12-16-18 Readings & Sermon

The first reading is from the book of Zephaniah.

Sing aloud, O daughter Zion.

Shout, O Israel.

Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem.

The Lord has taken away the judgments against you.

He has turned away your enemies.

The King of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst.

You shall fear disaster no more.

On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem, Do not fear, O Zion.

Do not let your hands grow weak.

The Lord your God is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory.

He will rejoice over you with gladness.

He will renew you in his love.

He will exalt over you with loud singing, as on the day of a festival.

I will remove disaster from you, so that you will not bear reproach for it.

I will deal with all your oppressors at that time.

I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth.

At that time I will bring you home.

At that time I will gather you, for I will make you renowned and praised.

Among all the peoples of the earth before your eyes, says the Lord.

The word of the Lord.

Please join me in the canticle from Isaiah.

We'll read responsibly by the half verse.

Surely it is God who saves me.

For the Lord is my stronghold and my sure defense.

Therefore you shall draw water with rejoicing.

On that day you shall say, May God's deeds be known among the peoples.

Sing the praises of the Lord, for God has done great things.

Cry aloud, inhabitants of Zion, ring out your joy.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.

Again I will say, rejoice.

Let your gentleness be known to everyone that the Lord is near.

Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.

And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guide your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

The word of the Lord.

John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, You brood of vipers who warned you to flee from the wrath to come, bear fruits worthy of repentance.

Do not begin to say to yourselves, We have Abraham as our ancestor.

For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.

Even now the axe 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.

And the crowds asked him, What then should we do?

In reply, he said to them, Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none, and whoever has food must do likewise.

Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, Teacher, what should we do?

He said to them, Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.

Soldiers also asked him, And we, what should we do?

He said to them, Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.

As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah.

John answered all of them by saying, I baptize you with water, but one who is more powerful than I is coming.

I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals.

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary.

But the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.

So with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.

The gospel of the Lord.

This is our third Sunday in Vadvent, which is really sort of a dark time in the year and a heavy time as we consider cultivating things like hope and peacemaking.

The church and her wisdom has made today the rose candle, sometimes called refreshment Sunday, sometimes called Rose Sunday, sometimes called Marian Sunday, and in Latin called Gaudete Sunday, which really means the imperative rejoice, as in y'all shall.

Like you'd better, or else.

So that is today.

And of course, you know it's a church word because outside here we just call it pink.

But uh we need special words in church, and today is Rose Sunday.

And of course, um this is a tough one because, quite honestly, I think uh joy can be really elusive, particularly when we consider that out there in the ordinary world, we often equate joy, I think falsely, with happiness.

As we often do peace, as if these were commodities for us to possess.

I have joy.

I have peace, or I don't.

Instead, I think hopefully I'm gonna stutter a little bit around joy this morning, but uh I think instead it's maybe helpful to consider the words of the poet Rilke, which is that joy and peace are always in us.

We are not always in joy and peace.

I think these are things maybe we can be possessed by.

I'm not sure, they're commodities we possess.

And so, of course, maybe you know the great Anglican theologian C.

S.

Lewis, a John Milton scholar, author of the Chronicles of Narnia, um, Lewis really drew a hard line between happiness and joy.

Happiness, said Lewis, is really something that is contingent upon our circumstances, and of course, therefore, it is always on a tight rope wire.

It rained, and I'm not happy anymore.

I stubbed my toe, I'm not happy anymore.

Joy, though, says Lewis, is actually something much greater than happiness because it's not dependent upon our circumstances.

Really, instead, joy is dependent upon our awareness of things like grace and God's compassion and call for us, which I think is why we were asked the first week to cultivate hope, that fundamental trust in God.

And I would suggest to you today, our Advent invitation is not to have joy, but to cultivate joy, to cultivate it.

I had a professor uh at Emory who said, this is totally in line with our reading today, is that repentance is joyful sorrow.

Repentance is joyful sorrow.

I put to you, happiness can never be sorrowful, but joy can abide sorrow.

And I think that's why we read on a joy Sunday, John the Baptist calling us, quite frankly, a brood of vipers.

That is not happy.

It might not even be joyful, we'll have to really make the case for that.

And John says, repent.

I don't usually associate repentance, quite honestly, with joy, because quite honestly, repentance is painful.

And I would put to you, happiness cannot abide pain.

The joy might not actually be afraid of pain.

So, repentance.

And I put to you, repentance is, I think, a little bit different biblically than what we often think.

Usually we think repentance means telling God how sorry we are, and um, actually, apology is not in any scope part of the biblical definition of what it means to repent.

We get four words in our tradition biblically that are translated as repent.

I think when we put them all together, we get an idea of what John's asking us to do.

So just a quick tour of those words.

Um Hebrew has two of them, interestingly enough.

Hebrew has 10,000 words in the whole language, Greek has about a hundred thousand words, English is five hundred and forty thousand words in the word bank.

So out of the most word poor, we get two.

The first is the word shoove, which means to turn.

I shooved into the parking lot this morning because I had to turn.

You ready?

I just repented in Hebrew because I turned around.

It's also based in an archery term where I aim and I miss, so then I turn my aim to give it another go.

We change our direction, we change our orientation.

That's repentance in Hebrew.

In Greek, the words metanoia, and maybe you've heard that prefix meta before, like metaphysics.

That is a way of thinking that is beyond physics, right?

So meta is beyond, greater than, and then that other piece, the word noia, that's from the Greek word noose, which is mind.

So really repentance in Greek, metanoia, is a mind that is beyond the mind we had.

It's not just that I learned a fact, it's that I had an epiphany, something that fundamentally changed the way that I look at the world.

It's a schema change.

And consider that before you were literate, words essentially meant nothing to you, but once upon learning to read, it's really hard to pass by words and not pay attention to them.

That's a fundamental change in the way we view the world.

There were many others, of course, but having a new mind, a mind that is so beyond the mind we used to have, is repentance number two.

In Latin, and this comes from the Vulgate, of course, the word is poena, and that's the root of our word penance.

And poena in Latin means, well, uh making even what you made slanted.

It is sort of when you steal something, you repay it with interest.

We get that.

Make right what you did wrong.

That's a piece of repentance.

The last bit, this is the second Hebrew word, is the word nicham.

It's the only kind of repenting that God does in the Bible.

Um really difficult to express, but I think it sort of comes from this recognition that all is not right and that I, as an individual, cannot write what is wrong.

This is when we think about words like ism, like sexism and ageism, racism.

All's not right in the world in these ways, and I am not able to correct the rest of the world as an individual, so I see it, I grieve it, and hopefully it helps me get a new mind and make some turns.

But I put to you even though I am very aware of the sexism that threatens my wife as a working professional, particularly as a female attorney and my daughter, I know it's wrong.

I work really hard to try to change things for them.

I cannot ultimately make that change.

And beyond that, I as a man enjoy inherent privileges they never will enjoy.

Instead of celebrating those privileges, it's important, I think, to be mindful and grieve the fact that my wife and my daughter don't get that.

You put all four of those things together, and that's what repentance means in the Bible.

And how on earth could that possibly be joyful?

Because it makes life bigger.

And this is exactly what John is talking about when he considers the difference between grain and chaff.

Historically, we have read this in a way that says, some people are chaff, and some people are grain, and you chaff people, God will burn an unquenchable fire, and of course we know that means hell.

And I want to tell you, I don't think that's what John's talking about at all.

I think John is saying, and it doesn't take a very careful examination of our lives to figure this out, we have storehouses of grain, and we have storehouses of chaff.

And what God would love to do is burn up the chaff in our lives, both for our sake and the sake of others, so that we might be more nourishing and more nourished by the world we live in.

After all, who do you know that is only grain?

If you know my mom, you can raise your hand, but that's about it.

No, when John talks about the axe being at the root of the trees, I think he's offering this invitation to think we have many trees in our life, some of which are righteous and just, and some of which, frankly, settle for ordinary stuff.

Ordinary stuff.

Stuff that is contingent upon circumstances.

So now I'm going to introduce Brene Brown to the conversation because she has quite a bit to say about this as well.

Brene Brown sort of says that joy is one of the most terrifying human emotions.

Because we experience it in these little slivers, and as soon as we get it, we often try to think, how can we keep it?

What can we do to make sure it never leaves us?

How can we build a wall around it?

And of course, when we do that, she says, we've lost it.

The example she uses is one that I actually really have never done outside the first week of my daughter being around.

She says, you know, consider as a parent, you look into the crib, and there is this baby, and this moment of just transcendence washes over you.

It helps if it's your baby, by the way.

I'm just being honest.

You you look and you say, Oh my God, there's my heart in that little crib.

And then all of a sudden, says Brene Brown, a lot of people say, There's going to be a terrible disease, I'm going to lose her, I'm going to lose him.

What will I do then?

So joy turns to what she calls foreboding joy.

And in that moment of imitation for awe and wonder, we go to safeguard and clutching, and of course, when you grab joy, it's sort of gone.

I've never been afraid in the cradle.

I mean, when she was firstborn and I held my daughter in my chest, I had no idea what I was doing, and I didn't sleep at all.

And there I was, and I thought, she I can't believe she's breathing.

Is she just gonna stop breathing because she's so small, you know?

But after that week, it didn't happen again until we were horse riding, and it's too bad I saw Gone with the Wind, you know, because um I thought, I there's my daughter and the horse, and the horse is gonna throw her off.

And there I was, just absolutely sort of terrified for a few moments, you know, and honestly, that's an interesting thing to think of as parents, our small children.

We think, gosh, there's nowhere to go but down here.

I don't know if you've ever felt that.

To look at your child with awe and wonder and say, I've got nowhere to go but down.

That is foreboding joy.

And of course, it leads us to do some really crazy things in moments of clutching and grabbing and defending.

Because we've got to keep it.

I think that's what John's saying to people about, hey, listen, uh, you have got extra stuff and you are trying to safeguard yourselves a little too much.

Because the truth is, says Brene Brown, joy really only happens when we decide we're willing to be vulnerable.

We don't control whether joy comes or goes, really, we control whether or not we're open to it.

Clutching it, I think, really doesn't quite work.

She says the thing to do when joy comes, is to accept joy vulnerably, and particularly to do the thing that I am not really good at, to be grateful that it showed up at all.

Ultimately, what she argues is that we miss out on a whole lot of gratitude because we correlate joy with circumstances.

We sort of think, oh my gosh, my relative is sick.

There can be no joy there.

And so we miss arguably some of the most holiest moments in life.

I can tell you because I wear one of these little collars around my neck, I get to walk into holy moments I didn't earn.

I get to be with people when they're born or when they're dying, or when they're getting married, or when they're deciding to confess.

It's a privilege of wearing the uniform.

And I get to see something I don't even get to see in my own relationships all the time: things like messy reconciliation.

And those are joyful things.

See, I've got relationships in my life, and I think you do too, with former classmates or family members in which I have reconciliation fantasies.

That's where I imagine exactly how that's going to go to my satisfaction, which is mostly that the other person is going to debase themselves.

They are going to say all the ways in which they ruined my life by that turn of phrase or not paying attention to me at the right moment or thinking about themselves, and then I'm going to say, you're right, you did that, and I choose to forgive you.

You may kiss my ring.

And that's why I don't have much joy, you see, because that's never happened to me.

And of course, it's because I'm approaching it entirely wrong.

See, while I haven't had those fantasies play out, I have had these moments in which people say things that they really should have said 30 years ago.

So it's great that they're saying it, but what about all the other stuff they said?

And instead of saying, thank God I heard that out of your mouth, I say, how dare you say that to me without apologize for all that other stuff you did say.

I got the words I was hoping for, but I didn't get the contrition and the debasing I thought I needed.

So in a moment, I hadn't found me joy, but I chose to knock it away because it didn't look like happiness.

Of course, I would tell you that I think picking joy in moments like that is painful.

And unless this sound too dark, I want to tell you that I spend most of my life afraid of pain.

Because pain hurts.

I don't like it.

It's interesting that there are arenas in my life in which I reconcile with pain.

If you've ever been an athlete, you understand going into any kind of exercise, it is going to hurt.

If it doesn't, let's be honest, you probably could push it a little bit harder.

Now, I'm not talking about tearing your ACL.

I don't think any athlete says, I'm going to endure an ACL tear and finish that marathon.

No, I'm talking about things like cramping and fatigue the next day, soreness.

We decided as athletes, or pretend athletes, we could endure that because the cost of it was bearable.

We were going to get some greater life out of the exercise or out of the achievement.

If you're not willing to do that, let me tell you, do not run a marathon.

Do not.

Stick with a 5K.

Which, by the way, also makes me very sore.

We decide we can do it.

But what's interesting is there's other areas of our lives where it's like we can't tolerate any pain at all.

We can't tolerate reconciliation that doesn't look like our fantasy, so we just blow it back and say that person wasn't sorry enough.

And we miss a moment.

Not to seize joy, don't you see, to be to be seized by it.

And to say, there is God in that messy, messy opportunity.

Joy, I think, is painful.

It means giving up our happiness to get something that's a lot bigger.

Joy is about repenting, it's about reorienting what we want in our minds.

Talk about a new way of thinking.

We've got to trade the reconciliation we fantasize for to get any at all.

Sometimes I'd rather not have any if I can't have the kind I want.

Don't you think that's the biggest obstacle of joy we have in our lives?

I can tell you it's the biggest obstacle I have in mine.

You might be bigger people than I am.

It's a little bit prickly, you know.

And this is this interesting bit to think about is that Paul tells the Philippians they're supposed to rejoice in everything.

Essentially, we can choose to be devastated by, well, devastating events.

And we can also choose somehow to find holiness in them.

I'm not making light of suffering, I'm not.

And by the way, you know, I think that the scriptures are very interested in us stopping suffering that leads to no life.

Does that make sense what I'm saying?

I grew up sometimes hearing that God really believes in suffering, so just get up on the cross and bleed out.

And you know, I want to suggest to you that if you are suffering and nobody's getting life out of it, get off the cross.

You know, I think this joy is about how do we get larger life for ourselves in the world.

And you know what?

Suffering doesn't necessarily lead to it.

But I will tell you, as a parent and as a child and as a friend, golly, trying to reconcile myself with well myself, I have to give stuff up, and that hurts.

And sometimes I don't want to do it.

Most of the time, I don't want to do it.

I wonder if this week isn't an opportunity to recognize our vulnerability and say, you know what?

Joy really would like to seize us.

And when we edit our story for the day, we have opportunities to either say, God, I'm just not happy.

Or, boy, you know, it was a hard day, and I'm so glad that person smiled at me.

God of the small things.

I wonder if that isn't the opportunity to cultivate some joy, to say, where, where did larger life intercept in my day?

Not did it happen the way I wanted, but where did it happen?

Could I be seized by it?

Could I trust God even in the difficult times?

I just want to be really, really fair.

The risk of oversharing, I've got relationships in my life where I don't even have a reconciliation fantasy, because I can't even imagine it.

I mean, even a really messy one.

I can't even imagine reconciliation.

And I wonder if cultivating joy isn't about asking God to grow my imagination a little bit.

Isn't that painful to lay down being right so that we could have righteousness instead?

I hope you will join me in at least trying to cultivate joy this week.

And we do this, you see, uh, I think because of this African proverb that's really quite interesting.

God created us human beings because God thought we might enjoy it.

Wish I'd heard that when I was a teenager.

This week.

Let's try to live into that phrase.

Let's try to enjoy the life God has given us, invited us.

And I will tell you, friends, it's going to take some work.

Um, but next week we'll get to do something different.

So let's put our hands uh to the joy plow this week.