St. Peter’s By The Sea Presbyterian Church
6410 Palos Verdes Drive South
Palos Verdes, CA 90275

"Rejoice Abundantly"
Rev. Ann Petker

December 13, 1998

Isaiah 35:1-10

On Sunday, November 22, Muslims in the northern region of Jakarta, Indonesia awoke to find that damage had been inflicted upon their mosque during the night. They reacted by lynching six Christians, brutally beating them to death in the street.

A new study out suggests that kids are overscheduled and overworked and running out of time for fun. Children’s leisure time, defined as time left over after sleeping, eating, personal hygiene and attending school or day care - dropped from 40% in 1981 to 25% today. Children are affected by the same time crunch that affects their parents. All work and no play could make some very messed up kids.

Debbie, wife and mother of two has struggled with her image of herself since adolescence. She feels like she is never good enough, isn’t smart enough or gifted enough to really matter. She longs to find meaning in her life, and unable to do so, she turns to alcohol and drugs to numb the pain. Still the pain exists and she continues to spiral downward.

"So really?" we might be tempted to ask? "The desert shall rejoice with joy and singing? "With joy?"

Joy. It is a word that is rarely used in common conversation or writing. Joy seems more to be a word reserved for the front of wedding invitations or on Christmas cards, with beautifully scripted letters. Joy. Of all of the vast array of emotions that well up within us, joy can be a very elusive part of our lives. Perhaps we know it better through its absence and our longings for it.

Maybe this text about all of creation responding in joy to God feels a bit out of place. You may be asking, "How can I feel joy when I look at the condition of the world, when I know the reality of society’s pain, of my pain?" The hearers of Isaiah’s prophesy felt pain too, yet the prophet dared them to envision a joyful future of life and health and homecoming.

The thirty-fifth chapter of Isaiah is a bit of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s among the chapters ascribed to the writer known as First Isaiah, but actually many scholar’s believe it is the work of an editor. Together with chapter thirty-four, these two chapters present the theme of God’s judgment on the nations and God’s deliverance of the people to their homeland in Judah. The text is to be heard within the context of a people in exile. But the author was declaring a message of joy to his hearers, that in spite of their exile, they had something to look forward to.

This text is one of many in the Book of Isaiah that is often read during Advent. But what on earth does it have to do with Advent? In its origin nothing. It had nothing to do with this liturgical season or with the coming of the Messiah. But it describes and evokes a sense of what we want to feel in Advent. The prophet is proclaiming a promise to the people. The prophet urges his listeners to hope when they despair, to react to the divine with awe instead of complacency, to have courage instead of fear, to choose life over barrenness.

Who of us does not want abundant life instead of barrenness? But everytime it seems we begin to claim that for ourselves, reality rears its head. A relationship goes sideways, a job is lost, illness robs us or a loved one of strength... We can get so weighed down by the harshness of reality that we have fewer and fewer experiences of joy. As a deeply intense person, this is something I have struggled with a great deal.

What I have been learning, is that I have been living with the wrong definition of joy. From the thirteenth century we get a story of St. Francis of Assisi entitled "True and Perfect Joy." In the story, St. Francis asks his friend Brother Leo to tell him a parable about the nature of joy. So Leo proceeds to illustrate situations that might ordinarily be considered occasions for spiritual joy: all church officials are moved to join the Franciscan order; all nonbelievers are converted to the faith; miracles and healings take place. True joy consists in none of these, Francis insists. Instead, he paints a word-picture of himself returning home to the friary in dead winter, exhausted, cold, and miserable and knocking at the brother’s door. He asks for entry but is not recognized and shut out. Attempting entrance again he is ridiculed and sent away. If in this situation he has patience and does not get upset, he claims, there is true joy."

At first when I read this story, I was irritated by it. How can this be a reflection of joy? But as I have lived with it over this week, its meaning has gradually become clear to me. I have tended to think that things, people, my job, all of the outward trappings of my life were what were to bring joy into my life, and if one of them was less than perfect, I felt no joy. What St. Francis’ story demonstrates for us is that only when he was stripped of all of the outward trappings of his life, could he experience joy. It is not that we must lose all of the things in our lives that we care about, it is that we must come to view them in a new light and begin to look for joy someplace else.

One of the first things we need to understand about joy is that we confuse it with excitement, pleasure, fun and happiness. It is not at all like these things except as C. S. Lewis pointed out, once we taste any of them we will want more. Protestant theologian Paul Tillich spoke of joy as a quality of life that we experience when we are really ourselves. Joy is nothing else than the awareness of our being fulfilled in our true being, in our personal center." Teilhard de Chardin said; "Joy is what we feel in the presence of God. Indeed, it is the most certain sign of God’s presence." In the 18th Century when Jonathan Edwards proposed signs to separate true religious experience from its counterfeits, the Puritan preacher recommended that we look for joy. It was, he held, the dead giveaway that God was present in someone’s life." St. Francis described joy the way he did, because once he had lost all the things he thought brought him joy, he discovered his joy rested in God alone. Everything else had distracted him. He had placed too much weight on them, given them too much responsibility for how he felt in life.

So here we are in the United States in the late twentieth century surrounded by an abundance of ways and things which give us positive feelings, but we have learned that a foot massager will not bring us joy and too often we give into despair, complacency, fear, and barrenness.

Now we find ourselves in the pre-Christmas shopping season where muzac carols blare at us in every store - bland voices singing; "Joy to the world." During Advent, the song I hear over and over in my head is "Something’s Coming" from West Side Story. Tony sings "I got a feeling there’s a miracle due, gonna come true, Coming to me. Could it be? Yes it could. Something’s coming, something good, If I can wait. Something’s coming, I don’t know what it is But it is gonna be great."

That is the feeling of Advent - something great is coming. That something can be carried out anywhere, even in a desert that will blossom like a rose in response. That something is carried out by God. And that something is the advent of Christ.

I don’t know about you, but I often have felt guilty that I can’t summon up that one feeling that the season requires. Confusion abounds in trying to make sense of the meaning of Advent. The words of the prophet tell us that God will come and save us. As Christians, that promise is always before us, and we can be confident of that promise because because God in the flesh of Jesus came to us once. God will come again. That is what lies at the heart of Advent. That will be the basis of our joy - the promise of God’s arrival - of God with us.

I am uneasy with that explanation. Why is it joy, of all things, that we associate with the coming of Christ, either the first of the second time around? I must admit if I were Mary, I don’t think I would have sung that magnificat quite so readily. In all the questions and doubts and ridicule that surrounded Mary and Joseph, was there time for joy? And maybe the magi were so well trained in diplomacy and pomp and circumstance that their regal dignity masked their disbelief that this little baby in a stinking manger was to be King. Maybe the star just had a bad sense of direction.

But I am so sentimental about the Christmas story that I will concede a sense of joy at the birth of the baby Jesus. It is much harder for me to believe in joy at Christ’s return. In celebrating Advent we Christians reclaim the good news of the baby’s birth, but we also proclaim our hope in Christ’s return and we say with the author of the revelation the penultimate words of the Bible: "Come, Lord Jesus!" When Jesus comes, our lives will be turned upside down. We will have to account for all that we have done and left undone.

Nonetheless, despite all of the logical reasons for not doing it, despite all the events of our world, society and individual lives which close in on us, we can anticipate joy this Advent season. We can act ridiculously joyful when the world around us, immediate and global, should cause us to be depressed and lose our faith. There are times we do get depressed and lose our faith. But sometimes we also feel joy. I call that defiant joy.

How much more absurd is it for us to feel joy in God’s promise than it was for the prophet of the book of Isaiah? It is defiant joy which the prophet proclaims. The prophet knew that a people separated from their homeland had little reason to rejoice, nonetheless, the prophet speaks of the desert singing, of the blind seeing, of mirages becoming real pools of water, of a processional highway cutting through the wilderness to lead the people home. And we can be reassured because the prophet tells us that no one, not even you and me shall go astray. The contribution of this text to the preparation for the coming of Jesus is that those who experience their lives as exile, those who pass through a wilderness, those who are weak may shout for joy, for God will transform all things.

God calls us to do many things, and one of those things is to allow ourselves to feel joy in the midst of the despair of life. That does not mean we are to deny that there is injustice and hatred and killing - much brokeness in the world and in our own lives. But to give into these forces is to deny the promise that God will come and save us. The only condition for joy is the presence of God. Joy happens when God is present and people know it, which means that it can erupt in a depressed economy, in the middle of a war, in an intensive care waiting room.

I read the story about a lay minister in a big, black Pentecostal church in Memphis. The lay minister worked with inner-city kids. One Sunday morning she got so full of the Holy Spirit while she was preaching that she still had some left over when she got done, so she stepped out of the pulpit and twirled around a couple of times on the red carpet, pumping her arms and shouting, "Yes, Lord! Woo-o-o-o! Woo-o-o! Amen!"

I want some of that, I want that for you, the ability to be so caught up with the presence of God that we can unabashedly, defiantly be filled with the joy that comes only from God!

Jesus is coming - God with us -Woo-o-o-o, Woo-o-o-o! Amen.