The Lord your God in your midst,
The Mighty One, will save;
He will rejoice over you with gladness,
He will quiet you with His love,
He will rejoice over you with singing.
Zephaniah 3:17
Yesterday the Church celebrated “Joy” in the Advent calendar. Like a guy on the street hollering “cheer up, sweetie – you’re prettier when you smile,” it seems like Week Three of Advent is scolding us to get it together, stop crying, put a Theological Smile on, and “rejoice in the Lord, sweetie – you’re a better Christian when you rejoice.”
Some of us are jumpy when the Church talks about Joy. Christians are like all humans – we have difficulty dealing with the painful and unpleasant emotions that other people bring to us. But Christians have a pernicious habit of calling that discomfort holy. Christian awkwardness with sadness, fear, and anger gets sanctified: the difficult emotions show “lack of trust” or “disobedience” or “immaturity.”
Our community’s difficulty accepting pain makes it hard to trust an Advent calendar that beckons us into Joy. We’ve been burned before.
Facebook reminded me that last year, the lectionary text for the Third Sunday in Advent was Zephaniah 3:17.
The Lord your God in your midst,
The Mighty One, will save;
He will rejoice over you with gladness,
He will quiet you with His love,
He will exult over you with loud singing.
This is not a prescriptive description of how the people of God should approach Advent. This is not a set of rules, or a set of guidelines, or even a suggestion, of how to feel on any particular day in the world. This is not a reproach or rebuke.
This is a description of what God feels when God looks at you, beloved.
When God looks at you, God feels Joy.
When was the last you swapped lenses and stopped seeing Scripture as a series of regulatory and prescriptive statements? What if you saw it telling the story of God’s unrelenting, unstoppable, unquenchable love for you?
When was the last time you saw the Church calendar not as points in time to do certain things, but as the feasts and fasts as arrows pointing towards the heart of God, directional signals reminding us season by season that God has been chasing us down through all of history – reminders that the Covenant has never been broken and will never be broken?
When was the last time you took a rest from relentless self-discipline and believed that as you are, today, with all the areas that you’ve grown so much in (hooray!) and all the sin and selfishness that still grips your heart (oh dear) – that exactly as you are, God looks at you and rejoices?
Take a breath from imagining Advent Joy as something to manufacture out of a weary heart. Beloved, God’s Advent Joy flows to us precisely as a balm for that weariness.
In Advent we wait for Jesus. We wait for the fulfilment of a Covenant. We wait for the first hints of what will blossom into the Gospel: powerful Grace that will reach its tendrils out to our evil, cold, stone-hard hearts and wrap around them, embrace them, whisper to them that “your sins are forgiven. Go in peace.” In Advent, we anticipate the delight of God in humanity being so ridiculously uncontainable that it spilled out into Time and Space in the Person of Jesus Christ. For God so delighted in the world…
The story of Advent is the story of a God whose Joy was so great that it became our strength and our salvation.
Maybe you are rich with happiness right now, in a place of centeredness and empowerment you never could have imagined a year ago. Maybe you are overwhelmed by how angry you are. Maybe you haven’t had a day where you haven’t cried since the summer. Maybe you’re all three of those things, from the beginning of the day to when you collapse into bed.
It’s not your joy, or lack of it, that matters this Advent season. It’s God’s relentless, pursuing Joy in you.
