LIVING
IN THE NOW
THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT 2008
Rev. Dr. Robert R. LaRochelle
When
today’s service is nearly over and we then will have only have one Sunday left
to go before we gather with our families and our friends and our church to
celebrate Christmas, we as a congregation will stand up and sing that Christmas
classic ‘ Joy to the World’. This morning, as we turn the corner past the
midpoint of Advent, our Pageant and pre Christmas Santa visits to Union behind
us, we have lighted this PINK candle, with PINK a color representing JOY, a joy
signifying, among other things, the fact that Advent will come to an end and
soon, very soon, Christmas Day WILL be here!
This
word JOY is bandied about with great frequency every year at this time. Even
those companies that won’t use the word CHRISTMAS in their advertising
materials, find ways of slipping
the word JOY in to their holiday promotions. ‘
Experience the JOY’, they will tell you, that is
the joy of pulling out your credit cards with great frequency. ‘
Share the joy’, they’ll say, the joy of 40% off that 80% markup,
all a part of that which they will freely cite as this glorious ‘season
of joy.’
So,
you see, there is a certain synonymous sense to these two words then- the word
CHRISTMAS and the word JOY. BUT what we’ve got to understand is that for many
people at this time of the year, there IS instead what we might call a disconnect,
or, in fancy terms, a cognitive
dissonance. A cognitive what? What I am saying is that this ‘season
of joy’ can be really tough, extremely tough, on those whose life
circumstances have left them terribly sad and hurting, so thus the disconnect: The
world is singing Christmas carols and I am
grieving. It’s my first Christmas without this person I love so much.
Everybody’s talking about JOY and here I am , feeling terrible
inside....I’ve lost my job, my marriage has fallen apart, I don’t know where
to turn.......and we’re singing ‘JOY TO THE WORLD’.
I
guess I always understood what I’ve just said theoretically, in my head, at
least until that Advent of 1996, when day after day, I traveled to my mother’s
home, then hospital, then eventually to the nursing home where she died on the
morning of Christmas Eve. Driving down the street where I grew up, there were
all the boyhood reminders of Christmases past: lights on the trees, children
dragging sleds to go sliding in the snow, building snowmen, tossing the white
stuff at one another with great vigor, in short, looking very, very happy. And then, opening a door, and seeing my mom, dying, all of
this culminating in on a Christmas Eve, a very strange day to begin the process
of funeral arrangements, before heading home to exchange presents with children,
even to the point of opening those my Mom had bought for us a few weeks prior,
before she got really, really sick. Then off to church, time to sing with
hundreds of other voices, time to sing ‘ Joy to the World.’ Disconnect. Cognitive
Dissonance. On this night in which the world has ramped the volume up on
joy, I’m one among the
earth’s millions, I am sure, feeling more than a little sad!
In
our Bible reading this morning, Paul tells us ‘ RejoiceALWAYS’. ALWAYS, he
says. ‘ Give thanks in ALL CIRCUMSTANCES’. IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES, he says.
When confronted with life’s often harsh realities, how does one make sense of
these Scriptural injunctions? How do they become more than nice gooey phrases
that sound good, comforting, reassuring and religious BUT have NO fundamental
relevance in our lives? Are they only what those other sweet words have become,
words like PEACE and HOPE and LOVE, words that
sound so good, yet all too often, just don’t really abide,
words that live not here in our hearts but up there on a shelf, pulled down on
special sentimental occasions, yet flunking the 7 day a week, 52 weeks a year test.....They just DON’T
REALLY LIVE WITHIN US...They have become bumper sticker words, slogans, as it
were, for a religion without relevance to our lives!
This
morning, I want to suggest, persuade and maybe even convince you of the
contrary, though, that this word JOY CAN be relevant to us IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES,
bad and good, and so, I would add, might those other sentimental words too. But
for the word JOY to make sense, for Paul to be comprehensible when he says ‘
Give thanks in all circumstances’, we’ve got to understand that there is
a big difference between a superficial, surface sense of JOY and its
accompanying synonymous term HAPPINESS and REAL INNER JOY. Joy and happiness get
so terribly confused. Happiness, which is a wonderful
thing, without the scrutiny of examination can be so shallow a word. So
often people seek happiness by finding all kinds of entertainments to fill up
their loneliness and their emptiness- and we confuse being joyful with just
feeling on top of the world all the time- great movie, great concert, terrific
party, fantastic date. What so many
of us call happiness is contingent about a variety of external circumstances,
either planned or coincidental.Yet,
real JOY, the joy
that Paul’s talking
about, the JOY that Jesus spoke of...real joy is DEEPER. You can be joyful even
when things aren’t going your way. You can, way down deep, find joy in the
very worst of circumstances because, way down deep, you’re feeling LOVED and
in your inner being, you JUST KNOW that you will be guided through this darkest
valley and that YOU WILL BE OK!
Real joy does not DEPEND on circumstances. Instead it offers perspective about
those circumstances!
I’m
going to guess that many of you have had a similar experience to my own in
losing my Mom. It was awful and it was painful, yet time passed and her memory
and impact on my life has not gone. Here I am talking about her. I’m able to
laugh at things she said and experiences we put each other through. I’ll still
never forget the time she was mad at me when I was in high school and she chased
me around the house! I won! I can say now with a smile that there were times I
drove her nuts! Real joy can come when the outer circumstances of life are
horrible. It comes from this inner belief that things will be fine, that someone
greater than I is in charge here, someone to whom we have given the name GOD,
and that God, in God’s grace, WILL see me through!
At
Christmas, as we celebrate the birth of a baby, it’s good to remember the
words of grown up, adult Jesus:
‘
Blessed are those who weep’, Jesus
said, ‘for one day, they shall laugh’
‘ Blessed are you when you suffer persecution for my sake.’ Blessed are you when
you suffer persecution? The
intelligent critic, that pain in the neck student I used to love to have in
class when I was a teacher, might very well ask the question: BE THANKFUL IN ALL
CIRCUMSTANCES...BLESSED IN SUFFERING PERSECUTION.....How? Here’s a John
McCain, tortured and beaten for 5 ½ years in a POW camp. Are you saying he can
find joy in those circumstances? Where is the mother watching her child starve
to death in a desert supposed to find JOY? Or someone huddled in a concentration
camp ready to die or yet another shipped off on a slave boat destined for a
plantation? Where is the JOY? And
how do you get there? Well, I would argue that, in the most DIRE of
circumstances, there CAN be inner joy, that in prison cells and work camps and
cotton fields, people have somehow found joy in their imaginations, their
poetry, the spirituals they sang and sometimes composed, the friendships they
relied upon in the worst possible places!
The
JOY of the believer, my friends, has nothing to do with joy or passive
acceptance of terrible and unjust circumstances, nor does it mean that one
should simply resign oneself to live with them and not try to battle your way
out. Not at all. The joy of the believer comes from LIVING EACH MOMENT with an
inner knowledge that God is here
IN THIS MOMENT, IN THIS NOW...and that God WILL see you through...somehow......
But the intelligent critic, the one
disinclined to just accept my pious words at face value, might ask yet another
question: How do I get there? How do I reach a point where I can find joy, real
joy, even when life’s not making me very happy? Those are great words and
ideas, but HOW do I get there?
Now,
of course, you’d expect a minister to tell you that it starts with prayer.
That’s one of those nice religious terms too and do you know what? Yes, it
does! But it need not start with fancy prayer or superstition masking as prayer,
the kind of stuff we talked about this Fall. Instead, it begins with a simple act of faith and trust, a simple act renewed each and every morning,
perhaps, before you get up, each evening before you take your rest.
You
know, back hundreds of years ago, Martin Luther wrote and taught some short and
simple prayers for both evening and morning. Each of them contained different
words, but each the very same phrase in the middle, a phrase that really says it
all, I think, says it all for all of us. The words Luther used are as relevant
in 2008 as they were in 1520:
For, into your hands, O God, I commend
myself, my body, my soul and all things
It’s
an act of faith to commend yourself to God, body, soul and all things... to
believe, REALLY BELIEVE, that God will
see you through and that God will lead you where you need to be led. Usually,
prayer in and of itself is not enough. We have to act. We have to step out and
take the risks that faith requires. Sometimes in darkest hours, people need more
than just prayer. They need counseling or they need medication to remove some
impediments that block out the hope for inner joy! Trusting that God will
provide and will take care does not mean that we abdicate doing what must be
done and what God has made possible for REAL JOY to fill our hearts. It
doesn’t mean that at all, but it DOES MEAN that this Advent candle contains an
amazing truth, that our Christmas celebration is laden with both an incredible
and yet deeply credible message, that, in ALL CIRCUMSTANCES, as we live out EACH
NOW in our lives, we can live that NOW with an amazing INNER JOY, the joy that
comes from knowing that the words Bruce read us in Psalm 126 are really true,
that;
Those
who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing
Shall come home, shall come home with shouts of JOY ( Psalm 126:6)
Have a JOYFUL, a REALLY JOYFUL, THIRD WEEK OF ADVENT!
AMEN+