Philippians 4:4-7
Luke 3:7-18
East Brentwood Presbyterian Church
December 13, 2015
John Hilley
rd
3 Sunday in Advent
God With Us:
Joy in a Time of Fear
The following is John’s preaching notes that he used during the worship service.
Introduction
“Joy” is the theme for this third Sunday of Advent, the joy of Christmas, the joy that is at
the heart of the good news of Jesus Christ. An interesting part of this tradition of Advent
is the lighting of the Advent Wreath. And on this Sunday, we light the pink candle in the
Advent wreath. It is the joy candle. The other candles are purple, the color of penitence.
But today— Joy Sunday—we light a pink candle. (It’s not pink because Mary really
wanted a baby girl, as some have suggested.)
Advent… Joy.
But there is a great tradition of grumpiness in the days of leading up to Christmas.
There’s the Grinch who hates Christmas. Maybe it was because his shoes were too tight
and his heart was two sizes too small. Grinch hates Christmas so much that he steals
presents, steals stockings, even down to the last log in the fireplace of little Cindy Loo
Who’s fireplace.
I was feeling pretty grouchy this week having come down with this respiratory cold
which had me hacking like a chain smoking coal miner. As an antidote to my
grouchiness, yesterday I watched the Christmas classic Love Actually that has in it every
beautiful and famous British actor. It helped a little with my grouchiness. I guess I should
be thankful that I didn’t have to go out to do Christmas shopping and listen to all of the
Christmas carols. Like “Little Drummer Boy.” Not only is it a weird song as if there was a
drummer boy at the manger! Who would want drums played during childbirth?! Our
first son Aaron took a long time to decide to be born. His mother was about to hit me and
yell at me and I was just saying nice things and speaking in a soothing voice during labor.
Could you imagine if I had a drum to help calm her during contractions?! That carol is
just one in a long line of songs featuring weird things creeping into the nativity. I find
myself getting pretty snotty about commercial versions of Christmas with weird things
creeping into the nativity that have no basis in the biblical text. I can get grouchy with
some of the sentimental Christmas music. How did it go from what it was originally, a
story of alienation, about homelessness, refugees, religious and political tyranny, to all
that gets packaged today as Christmas. Bah Humbug!
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But, lest I digress , let’s get back to the subject of joy …
Frederick Buechner tells about a Christmas pageant in an Episcopal church. All the
characters were down front at the chancel steps, gathered around the manger. Most of
the children were dressed as angels, the angelic choir that at just the right moment was
supposed to sing “Glory to God in the highest.” But there were a lot of angels crowded
into a small space, and the ones in the back couldn’t see what was happening in the front.
“Glory to God in the highest,” they sang on cue. And then one little girl, in the very back
row “electrified the whole church by crying out in a voice shrill with irritation and
frustration at having her view blocked, ‘Let Jesus show’” (Secrets in the Dark, pp. 267–8).
That’s what we’re here for: to let Jesus show. Buechner writes, “There is so much that
hides Jesus, the church itself hides him, all the hoopla. . . . Let Jesus show in these
churches we have built for him not just Jesus as we cut him down to size in sermons and
Christmas songs…or in rules…or among the sentimentality of drummer boys, or three
kings, or kneeling Santas in the manger.
Today we light the… Joy… candle.
And how I need to be reminded about joy.
And maybe you need to, too.
You can make a good case that the Christian faith and the Jewish and Christian Bible are
basically about joy.
Yesterday early evening I stopped by Trader Joe’s to pick up a couple of groceries and in
checking out he asked me if I had big plans that evening. I said “no” -- that I had to get up
early today. He said, “oh, what for?” I paused and said I was a minister and then said I
had to finish a sermon. He said, “Oh… What is it on?” I said joy. He said, “I wonder how
many times that word is mentioned in the Bible?” I was on my way to say “I don’t know and I really didn’t know - but I was feeling the need to aim high and I was about to say
around 60 times” when he answered his own question: “it must be hundreds”. I
managed to recover and say “joy must be mentioned 60 times in the New Testament
alone.” (I went home and checked Strong’s Concordance -- joy is mentioned about 115
times in the Old Testament and 58 times in the NT. Yes!) There are a couple of places of
note:
Isaiah: “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. . . . Shout aloud and
sing for joy.” (Isaiah 12:3, 6)
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One of the most fascinating examples is in the Old Testament book of the prophet
Zephaniah, and the reason is that Zephaniah is really unpleasant, the gloomiest, most
unrelentingly dismal and depressing book in the Bible. Things are so terrible, people are
so awful, there is simply nothing good to say. The only thing is for God to destroy
everything and start all over again. And then, after several chapters of this, near the end,
without warning:
“Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel!
Rejoice and exult with all your heart.”
Apparently there’s something going on here that is more important than all the evil and
injustice and despair in the world; something more profound, more real, than all the
dismal gloom the prophet sees in the world; apparently there is a light shining in the
darkness.
Speaking of darkness, it is helpful to remember St. Paul who was in jail, in a dark, dank
cell somewhere in the Roman Empire, we’re not sure where exactly, but we know he was
on his way to Rome for his trial and probably execution. And what does he say to his
friends in the little church in Philippi, who themselves were facing persecution, torture,
and possible death? (I appreciate and draw upon John Buchanan’s exposition of the
Philippians text in his sermon “Rejoicing.”)
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.”
Of course, in the eyes of many, the church is not viewed as a place very joyful or even
very happy. Some of you come out of experiences of endless church services, stern piety.
Indeed Presbyterian is used by some writers as a synonym for grim, moralistic, tightlipped piety. We Presbyterians kid ourselves by describing our church as “God’s Frozen
Chosen.”
Having people like John the Baptist in your history doesn’t make things any easier. Talk
about a kill joy. No one wants to be chastised by John the Baptist this close to Christmas.
Not one of you wants to be challenged by John’s words. But there is no getting to
Bethlehem and the sweet baby in the manger without first hearing the rough prophet in
the wilderness call us to repentance. Faithful and fruitful arrival at the manger will only
be possible after the careful self-examination and recommitment called for in John. John
the Baptist stands between us and the baby Jesus in the manger and he calls us to focus
on that which is important. Reprioritize and return to lives focused on the love of God
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and the love of neighbor, he says. I do think joy and love of God and love of neighbor are
connected.
So is joy and good health. Research on happiness and joy points to evidence that joyful
people are healthy people. Joy actually produces endorphins which help us to cope with
pain. Joy, to be fully experienced, must be shared.
But, while joy leads to good health, it doesn’t make it easy. It can be an uphill battle.
There is a lot about life that is not particularly conducive to joy and rejoicing. Especially
right now. Truth be told, I was feeling pretty grumpy on account of the news. And that
so many people this week were filling the airwaves with their venom and hate. And fear.
And news that Americans are as fear filled now as we were immediately after September
11th. Such fear.
This week the very reasonable Marilynne Robinson wrote an article, titled “Fear.” She
wrote:
“There is something I have felt the need to say, that I have spoken about in
various settings, extemporaneously, because my thoughts on the subject
have not been entirely formed, and because it is painful to me to have to
express them. However, my thesis is always the same, and it is very simply
stated, though it has two parts: first, contemporary America is full of fear.
And second, fear is not a Christian habit of mind. As children we learn to
say, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will
fear no evil, for Thou art with me.” We learn that, after his resurrection,
Jesus told his disciples, “Lo I am with you always, to the close of the age.”
Christ is a gracious, abiding presence in all reality, and in him history will
finally be resolved.
She continues:
“These are larger, more embracing terms than contemporary Christianity is in the
habit of using. Be we are taught that Christ “was in the beginning with God; all
things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was
made…the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” We
as Christians cannot think of Christ as isolated in space or time if we really accept
the authority of our own texts. Nor can we imagine that this life on earth is our only
life, our primary life. As Christians we are to believe that we are to fear not the
death of our bodies but the loss of souls.” The loss of our souls, she writes, “in the
face of fear, real or pretended and in present time when we are buying Kalashnikov
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rifles in such numbers that it is helping subsidize rearmament of our one time Cold
War enemy.
In these current days, our emotions -- and our faith -- can in any one of a number of
directions: further down the rabbit hole of grouchiness… or we can go into the morass
of fear…or we can go in the opposite direction and overcompensate into some kind of
spiritual candy crush.
Imagine in this time of heightened fear in our nation, you are visiting New York City. You
are riding in a subway tunnel. There is a blackout. What do you do? Of course, you reach
for your smartphone. What would you do with it? You could use the remaining battery
power trying to find out all the ways one can die in a subway tunnel or send out text
messages saying “Oh my God, we are doomed.” You can respond to the fear and the
darkness by using the remaining battery in your cell phone to entertain yourself playing
Candy Crush. Or you could use that phone as a light to see others around you, to see the
contours of your environment around you, and maybe even to use it to walk through a
light source more reliable and powerful than your own. (Thanks to Nadia Bolz-Weber
for this image in her book Accidental Saints.)
“Rejoice always; do not worry about anything,” St. Paul admonished. This is no superficial,
Pollyannish, phony sentimentality. Religion has been used as a place to pretend that everything
is just fine with ourselves and the world. We have lost the plot if we have used religion as the
place we escape from the difficult realities instead of where the difficult realities are given
meaning.
What Paul is saying is not sentimentality; it is something that wells up out of the depths of a
person’s soul, something grounded in a reality more real, more powerful than any jail cell.
Rejoice! That’s easier said than done. We do worry. We have bills to pay, children to raise; we
have mortgages and home improvement loans. We worry about our cholesterol, our weight, and
the state of the nation.
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice,” a man wrote to his friends from a jail cell,
on his way to death. And the one he followed, Jesus, on the last evening of his life, knowing that
he was just hours away from his crucifixion, sitting at table with his friends, eating their last
meal together, must have startled them:
“I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be
complete.”
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In this season, we can turn to fear. We can turn to the sentimentality of bad Christmas songs.
Neither help us make sense of the world as it actually exists.
I’m turning to joy. And to the manger. Where if I find a little drummer boy there, so be it. But I
will take up company with the shepherds who, when, on a dark night long ago, were startled by a
sky full of light and singing, they heard an angel, a messenger from God: “Do not be afraid; for
see, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.”
There is a light that shines in every darkness. And because today, in whatever
circumstance you find yourself, God comes to you to love and save and give you life in all
its promise and fullness.
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