Advent: Looking for Joy in all the Wrong Places

A sermon preached by Scott Nowack on December 11, 2011

at the First Presbyterian Church, Kilgore, Texas.

Looking For Joy in all the Wrong Places

Luke 1: 46-55

            We have just read one of the most inspiring passages of the Bible.  These words of Mary have been put to music more than any other passage in scripture.  It is a message of triumph and victory, of strength and might.  It is a message of true joy.

            What is true joy and where does it come from? 

Where do we find joy in our lives?  Is there someone here today who finds joy in their work, their career?  Our personal identity is often grounded in the work we do.  It feels good to know that you need to be somewhere, to know that you are needed someplace to do a specific job for which you were the most qualified applicant.   To be needed and to have a purpose for your life: what a joyful feeling!  But that’s not the joy I’m talking about.

            I would be willing to guess that there are some of us here today who find joy in material possessions.  Who doesn’t want a nice car to drive or a beautiful home to live in or nice clothes to wear?  I love getting new things, especially as gifts from other people.  As a kid during Christmas, my brother and I would be aching with anticipation on Christmas Eve night for Christmas Day to arrive.  I remember lying in bed one year having a staring contest with my alarm clock.  I lost.  The minutes felt like hours.  It was as if time were standing still.  Finally the time came that we were allowed to go downstairs to open our gifts.  The joy and the excitement was electric!  New toys – Yeah!  New clothes – Boooo!  The laughter, the cheers, and the sound of ripping paper filled the room.  It was such a joyous time!  But that’s not the joy I’m talking about.

            The joy I am talking about is the one that seeks us out; that finds us at unexpected times and places, in unexpected ways.  It’s the joy that catches us off-guard and unprepared.  It’s the joy that comes to us in God’s time and not our own, infiltrating our lives at the core of our being.  It’s the joy that is eternal and rooted in God, not the fleeting, here today gone tomorrow, form of joy that we often confuse with the happiness we experience when opening Christmas gifts.

            Many years ago, the mother-in-law of a good friend of mine was dying of cancer.  I met her for the first time at my friend’s wedding.  I must tell you I had never met such a joyful person in my life!  What a wonderful woman!  Her positive attitude and her reliance on God’s grace amazed me.  I remember visiting her on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and I was blown away by her loving and enduring spirit.  She gave me a big hug when I arrived.  She was smiling from ear to ear; the joy that she had in her life filled the entire house, every nook and cranny.  Despite the fact that she struggled everyday with her cancer and slept in a hospital bed with oxygen 24 hours a day, her spirit and her attitude were unbroken.  Would any of us expect to see such joy flourish, grow and prosper in such a desperate situation?   

            One Christmas I found myself in one of the coldest places I’ve ever been, Chicago, IL.  It was a Sunday and it was cold.  I went to church that day downtown on North Michigan Ave., a.k.a. the Magnificent Mile.  It is named as such for all the fancy and expensive stores and malls that line up both sides of this street.  After church, I braved the cold and did some shopping for Christmas.  After a cold and crisp afternoon going in and out of stores, I had had enough.  So I walked to the subway station to head uptown.  As I sat on one of the benches, tired and exhausted from my mighty shopping expedition, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, a man; a simple man.  A tired man whose wrinkled, aged face did not accurately tell his true age.  He was standing by the tracks with a paper coffee cup on the ground at his feet.  He was wearing old, dirty sneakers with a couple of layers of socks on each foot.  His pants were black, worn and faded.  Under an old army camouflage jacket, this man wore several layers of tattered shirts and sweaters which when worn together combine for a true drab look.  Upon his head was a beat up Chicago Bulls wool hat, on his hands were a pair of finger-less gloves, and wrapped around his neck was a long, old wool scarf.  He was not a beautiful sight to behold.  But just when I was about to write him off in my mind as another bum on the street, he began to sing.  His voice was magnificent!  It was like that of the angels who announced to the shepherds that Jesus the Messiah was born.  His voice carried beautifully through the entire subway station.    As he sang “Little Drummer Boy”.  As he was stomping his foot on the station floor and clapping his hands together, he sang his song.  “I have no gift to bring, ba ra ba ba ba”. The music was so joyful and so amazing.  I was overwhelmed.  Here was a man, down and out, a bum by society’s standards, singing in the subway station that he has no gift to bring as thousands of people come and go with bags and boxes of gifts for Christmas.  The irony of it all is that this man did have a gift, a gift of joyful praise to God to be shared with all of us who heard him that afternoon.  The joy I felt that afternoon was not from all the Christmas hoopla or from spending money on Christmas gifts.  Like the joy I saw in my friend’s mother-in-law, the joy I felt came from a most unexpected source and at a most unexpected time and place. 

This is the joy that comes from God; the joy Mary felt when she received the news from God that she was going to have a son.  Here is Mary, a woman, a teenager, not well educated, poor, engaged to Joseph, not well-connected, a nobody in her culture, who gets an unexpected message from God.  Who would have ever imagined that Mary would be called by God to be a major player in God’s plan for the redemption of the world.  And Mary is open to what God is calling her to do.  She accepts her unexpected call with the true joy we read in our scripture lesson today.  Where does Mary’s joy come from?  It comes from God.  Where did my friend’s mother-in-law joy come from?  It comes from God.  Where did the subway singer’s joy come from?  It comes from God.  True joy comes from God.

God can work through the powerful and wealthy and mighty of this world, but is too often ignored or forgotten.  But God also works through the lowly, the poor, the oppressed, and the outcast and gets results.  By doing so, God turns our understanding of the world upside down.  We see this “role reversal” in verses 52-53,

“He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

            Through the words of Mary, we come to realize that God has been at work in the world since “the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever”(v.55).  God’s disruption of our world didn’t end with Abraham.  It continued through to the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.  God continues to be at work in our present day working to bring about justice and peace for all people.  We are also assured that God will continue to disrupt the world straight into the future.  We have not been abandoned or left alone.  Our God has been with us in the past, God is with us today, and God will be with us in the future.  There is great joy to be found in this truth.

True joy comes from God, not our careers or our possessions or through earthly power and influence.  True joy comes from God and God alone and it is available to all who believe and trust in Him.  In essence, Jesus means joy.  If we are truly filled with this joy, it should be on the brink of bubbling and gurgling out of us each day.  A father asked a child why she liked her Sunday school teacher so much.  She answered, because her eyes twinkle like she's laughing inside all the time.  Jesus as our joy keeps the corners of our mouths perpetually turning up.  Keep smiling!

            May you be given the gift of discernment to know what God is calling you to do for your life and for the life of our congregation.  May we be watchful of the movement of the Holy Spirit and be in tune to God’s plan for each of us, our congregation, and our world.  Let us have the same joy to serve our God as Mary did and the same courage and faithfulness to carry it through.