Choose Joy

 Grace Episcopal Church, Monroe, La., Advent 3

You brood of vipers! Do not even try to make excuses for yourselves! God knows who you are; he made you. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 

 

So John the Baptizer preaches. Having grown up in a deeply protestant, rather Calvinistic religious tradition, I’ve heard many a sermon like that. The surprise here is that Luke, our observer of this sermon, concludes his account on an upbeat note. 

 

So, with many other exhortations, Luke says, he [John the Baptizer] proclaimed the good news to the people.

You know, if that’s the good news, I think I’ll pass on the bad new! 

Today is the 3^rd Sunday of Advent, the “Joy” Sunday. We celebrate this departure from the solemnity of Advent with a pink candle and pink vestments.  

 

Of course, there is good news—and cause for joy—in John’s sermon and I will come back to that. But for the moment, “joy” is a lot more obvious in our other lessons for today. 

 

Take Zephaniah: Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem! 

 

Listen to Paul writing to the Philippians: Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. 

 

Now, you might think from these passages, that Zephaniah and Paul were living in hunky dory times when they wrote these words, right? Everything must have been right in the world for them to experience such joy! The stock market was performing, the economy booming. The nations were at peace. Politics was all polite debate and cooperation. Unity abounded. No culture wars. Right? 

 

But of course, wrong! That’s not how it was at all. Zephaniah was a prophet. His main job was to preach God’s judgement to the Israelites—who at that point in time were divided into two nations that each seemed to be trying to outdo the other in terms of sinfulness. 

 

As for Paul, things were far from hunky dory. He most likely wrote his letter to the Philippians from a Roman jail. 

 

Joy is an emotion, and we humans have a strong tendency to think of emotions—like joy, happiness, contentment—as things we experience in response to… well, other things. Our lives are going well, so we are content. Our grandchildren are born, or about to be born as in my case! And we experience joy. Our families gather for the holidays and we are happy. 

 

Moreover, we come to depend on these other things to bring us joy or happiness or contentment. We look to the world around us and wait for the feelings to happen. 

 

Brothers and sisters, consider the possibility that joy is something we must choose, and we have good reason to choose it—regardless of what’s happening in the world around us. 

 

Here’s how I came to that realization. A number of years ago—probably at least 16 years ago—I went on a mission trip to the Dominican Republic. We met a woman missionary there who had arranged for us to work for most of a week cleaning and painting and getting an Episcopal day school ready for the school year. 

 

This Episcopal Day school was a very plain, basic school—small classrooms, a bare courtyard for a playground, no technology, no air conditioning, no closets stuffed with crayons, construction paper, markers, and more. In comparison, Grace Episcopal day school is quite luxurious. 

 

But then one day toward the end of the week, we finished our work early and our host took us to tour the community. And she took us to the most utterly poverty-stricken neighborhood I had ever seen, and to this day have ever seen. We drove down dirt streets. Trash was everywhere. Children played in the dirt and trash and weeds in front of houses built of scrap wood, rusty sheet metal, cardboard. Emaciated dogs scavenged for food. Open doorways and windows but no doors, no screens, no window panes. 

 

I was haunted by what I had seen. We finished our work in the next day or two and caught our flight back to the U.S. But I couldn’t get that neighborhood out of my mind. I had not the slightest idea how to help, and I still don’t. 

 

Oddly enough, very shortly after getting home, I was asked to speak at a worship service over at St. Thomas’. A group of folks—lay folks—were, at that time, meeting Sunday evenings for what we called a “praise service”—an informal worship comprised of singing, prayer, and sharing experiences of God in our lives. No clergy necessary, although a priest occasionally came by. 

 

And within days of getting back from that mission trip, I was asked to speak at that service. I did not know what to say. I was still haunted by the utter poverty of that neighborhood. It weighed on me. I did not feel like singing. I did not feel like praising God. If anything, I wanted to chew God out for letting that happen—as if God were responsible for the messes created by human societies. 

 

I did not feel joy. And so, I told the story, and then I said what I am saying to you today: We must choose joy. Joy is not a feeling we get when good things happen, when the stars align, when our children behave and our spouse gives us just what we wanted for Christmas. Joy is a choice we make. Regardless of what is going on in the world, we must choose joy. 

 

Listen to Creation

And why? Why must we choose joy? 

 

Zephaniah tells us: The Lord your God is in your midst, he says, and he says it not once but twice. He goes on to speak about God’s forgiveness and mercy—things to be joyful about, for sure. But the cause for joy, first and foremost, is—simply—that God is in our midst. In the midst of our sinfulness. In the midst of our political conflict. In the midst of our mess. 

 

St. Paul says basically the same thing: Rejoice…the Lord is near. And how about Isaiah? Look at the last verse of Canticle 9, the First Song of Isaiah: Cry aloud, inhabitants of Zion, ring out your joy, for the great one in the midst of you is the Holy One of Israel. 

 

We choose joy because God is with us in this troubled and troubling world. We choose joy because no mess we humans have ever made is beneath God’s presence. We choose joy because we know that God has never and will never give up on us. We choose joy because we are God’s beloved, and that is enough. 

 

Does that mean we are always going to feel joyful? Of course not. Does choosing joy let us off the hook of caring for a hurting world? Relieve us of responsibility for cleaning up the horrific messes we humans have created? Of course not. I’m not preaching this sermon to let us off the hook! 

 

So here’s where I want to look back at the good news in John the Baptizer’s sermon. He preaches repentance in no uncertain terms, and indeed people repent. And they say to John, What then should we do? 

 

And John answers: If you have two coats, give one to your neighbor who has none. Share the food you have. He does NOT say, go create world peace. Solve the problem of world hunger. Fix the broken political system.

 

See, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the troubles of the world. It is possible to be frozen in our tracks by seemingly insurmountable problems. It is tempting to do nothing because we know we can’t do everything. Sometimes we decide that we didn’t cause a situation therefore it’s not our job to fix it. 

 

But where is God in that? Those are truly human—but truly joyless––responses to a hurting world and to our hurting neighbors. But where is God in those responses? 

 

Choosing joy is choosing something deeper than the transitory emotions that come from external events and situations. It’s remembering who we are and who we belong to—in spite of what is going on around us, and then sharing that good news in whatever ways we are able––individually and corporately. Choosing joy is making God’s love known to our neighbor however we can—remembering what Jesus taught us: That of those who have much, more is expected. 

 

Brothers and sisters, do not sit around waiting for the feels. Choose joy, for the Lord our God is in our midst.

  

 In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. AMEN.