Joy is in the Present
Luke 1:47-55 Isaiah 35:1-10
December 23, 2007    Fourth Sunday of Advent

I lived out in the desert for awhile, and most of the time, the
desert was as you might expect – pretty desolate.  The sands seemed to
stretch out for miles, with the only relief being some grey-green
cacti spotted here and there.  But a friend who actually lived in the
desert and had spent most of her life there warned me not to judge the
desert too harshly.  She encouraged me to keep my mind open at least
until the first rain.  She was right.  The rains came and they came
with ferocity.  But after they had fallen, after they had washed
everything that wasn't fastened down out of the way, the desert set
about blooming.  If you have never seen the desert bloom, then you are
really missing out on something spectacular.  The colors literally
exploded out of the sandy brown-grey background.  It seemed as if
cacti bloomed overnight, and maybe they did.  But however fast it
happened, it was magnificent, and you absolutely couldn't miss it.  I
had once heard that the colors of the desert were muted and subtle,
well most of the year this is true, but when the season is just right,
when the rains have fallen, then the colors that follow cannot be
beaten anywhere in the world.
This is what Isaiah is speaking of, I am certain.  When he says "the
desert shall rejoice and blossom," he means it.  There is no doubt
that when the desert blooms, it is rejoicing.  And it doesn't take
much imagination to hear the desert singing as well.  Joy is an
emotion with which we are not incredibly familiar.  It may be the
least familiar emotion of all, in fact.  Earlier this week when I was
talking with my husband Gary about this scripture and the fact that
this third Sunday of Advent would focus on joy, we took time
throughout our dinner to think about and share with each other the
times when we felt joy in the past few years.  It wasn't easy, oddly
enough.  We could easily recall times when we were happy, but the
times when we truly felt joy were a little more difficult to pinpoint.
 C.S. Lewis wrote, "Joy must be sharply distinguished from both
happiness and pleasure. Joy has indeed one characteristinc and one
only in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it
will want it again.  I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would
ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in
the world.  But joy is never in our power and pleasure often is."  It
seems as though everything has to line up for joy to slip into our
souls.  The planets, the stars, our home life and work, all of these
things need to be flowing along in a positive way in order for us to
feel joy.  But maybe not.  Maybe joy doesn't need such a clear pathway
in order to be felt.  Maybe joy is more prevalent than we might think.
 Maybe, in fact, joy is similar to the blooms of a desert.  Maybe,
like those rare blooms, joy is always present as a seed of a
possibility, just waiting for the right conditions to make way for it
to come through and show its true colors?
Even if joy is prevalent or if it is an underlying possibility, joy
is still not obvious.  C.S. Lewis wrote a book entitled "Surprised by
Joy," and I think he got it right.  I think that joy does somehow
surprise us in the most unexpected of situations.  This morning's
reading from Luke is one of those places where we might have missed
the joy if we didn't know to look for it.  The passage is commonly
known as "the Magnificat" which is actually the first word of Mary's
praise prayer, in Latin.  "My soul gives glory to God." Mary's
situation is one that now, having the hindsight of the ages to see it,
seems perfectly fine and acceptable, but the reality was that she was
a teenager who had gotten pregnant by someone other than her fiancé.
But Mary hardly takes any time at all to accept her situation, and not
only accept it, but she seems to recognize the amazing power and
possibility of her situation, or at least of what God is planning to
do through her.  The joy that Mary sings about is a joy that involves
more than she and Joseph cuddling their newborn baby.  Mary sings of
how God is going to topple down the thrones of false rulers and give
the rich their comeuppance.  She sings of how the people who have been
hungry and oppressed will finally be on the receiving end of good
things, and that those who have abused them will regret their
cruelties.
Mary sees her pregnancy as a sign of something wonderful for everyone
who has eve suffered or been hungry or gone without.  Mary sees that
the child she carries is intended for good things, intended to turn
the world absolutely upside down.  And she, at her tender young age,
is not afraid to tell people about what is coming.  She knows things
with the certainty that many young people have in all of their
idealism and hope.
When I first started thinking of Mary as a young woman, I saw her as
someone whose faith was a physical part of her everyday life.  I saw
her as a young woman for whom angelic visitations were not maybe
everyday occurrences, but they also were not beyond the realm of
possibility.  I saw Mary as someone who spoke with God on a regular
basis, consulted God before she made choices, and lived as if her
relationship with God was as real as her relationships with her
parents and friends.  Oswald Chambers wrote  "A life of intimacy with
God is characterized by joy."  I imagine that this is how it was for
Mary.  And even though her life was never what anyone would dare to
call "easy," it was a life that had its moments of a deeper joy than
most of us will ever know.  When I contemplate why Mary might have
found joy in her life, despite the odds stacked against her, then I
also have to ask why many of us find joy so difficult to experience.
The story of the visitors to the stable on the night Jesus was born
tells us that Mary was warned, "a sword shall pierce your heart,"
which we know now to have been a warning about Jesus' eventual death
on the cross.  But if Mary had taken only that message to heart
throughout the years of Jesus' childhood, she would have missed out on
the joys of raising her son.  She could have spent his entire
childhood looking around every corner for whatever was going to go
wrong. Philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard suggests that joy is to be
experienced only and completely in the now. He said "joy is the
present tense…the whole emphasis is on the present." I like this idea.
 How often in our lives, do we wish the present moment away?  How
often do we wish we were somewhere else doing something – perhaps
anything other than what we are doing?  Is it possible that when we do
this, when we run away in our minds, then we make it difficult if not
impossible to experience not only the present moment, but joy itself?
What if we were to take this Sunday's theme upon ourselves as a
responsibility?  As God's children, is it possible that we are
supposed to discover joy in our lives?  We usually don't think of our
faith as making this kind of demand on us, do we?  And yet, as a
people who waited in darkness and are maybe just now starting to
glimpse a great light, isn't some sort of celebration in order?  Isn't
it about time for the desert inside of us to blossom into all of its
vibrant colors?

God of peace and hope, you know our names.  You know each of us by
heart, having counted even the hairs on our heads.  You know the joys
that are lying dormant within us as well.  You are aware of all of the
possibilities that lie in wait for just the right moment.  Help us to
bloom, Lord, as Mary bloomed.  Help us to bring to birth all of the
colors and possibilities that we have within us.  May we draw from the
joy that lies deep in the heart of us, bringing it out so that it
might shine, and so might we.  In the name of the One for whom we wait
we pray, Amen.