Texts: Isaiah 61:1-11, Luke 1:46-55

It is the third Sunday of Advent! We’ve lit the pink candle, which is pink in recognition of Gaudete Sunday, a celebration of the joy that Christmas is imminent. Gaudete meaning “joy.”

And before I go on, I’m going to turn it back on you all: What are the things that bring you joy? Where and how do you find or experience joy? 

[responses included: puppies, grandkids, dark chocolate hot chocolate with melted marshmallows, sunsets, laughter, our amazing kids, friends, work in the woodshop, cats and pets, Sundays walking in the fields]

One silly thing that came to mind for me was a song. I think I learned it at camp when I was a child. It goes:

O be joyful, O be jubilant

Put your sorrows far away.

Come rejoice and sing together

This happy day.

This is a song that always delighted me because a) it could be sung in a round, which I loved – and still love, and b) you could mix up the letters and sing,

O gee boyful, O gee buvilant

Soot your porrows arr faway

Rum kejoice and ting soogether

This sappy hay.

I still kind of love it and find delight in it. And that – delight that is – put me in mind of the author Ross Gay, who wrote a book called, The Book of Delights. The book documents Gay’s practice of documenting an instance of delight each day over the course of a year. 

Ross Gay also has a book – a more recent one – called Inciting Joy. And it was an interview of Gar that I remembered in which he talks about both delight and joy and the difference between them. He says some of the way he started thinking about the difference was based on a short piece by Zadie Smith in the “New York Review of Books.”

He didn’t quote her directly, so I looked up the article, which is simply called “Joy.” She says, quite provocatively, I think:

The thing no one ever tells you about joy is that it has very little real pleasure in it.

Smith goes on to talk about her experience of parenting. While there are moments of delight, it’s ultimately hard, tiring and frustrating. I think the same might be said of many creative or other endeavors in which we find joy – writing or painting or quilting or throwing pottery or running a marathon – can be frustrating and filled with mistakes and blocks and physically challenging or painful. But the satisfaction and joy are also deep.

In my little song, the word say to be joyful and jubilant and to put your sorrows far away but In the interview with Gay, he says that his own understanding of joy can’t be taken apart from sorrow. For him, joy is about connection – what he called ‘entanglement’ – and that practices of entanglement often come because of sorrow. Joy is giving and receiving care, collaborating, making meaning.

In that way my silly song does get it right: singing together is cause for joy. I think of the way, for example the joy and grief mingled when we sang together at Roy’s memorial. Music is deeply joy making – especially when our voices are raised together.

Yesterday afternoon I joined a group of carolers at Westlake Center. While I would delight in any opportunity to sing Christmas Carols, this was a joy-filled experience as we sang with grief and conviction for a ceasefire in Gaza. When I was asked to contribute a quote for the press release, I said this:

Singing is a central part of my Christian tradition. Especially in this time, we follow the example of Mary, who when she learned that she would become the mother of Jesus, proclaimed in revolutionary song that tyrants would fall from their thrones and that the oppressed would be freed. Our carols are both a celebration of Jesus’ birth and call for others to follow his example of peace.

We just heard it for ourselves. Luke’s gospel record’s Mary singing that she will rejoice in God, who scatters the arrogant and feeds the hungry and sent away the rich empty handed. 

Mary’s song is an echo of the prophets before her, including Isaiah. You may have even noticed because they were read one after the other. Rejoicing and joy is paired both with the juxtaposition against suffering and with a freedom from oppression. 

Isaiah’s people are returning from exile. They are in a time of rebuilding, shaking off generations of suffering and looking to something new. As I read the lines about prisoners being released and captives going free I thought about the images and voices in the news this week about Syria. In Assad’s most notorious prison, infamous for torture and repression of dissent, door hung open, and the doors of captivity were burst.

And at the same time, rejoicing people of Syria are in something of the same position as Isaiah’s listeners. Our Isaiah reading ends, 

“As the earth puts out its growth, and as a garden grows its seeds, so the Lord God will grow righteousness and praise before all the nations.”

Syrians are starting from the beginning. What new and liberating thing could grow from the seeds and roots that have been buried for so long? That future is not yet written.

Joy will be essential for them as it is for any people who face a hard challenge of rebuilding or resistance. Tyranny delights in separation and isolation and fear but it is not joyful. So joy is an essential part of resisting it. 

Black activities in the United States have known this for years. Have know that joy is integral to liberating movements. Kleaver Cruz, founder of The Black Joy Project says,

Black Joy is not … dismissing or creating an ‘alternate’ black narrative that ignores the realities of our collective pain; rather, it is about holding the pain and injustice…in tension with the joy we experience. It’s about using that joy as an entry into understanding the oppressive forces we navigate through as a means to imagine and create a world free of them. (National Museum of African American History and Culture)

That same article in on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture site talks about how joy has been sustaining from the beginning of Africans’ history in the Americas:

Enslaved Africans understood that they were not free. And yet they believed and knew that there were generations coming after them that would be free. That kind of empowering Black Joy gave them the will to hold on and press forward, no matter what situations confronted them.

When Mary rejoices in God, she does not know who Jesus will become. She is herself still under occupation. She has no certainty of the future, but she trusts in a God who does great things, who binds up the brokenhearted, who releases the captives. And she immediately reinforces her connections with her community as she hurries to stay with Elizabeth. Joy!

Our movements for liberation really need the words of Mary and Isaiah. We need joy for sustenance. It’s why I went to Westlake to sing ceasefire carols. It’s why I work with other parents in my neighborhood to do collaborative fundraising for all of our schools instead of just my own. It’s why I love a potluck! Ross Gay backs me up: Potlucks build our entanglement and so they are a practice of joy.

We will all need, in the same way we practice hope, to look for and practice and name our experiences of joy in the coming years. And so, I want to ask again as we close: Where and how are you experiencing joy? 

May the God who brings tyrants down from their thrones,

Who fills the hungry with good things

And who binds up the broken hearted,

Clothes us each in a robe of righteousness and joy.

Amen.

—