joy — Andy James

Mary: Casting Aside Fear

December 13, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 1:26-55
preached on December 13, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It had begun as an ordinary day in an ordinary town in Palestine for an ordinary hometown girl Mary, but by the time it was over everything was different for everyone. In the midst of this ordinary day, the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and gave her the surprise of a lifetime. She had to have been startled and afraid, to say the least. What did God want to do with her anyway? She was just a young girl, waiting for her day to come as she would move into full adulthood upon her marriage to Joseph, preparing for the journey of life that seemed to be clear before her—but not yet begun—in marriage and childbearing, watching for something new to take hold in her own world and in the world around her.

But the angel Gabriel explained that God could and would do amazing things in and through her. First, he assured Mary that there was nothing to fear in this surprising visit. She had “found favor with God” and would “conceive in [her] womb and bear a son,” who would “be great, and… called the Son of the Most High.” Even her virginity would not get in the way of all this, for she would bear this holy child by the power of the Holy Spirit. After all this, just to make it abundantly clear, he closed by assuring her, “Nothing will be impossible with God.” Mary responded with confidence beyond her young age: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” As the angel left her, she returned to her day, her life forever changed by this encounter on this ordinary day.

The days that change us usually start out looking pretty ordinary, too. Whether things change for the better or the worse, there is strangely little that distinguishes days of great change for us from others at first. The day we get a new job offer, the day we learn of the death of a good friend, the day the world around us seems to break down in yet another way—all these days begin in the same way even though they end with incredible shifts of life to bring us hope or cause us despair.

While our ordinary days are rarely if ever marked with the sort of direct encounter with an angel of the Lord as Mary experienced, we might find God in our midst in unexpected ways on our ordinary days. Maybe we will receive a surprising possibility that offers us a new and different way for the days ahead. Maybe a crisis will come that leaves us seeking God’s presence and hope as we respond. Or maybe our hopes and expectations for life have been upended, with no clear understandings of different possibilities for the days ahead even as we are challenged to set aside our fears and live in hope.

Amid all these unexpected encounters with God, the angel’s words to Mary should echo in our lives, too. The angel’s confident words “do not be afraid” and “nothing will be impossible with God” are addressed to us, too. In these fearful days, when even the most ordinary days seem filled with the possibilities of terror, when we wonder when, not if, when we will be victims of some dramatic tragedy, when we learn about disaster and crisis in every corner of the world almost instantaneously, when we are so easily turned against our common humanity because of our fears of things that are different or beyond our comprehension, when even the hopeful things of our lives can lead us to live in fear, the angel’s words to Mary should give us comfort. We do not have to be paralyzed by uncertainty, torn apart by anxiety, forced to live in fear and paranoia, or left wondering what will happen to us. In the light of Mary’s encounter with the angel, we can instead be confident that God’s presence will sustain us on our ordinary and extraordinary days. Even the transformation that we so desperately need and that seems so impossible to attain will not be impossible with God.

Mary’s changed life continued as she set out to meet her cousin Elizabeth. The angel had told her that Elizabeth was also experiencing the unexpected gift of a child, and so she set out to share these days with her relative. When she arrived, their joyous meeting reflected the new ordinary for both of them. They were filled with hope and wonder at the new lives that they were bearing into the world, and there was something incredible about sharing it together.

As their joy and hope met, they both broke into song. Elizabeth celebrated the gift of encountering this woman who would bear such a life into the world. Her son, still in her womb, leaped for joy as soon as Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, and they were all filled with the blessing of God as they shared this time.

Then Mary offered up her own words of praise in the incredible words that have come to be known as the Magnificat. Her rejoicing was directly addressed to God who made all these things possible, who lifted up this lowly, ordinary servant, showered great blessing upon her, and showed the wonder of God’s name in these acts. She rejoiced that God was doing a new thing in and through her to transform the world, showing strength and power and might over against the seemingly powerful persons of the world, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry, sending the rich away empty, and helping God’s people by showing the depths of mercy and hope from generation to generation.

We can know these depths of mercy and hope in our own generation, too. We can walk together with our sisters and brothers in faith and life as Mary and Elizabeth did to find the hope that we need in our ordinary and extraordinary days. When we are overcome by fear and uncertainty, we can come together to find support for the journey. When we are tempted to retreat to our own corners of life and separate ourselves from others, we are reminded that we are better together. And when there is cause for rejoicing in our lives, there is no better way to do it than to share such a moment with others.

We can join Elizabeth and Mary in songs of praise to God of our own. When our world leaves us wondering how we might begin to offer thanks, we can still offer our cries for a different way. When we cry out in this way for God’s transformation to take hold, we praise God for the ways in which things have changed before and show the depth of our faith and hope that these things can and will take place again. And as our experiences bring songs of praise, we join our voices with Elizabeth and Mary and so many other generations, celebrating the ways that God has been at work in our midst even as we look for all things to be possible in God’s gift of the days ahead and work to set aside our fears so that we can fully participate in God’s new creation as it comes into our midst.

So as we journey through these Advent days, may we trust that the angel who spoke to Mary speaks also to us on our most ordinary and most extraordinary days, inviting us to set aside our fears and trust that nothing will be impossible with God, so that we might share in the wonder and hope that comes to us in the birth, life, death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus Christ until he comes again to make us and all things new. Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.

No Joy in Mudville

September 22, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Jeremiah 8:17-9:1
preached on September 22, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

This has not been a good summer for baseball fans in New York. The Mets fans among us are pretty well adjusted to the season coming to an end in mid-September, but Yankees fans just aren’t quite as prepared for the way the Bronx Bombers haven’t lived up to expectations this summer—though apparently from the little I’ve heard it’s not quite over yet!! All in all, there is so little joy among baseball fans in New York this year that you’d think Casey had just struck out in Mudville!

But baseball is only the beginning of the things that are dragging down our hearts and minds these days. With each passing day, there seem to be more reasons to join the prophet Jeremiah in his lament:

My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.

It has been a tough few months in our world. We narrowly escaped what would have likely been a nasty and long entry into the ongoing civil war in Syria, and I’m not sure we’re fully out of the woods yet. We’ve had little option other than to just watch as incredible floods in Colorado and fires in California have left thousands displaced from their homes. Terrorist attacks continue around the world, as at least 39 people were killed by an armed attack on a mall in Nairobi yesterday that continues even now and at least 75 more people were killed today when two explosions rocked a church in Pakistan. Closer to home, women and men and children keep getting attacked by shooters armed with guns that seem to have little place among us except to bring deeper and broader violence, this first on Monday in the midst of a busy military office building in Washington, DC, as 13 people were killed, then on Thursday in a city park in Chicago as another 13 were wounded, including a three-year-old boy, not to mention the countless other violent crimes involving guns that aren’t quite spectacular enough to merit mention on the nightly news. And if that weren’t enough to make your hearts heavy, this week the House of Representatives voted to cut $40 billion a year from the basic programs that help feed the poor in our country, removing four million people from those eligible to receive these benefits in a time when we still have the highest poverty levels in two decades. All these things leave me crying out with Jeremiah, “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.”

Jeremiah’s cry went well beyond this, though. His original lament in our reading this morning was rooted in a world under attack. Just before these verses, the prophet describes the arrival of troops from the north as the people hear “the snorting of their horses” and “the neighing of their stallions,” and yet the prophet’s cries here make it clear that the people still have not responded to God’s invitation to find a new and different way. “Is the Lord not in Zion?” he asks. “Is her King not in her?” Everyone assumes that the destruction about to be let loose upon Israel can be blamed on the absence of God in their midst, and even God does not deny this, responding by saying, “Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?” The people seem to have it coming, yet they also assume that God will step up and save them, even though the seasons shift and turn and nothing has changed.

But this seeming anger is not the only divine emotion expressed here. The people of Israel are not just “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” to quote the famous sermon title of Jonathan Edwards, great preacher of the First Great Awakening. The prophet here insists that God is up to something more and very much interested in finding a new way:

For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt;
I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?
O that my head were a spring of water,
and my eyes a fountain of tears,
so that I might weep day and night
for the slain of my poor people!

God clearly does not take joy in bringing down those who go astray but instead cries out with deep and real lamentation because things have taken such a nasty turn. God is not happy to pursue vengeance or restitution for the ways the people have offended but rather desires to restore the full health and wholeness of God’s people. God does not seek to kill the people who have so deeply offended but rather weeps day and night for the slain of the people of Israel.

These are incredibly different words than those we heard only a week ago. Last Sunday we heard about how God rejoices when one sinner comes to repentance, about how God’s rejoicing is so deep and broad and wide that it gives us room to transform our own words and actions in our world so filled with pain and hurt. Yet these words of lamentation from Jeremiah this morning do not describe a different God but the same God. The same God who rejoices when humanity lives into God’s new way also weeps when we make a huge mess of things enough to put a whole people or nation or world at risk. The same God who rejoices like a shepherd finding a lost sheep or a woman locating a lost coin falls into mourning and dismay when any of God’s people are hurting. The same God who invites us to join in rejoicing because of God’s deep and wide grace for all creation also invites us to join in lamentation not only when there is no joy in Mudville, Flushing Meadows, or the Bronx, but also in Damascus, Nairobi, Peshawar, Chicago, Washington, or the homes of the hungry and hurting around us.

If we take all these words seriously and wish to join the full divine embrace of joy and lamentation, we may have to think differently about some things. We must take care when we claim God’s blessing upon us for the joy that comes our way, for if this divine blessing so fleeting that it becomes easy to question the presence of God in times of trouble, we have misunderstood the depth of God’s grace. We must not give thanks to God that we aren’t quite as bad off as that person over there, in whatever form that thanksgiving takes, for God does not rejoice in our good state but rather longs for justice and peace and relief for those who are in greatest need. And we must not feel the immediate and constant need to embrace some nugget of good in every situation, as we might do in trying—always ineffectively, I might add!—to comfort the family of one who has died with trite words that their loved one has “gone to a better place” or that untimely death is “part of God’s plan.” God does not offer words like these but instead cries out as we hear from the prophet today:

My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick….
For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt;
I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.

With each passing day, I am more and more convinced that God ultimately desires our deepest and greatest honesty—our true, deep, heartfelt rejoicing when there is life to be celebrated and our honest and true lamentation when pain and hurt and strife are the real marks of the day. When we deal with others, then, the best we can offer them is time and space to make these same expressions of joy and sorrow, of thanksgiving and lament, for we know and trust that God is present with us and joins us wherever we are, in our joy and in our sorrow.

This amazing gift of God’s presence in joy and sorrow also calls us to transform our own lamentation for the pain and hurt of our lives and our world into action. We are called to cry out and work for peace in the midst of the wars of our world. We are called to respond with compassion and hope to those whose homes and lives have been touched by natural disasters. We are called not just to root out those who instigate horrible acts of terrorism but to enter into new ways of relationship with others in our world so that the anger and hurt that make such fertile ground for these things can finally be set aside. We are called to demand full enforcement of our current laws around gun control and to speak out for new, reasonable measures to prevent the kinds of massacres that keep happening, not just in dramatic incidents every couple months but every single day in so many places around our country. And we are called not just to make a difference for the hungry in our own community as we have done so well in our work with the Grace Church Food Pantry but to work on a broader scale to ensure that all people have access to the healthy food that they need to be well.

So may we join Jeremiah and God in the lamentations of our days, not just because there is no joy in Mudville or the baseball season hasn’t gone as we hoped but because there is yet more pain and sorrow in our lives and our world. And even as we lift our voices with cries of pain and hurt and dismay, may we join in God’s work of transforming this sadness into joy, of melting down the weapons of war to become the instruments of peace, of making a new and different way for all God’s people, for there is a balm in Gilead,the health of all people will be restored, and the sorrow of all will be washed away. Thanks be to God. Amen.

A Seeking, Rejoicing God

September 15, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 15:1-10
preached on September 15, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Many churches these days spend a lot of time, energy, and money talking about “seekers.” According to their research and approach, there are a lot of “spiritual seekers” out there who are looking for a church of one sort or another. These seekers usually fit a very specific demographic: white, usually married men and women, with one or two children and middle-class suburban values and sensibilities. They use this focus on seekers as the guiding principle behind all the other things that they do, establishing small groups that meet in people’s homes and talk about the problems brought on by our intense and busy culture, designing worship and choosing music to support the individual’s life of faith, and setting up other programs that meet specific perceived needs of this population. There are people who are very much seeking this kind of community, but increasingly I wonder if there are as many people who don’t fit this model as those who do.

This morning’s reading from Luke gives us two parables about seekers, but these folks seem to be quite different from the seekers these churches are expecting. When he told these stories, Jesus was talking with “tax collectors and sinners,” although they were not his intended audience! They were not the seekers he was referring to. Instead, he directed these stories more at the hyper-religious Pharisees and scribes who were criticizing Jesus for the company he was keeping.

First he told the story of a man who had lost one sheep out of a hundred. This strange shepherd leaves the rest of the flock behind to go seek out this one sheep who is lost, then he returns with it on his shoulders. This seeking shepherd rejoices because his one lost sheep has been found, and he feels it worthy of a celebration for everyone! So Jesus connects this rejoicing back to his audience of Pharisees and scribes—and the tax collectors and sinners who were certainly also listening in!—by noting that “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”

Then Jesus repeats the same model and outline with a second story of a different seeker, this time a woman who has lost one of her ten silver coins. She is so intent on seeking it out and finding it that she lights a lamp, uses precious oil, sweeps the house clean, and turns the house upside down until she finds it. Then she too invites her friends and neighbors to join her rejoicing, just as “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

If we take a closer look at these parables, we have to notice the characters here. Who is doing the seeking? What is actually being sought? Unlike the seekers so many churches desire, the seekers here are not people but God. The ones doing the seeking and the subsequent rejoicing are stand-ins not for humans but for the divine, and it is surely worth noting that the second story puts a woman into this role, the only time in the New Testament when a parable “presents a woman as a metaphor or allegory for God.” (Charles Cousar, “Exegetical Perspective on Luke 15:1-10,” Feasting on the Word Year C Volume 4, p. 71) The things being sought out are also notable, as the lost sheep and lost coin are deeply precious and yet have little or no control over being lost.

The scribes and Pharisees in Jesus’ day—and some of the more legalistic among us in our own—would not particularly like this, preferring to keep the emphasis on repentance and encouraging a sense of personal responsibility for sinfulness. But Jesus will have none of this today. His emphasis here is on joy, for these stories do not call sinners to find a new way but rather invite everyone, especially those who consider themselves particularly righteous, to join in God’s celebration of new life.

In reflecting on the joy in these parables in Luke 15, Henri Nouwen offers a beautiful word:

God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising [God] for [all] goodness. No, God rejoices because one of [God’s] children who was lost has been found. What I am called to is to enter into that joy. It is God’s joy, not the joy that the world offers. It is the joy that comes from seeing a child walk home amid all the destruction, devastation, and anguish of the world. It is a hidden joy, [an] inconspicuous [minute detail]….

But God rejoices when one repentant sinner returns. Statistically that is not very interesting. But for God, numbers never seem to matter…. From God’s perspective, one hidden act of repentance, one little gesture of selfless love, one moment of true forgiveness is all that is needed to bring God from [the] throne to run to [a] returning son and to fill the heavens with sounds of divine joy. (Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 114, 116)

So today’s kickoff celebration seems like an appropriate time to hear these parables anew and spend our time rejoicing. We can use a moment to stop and celebrate and enjoy a crisp fall day at the end of a long and hot summer. We can appreciate a new and different word in the midst of so many other words in our world. And we need a reminder to rejoice as we begin a new time in our life together as my hours shift and change in my service to this congregation.

At our core, I think we are pretty good at this kind of celebration, at welcoming those who might have been called “tax collectors and sinners” back in Jesus’ time, at leaving room for our faith to deepen and our seeking God to find us in the midst of the strange and confusing wilderness of our world, at putting our focus on the rejoicing that God calls us to do each and every day. When I think about the seekers here, though, I am challenged by these images of this seeking God—a shepherd who is not afraid to leave ninety-nine sheep behind to find the one who is lost, a woman who is willing to burn a extra oil in her lamp and get dirty from stirring up all the dust around the house just to find one lost coin.

We can certainly be grateful that we have a God who will do this for us and for anyone, but I don’t think that mere gratitude is enough. Beyond joining in the rejoicing, I believe that we are also challenged to join God in the search, to leave behind the familiar and certain so that we can discover the deeper and greater pleasure of something new, to use the gifts that we have been given in new and different ways, maybe even to get a little dirty and put a few things at risk as we look to recover the lost coins and lost sheep of our world today. We are invited not just to set aside our uncertainties about those who are different from us but in fact to join God in seeking out those very kinds of people who are lost and cannot even cry out for help. We are encouraged not just to throw open our doors and see who shows up in our life together but to go out and seek not just those who are already seeking us but even more those who are not even able to know that they need to seek something, those who cannot even begin to cry out for new life.

This might mean giving up things that are dear to us: a little extra time, maybe some beloved traditions, almost certainly some money, and maybe even a whole lot more. Yet the rejoicing that can emerge from this search can be so much more rewarding. We can transform our understanding of our lives and our relationships, recognizing that they are not grounded in the merit of what we or others do but rather in the deep and wide mercy of God for us and all creation. We can seek out others, not just to increase the numbers in our midst or address their eternal fate but to invite them to share in the kind of rejoicing that gives us life. And in giving up something of what we have been, we might discover that God is seeking us too, that God is working to find the things within us that seem to be lost, that God is diligently searching our hearts and our lives to help us to lift up the times and places and ways that we too can made new, and that God is inviting us to rejoice as these new things take hold in us.

So may God open our hearts and our minds and our lives to this new and deeper rejoicing, that we might welcome the God who seeks us, join God in diligently and hopefully seeking out those who are lost, and share in rejoicing with God and all creation until all that is lost is found and all things are made new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Joy Abundant

December 16, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Philippians 4:4-7 for the Third Sunday of Advent
preached on December 16, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

The past two days have been an incredible mix of emotions for me. I spent Friday as a somewhat usual day off—until I heard of the horrific events of the school shooting in Newtown, when I then tried to follow the news as best I could without becoming engrossed in the sad and difficult news of the day. Then, as many of you know, I spent all day yesterday on a very quick trip to Washington, DC, where about thirty members of the choir I sing with sang at the White House to provide entertainment for the public holiday tours.

It was a strange mixture of two days. Friday, nothing seemed right. Christmas seemed an eternity away, with some twenty children killed mercilessly in yet another incident of gun violence that for some reason we are unable or unwilling to do anything about. Then yesterday, within seconds of walking into the White House, Christmas came into sharp view, with some of the most beautiful decorations I have ever seen and the scent of pine and fir all around. I told one of my fellow singers that I felt like Christmas had finally begun! Several of us noted how it seemed quite strange to sing about joy and happiness after Friday’s events, but the eventual decision was to set aside the horrific events of Friday and try to set a celebratory mood for the day, and I think it worked.

The past two days have felt very much like a strange mix of joy and sadness, but that’s also what we face today in our worship. Today is the third Sunday of Advent, the time each year where we light the pink candle of the Advent wreath and celebrate the joy that comes when Jesus is born. The texts appointed for this day talk about the joy and hope that comes in and through the birth of Jesus, and so we normally think about how this season is filled with great joy and hope and promise, and we finally get to sing one of the great Christmas carols, “Joy to the World,” because it fits with Advent as much as Christmas.

But today, the joy and hope and promise of Advent and Christmas seem to be left in the midst of the horrors at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Rejoice in the Lord always, even in the midst of this?? Paul couldn’t have meant that we have to rejoice today, could he? If we take our last song seriously, do we have to be thankful for this? In the face of such tragedy and death, what are we to do? Celebrate?

One option for rejoicing that I hear a lot in times like this is to be thankful that it wasn’t us, that no one we knew was killed, or that the violence didn’t get any worse. In the face of such suffering, I don’t think it is our place to rejoice that we aren’t as bad off as those people over there or to thank God that we haven’t faced such loss ourselves. As Christians, it is our call to stand with those who face this kind of immense, real, deep loss and pain and to do everything we can to embody the love, grace, mercy, and justice of God in Christ each and every day.

So in the midst of such a challenge, I am grateful that this text says that there is more for us to do. Some days we just can’t rejoice, but since there is more to do, we can move on for now and come back to rejoicing on another day—or maybe even later on in this sermon! So when Paul suggests that our gentleness be known to everyone, I think we might have something that seems doable in a moment like this. We can be gracious and understanding to those who approach these difficult days from very different perspectives. We can respond to such heinous violence in our world not with more violence but rather with a generous and gentle call to peace. And we can listen and hear in such a way that those who suffer pain and loss in the midst of this and so many other moments of violence know that we stand with them and will join in God’s work to make all things new.

After we start down the path to gentleness, Paul challenges us yet again to trust that the Lord is near. On days like yesterday for me, that felt entirely possible. Amidst the beautiful holiday decor of the White House, amidst the pageantry and majesty of Washington, DC, amidst the presence of my fellow singers and in the beautiful music we created together, God felt very near. But on Friday, God didn’t seem very near but in fact felt very much absent—not because there was no prayer in the school as some have suggested but because the horrific things that happened there were so far from what God intends for creation. Yet the Lord is still near. In the life and death of Jesus, we see that God has experienced the full breadth and depth of human life even as he conquered the fullness of death and destruction, and we can trust that he will return to make that victory full and complete and joyous for all. In moments like this, in joy and sorrow, we can be confident that the Lord is and will be near to make all things new for us and all creation.

But then Paul continues with another challenge: “Do not worry about anything.” Have you ever tried not to worry about anything? It’s not easy, and I’m not sure I know anyone who has been able to pull it off, because when I try, I all too soon start to worry about how much I worry! Paul certainly tempers this perspective with an instruction to be faithful in prayer, but it is nonetheless incredibly difficult to set aside all the things that make us worry even when we can turn to God in prayer.

And finally, Paul tells us to trust God’s peace: “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” If this peace can come, then send it our way, O God! It sure would be helpful in the Middle East these days, and Newtown could use some of it, too. But while this peace will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, Paul says it also surpasses all understanding—so sometimes we may have it when we don’t even know it.

But amidst this peace that surpasses all understanding, alongside all the pain and sorrow and sighing of these days, along with the joyful expectation of Christmas, we might finally be ready to embrace the fullness of this joy. Real and true and complete joy comes not from imprisoning ourselves in deep sorrow, not from taking pleasure in the pain of others, not from always having everything that we need and want, but from a way of life that shows deep and real gratitude for the gifts we have from God, for God’s presence with us in the midst of every storm, and for God’s gift of new life that emerges in the face of death. This joy is not about us and our happiness, about smiling faces or simple laughter or even safety amidst great peril. Joy is not about escaping the pain of our world with a holiday that doesn’t deal in the real here and now, for if Christmas is anything, it is a celebration of our God who came into our midst to dwell in the dark and painful stuff of our world. This joy that is solely about our happiness, this joy that simply wants to escape the real things of life—these are the forced cheer and shallow celebration that we confessed earlier today, things that we too often claim are the fullness of what God intends.

Instead, the deep, real, true joy that God gives us may not always be cheerful or happy, but it does show us how God can transform us and our world through justice, mercy, and peace. It helps us to see how the world is about more than our own happiness. It reminds us that God has broken into our world in Jesus to feel the joy and sorrow of the human experience. And it promises us that there is something more in store for us than what we can see in the here and now.

So in these days when joy may seem so far off and yet so near, when our lives and our world are touched by pain, violence, sorrow, and confusion, may God open our eyes to the One who comes to bring us real and true and deep joy, to the One who transforms possibility into promise and pain and suffering into new life, to the One who breaks into our world to bring us wonder and peace and hope so that our joy might be all the more complete and real and deep and true when we welcome Jesus on Christmas morning and when he returns to make all things new.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Rejoice Always

December 12, 2011 By Andy James

a sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent on 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24
preached on December 11, 2011, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

“Rejoice always.”

In the wonderful list of exhortations and instructions that the apostle Paul offers to the church in Thessalonica, I think this one has to be the hardest. It’s not easy to pray without ceasing or give thanks in all circumstances, nor can we easily be open to the words of prophets, hold fast to what is good, or abstain from every form of evil. But “rejoice always”? It just seems nearly impossible.

Thankfully there has been a lot of reason for me to rejoice lately. Last weekend, I spent an afternoon with dear friends and their two sons, enjoying many laughs and lots of fun as we saw a movie and took a leisurely afternoon to wander around Brooklyn together. Then I spent last Sunday evening in one of my favorite churches in Manhattan, listening to beautiful music and timeless words of waiting and wonder amidst the quietness of the Advent season. This week has been a good one on the church front, too – first as we learned that the pending litigation against the church is finally being settled and as we took some major steps toward completing the sale of the manse, too. You’ll be hearing more about these things in the coming weeks, but I for one am quite joyful that things are finally moving along with two projects that have occupied a lot of our time and energy in recent months.

But even amidst all this, everything hasn’t been joyful this week. Even all this joy has been tinged with something else – there’s always been something just under the surface nagging me and suppressing my joy. There were little things that went wrong – a broken paper shredder in the midst of a major cleaning project at the manse that led to an unexpected, unbudgeted expense for me – but also bigger things like changing plans that took away from hoped-for time with friends and another friend who lost his job this week and just doesn’t have a clear picture of what is ahead.

But all the little things that suppress joy in my own life seem so small amidst all the pain and struggle around us in our world – the uncertainty around elections in Russia and the Congo, the continued frustrations of economic and political life in our own nation, state, and city, and the heart-wrenching news of another shooting at Virginia Tech University on Thursday just as they finally were beginning to recover from the last tragedy there several years ago.

So in the midst of all the struggles of our lives, it’s not so easy to “rejoice always” – unless you count schadenfreude, that German concept of taking pleasure in the pain of others, as rejoicing! But yet Paul’s exhortation is still before us: “Rejoice always.”

It was surely just as difficult for his first hearers to take this seriously. They were some of the earliest converts to this new religious practice, and they didn’t have a clear path for how to behave or what to do. They were a tiny minority group in a city and nation where even perceived disloyalty to the practices of the empire meant troubles of all sorts. And people around them just didn’t understand why they would embrace this new religious faith and practice that seemed to bring nothing more than difficulty and struggle. And yet Paul instructed them to rejoice always.

I don’t think Paul didn’t understand what this was all about – he knew that rejoicing isn’t always easy. But he knew that rejoicing is about more than temporary things, about more than happiness in the here and now, about more than just seeing our needs and desires fulfilled and realized right away. Our vision of joy has become so limited, captured in an ideal of happiness for this immediate moment, locked up in snow-capped letters with little meaning on holiday cards or alongside the latest display in your favorite store, found first and foremost in gaining something right away for our immediate fulfillment and happiness.

But there is so much more to this joy and rejoicing than just these things. Joy goes beyond this immediate moment, beyond mere platitudes and snow-capped letters that show up in the ever-expanding holiday season, beyond the momentary happiness that comes as we enjoy time with friends and watch long-planned projects finally come to an end. Instead, real joy inspires us and even demands for us to look beyond the immediate things, to trust that there is something more than what we can see happening before us, to open our eyes to the transformation possible in and through our struggle and our happiness, to hope that God will be up to more than we can imagine and understand.

Advent and Christmas bring us true joy not just because Jesus has come but also and even more because Jesus is coming again, because there will be joy beyond all our dreams, because everything that drains us of true joy will be drained of all its power over us, because this world does not and will not have the last word on anything, for there is great joy yet to come in and through Jesus Christ our Lord.

And so on this Sunday when we celebrate joy, when we let a little more Christmas joy creep into the preparations of our Advent, when we look again to God with hope and longing for the new things yet to come, when we light a pink candle and sing songs that speak of deep joy, we remember not happiness but deep and real joy, not empty platitudes of happiness that last only as long as the newness of gifts on Christmas morning but the joy of promises once fulfilled that will be fulfilled again, not temporary happiness for a few privileged people but permanent and transformative new life for all creation.

Pastor Abby Henrich puts it well, I think:

Joy is not easily won. You only get it by giving of yourself. Then, joy cracks the very center of your being open and allows the terrifying beauty of this world to creep in.

Joy has no defenses. With joy the pain of this life creeps in too.

Yet joy is like slipping on a new pair of glasses. Everything in the world becomes more beautiful and more painful when we open ourselves to joy.

So may we have all that we need to “rejoice always,” to give thanks in all things, and trust that God is still working around us to make all things new in Jesus Christ our Lord, the one who has come and is coming again. Alleluia! Amen.