Advent 3C

The 3rd Sunday of Advent Year C
December 13, 2009
One day this past week, I was very, very grumpy. I was feeling overwhelmed by the pressures of the season, wondering when I was going to have time to do my Christmas shopping, address and mail our Christmas cards, bake, and find that missing box of Christmas ornaments that we’ve managed to lose in the move. I was sitting at my desk, making an angel tree for our outreach project, and I was getting more and more cross as green glitter from the tree got all over my desk and my hands and my face, my hands got sticky from the glue stick I was using, and it became increasingly more apparent that making an angel tree for the parish is not one of my gifts for ministry—Martha Stewart I am not! As I was gluing the gift requests on the back of the angel ornaments, I stopped to read one of the lists of request for Christmas presents. It was from a 7 year old girl whose favorite color is purple or pink (like my own daughter) and who had asked for either a bike or a scooter for Christmas and also for a gift certificate to a portrait studio for her family to get their picture made. Intrigued, I read another from a 17 year old boy: itunes gift card and black ankle socks; and another: a full sheet set, a floor lamp, and any classic movie on dvd; and another: a 2 sided crock pot, scrapbooks, and comfortable shoes for work; and another: slippers, a monthly bus pass, and black hair dye; and another: Sponge bob square pants shoes to fit a size 4T and anything Spiderman or Superman…12 of these little sheets of paper I read, each one representing a beloved child of God whose humble hopes and dreams were offered to us with the hope that we could help them be fulfilled. And here I was irritated by all the green glitter getting on my desk.
I could just hear John the Baptist’s scathing comment to me across the ages as he called me worse things than a brood of vipers.
Now, I do not offer this to you in order to make you feel guilty or to make you share in my guilt. Today is Gaudete Sunday, rejoice Sunday, when our Advent penitence is somewhat lightened; we light the pink candle, and we are invited to join the call of the prophet Zephaniah, the apostle Paul, and even fussy old John the Baptist. My struggle this week has been how to live into this call to rejoice when our hearts may feel burdened by the cares and the concerns, the pressures of the season? How do we rejoice when our hearts feel heavy or anxious, stressed or broken? And what does it mean to rejoice?
We can learn something about rejoicing from Paul and from John the Baptist this week. First, Paul. His words may seem like an empty echo when read out of context of the rest of his letter to the church in Phillipi. But then we remember that in this letter, he has identified three great threats to the community: opponents who have caused them suffering, so much so that Paul fears that the church might divide in the face of it; alternative teachers who Paul unflatteringly calls “dogs” who threaten the gospel that he has been proclaiming; and a conflict between two female leaders of the congregation called Euodia and Syntyche who are at odds over an interpersonal and congregational issue. On top of all this, Paul is writing his letter in chains from prison. So when the people of the church of Phillippi hear Paul’s letter saying, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice…” they are listening with hearts that are weighed down from external and internal conflicts with anxiety about their future . He goes on to support his call to rejoicing by encouraging them to show forth their gentleness, to not worry and to pray, to turn their focus away from their fears and their conflicts and to focus outward on others in their community.
When the people come to John the Baptist in today’s gospel reading, even after his great tongue-lashing of them, they continue to ask him again and again…”What then should we do?” John’s great gift is that he is a person of vision who knows exactly who he is (not the Messiah but the one pointing to him) and that he has a very clear understanding of who his listeners are and who they could possibly be. He tells each one what they need to do in order to bear fruits worthy of repentance, and each prescription has to do with looking outside of themselves and their own issues and treating others with justice and mercy, gentleness and charity.
The poet Audre Lord wrote to her friend and fellow poet, Adrienne Rich: “Once you live any piece of your vision, it opens you to a constant onslaught of necessities, of horrors, but of wonders too, of possibilities.”
That is what John the Baptist offers his hearers: “possibilities”. It is the possibility of the good news—how we can be, how we will be changed for the better.
It is also at the heart of Paul’s hope and his call to rejoice—the possibility of transformation that he has experienced and continues to experience even in prison and the possibility of the church in Phillippi.
And so it is with us.
Our joy is not rooted in our own happiness, in our own prosperity, in our own stress and conflict-free circumstances. Our joy is rooted in our Lord Jesus Christ, in the way that he transforms our hearts and our minds so that we are no longer orbiting around our own sufferings and hardships, but we can be focused on God and on others and on the joy that springs forth from those relationships.
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.” For with God, all things are possible.