Rejoice!

Photo of The Rev. Carol Sanford by The Rev. Carol Sanford

It is the third Sunday of the Holy Season of Advent, a time of joyful anticipation in the Church and sometimes not-so-joyful experiences in the secular ‘holiday’ world. For a few days last week Grady and I joined a group on retreat in a monastery in western Arkansas. Subiaco Abby sits like a medieval stone fortress high on a hill, surrounded by fertile fields and grazing cattle. If you imagine that it is easier to maintain a prayerful Advent focus while chanting Vespers with black-robed monks in great, glowing marble halls, than it is when standing in long lines at Target… you’re right, at least for short visits.

During the long trip home, we maintained a sort of cocooned atmosphere of distance from ordinary concerns. We even jumped ahead a bit on the calendar and listened to Christmas music in the car.  After all, it was a seven- hour drive and how many times can you sing  ‘O come O come Emmanuel?’

At any rate, we arrived home, gathered up the Sunday papers from the front step, and prepared for a gentle transition back to everyday life.  Perhaps I should have waited a day before catching up on the news, but I opened the Star and there, on the front page, was an article exposing more damage done by individuals and institutions charged with the care of God’s children. I read very little, but enough. Sometimes the weight of the world is crushing in its brutality, and betrayal of trust is among the cruelest of blows.

Not all betrayal is of such gut-wrenching proportion, but most of us have experienced some level of hopes dashed or of promises broken. It’s easy to get caught up in lively condemnation of the wrongdoers, but we need to remember that not one of us is without sin.  It can be depressing and disheartening to face that no life unfolding on earth is free from wounds or from wounding. And yet this third Sunday in Advent is called Gaudete, or Rejoicing, Sunday. That’s why we have the pink candle on the Advent wreath.  Today we are not just preparing for the coming of Christ and hoping for that glorious day, today we affirm our trust and faith in His coming, and so we rejoice.

Trusting puts us in a vulnerable position.  We want to trust God, but we can’t help but see that the oppressed, the broken-hearted, the captives, and the ruined cities are still with us.  If God hasn’t fixed all this since the time of Isaiah, why is it that we trust? How is it that we rejoice?

St. Paul goes so far as to say that we are to give thanks in all circumstances and to rejoice always. This is sometimes interpreted to mean that we should give thanks for all circumstances. I disagree, for I cannot in my heart give thanks for the abuse of children or of anyone or of any part of God’s creation. What I can do, though, is rejoice and trust and observe that God is present and that God can and will bring good out of every condition when given the opening, the pathway, to do so.

Again this week we hear of John, the voice of Jesus’ time who proclaimed the coming of the Lord and cried out to make straight His way. John must have been an unlikely candidate to draw a following.  In artistic impressions, the image of a wild prophet may appear appealing, but even in those days the accepted norm of a holy person would have been someone a bit more presentable.  John was, after all, dressed in the skins and eating the bugs of poverty, and yet he was a presence so powerful that the rulers and the most religious men of his day could not ignore him. 

We assume that John was being questioned by those sent from the Pharisees because he was perceived as a threat. They did not trust him. But consider this: people then were just as we are in their thirst for God, and I have to think that his questioners also came in hopes of hearing or seeing something of the Divine.

And they did. Or at least they had the chance to see. Before them was a man sent from God as a witness to the light of God in Christ.  Although John is usually depicted as strong and fiery, there is for me a poignancy, a tenderness, in his statement,  “Among you stands one whom you do not know.”  Perhaps it is my lingering sorrow from recent news items, but I hear an echo of both sadness and sweetness in John’s words. Most of those around him are blind to what he can see, and yet he remains faithful to the testimony he carries and continues with his work while waiting for the light to become visible to others.

I think also of Mary, as she carried Jesus. Surely she was unremarked as anything other than another young girl awaiting the birth of her child, but what spectacular Glory was held within her. The Magnificat is an echo of even more ancient poetry, a renewed outpouring of  joy at a single life made Holy and at a world to be transformed in justice and light.

Both Mary, the mother of our Lord, and John, the charismatic baptizer, knew the burden and joy of trusting in God while waiting for God’s Glory to become visible and, indeed, tangible. We rejoice today because, although there is betrayal by the people of God, there is no betrayal in or by God. The light of God which we affirm this third Sunday, this Rejoicing Sunday, will shine forth at the Nativity, burst all bounds at Easter, and come to blaze within us at Pentecost.

The peaceful anticipatory Advent glow of the Cathedral or of the monastery does not reside in stone walls. Conflict and pain are just as present to and within these Holy buildings as they are outside of them. The light of these places is the very light of Christ gathered up in proclamation and sacrament and prayer; the creating, redeeming and sustaining Peace which passes all understanding affirmed and practiced among us.

We cannot yearn for something completely unknown to us. The Prince of Peace does not come to us from the outside in, but comes to our awareness from within and among us where He already dwells. We long for what we already have. The Way that we are to make straight is the path from our hearts to each other and to the world.

We make that way straight by heeding St. Paul’s injunction to test everything and to hold fast to what is good. As that goodness becomes manifest in our lives, we, ourselves, are tangible pathways by which Christ’s love travels out into the world and becomes visible to those who have yet to see it, that they may, then, find that light within themselves.

Each of us is sent by our baptism, by our humanity and by our divinity in Christ, to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners, and to build up the ruined cities. We have already begun this work in numerous programs of caring ministry within the Cathedral itself and bridging borders of every kind in reflection of God’s boundless Kingdom.

As we welcome Christ by reaching out in love and compassion, as we prepare for the coming of the Christ Child with Christmas trimmings both external and internal, we will come to know truly and at depth that God is trustworthy, that He remembers the promises that he made to Abraham and his children forever, because we will become a part of those promises ourselves. And when that happens, we cannot help but proclaim the greatness of our Lord and our spirits will rejoice in God our Savior.

There was one sent from God, whose name was John…and whose name is Sue and Jerry and Jeff and Sally and Jill and Steve and Betty and … …