Dear Friends,
During my backpacking days, I learned to appreciate the value of a well-placed trail marker (also known as a “duck”). When hiking through snow or over large stretches of granite slab, those trail markers kept us from wandering off in the wrong direction on more than a fewoccasions! They kept us pointed in the right direction.
In a similar fashion, our Advent trail markers of Peace, Hope, Joy and Love are helping us to stay on the trail that leads to Bethlehem and the celebration of the birth of a baby who would become known to the world as Jesus of Nazareth. Thus far in our Advent journey, we havebenefited from the direction provided by the trail markers of Peace and Hope. This week, our focus turns to the trail marker of joy and the invitation that it offers.
When you think of joy, what do you think of? Usually, we tend to think in terms of something that is pretty exciting,something that provides us with a burst of happiness and laughter, something that makes us want to celebrate. We may think, for example, of the joy of a birthday party or the joy of celebrating a graduation or a promotion. We may think of the joy that comes to us when our team wins the big game and we can celebrate with other fans.
To be sure, those are joyful moments, without question. Yet, the joy that comes to my mind as I prepare for worship this Sunday is a joy that reaches a little deeper into the experience of living, one that is not necessarily contingent upon everything working out in the way I want it to work out. In other words, I am thinking about a joy that can be present even amid the most challenging and difficult times.
This experience of joy, you see, can be found in simply knowing who you are and whose you are. It can come from realizing that, even in the most difficult of moments, God Spirit is present and it is God who holds us—even then—in the palm of God’s hands.
In our scripture reading from Isaiah 35 this week, the prophet anticipates the coming day of joy when the people of Israel will return from their exile. It will be a day, he suggests, when “The wilderness and the dry land will be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom.” He than goes on to suggest that on that day, “the eyes of the blind and the deaf shall be opened, then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.”
Finally, at the conclusion of this passage, Isaiah writes that, “The ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy will be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.”
You get the picture. Even in moments of darkness and struggle, there is joy to be found in the anticipation of what is yet to come. As long as God is at work, Isaiah suggests, there is reason for joy.
In my message on Sunday, I will be talking about the ways in which Jesus became the fulfillment of Isaiah’s vision. When the disciples of John the Baptist asked him if he was the One to come or if they should look for another, he simply replied: “Go tell John what you hear and see. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with skin disease are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead areraised and the poor have good news brought to them.” (Matthew 11: 4-6)
Jesus is here suggesting that the joyous signs of his ministry are those that match up with the vision that Isaiah had lifted centuries earlier. In effect, Jesus is saying that, in his ministry, the time of joy and celebration that Isaiah had envisioned had finally come to pass.
As you prepare for worship this week, I invite you to consider your own definition of joy and what it looks like in the every-day circumstance of living. Is your inspiration for joy something that is fleeting, something that is here one moment and gone the next? Or, does it have a staying power that is rooted in your faith and confidence that, even in difficult times, God is still at work?
That, it seems to me, is what the joy of the Advent season is all about—a joy that is not dependent upon everything going our way, but instead, upon the knowledge that God has our back—and that God is at work, in and through us—to help us realize the future that we have dreamed about.
Peace & Joy,
Ron
Rev. Ron Dunn