Advent 3 Lessons and Carols 2025

As we light the Advent reads, I invite you to say with me, light of the world in grace and beauty, mirror of God's eternal face, transparent flame of love's free duty, you bring salvation to our human race.

Sacred mystery, we light the third candle of Advent for joy and for grace.

We kindle it with joy.

We kindle it with joy.

We recall the times we have struggled to practice your way of love, and yet we continue to joyfully walk on the journey you've set before us.

Sacred ministry, visit us and fill us with your spirit.

Bring your good news to life within us.

Give us courage to walk in the way of the beloved community that you've set before us.

Amen.

Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires know, and from whom no secrets are hidden.

Let the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee and wordily magnify thy holy name.

Through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

The Lord be with you.

Let us pray.

Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us.

And because we are sorely hindered by our sin, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with you and the Holy Spirit be honor and glory now and forever.

Amen.

Behold, God is my salvation.

I will trust and I will not fear for God.

God is my strength and my mind has become my salvation.

And say in that day, be praise to the God of our salvation.

Call on God's name.

Let this be made known in all Europe.

Shout, daughter, seen daughter, daughter, you shall dwell in Sion, for great in your midst, daughter, is the holy one of Israel, the word of the Lord.

I have a hard idea.

How I love you in the nation of Christ.

And this is my prayer.

So that in the day of Christ, pure and blind.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, grown inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

The word of the Lord.

And the Lord God will give you a sister Jacob.

He will reign over the house of Jacob forever.

And of his kingdom, there will be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do it.

Praise to you all in peace from the one who is and who does and who is come.

And from the seven spirits before God of Jesus Christ, we made it to Christmas.

Glory be to thee, Lord Christ.

Mary set out those days and went to the hill country with haste to Judean town.

There she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.

Now when Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby leapt in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.

Elizabeth exclaimed with a loud cry, Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.

From where does this visit come to me that the mother of my sovereign comes to you?

Look, as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting in my ear, the baby in my womb leapt for joy.

Now blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of those things spoken to her by the Holy One.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

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

Amen.

Please be seated.

Really, really short today.

Anybody know Woodenly what the word liturgy means?

Woodenly.

Jim's nodding, what is it?

We usually translated Woodenly as a work of the people.

Actually, where it comes from in Greek, when there was no public works division, right, that was maintaining roads, is that when there needed to be a bridge built, a private citizen would build that bridge.

A patron would build the bridge to support the people.

Truly, liturgy is the works for the people at private expense.

Which is what you just enjoyed.

Right.

The private expense of the choir doing the work to hopefully bridge you into a different place in Advent with music and beauty.

So I don't want to try to top that.

I'm not going to, but I do want to just reflect for five minutes on the virtue of the week, which is joy.

So a reminder for you that we're in a penitential season.

It's supposed to be festive, but in church this is penitential.

And just like Lent, we have during a penitential season a moment to pause.

It's called refreshment Sunday, Gaudate Sunday, Rose Sunday, right?

We've had two tough weeks.

Now we get this reminder.

This is what it's all for, just like the fourth Sunday in Lent.

And we have, of course, the rose candle, which is to remind us what's joy all about.

It's hard because we use joy very interchangeably with happiness outside of here.

Oh, I really enjoyed that Christmas party.

Why?

Because it was short, or because the food was good, or because it was a great venue, right?

Usually that means like it made me happy.

But I was talking with Sean this week and he made this great reminder to me.

You know, the word happy, the root of that is the same as like haphazard and happen stance.

The root of that word hap, it means chance.

How interesting isn't it that we conflate something that has to do with chance, with joy, which I'm gonna say biblically has nothing to do with chance whatsoever.

Think through happiness, particularly in the development of your career.

There were these moments when you thought, when I graduate college, I'm gonna be happy.

When I get that promotion, then I'm going to be happy.

Did that always come for me?

No.

Because then there was going to be the next thing, right?

And then the next thing, it was like you reach one of these kind of benchmarks, and then the treadmill turns even faster.

And you know, there's this really interesting bit, and I'm not shaming anything about Christmas, but I'm going to say this.

In a capitalist society, we've almost decided that gift giving and receiving is correlated with happiness.

And if you've ever received or given a gift, I trust that chance has not fallen into your lap.

Have you ever been given a gift and felt grief or disappointment?

Have you ever given a gift and been disappointed or grieved with how it was received or not?

Apparently gave happenstance happiness to somebody else.

We don't know what to do with those feelings outside of the church.

I'm telling you, we don't know what to do with them.

So there is this ancient wisdom that joy is actually really different from happiness.

And from the research I could tell, let me just tell you, joy has very little to do with happiness.

It seems like happiness biblically looks a lot more like contentment.

Or to put it a different way, I have joy when I know I've lived into God's values, even if it was really unpleasant.

Joy might be a lot more like integrity than laughter.

Might be more about faithfulness than smiles.

And I've got to tell you, if you've ever had a kid, let me just start by asking this, because I've got one.

Here's my joy story of the week.

You ever done something really dumb in front of one of your kids?

It's not just that you feel the dagger from having done this thing you would call them out for doing.

But because they're there, it twists.

Let me tell you about my join layman this week.

Happened last Sunday after we had a beautiful service and this wonderful time with confirmation and talking about peacemaking, and I went to Costco, and I know it's a snare to me.

But Costco parking lot this time of year.

I even went, I'm gonna be patient.

So there I was.

There was a spot, it wasn't even close to the door.

I saw the person backing out.

I put my blanker on for about two and a half minutes, and that's not an overestimation.

Two and a half minutes.

And because of the way the traffic was flowing, what do you know?

A car zipped right in and took the spot.

So I honked the park.

And then I put the car in a park and I got out.

And I was not gonna look for a confrontation.

I wasn't looking for a physical altercation.

I got out and I said to the person, you must not have seen me waiting there for some time with my blanker on.

The person like grabbed a rolled up newspaper and like brandished it and said to me, I believe.

Which was factually incorrect.

I knew better than to have a physical altercation in the Costco parking lot.

I said something like, Well, clearly you need the spot more than I do.

I sure hope you have a happy Christmas.

And a part of my soul that was sitting in the passenger seat in my 13-year-old child wasn't mad at me.

She was grieving what her father had just done.

And she said to me, Why did you have to escalate that?

And of course, what I said was, well, my sense of justice was offended.

I actually wasn't even being defensive.

I was shocked.

I actually thought my kid would be mad at me and would call me out.

But the thing that I was met with was grief.

I brought grief into my 13-year-old child by being a fool.

By being a fool.

And I want you to hear this because truly, if my kid hadn't been in the car, I probably wouldn't have thought about it twice.

Because my kid was in the car.

And that's where joy is fine.

I once had a professor who said that repentance is joyful sorrow.

Now you try on happy sorrow and it's a non-starter.

But why is it a joy to repent?

Truth be told.

And having been raised in a culture that conflates that with politics, with who's in and who's out, according to my preacher or my interpretation of the scripture, I don't know if I even want to enter into that.

It's an indictment to call ourselves Christians.

It doesn't mean we vote a particular way.

It means we look like Jesus.

Which is not always very fun.

Sometimes laughter comes.

But to be a Christian means we hope in the things God hopes, not our wishes.

To be a Christian means we're not peacekeepers.

We dare to build new bridges at our own expense so that the public can cross to the other side.

It means to be peacemakers.

Joy.

From the outside, I've had people say, you have so much joy.

Look at all the things you do.

And boy, my interior response is often like, you must think I have fun in those things more than I do.

The things that I do that look like adventure are joyful because they're my values, even if they don't bring me happiness.

I think we're actually called this week to sit down really, really hard and examine whether or not what we are doing is joyful or baiting happiness.

I've used this language before, so I'm sorry if you've heard me say this right.

If I give you a quote-unquote gift, and the way you receive it or treat it can cause me pain, I didn't give you anything.

I made an investment.

That is someone who says, I thought of you and I loved thinking of you, and whatever you do to it will never take that away because the love went into it, and there I rest.

I'm not mature enough to do that, so we'll have advent again next year.

This is still a penitential season, but the question really is: what do we find enjoyable?

Not happy.

What do we find enjoyable?

Joy is not left to chance.

Joy is left to being a little Christ.

To whom do we bring joy?

Why did we read this gospel about pregnancy?

I'm sorry, this is a thing I don't get to do as a man.

There is nothing happy about creating room inside your physical body for another living being who would kill you without a placenta.

There's nothing happy about that.

There's nothing happy about not only making that room, but sending so much of your own energy into it that it will destroy your body.

And that is probably why the pregnant metaphor makes so much sense.

Because listen, if you've ever had a kid, I hope you realize you weren't able to control who that child was.

You could choose to tolerate your child for being different from you.

And toleration is not an admin virtue, respect it.

So what are we called to do?

We're called to make room for other people with respect.

And not only make room like you stay over there.

See, there's no demilitarized zone in God's kingdom.

We're called to make room for them and send nourishment, and that's not really ever easy, and it's rarely fun.

And my prayer this week is that it will be joyful for you.