Sermon: Be Joyful While You Wait – Third Sunday of Advent (James 5: 7-10)
Whether it’s a note in a Christmas card, or a song on the radio, or an ad on your phone, or a special show on tv or a Bible verse at church, the message this time of year is clear: It’s Christmas, it’s time to get happy. This time of year is full of messages of peace, joy, hope, and love, and out there in the secular world they are meant to, primarily, make us happy. Be happy because its Christmas time. Be happy because we’ve made it through another year. Be happy because even in the cold and dark of winter we have this merry and bright holiday to celebrate. Be happy because the baby Jesus is born. Which is true. All those things do make me happy. Still, it’s always one of the difficult things to wrestle with this time of year that even in this season that encourages happiness, there are still things that make us stressed, or sad, or break our hearts. As much as we wish them to be, the holidays are not happy for everyone all of the time.
Dealing with this struggle with the difficult parts of life while also getting in the Christmas spirit is at the heart of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. I know I talked about Die Hard last week, and it wasn’t my intent to have a Christmas movie sermon series, but when I watched Charlie Brown this year and read an article about its 60th anniversary this year, I couldn’t help but notice the connections. Anyway, in that Christmas classic, we follow Charlie Brown throughout his day as he sees everyone around him having a happy holiday, enjoying all the things of the season. Meanwhile, in typical Charlie Brown fashion, he is miserable and focused on the pressure he feels to be made happy by all the commercial trappings of Christmas, but in reality, he feels stressed, disappointed, and left out. In his attempt to join in and contribute the Christmas festivities Charlie Brown goes out to get a Christmas tree for their play. He chooses that infamously sparse little sapling and brings it back to the group. The rest of the kids respond by laughing at the tree and blaming Charlie Brown for ruining their Christmas. This tree couldn’t possibly get people in the Christmas spirit.
You’ll notice that happiness, or Christmas cheer, is not one of the themes of Advent. We light these candles on the Advent wreath, each one representing a different theme of the season. There is not a happiness candle, though. There are candles for hope, peace, love, and joy, which is the pink, or rose-colored candle that we light today, on the third Sunday of Advent. Joy seems kind of happy, doesn’t it? Joy indicates being in a good mood, the same as happiness. So, is there a difference between joy and happiness? Is there a reason that Advent takes time for joy, but not, specifically for happiness?
It seems to me that in our society, happiness is to be something that we are encouraged to strive towards. Not just at Christmas, but all year long and throughout our lives. Happiness is presented as something that can and should be achieved, and if we can achieve something then, perhaps, we can maintain it and sustain it. We are led to believe that if we get to happiness then we should be able to stay there, in that state, forever. As we move through life, we find this is hard to do. So, of course, in our world of consumerism and materialism, we are bombarded non-stop with ads and messages about things that promise to make us happy. If we get enough of them, buy them often enough, we can stay happy. We see this experienced by Charlie Brown in the Christmas special, but also in many other Charlie Brown stories. It’s kind of his thing. Striving for happiness, often unsuccessfully, in a world he doesn’t feel that he fits in with. Christmas is just the time of year when that struggle seems most pronounced. It seems to be making everyone else happy, why can’t I be that happy too?
Then, there are those people who do feel happy at Christmastime. People for whom the holidays provide a jolt of good feelings at the end of the year. Some people need that jolt, because the year leading up to it may have been difficult or monotonous or anything less than good. When we experience those kinds of feelings it can be difficult to wait for that time when we arrive at happiness. People’s patience can be tested waiting for happiness all year. “Why can’t everyday be Christmas? Then we would be happy all the time.” Happiness can be a precarious thing, though, especially when so much energy is put towards striving to achieve it, rather than letting ourselves simply experience it when it is here.
James, the author of the letter we heard from this morning, is writing to an audience that is on edge as it waits. They are not waiting for happiness in the way we’ve been talking about it. They are waiting for the fulfillment of the promise made for Jesus’s return and the realization of the realm of God. Although, they probably assume this will make them happy. They had come together as a community to strive, and wait, for something better. This expectation had not been realized yet, and things in their home city were getting tense. The letter seems to imply they were facing some persecution and abuse from the rich and powerful people in the city. In their impatience they were beginning to grumble and point fingers at one another. So, James writes to calm them and encourage them. Not unlike Charlie Brown’s friends laying blame on him for their unrealized Christmas expectations. The frustration of that moment causes Charlie Brown to have a crisis of faith and shout out, “Does anybody know the meaning of Christmas?”
An important question, but we are not to Christmas yet. We are still in the season of Advent, and one of the meanings of Advent is waiting. Advent is that time in our Christian calendar when we await the birth of the Christ child. Our faith can be challenged in times of waiting. In waiting we can be faced with unmet expectations, disappointment, anxiety, and suffering. James preaches patience to his community, but this can be a difficult ask for people who are struggling with life’s difficulties. So, it is important that at Advent we are reminded that we are not just asked to wait. We are also offered the opportunity to experience hope, peace, love, and joy. Which is what we observe today.
Joy doesn’t come with the same sort of striving we discussed in relation to happiness. Certainly, people want to experience joy, and so there are those out there who try to profit of selling that experience. It doesn’t seem though, that people expect to feel joy all the time. People view happiness as a baseline state of existence. Being happy can just be who they are. For instance, if someone asked you what you wanted for your children in their life, I imagine at some point your answer would have been, “I just want them to be happy.” Being happy can just be who they are. Maybe there was a time in your life when that was all that you wanted for yourself. To be happy. No one expects to be joyful though, at least not all the time. Joy seems reserved for special occasions. Perhaps that is because joy tends to emerge where and when we don’t expect it. Joy finds us and surprises us. Like a flower in the desert, or like Mary’s song when she heard the news of her pregnancy. Joy arrives in the hidden and surprising, and can be a powerful tool to fuel us and encourage us in waiting.
One of the traditional readings for the third Sunday in Advent is Luke 1:46-55, which is known as the Magnificat. This is a song sung by Mary when she visits her cousin Elizabeth to share with her the news that she has become unexpectedly and impossibly pregnant. Elizabeth is not just Mary’s cousin; she is also pregnant with the baby that will be John the Baptist. When she hears Mary’s news the baby inside her leaps for joy. Mary and Elizabeth take this as a sign that what the angel told Mary about Jesus’s special destiny was true. So, Mary responds with a joyful act of her own. She sings a song, praising and giving thanks to God.
As a piece of writing, the Magnificat mirrors Hannah’s Song in the Hebrew Bible, from 1 Samuel chapter 2. Hannah was the mother of the Prophet Samuel, who would go on to call and anoint King David. Hannah had been waiting for a child for a long time. She prayed to God that if she had a son, she would give the child to the service of God. So, after Samuel is born Hannah takes him to the temple and gives him to the old priest, Eli, so that he will grow up and work in the house of God. Like Mary, Hannah gave birth to a miracle child, and now that child is going to grow to do God’s work in the world, fulfilling the promises made between God and Hannah. In these two women’s songs we have expressions of joy. The joy of new mothers who didn’t expect to become mothers, who were surprised by their pregnancies. They also share the joy of being mothers excited for their child’s future. Their joy was for the blessing that had entered their lives, but also for the hope they held for the future. Which is, perhaps, part of the joy we find in the birth of any child. In that spirit, Mary’s song is a joyful celebration and anticipation of what has been promised, what has been fulfilled, and what is still to come.
Mary’s Magnificat was written in the Gospel of Luke for a community that is similar to the one James wrote his letter. People awaiting the apocalypse, and freedom from the oppression of the rich and powerful in their community. However, the audience Luke wrote the Magnificat for came decades later. Their wait was longer. They were the 2nd or 3rd generation of churches. These were communities in the process of moving from a perspective of expecting the Second Coming to happen soon, to one of finding hope in their waiting, and seeing God as present and working in their lives even during times of waiting. There was a tension in the community about their present experience and the hoped-for future. James’s message to them resonates for any decade of the church. We must be patient in our waiting.
Waiting for Christ requires patience, but patience can be helped by experiencing joy. James points to the prophets of Israel as models of patience. Who used the time of waiting to share God’s word with the people. Their objective was not always to bring joy. Sometimes it was quite the opposite when they reprimanded the people and called them to repentance. During Advent however we are offered words from the prophets and apostles and Gospels that point us toward hope, peace, love, and joy. After all, when Charlie Brown asked for the meaning of Christmas, his answer came from Linus sharing the story of the Angel choir appearing to the shepherds in Luke chapter 2. The good news of great joy meant for all people. God is, and will be, with us.
Rather than grumble at one another, thus harming the community, our patient waiting can offer us the opportunity to be open to the unexpected and impossible. Joy comes in the unexpected moments. At Advent we wait for is the promises of God, but we also remain aware of God’s presence with us. We find joy in the both the promises that have been fulfilled and in those for which we still have great expectations. Mary celebrates the redemptive work of God, represented by the child growing inside her, as if what that child would become and the work he would do was already completed. Similarly, we can find joy by celebrating the world that we want (and that God wants) as if it is already here, not just something we are waiting for, because if God is with us, why can’t that world happen now?
After all, Charlie Brown and his friends finally experienced the joy of Christmas together not because of anything he did. He didn’t fake Christmas cheer. He didn’t buy them a better Christmas tree. Things changed when his friends started to look at things differently. When they saw the little Christmas tree for what it was and what it could be, rather than what it wasn’t. They dressed it up as if it was the best Christmas tree in town, and so it was. They start to sing and Charlie Brown joins in, surprised by this unexpected outpouring of Christmas joy.
Advent is about waiting, yes. It is a period of time; it is four weeks of waiting. It is also a process, a process that we go through to prepare for Christmas. And, as with any period of time or process there exists in it the possibility for a spark of joy. During advent we find that spark of joy not in the waiting itself, but in what it is we wait for, that Good News of Great Joy for all the People. Amen.