The Third Sunday of Advent: Year A

“Christmas Joy is Different”

A sermon by Deacon Erika Hagan

Please note – the sermon as given in church may not be identical to what is written here – this is my starting point, but I allow the Spirit to guide me when I preach. The YouTube recording is the best representation of the sermon as given. Peace – Erika+

Christmas Joy is different than other kinds of joy.

You may have noticed that today we lit the “pink” candle on the Advent wreath. We do this for the 3rd Sunday of Advent each year, and some churches will even swap out their vestments and falls from purple to pink on this Sunday. We do this for “Gaudate Sunday,” this 3rd Sunday of Advent, to jostle us from our usual day-to-day flow of Advent – to jar us from our Christmas planning and preparation – to remember…Joy.

Christmas Joy is different than other kinds of joy.

“Gaudate Sunday” means the Sunday of Rejoicing. On this day, if we were a certain kind of Anglo-Catholic, or a Roman Catholic church that still sang their introit, we would hear this a prayer to open worship: “Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico, gaudete….”

This may be translated as: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice. Let your forbearance be known to all, for the Lord is near at hand; have no anxiety about anything, but in all things, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God. Lord, you have blessed your land; you have turned away the captivity of Jacob.”

Christmas Joy is different than other kinds of joy.

For most kinds of joy, we are surprised by something in the present. A beautiful sunrise, a delicious meal, a college student home for the holidays. We encounter something so good, so full of beauty and love, that we are lifted up. We are joyful. We rejoice.

But Christmas Joy is different than other kinds of joy.

John the Baptist sits in jail. He has been arrested for condemning King Herod’s marriage, because his wife had previously been married to his own brother, whom, it was rumored, King Herod murdered in order to marry her. This prophet who had been called by God to preach repentance and baptism for forgiveness of sins out in the desert was chained up inside where no one could see him or hear his word from God.

And from that prison, he sends word to his cousin, Jesus, and asks, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” I love this moment because when others describe John the Baptist, it is as the messenger from Isaiah, sent out ahead to prepare the way for the messiah. It’s easy to assume John the Baptist would think of himself this way too – to claim that mantel of prophet, of messenger – and yet, he sends word from Herod’s prison – Jesus, are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?

He isn’t sure. He has faith that Emmanuel, God with us, will come. He has hope that it may be Jesus. But he has to ask – is it true? Is it happening? Is it real?

Jesus sends back word of what is happening in the world outside that jail cell, as Jesus travels and preaches and teaches – 5the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

We don’t get to hear how John reacts to this news – the next we hear of John the Baptist is when he is executed for his crimes of speaking the truth to power, and that is powerful witness, but still I wonder. When John the Baptist heard of the miracles happening through Jesus out in the world, of the poor hearing good news…I wonder if he felt Joy. I wonder if surrounded by misery and darkness, he felt an intense joy the kind of which he’d never known.

Christmas Joy is different than other kinds of joy.

Advent was traditionally a season of fasting, a preparation for the birth of Christ, for the incarnation of God with us. You fasted and prayed to make room for the audaciousness of Christ being born among us. And in the middle of this season of abstaining – Gaudate. Rejoice. Pink candle.

In our tradition, we don’t fast anymore in Advent – it is a different kind of season than Lent for us – but we do spend these four weeks in a quiet anticipation. O come, o come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel. We observe the darkness as the sun sets earlier and earlier, and the broken world around us entrenched in war and gun violence and pandemic and income inequality and…and…and. We see the same things we bought last Advent to prepare for Christmas – ingredients for holiday meals and gas to travel to family – cost more and contain less.

If this world were all there was, this materialistic, competitive, cruel world, this cold darkness, we would be captive indeed, forced to wake up and shove our bodies and spirits through another day, day after day, until we die. If this world were all there was, we would be in a prison too, like John the Baptist.

But today we remind ourselves – Rejoice. Emmanuel shall come to thee. The Lord is near at hand. Christ is the one – we don’t have to wait for another. And Christmas joy, that joy that is different from other joys, is fiercer and stronger and more precious than other joys because it lifts us up even in darkness. Even in prison. Even in waiting in line at the post office.

It is not yet Christmas. We have more quiet waiting ahead, more somber anticipation and preparation at hand. We have not yet reached the darkest day of the year, when the sun rises late and sets early. But today, we embrace this truth: We children of God, we followers of Jesus, we the gathered body of Christ expressed as gathered worshipers in Christ Church, Trumbull – we have a Joy within us that is different than other kinds of Joy – because we know that wars will end and we will live in peace, that guns will be turned to ploughshares, that no illness or even death will end our existence in God’s creation.

We know that Jesus Christ is about to be born, that God will come to us as one of us. We know he will come in a humble stable, into poverty, into oppression. In the gospel today, Jesus asks where the people were looking for the good news – inside a palace by someone with soft clothes, or out in the wilderness by someone with clothes made of rough camel’s hair, currently held captive in Herod’s prison.

When we are in our own wilderness, when the world is rough with us and not soft, when we are held captive by systems we did not ask for and cannot escape from – that is where the good news is. Over and over again, God shows us that his place is there where things are hard, a light in the darkness. And we rejoice, because that’s where we are too.

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice. Let your forbearance be known to all, for the Lord is near at hand; have no anxiety about anything, but in all things, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God. Lord, you have blessed your land; you have turned away the captivity of Jacob.

Christmas Joy is different than other kinds of joy.

Amen.