Foothills Congregational Church The Rev. W. Mathew Broadbent

United Church of Christ 3^rd Sunday in Advent

461 Orange Ave., Los Altos, CA 94087 December 12, 2010

I AM BECOMING JOY

Isaiah 35:1-10; Luke 1:47-55

I am becoming joy. Joy! Joy! Joy! Happiness? Giddiness? Delight, elation, exaltation, exhilaration, rapture, bliss, joie de vivre, blessing – there are thirty nine synonyms for joy in my dictionary. What’s yours?

Some say joy is the emotion of great happiness. The philosopher John Locke said: “Joy is a delight of the mind, from the consideration of the present or assured approaching possession of a good.” There’s a materialist for you. More generally it is stated as “The passion or emotion excited by the expectation of good.” Delightful! Joy is a good thing. It is that which causes joy or happiness.

Notice how joy and happiness are linked together, but are they the same? In my dictionary happiness is defined as a feeling of pleasure, or contentment, and the root of the word is the Middle English, happ, meaning chance or luck, like happenstance. Remember how in the 70’s we had “happenings,” now we call them “flash mobs.” It may be haphazard but it almost always comes as a surprise, like a joke that catches you off-guard.

My new favorite story is of the grandfather shopping with his grandson at one of those mega stores. There was a woman observing the uncontrolled behavior of the little boy who kept screaming - “I want that! I want that!” - and then throwing a fit when he didn’t get “that.” But the grandfather kept his calm and said, “Settle down, Bill. We are only going to be here a little while longer. It’s all right. Stay calm.” And when they got to the candy aisle the little boy was off the charts grabbing handfuls of candy bars. The grandfather took them away gently and put them back saying, “Bill, I need you under control. Calm down, we are almost done.” At the checkout counter the little boy starting throwing things out of the cart at the checker. The grandfather picked him up, “Now Bill, let’s not be violent. We’ll pay for this and go home. It’s all right. Be cool, Bill.”

When they went into the parking lot the woman who had been observing all this followed them out, stopped the grandfather and said, “That was amazing, the way you kept your calm while your grandson was out of control. I am impressed. Little Billy is very lucky to have you for a grandparent. The man looked at the woman and said, “Look, Lady, I’m Bill, that little twit is Dwight.”

Surprise, even when you know its coming, makes you laugh. Is it the same as joy, however? I was schooled in the definition of joy by a 10-year-old girl in my former church. I know I have told this story before but I take pleasure in repeating it. It was during the “Time With the Children,” probably on the Third Sunday in Advent, and I had asked them what Joy means. They gave me many of the words I gave to you at the beginning of this sermon, and happiness predominated. That is until this little girl raised her hand and said, reflectively, “I think joy is being deeply satisfied.” And we were all stunned. I didn’t know how to continue. You see, six months earlier I had conducted her mother’s funeral. Her mother had died of a brain tumor. From diagnosis to death had taken less than a year. She left a bereaved husband and two young children.

“I think joy is being deeply satisfied.” I thought, “that pretty much says it all. I have nothing else to add.” But, then, because most of the congregation didn’t know the context of this little girl’s statement, I had more work to do.

Joy may feel like happiness but it is something more, something deeper, and more profound. It is one of the reasons we continue to live in the face of harsh realities. It takes courage to live in this world, and sometimes it takes a young child to point the way, when we are so busy trying to be happy. One of the ancient Christmas Carols in Benjamin Britten’s “A Ceremony of Carols” ends with this lovely image:

This little babe so few days old

is come to rifle Satan’s fold.

All hell doth at his presence quake

though he himself for cold doth shake.

Or as the prophet Isaiah put it in today’s text:

Strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees.

Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear!’

Here is your God.

It has been written that one way to distill the message of the Bible is with two words: “Fear not.” We hear it in the Christmas scriptures. When the angel came to Mary she was afraid, but the angel said, “Fear not, Mary, for you have found favor with God.” When the night sky shimmered, and an angel appeared, the shepherds quaked, terrified. “Fear not. Do not be afraid,” the angel said – or “Sore afraid” if you are still reading the King James version. John Buchanan, a Presbyterian minister from Chicago, said that when he was a child he thought the shepherds were “so afraid they made themselves sore from shivering.”

Jesus constantly encouraged his followers to live through their fears. When he decides to go to Jerusalem they are afraid and beg him not to go. When he is arrested they all flee in fear. After his crucifixion they cower in a closed room in fear. And when a few venture out to the burial place early on Sunday morning and find the tomb empty, the words come again: “Fear not. Do not be afraid.”

The Biblical assertion is that when God is present you can let fear go. Centuries before Jesus’ birth, Isaiah wrote to a nation frightened for good reason. Judah is small, weak, vulnerable, a pawn in the power games of major players. The future looks grim. There are a lot of shaking hands and wobbly knees when the prophet exhorts, “strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees.”

The Bible has so much to say about fear because fear is such an enemy of life. It is hard to love when you are afraid. It is hard to care passionately about anything when you are afraid. It is impossible to be joyful about anything when you are afraid. Fear limits life, constrains life, pollutes life. To live in a constant state of fear can hardly be called living and certainly not the abundant life Christ calls us to be.

Fear is good for one thing. It alerts us to danger. I hate those hats and t-shirts that say No Fear! Someone came up with this idea to commercialize adolescent insanity. “No Fear!” This is why automobile crashes are the leading cause of death among teens, and why we send eighteen year-olds to war, and why we cringe when our adult children tell us what they never told us they did when they were in High School. It is not necessarily a bad thing to put the fear of God into our children.

The problem, as Peter Steinke describes it, is that when fear becomes overwhelming, alertness diminishes, and adrenalin floods the body, riveting the body on the object of fear. Tunnel vision occurs and fear takes over.

And when fear takes over violence results, and we are likely to assault our partner, hit our children, riot in the streets, find scapegoats for our anger in race or religion, invade nations, and torture prisoners, or beat ourselves up with guilt and shame. Fear is too much with us, we need an alternate reality.

If you have been attending worship these past three weeks you may have noticed the pattern of these sermons. I begin with the phrase “I am becoming - hope / peace / joy – and then I proceed to define these words, set them in their biblical context, and then try to probe deeper into the meaning of hope / peace / joy. There is yet another layer of theological context found in the word “becoming.”

We are culturally accustomed to think of God as a fixed point of reference. God is someone, some place, in cosmic time. This God has a plan for us and either we figure out the plan and succeed, or we don’t and we’re doomed. This is classic Calvinist theology, a carrot and stick approach to salvation that leaves no room for “becoming.” It either is or is not. You are either saved or you are not – your choice. Though a more sophisticated theology says this is really God’s choice. Even so, there is no room for becoming. We are doomed to live in fear of divine judgment.

I have become enamored of a different theological paradigm. “Process theology speaks of two aspects of divine activity in the world: the ‘creative love of God’ and the ‘responsive love of God’ (Catherine Keller: ON THE MYSTERY, pp. 98-99). Creative love is the divine passion that has a cosmic appetite for becoming, for beauty and the intensity of experience. This creative love “attracts,” it “calls” as the “initial aim” of each creature – or the “lure” – that invites us into the future to actualize the possibilities for greater beauty and intensity in our own lives. The responsive love of God, what may be called “Agape,” responds to whatever we have become, receives us as we are, has compassion for us, and walks with us in holy love.

Becoming is the key to an authentic life. There is always more than we imagined. We are always more than we imagined ourselves to be. Today, in this moment you are becoming a manifestation of God’s dream of creation. There is reason for joy, here, in this moment.

Augustine understood this notion of becoming. He wrote in his Confessions, “In the beginning, O God, you made heaven and earth in your Word, in your Son, in your Power, in your Wisdom, in your Truth, speaking in a wondrous way and working in a wondrous way. Who shall comprehend it? Who shall declare it? What is that which shines through me and strikes my heart without injuring it? I both shudder and glow with passion: I shudder, in as much as I am unlike it; I glow with passion in as much as I am like to it.”

I am becoming… Thank God I am becoming, because life is hard enough if this is all there is. You may remember the old Peggy Lee torch song: “Is That All There Is? The chorus goes:

if that’s all there is, my friends,

then let’s keep dancing

let’s break out the booze and have a ball

if that’s all there is

I hate that song. I hate the despair, the repressed fear, and the acceptance that this is all there is, especially, when we know better. I want more. I want hope. I want peace. I want joy. I want love. I want the reassurance that these are possible. It is like the young daughter of a friend who went to bed, saying her bedtime prayers, kissing her parents goodnight, and for years she would say, as they left, “Make sounds.” She wanted the security of her parents’ presence, the comforting sounds of their voices, dishes being dried, the television set droning on in the background, sounds of home and safety and love. In Jesus Christ, God comes close, in the sound of a human voice. Beyond the assurance of ancient prophets and the beauty of the Christmas story we believe something cosmic has happened and is happening.

Yes, the world is still a dangerous, shadowed place. Life is hard at every age and in every generation, and place in history. Some of you are living that reality, right now. But, listen to me, we have received Good News of God’s real presence, and we have heard the words “Fear not.” We are being lured into living beyond fear, into becoming hope, and peace, and joy, enraptured by the creative and responsive Love, we call God.

The sermon is built upon ideas presented by John Buchanan in,

“Preaching the Advent Texts: Hope, Peace, Courage.” Journal for Preachers / Advent 2010