water, they are to keep on asking, keep on thanking, above all keep on making themselves known. He does not promise them that as a result they will be delivered from the worst things any more than Jesus himself was delivered from them. What he promises them instead is that "the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

That is the sense in which he dares say, "Have no anxiety about anything." Or, as he puts it a few lines earlier, "Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, Rejoice!"

Friends, may the Holy Spirit be with your hearts and minds and bring you joy! In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.