Advent 3 - Joy

 Isaiah 35 December 15, 2019 Advent 3 – Joy

 

Are you happy? Do you feel joy?

We ask this question of ourselves and others a lot.

We take our emotional temperature often.

 

I don’t know that this would have been a question in Isaiah’s time.
It probably would have seemed foreign to everyone.
People were joyful at times, of course, and they expressed joy.

It shows up in scripture often.
But the idea of contemplating joy and pursuing joy

feels more like a modern construct.
Maybe just of the 21st century.

 

My educated guess is they were more pragmatic about things.
The questions would have been:
Are you dead? Are you starving? Are you in pain?
If not, then great—you have joy.
Kind of sounds like my grandmother, actually.

 

But now, joy seems to be a bit of an obsession,

at least for many middle-class American people.
Once we have a place to live

and our basic needs met, then we want to know:
Do I feel joy? How can I get more joy?

 

People have joy workshops, retreats, classes.

One gives a certificate in joy.

Which means that you’re certified joyful.

 

And we often find ourselves looking for joy in things.

Cars and houses and possessions.

Sears once had a Christmas campaign

called Real Joy Guaranteed.
There’s so much wrong with that,

I’m not sure where to begin.

 

A few years ago Marie Kondo, was the rage,

she was the decluttering expert, so she found joy in not having things.

She told us to look at every object we own and ask,
“Does this spark joy?”
If not, she says, get rid of it.
I don’t know if a box of Band-Aids sparks joy,

but I still think I should keep it around.

 

There was a study showing that a lot of

young adults struggle with depression and anxiety

because their parents created an environment

too comfortable, too manufactured.

They were so focused on curating their children’s joy,

that the children never learned how to experience

joy on their own without someone doing it for them.

 

We want to pursue joy, achieve it, certify it, purchase it.
We want to give it to our children.
We want joy in our homes, our families, our churches, our worship.
We’d like to experience it all the time.
We want to own joy.

 

But I’m not sure that’s how it works.

This week in Advent, our focus is joy.
It’s called Gaudete Sunday – which is Latin for Rejoice.
It has been the theme for the third Sunday in Advent

since at least the ninth century.

Yet historically, joy hasn’t been what Christianity was known for.

We’ve been known more for seriousness,

stoicism, guilt, and solemnity.
One of my former members told me

that as a young woman, her pastor scolded her

for smiling as she walked back from communion.

 

Today some people still wonder,
Can we laugh in church?
Is it okay to be joyful in God’s presence?

Should we be more serious for God.

 

And then there are other branches of

Christianity where the only acceptable emotion

is joy—where you have to feel blessed all the time.

 

Joy becomes a requirement,

and any negative emotion like sadness

or sorrow or depression, or anger

is seen as a lack of faith.

Christian joy becomes a commodity.

 

So many ideas about joy.
And none of them seem to hit the real mark.

 

In my first congregation, I visited a member

who had been in the hospital

for weeks after a spinal injury.

She hadn’t walked since that time.

When I first saw here,

She was pretty depressed and hopeless and angry

which I completely understood.

 

Then the next time I saw her, she was changed.

She said that week during physical therapy,

she managed to stand—just for a moment—

supported on both sides.

When she told me about it, her face lit up.

“It was only three seconds,” she said,

“but I felt like I was flying.”

 

Three seconds wasn’t much,
But to her, those three seconds were pure joy.

the kind that can only be understood

when you’ve known pain, fear, helplessness.
That joy was not born not from ease,

and not from constantly pursuing joy

or even from self-care. It was found in endurance.

That joy is probably more what Isaiah was talking about.

 

Isaiah tells the people:

The desert will bloom.
The dry land will gush with water.
Weak hands will grow strong.
Blind eyes will open, deaf ears will hear,
and those who cannot walk will run and leap.

 

This is joy, but it is joy that comes through suffering.

The water is amazing

because it falls on dry ground.
The crocuses are beautiful

because they bloom in a wasteland.

Seeing and hearing are miracles,

only if you have been unable to see or hear.
Walking is ordinary until the time you

wondered if you might never walk again.

 

The joy that comes from God

is not something we can pursue.
Not something we can buy or learn.
Not something we can manufacture

for ourselves or our children.
It is the joy that rises from

what is broken, what hurts, what feels lost.

 

Part of the lessons of Christ and of Easter is that

real joy comes through suffering.

Something that so many people

want to avoid completely.

 

Now no one should pursue suffering,

But as Christians, when it does happen,

we can see our own suffering as

and opportunity for God to work in us.

 

And we are also called to not

shy away from the suffering of others.

If you aren’t suffering yourself

then suffer with someone else.
Compassion produces joy.
Generosity produces joy.
Solidarity produces joy.

 

So yes—in Christ there is joy.
But the joy Christ gives is not a mood.
It is not a personality trait.
It is not a demand placed on you during the holidays.
It is not a decoration you have to hang on your heart.

It is a promise.

 

A promise that the desert places

in our lives are not wasted places.
A promise that dry seasons

will not stay dry forever.

A promise that God can take the very things

that break us and turn them into

places of surprising, impossible life.

 

And here is another deeper thing:
Joy is not the opposite of sorrow.
Joy is what God grows in the soil of sorrow.
Joy is the first light breaking into the long night.
Joy is what happens when God enters

the world and refuses to leave us alone in the dark.

 That’s why , even at the darkest time,

Isaiah can see crocuses

blooming where no flower should bloom.
That’s why the weak become strong,
and the blind see,
and the lame leap,
and the fearful find courage again.
Because God has entered the story.

 

So if you are not feeling joy right now—
if you’re weary, worried, stretched thin, or grieving—
hear this good news:

Christ does not wait for you to feel joyful before he comes.

He comes to you in the desert.
He walks with you through it.
And he will not stop until joy blooms again.

 This is the promise of Advent:

that even now, even here,
God is preparing a way in the wilderness,
a holy road where sorrow will not have the last word.

 So take heart. Hold on.

Stay awake and watch.

 Because the one who brings joy out of sorrow,

life out of death,
and flowers out of barren ground
is already on the way.

Advent 2 Peace

 Isaiah 11:1-10 Advent 2 – Peace December 7, 2025

 

When we say peace, we can mean a couple of things.

Peace can be an inner feeling, a calm

a sense of well-being and comfort.

You can feel  peace in the middle of chaos,

when things are going terribly.

People have often told me that during times of great

upheaval and illness and uncertainty, that’s when

they have felt a sense of peace and known it was God’s presence.

 

But peace is also the absence of conflict.

Either on a personal level or on a community

or national level.

Basically, a lack of war.

 

The bible uses peace in both of these ways.

And it’s sometimes difficult to know which one

the passage is talking about.

Many times it seems like our inner peace

proceeds from peace in the home or in the world.

And many times it seems like peace in the

world proceeds from our inner peace.

Which comes first, peace or peace?

 

Many of us have experienced inner peace.

It may come and go for us, but a lot of us know the feeling.

But in our lifetime, this world and our country

has never been at peace that is a lack of war for very long.

 

Since 1776, in the 249 years since this

country was founded, the US has had,

technically, only  had 21 years of actual peace.

The other 228 years we have been

engaged in some sort of military conflict.

The longest stretch of peace for the United States,

was after World War I and during the depression.

But when we think about that time in history, it does not seem peaceful.

There might have been a lack of direct military activity on our part,

but everything else seemed to be in upheaval.

 

 There were awful things happening in Europe,

And fascist regimes were a constant threat for the US.

And ironically we remember this all today on the anniversary of the

Attack on Pearl Harbor which led us into World War 2.

But maybe it’s not ironic, because almost every day is a day

of some military significance.

 

For almost all of its existence, this country has been

involved in one war or another.

And it’s the same for much of the rest of the world.

Even though we are all, as a whole, doing much better

than any time in its entire history, our nations still have a

tendency towards violence when it comes to disagreements.

Whether it’s drone strikes, or bombings, armed interventions,

or encouraging and funding other countries to carry them out.

 

And because of that, whether we know it or not, we have always been

at a heightened state of alert and worry

about current or potential violent conflict.

Even more so if you have a loved one who is

in the area of conflict or in the military.

 

And I think it’s safe to say that that heightened state

of alert and anxiety has contributed to the tension and anxiety

inside our country – in the rampant gun violence, mass shootings,

and even the polarization in our politics and threat of violence.

 

When we are always on the lookout for an enemy,

then anyone foreign to us can seem like an enemy.

We have learned to be fearful of anything different.

And fear often leads to aggression.

 

Our lack of inner peace has lead to a lack of outer peace.

And our lack of outer peace has lead to a lack of inner peace.

Peace and peace go hand in hand.

 

During Isaiah’s time and for the whole of its history,

Israel was in an even worse situation of constant war.

Israel itself was not itself a very powerful nation,

not a super-power like the United States by any means.

 

Actually, it was rather insignificant globally.

But, geographically, Israel was between super-powers.

It was on the path to get to one place from another.

So it was always stuck between nations

that seemed to be in constant struggles for power:

Assyria, Canaan, Hittite, Babylonia, Egypt, Persia

So someone was always beating up on Israel to get to someone else.

 

So, Israel was in a state of war more than it was at peace too,

the scriptures certainly reflect that.

And no doubt that affected their personal relationships

and the state of their homes and communities too.

Their state of alert was very high, and

they experienced this violence first-hand –

it wasn’t seen on TV or heard of in some far off place.

It was in their own backyards and their front yards.

 

They knew as well how difficult outer peace

was to achieve too.

Each side has to want it at the same time,

the other entities have to be willing participants.

And peace takes a great deal of vulnerability,

It takes admitting  wrong, hearing the other parties admission,

accepting those admissions, and promising to change.

In other words, confession, repentance and forgiveness.

There is a lot of risk in even beginning the process of peace.

 

And a lot can go wrong when there is distrust,

and language differences, and a tradition of hatred.

This is true of global wars and wars in neighborhoods and families too.

 

And if we think of our own country and times,

Even if we don’t have a reason for war,

there is so much of our lives and our economy

that is built around war and militarism.

 

There are millions of jobs, so much income in weapons,

industries and companies that are built around war.

So many people have built careers around war,

many people find personal fulfillment and a sense of

belonging in their job in the military.

 

Military spending in the US in 2024 was $820 billion dollars

An enormous amount of money.

Many people have a financial investment

in staying at war or near war.

If we had an extended time of peace,

that would mean dismantling much of this infrastructure

and it would cause a great upheaval in many lives.

There is a lot working against outer peace.

It’s actually easier to stay at war.

Frankly, it’s kind of an addiction.

 

It seems like a great knot that can’t be un-tied

and true peace, inner and outer, seems like an impossibility.

I’m sure that peace for Israel seemed impossible

in Isaiah’s time too.

 

But still, with all of these difficulties in place,

Isaiah and the other prophets and religious leaders

promised that God would, one day, bring peace.

 

Chances are that Isaiah was writing his prophecies

during one of Israel’s times of  war and siege

in the 700’s.  The powerful Assyrian army

stormed through Israel five times,

reaping terror and destruction where it went.

 

And yet, in the middle of that destruction,

Isaiah paints one of the most famous passages of the Hebrew Scriptures :

The wolf shall live with the lamb;
the leopard shall lie down with the goat;
the calf and the lion together,
and a little child shall lead them.

 

It’s a beautiful image.

But if it happened now in our current world, as one comedian said,

“The wolf can lie down with the lamb, but the lamb won’t get much sleep.”

Predators do what predators do.

Isaiah’s image is not possible now.

Isaiah is describing something far deeper

than a photo-op with natural enemies sitting politely together.

This is a change in the very order of things.

The powerful no longer threaten the vulnerable.

The weak no longer live in fear.

It is a world where violence is no longer the default setting.

 

These animals are, of course, metaphors for human life—

for our power struggles, our conflicts, and our habits of harm.

Isaiah imagines an end to that dynamic that has shaped our world.

Isaiah is imagining peace.

Outer peace brought on by inner peace.

Or inner peace brought on by outer peace.

 

And this world of peace is brought about by a child—

a shoot from the stump of Jesse, a descendant of David.

 

David was a warrior king, but from his line will come a king

who brings peace not through force,

but through justice and righteousness.

 

As Martin Luther King Jr. said,

“Peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.”

 

Real peace doesn’t come simply because people stop fighting.

Real peace comes when oppression ends,

when poverty is addressed,

when the rights of all people are honored.

 

Isaiah’s vision is not just about better

diplomacy or human self-control.

It is about a transformed creation—

hearts and minds reshaped by God.

This is more than humanity alone can accomplish.

 

This is the work of the Messiah.

The one we believe has come to us in Jesus Christ.

Jesus teaches us the ways of peace:

justice, understanding, openness, forgiveness, repentance.

These are the practices that create inner peace—

and they are the same practices that create outer peace.

 

We have not yet learned these ways fully.

But Christ shows us the path.

 

One day, God’s way will be born in all of us,

and that will bring true peace to the world.

And the choices we make now— how we live,

how we interact with strangers, how we seek justice—

are the building blocks of that eternal peace.

 

The promise of Isaiah is still ours: A little child will lead us.

Peace will come to this war-torn world.

And that promise can give us inner peace even now.

Hope

 Isaiah 2:1-5 November  30, 2025

Advent 1 – Hope

 The dictionary defines Hope like this:

“to cherish a desire with anticipation

for example, ‘she hopes to 

be invited to the party”

That’s true and we know 

what they’re talking about,

but hope is more than that isn’t it?

 

To live with hope is to be optimistic,

but it’s more than just optimism.

Martin Luther said, “everything that is done

in the world is done by hope.”

Even when the present seems desperate,

to live with hope in the future is to live with trust,

to live with faith, to live with purpose.

Hope is faith that God will not abandon us

and that the future will be better.

 

The prophet Isaiah had that faith in God and hope for the future.

During Advent, we’ll be reading from the book of Isaiah.

And the traditional theme for first Advent is “hope”.

 

The book of Isaiah is long. 66 chapters.

It’s ascribed to Isaiah the son of Amoz who lived in the 8^th century,

but most scholars believe that it’s written by several people,

and they divide it into three different sections:

First Isiah Second Isaiah and Third Isaiah.

First Isaiah are books 1-39 written around the 700’s BC

before the destruction of Jerusalem and exile of the Israelites.

Second Isaiah, books 40-55 was in the

500’s BC during the exile of the Israelites

and Third Isaiah, books 56-66 were written after

the Israelites return from exile in the 400’s BC.

 

All our readings this Advent are from the first part of Isaiah

The time before the invasion of the Babylonians,

This is a time when Isaiah and other people could feel 

that things were going wrong, were heading in the wrong direction

and were not going according to God’s will and vision,

and Isaiah was giving a warning to the country of Israel.

But the siege of Jerusalem and the exile of the Jews

hadn’t happened yet.

 

Chapter one starts out with this kind of warning:

 Ah, sinful nation, people laden with iniquity,
offspring who do evil, children who deal corruptly,
who have forsaken the Lord,   
who have despised the Holy One of Israel,
who are utterly estranged!

 he goes on:

 ²² Your silver has become impure    your wine is mixed with water.
²³ Your princes are rebels   and companions of thieves.
Everyone loves a bribe   and runs after gifts.
They do not defend the orphan,
and the widow’s cause does not come before them.

 Isaiah sees a country of people

only focused on its own gain.

Leaders using the power they have to

serve themselves and get rich rather

than to lift up and support the most vulnerable.

 

This was not the country that God had established.

Not the city on a hill for others to look to and imitate,

But just another corrupt country that has put

God’s will and those in need

at the bottom of the priority list.

  

Maybe we can appreciate Isaiah’s

observations today in this country.

The hopes for our nation had been high at one time.

Once we saw ourselves as the one to emulate,

once we were an example for others.

But things haven’t been heading in

a good direction for a very long time.

 

Just like Isaiah said,

people are weighed down with inequity,

everyone does seem to love a bribe

criminals and thieves are the honored ones,

 

Everyone is just out for what they can get,

and the widows and the orphans – which are biblical code words

for the most vulnerable in our society – are still not cared for.

And violence has been our fallback since the beginning.

This country is not the one that we once believed it was.

We’re letting ourselves and God down in lots of ways.

 

I think we can feel Isaiah’s sense of foreboding.

This model is not sustainable in the long run.

It feels like we’re on the edge of a precipice,

something that will be very unpleasant for all of us.

 

Isaiah warns that these ways will only lead to destruction

to the dissolution of everything they knew

he uses phrases like: “humanity will be brought low”,

“doom will follow”.

Everyone will feel God’s disappointment.

It might seem, then and now, like all hope is lost.

 

But our call as people of faith is to have hope in

the midst of hopeless situations.

When we give up hope, then we stop trying.

We engage in what’s called “premature capitulation”.

We believe in the power of the bad in the world,

more than the power of the good so we give up too soon.

The forces of evil in this world love that.

The forces of evil love it when good people give up hope,

Hope is not just blind optimism, which can be naive.

Hope is acting, it’s determination. It’s having your ducks in a row

and pushing forward. It’s anticipating God’s actions and help.

Maybe that’s why our biblical stories are so full

of miracles –things that seem impossible.

God wants to get us used to the impossible happening.

So that we will still have hope.

 

I want to remind you about hope that many of us were involved in.

In February of 2022, I had heard that Chimney Cove was

going to be torn down to build luxury apartments.

The developer actually called me, and thought I would be

happy about this, but I was not.

So I talked to a lot of people about it,

and I got a group together to discuss it.

And most people said that nothing could be done.

The deal was too far along too much money was involved.

I remember one friend saying, “You can’t stop that”.

I heard that and I actually believed it in a lot of ways.

 

But when the eviction notices were given out and people

were given just 30 days to leave, we didn’t give in to

the fatality of the whole thing, and we all raised a stink

and we started to go on TV and mobilize.

And that caused lots of other people to raise a stink.

 

We erred on the side of hope and in the end,

our friends in Chimney Cove were able to stay.

Was it a miracle? hmm. You can probably connect the dots and see

how it all happened, but it sure felt like a miracle.

Had we all just given up and stayed quiet, and given into

premature capitulation and not had hope,

the outcome would have been different.

 

In the midst of desperate situations,

Hope is one of our greatest weapons.

And in the midst of whatever seems hopeless now

we have to remember those miracles, and

to use that hope and not give in too quickly.

 

And more than just that one event, I have hope that one day,

the people of Chimney Cove will not have to worry

about being evicted because of redevelopment.

I have hope that they will be saved permanently as workforce housing.

 

In the midst of Isaiah’s visions of destruction,

he provides stories of a new city and a new reality.

He shows that God has not abandoned the people.

There is promise. There is hope.

 

The sadness that the people face

will not be permanent, it won’t last forever.

In their trials and desperation, the people

will understand where they went wrong.

They will discard all the things that were useless,

they will reject the ways that led them astray.

They will go back to capture the vision that they once had.

 

That’s what this first reading for Advent 1 is.

After the warning and destruction in chapter 1,

there is hope in Chapter 2.

In this vision, people are flooding to the house of God

not just the steady faithful, but all people are going

to find wisdom and to learn the ways of God.

This is not just a dream of church growth,

or to make this a Christian nation.

  

This is a vision of something much more encompassing,

much more important.  People are coming

to learn God’s word and God’s ways

because the ways of the world that they have been

following didn’t work. The world is working together

to live out the way and the vision of God.

 

And the sign of this transformation would be this:

“They will turn their swords into ploughshares

and their spears into pruning hooks.”

 

We’ve heard this phrase so often it might be cliché now

it appears in both Isaiah and Micah

but think of how astounding and hopeful

that vision would be:

 

That the whole world would find no need for weapons.

Our grandchildren and great grandchildren

would not need to know anything about

war, or self-defense, or violence, or bombings,

or mass shootings, or school shootings, or accidental shootings,

or active shooter drills, or murders, or stranger danger, 

or nuclear bombs, or wounded veterans, or chemical weapons, or refugees.

 

So much so, that they would look at guns and

missiles and say, “what do we need these useless things for?

Let’s melt them down and turn them

into something we can actually use.”

 

This is an amazing vision, better than our current reality.

This is the hope that Isaiah envisions for all people.

  

And the whole book of Isaiah tells us that that hope

will be heralded through the gift of a child.

The shoot that comes off of Jesse’s tree

Immanuel, God is with us, Wonderful Counselor,

Prince of peace.

The Messiah.

 

This is our hope.

This is what we long for,

this is what we pray for,

The one that will deliver us into a new life.

 

This is we believe has already come in

the life, cross, and resurrection of Jesus Christ,

And is still being formed in us.

The gestation period for this birth is long.

and it is growing in us every day.

Part of me says that’s what the second coming is:

The hope of Christ being born again in us, in our hearts.

 

That is the Word of God that Isaiah saw.

When all will be made new again.

The hope of a world recreated in God’s

image and according to God’s will.

 

The hope of the one that was,

and is, and is still to come.

The hope of the Messiah.

The hope of Christ.