Rejoice!?

Psalm 126

1 When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.2 Then our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy;then it was said among the nations, “The Lord has done great things for them.”3 The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced. 4 Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like the watercourses in the Negeb. 5 May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.6 Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing,shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.

Isaiah 12:1-6

You will say on that day:“I will give thanks to you, O Lord,    for though you were angry with me,your anger turned away,    and you comforted me.

2 Surely God is my salvation;    I will trust and will not be afraid,for the Lord is my strength and my might;    he has become my salvation.”

3 With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. 4 And you will say on that day:

“Give thanks to the Lord;    call on his name;make known his deeds among the nations;    proclaim that his name is exalted.

5 Sing praises to the Lord, for he has done gloriously;    let this be known in all the earth.

6 Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion,    for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.”

Philippians 4:4-7

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. 5 Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

8 Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about[d] these things. 9 As for the things that you have learned and received and heard and noticed in me, do them, and the God of peace will be with you.

Even if joy doesn’t seem like a compelling subject much of the year, we expect joy to make an appearance at Christmas.   It’s woven into the fabric.  One common expression to convey one’s joy is to say, “I was like a kid on Christmas morning”, and indeed a central aspect of Christmas, for many, is the nostalgia of childhood, the anticipation of the day when your dreams would come true.   We often feel some pressure to recreate that joy only to find ourselves disappointed when the season doesn’t deliver.  And if you’re parent - or maybe even if you’re not - you experience Christmas vicariously through children. 

That kind of childlike anticipation might be instructive for us grownups for whom Advent is meant to be a season of entering into a world of where God’s people walked in darkness for centuries waiting for the light to shine  The idea is the we might experience anew the good news that God is Immanuel, even that we might receive this like joyful children, and that this would inspire us to long for, to prepare for, the day when Christ comes again.  That’s the idea, anyway.

The word joy shows up in Scripture whenever God does something that the people have been waiting for God to do, when some distant promise which they’ve clung to, despite hope having been all but lost, finally is fulfilled.  Or it speaks of that future joy when the promise is fulfilled, the joy of anticipated joy.  

The passage from Isaiah 12 addresses a people in exile, who have been driven from the Promised Land but now God, through Isaiah, promises a day when they will be restored, a day of salvation.  It is this promise, this vision of future joy, which sustains the people.  

Psalm 126 apparently expresses a moment where captivity has given way to liberation, suffering to deliverance, like a dry river restored to flowing water.  People lived and died in this expectation, but now to experience its reality was like living in a dream.  

It is the waiting, the longing, that makes joy possible, and the degree of joy experienced is proportional to the time spent waiting, to the suffering endured, to the despair overcome, and to the surprise of it all. The travail of labor gives way to the birth of the child.  The more prolonged the struggle, the more daunting the obstacles, the greater the joy that results.  

This way of talking about joy emphasizes its emotional aspect; joy is the felt experience in response to a particular event or state of affairs.  Joy names the profound satisfaction when there is congruence between the way things are and the way you want them to be, or when reality exceeds your dreams.  And this way of framing joy almost necessarily makes it fleeting.  The joy of the child on Christmas morning gives way to the humdrum realities of life.  Turns out not all your dreams come true; joy comes and goes.  We do not - we almost certainly cannot - continue to live in that initial joy.  Any state of affairs, however extraordinary, eventually becomes normal. 

But joy, within Scripture and Christian tradition, is not merely a temporary emotional response but even a state of being.  We are not to experience joy now and then; we are to be joyful.  In the passage from Philippians, Paul implores the church to, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.”  We are commanded to rejoice because Christ has come, fulfilling - exceeding - all expectation.  Joy is the proper response.  While life goes on as before, everything is changed, and indeed history is, in Paul’s reckoning, essentially finished; we now await the final consummation when Christ’s returns.   “The Lord is near”, he assures us.  

I have to confess that I often feel a disconnect between the way that Paul, especially, describes life as a Christian and the actual experience of life as a Christian.  This leaves us wondering if we're not doing something right or whether perhaps Paul has overstated his case - or whether his words are wishful thinking.    

I trust it won’t scandalize anyone to mention that Paul quite clearly expected Christ to return very soon and was also quite clearly wrong in this regard.  The Lord’s coming was not so near it turned out, and while the impact of Christ’s appearance in history should not be underestimated, it’s still the case that history continues much as before.  There was and still are wars and disasters, poverty and abuse, broken people and broken relationships everywhere you look.  How can we persist in that joy given what we know of life?  

I’m guessing most of us are familiar with the kind of Christian folks for whom this question does not occur or is dismissed, for whom faith means insisting that Christian truth claims essentially override human experience.  These are the kinds of people who, after a child dies, tell the parents to cheer up because now the child is in a better place.  But if joy is that place where God’s good intentions are realized, the death of a child is certainly the opposite.  There is no joy to be found in that.  Even so, in my experience it’s quite difficult for many Christians to mourn properly, or to be honest about their sorrow and frustration, because they think they’re supposed to be joyful, so instead they affect happiness and suppress emotions.  In the desire to affirm a higher reality they end up denying basic reality.  Clearly this is not the way.  

Having said that, it remains the case that “rejoice!” is a valid command, that joy, rather than only being something that happens to us, is also a choice of sorts, something we align ourselves with whatever our circumstances.  It is a way of being.  

In that little video where various intellectuals take a stab at defining joy, the one which most has the ring of truth about it (at least to my ears) was the statement that joy names the resistance to despair and the forces of death.  This way of putting it seems to me to take seriously both the witness of Scripture and the witness of experience.  

At Christmas we celebrate the incarnation, that God the infinite, eternal God took on our finite humanity and entered the temporal plane, that God has not abandoned humanity but, in fact, assumes humanity and suffers as one us in order to save us.   Christ takes us from darkness to light, from death to life, from despair to joy, revealing to us who God is and who we are.  And yet, even as we tell this story, we are reminded that we still live in a world where the is much darkness, where the powers of death prevail, where despair remains a live option.  And faith does not exempt us from this reality; if anything it allows us to see more clearly.  Nor does faith equal complete assurance that these things are true - though we should expect that our experience accords with this story, even as many questions remain unanswered.  The substance of faith, ultimately, (as I’ve said before) is to life as if this was true, it is to say, “this is my story, this is my song” 

Here’s another confession: just about every night, before I go to bed, or when I wake up in the darkness, I think about death.  This is typical of middle age, I suppose, but I am troubled by the thought that I’ve already quite likely got more life behind me than before.   I imagine that I am hardly alone in this, and I imagine as well many people out there experience a kind of quiet despair as they reckon with their own finitude in a world without meaning.  Morning comes and we get on with life, but our little existential crises persist.   

I do not want to suggest that only Christians can experience joy - in fact, there’s much evidence that Christians are often uniquely incapable of joy - but it seems clear to me that whether we cling to joy or whether we succumb to despair has everything to do with what kind of world we imagine ourselves to be living in.  If we are living in a world in which our existence is a glorious accident of brute material forces, without meaning or purpose, then despair is not only possible but maybe even sensible.  But if we are living in a world which God not only created but in which God is intimately involved, even having entered that world in flesh and blood, and we then insist that God will - God must - bring to completion what God has started, then our existence not only becomes endurable, but in fact we come to see that existence is good.  And whether we tend toward the story of despair or the story of joy is a matter of personal experience much more than some dispassionate weighing of the “evidence”, but even more it is fundamentally a decision.  The heart of the matter: Is life worth living?  Is there hope?  If we can say yes, then we can find joy.

It seems to me that we live in world in which people increasingly question if existence is, in fact, good, who find it difficult to give an account of why life is worth living, and while ostensibly Christians ought to be inoculated against this kid of despair, because this is the zeitgeist in which we live and move and have our being, we too imbibe of this spirit.  The message we receive, in a million little ways, is that life is kind of lousy.  And to be sure, we should have our eyes wide open to suffering and injustice, but that does not mean speaking negatively equates speaking truth.  

We come to worship in large part to reorient our lives, to hear an alternative account of reality, to learn new habits of thought.  And this is hard work, swimming against the current.   When we find ourselves closer to despair than to joy we should heed Paul’s words:   

8 Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

There is no shortage of things which meet this criteria, but nothing fulfills it quite like the incarnation of God in Christ Jesus.  Our work this Advent - and always - is to dwell upon the thought that God became human and in that to find our joy.  What greater affirmation could there be that life is worth living than that God himself lived our life, that God becomes our brother and friend, that we are not alone.