There is something beautiful and mysterious about Advent, but there is, at the same time, something unsettling, darkly anxious, almost threatening about it. The Advent mood is hard to put into words. It is often captured better by its hymns, which are often dark and brooding, sung in a minor key.
The scripture lessons for Advent set the tone with their continued prophetic calls for repentance, the dire warnings to “wait and watch,” the urgency of preparation for what is coming. We hear about those who are unprepared for God, tenants who are surprised by the sudden appearance of their long-absent landlord, sleepy bridesmaids waiting with their empty oil-lamps for the bridegroom to come.
In short, it’s an expectant season, a season of being primed and pumped, and there is a nervous edge to the waiting. Lauren Winner, in her charming book Girl Meets God says of Advent, “The waiting is meant to be a little anxious. I picture Jane Austen heroines. They never are quite sure that their intended will come.”
But the Advent mood undergoes a dramatic change today, on this Third Sunday of Advent. The lessons lose their menace and begin to dance a bit. Suddenly, the warnings turn into promises. We hear of deserts blossoming, the seas exulting, and the trees of the field clapping their hands, so that if there were one word to capture the new mood it would have to be joy!
Traditionally this Third Sunday of Advent is called Gaudete Sunday, from the Latin for joy, and it is a day for rejoicing.
But perhaps some of you don’t feel like rejoicing. Perhaps your own mood is more like the rest of Advent, darker, more anxious, somewhat unsettled, for any number of reasons, not least of which might be the state of the world.
The news of the world is always a distressed word, a word full of sadness and anger, an unsettled world tinged with fear and heavy with regret. Perhaps that is why the darker mood of the Advent season speaks to us at times more authentically than its more joyous mood. Because the news of the world in which we live is so often itself such a dark unsettled word.
Whether we recognize it or not we come to church to hear a counter-Word. We come burdened by our occupations and pre-occupations, weighed down by both the demands of daily living and the larger societal and global worries that clamor for our attention. We often think we have things pretty much figured out, but there are nagging areas of uncertainty about our fate and future.
We come perhaps unsure how reliable even the words we hear in church might be. The New Yorker last week had a cartoon in which a man is shaking hands with a minister at the door of a church. “Good sermon, Reverend,” he says, “but that God stuff is pretty far-fetched.”
Yes, it is. To the ears of the world the Good News often sounds like too-good-to be-true news. And a weekly hour’s religious interlude away from the world’s worries may not be enough to get us ready for rejoicing.
Nevertheless, on this Third Sunday in Advent we are admonished to rejoice. And in its wisdom the church has placed this rejoicing season in the midst of the heavier Advent mood, placed today’s major key joyfulness amid the plaintive longing of the rest of the season.
So what are we to make of the juxtaposition between the dark brooding mood of Advent and this new note of rejoicing? I would like to suggest that what Advent captures is the truth that we must always do our rejoicing in the very midst of the anguished world of sin and doubt. Just as we celebrate Easter in front of the backdrop of the cross of Good Friday, so we must come to celebrate Christmas out of the dark unsettledness of Advent.
Because we live between the first and second comings, in a world whose redemption is secure but not fully accomplished. We live in the time of the “already but not yet,” when Christ has already come, but remains to come again in glory to judge the earth. So our rejoicing in this waiting season is an act of faith in God’s promise. We can rejoice now because of what God has done and because of what we trust in faith he will do.
As Madeleine L’Engle put it in her poem First Coming:
We cannot wait till the world is sane
To raise our songs with joyful voice,
“We cannot wait till the world is sane to raise our songs with joyful voice.” This is not quite “singing in the rain,” but it is singing despite great griefs and burdens, both personal and public. After all, Paul admonishes us not to merely rejoice when life has filled our basket with good things, but to rejoice always, and then, as if he knew that we couldn’t quite believe what he was asking of us, he repeats it: “Again I say rejoice!”
For Paul rejoicing is part and parcel of the Christian life, not something we psyche ourselves up for, but a gift of the Holy Spirit that comes unbidden. Joy doesn’t depend on outward circumstances, as anyone who has worshiped with Christians in the Third World will tell you. Paul himself once broke into song while he was in prison in Philippi with his friend Silas. (Acts 16:25) In today’s Epistle lesson he now writes a letter of thanks to Philippi from yet another prison.
Paul did not wait to do his rejoicing. In the midst of adversity, the Lord had set him free for joy. That is why Christians rejoice. Because, in Paul’s words, “the Lord is near!” Does Paul mean the Lord is near in the general sense that God is always present, or does he mean the Lord is near in the more specific eschatological sense of “the Lord is coming?”
It is hard to say from the context, but it is quite possible that Paul means both. And since the present sufferings of the Philippians are at the hand of those who call Caesar “Lord” Paul may be reminding them that the true Lord is near. There are echoes here with the oracles of Zephaniah, who said: “The day of the Lord is near.” (Zephaniah 1; 7, 14)
We also have some rejoicing in our reading from Zephaniah today. Which is all the more remarkable because the Book of Zephaniah doesn’t start out sounding very much like Good News. Listen to how God describes the day of his coming:
I will utterly sweep away everything
from the face of the earth, says the Lord.
I will sweep away humans and animals;
I will sweep away the birds of the air
And the fish of the sea.
I will make the wicked stumble.
I will cut off humanity
from the face of the earth, says the Lord.
These are not words of hope and promise; these are words of warning, dire words that leave us judged and dead.
Now listen to these words from Chapter three:
Sing aloud, O daughter Zion;
Shout, O Israel!
Rejoice and exult with all your heart,
O daughter Jerusalem!
The Lord has taken away the judgments against you . . .
The Lord your God is in your midst,
A warrior who gives victory;
He will rejoice over you with gladness
He will renew you in his love;
He will exult over you with loud singing
As on a day of festival.”
So how does the story get from Chapter 1 to Chapter 3, from judgment to mercy; from wrath to tender forgiveness; from fear to rejoicing, from death to life?
The answer is that the God who comes to be our judge is the same God who comes to be our Savior. This is what holds the waiting and rejoicing moods of Advent together.
God has taken the sentence that we deserve and has taken it upon himself. In Christ our judgment have been removed and the enemy has been turned away at the gates. We can rejoice as prisoners who have received a stay of execution. The Good News is like a governor’s pardon that arrives by the last post.
Such a reprieve is cause for rejoicing. Those who would have been given over to death by the word of the law are now brought to life by the life-giving word of the Gospel. God turns our death into life, our shame into praise. No wonder St. Paul commands us to rejoice!
But the rejoicing is not just on our part. We are not the only ones rejoicing this Advent. God rejoices along with those whose sentence he has overturned. Even God sings, ““he will exult over you with loud singing!” God not only invites us to the party he comes himself.
Because God is a lover and invites us to love him in return. The Christian story is above all a love story. It is not about something called religion, but it is all about the love God has for us. God wants us for himself. He wants us as lovers. This is the God who heals and saves, the God who gives meaning and hope to the downcast and new life to the dead. This is God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and our Father, the God worth waiting for, and working for, and praying to and rejoicing with.
This is the God that our ancestors have worshipped in this building since 1853 and in two previous meetinghouses on this site going back to 1764. This is the God we pray will bring many to himself in this place in the years to come, so that in this place 150 years from now people, will hear the Good News of his love. And so we rejoice and sing.
We cannot wait till the world is sane
To raise our songs with joyful voice,
For to share our grief, to touch our pain,
He came with love: Rejoice! Rejoice!
The Reverend Dr. Richard L. Floyd. A sermon given at First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, Massachusetts on December 14, 2003.
