"Joy"

Luke 2:8-20

December 25, 2016

I.

There is a scene near the beginning of the movie, “City Slickers,” where Billy Crystal is having a bout of mid-life depression, finally indicated by his using giant office scissors to trim the hair in his ears.  Ear hair being a sure indication that one’s life is over.  Finally, his wife urges him to take this vacation with his friends at a ranch out west.  “Go and find your joy,” she says.  I think she mainly wanted to get his morose self out of the house.  But he does, and we get a wonderful and funny film out of it.  But is joy what he finds?  Or just a few great lines and lot of laughs?  

I haven’t done a survey on the use of oversized office scissors, but I am finding many people for whom the joy has left their lives, if there ever was much to begin with.  This is kind of a puzzle for us because we live pretty comfortably, all things considered.  You’d think joy would not be that hard to come by when we have Netflix and Spotify, and Amazon will deliver anything to our door in a couple of days.  But it becomes clear that whatever modern conveniences and entertainments do for us, they don’t bring us joy.  

Our republic is in part based on a document that talks about our right to “pursue happiness.”  But happiness is not the same as joy, even though we often confuse them.  Happiness is based on circumstances, while joy is something you have inside you no matter what's going on in your life.  Happiness is superficial and can be bought.  I’m sure a 2017 Porsche 960 would make me happy for a little while, and it would only cost $200,000 (if anybody’s looking for a last-minute Christmas gift for me).  I would be happier if certain people in my various circles got along better, but since that’s about as likely as the Porsche, I am probably going to have to find it elsewhere.  Or let that go and focus on the joy.            

This is supposed to be the season of joy.  We see the word “joy” spelled out in red, green, and gold at the mall or on people’s houses.  But for many if not most of us December is more a time of stress than joy.  And our credit card bills haven’t even come yet.  This particular December is worse because I know a lot of people who justifiably feel concerned for their own safety after about January 20.  So there’s that.  

In addition to everything else we do to ensure a meaningful holiday.  Including all the many things done by some of you to make our services this weekend go well.  But there’s traffic and occasional bad weather, and if you’re  a student you have finals and papers due, and choirs have extra rehearsals.  And the lack of sunlight has a the effect of depressing people’s mood, which explains a lot about December, including the increased utilization of chemical mood enhancers, like Egg Nog.    

We can’t all find our joy by taking a vacation out west herding cattle on the range with Jack Palance and Helen Slater.  Jack Palance is dead, for one thing.  (Hopefully, the Lord is not making him angry in heaven, which is a watered-down reference to the best line from that movie, which is not quite repeatable from the pulpit.)  

And artificially pumping up the happiness often seems rather strained.  Not to be too much of a Scrooge or anything.

II.

In our passage for today the word joy appears as part of the message the angel of the Lord delivers to the shepherds about “wonderful, joyous news for all people.”  The traditional renderings talk about “good news of great joy.”  But the point is that the angel, followed up by no less than “a great assembly of the heavenly forces” glorifying God and proclaiming God’s shalom among the people, comes to shepherds, of all people.  

Being a shepherd was not a happy job.  It was cold, lonely, responsible, unremunerative, and grueling work.  Shepherds were near the bottom rank of minimum-wage workers (just above anyone employed dumping livestock excrement into the Dead Sea — which still happens by the way, as I reminded those enthusiastic young people at the mall pushing skin-care products made of salt from the same Dead Sea, which they did not appear to appreciate.  That sea is dead for a reason… but I digress).

You’d think the angels could have found a slightly higher class of people than shepherds to appear to, for heaven’s sake.  Since when and to whom do shepherds matter?  Maybe the angels had a malfunction in their cosmic GPS and intended to appear gloriously over the spectacular Temple under construction in Jerusalem, but missed an exit or something and set up over a hillside near Bethlehem by mistake.

But no, of course, God chooses the shepherds on purpose to make a point about the Messiah coming to turn things upside down, which we heard in his mothers’ hymn in the previous chapter.  The baby born in Bethlehem will proclaim that the last will be first and the first will be last.  So it is perfectly consistent for angels from the highest heaven to appear to lowly shepherds.  Shepherds do matter to God; as will lepers, disabled people, foreigners, children, women, the sick, and the “tax-collectors and prostitutes” Jesus will be famous for associating with.        

When we visited Palestine, our hotel was half a block from the field where the shepherds were hanging out that very night.  There’s a village there called Beit Sahour.  The people in Beit Sahour understand what its like not to matter.  They experience persecution every day.  Their streets are scarred by tank tracks.  I met people whose children were abducted by Israeli soldiers in the middle of the night, something that happens a lot, and is reminiscent of King Herod’s policies 20 centuries before. 

Beit Sahour is 80% Christian. The people in Beit Sahour still identify with those shepherds.  They still derive hope from the story that God appeared to a bunch of nobodies languishing under night sky suffering the business-end of colonialism, empire, and the market economy.  Because they suffer the same kinds of injustice and persecution.  

Maybe real joy is based on hope because it doesn’t depend on what is actually going on out there in the world of politics and economics.  Maybe the fact that soldiers bulldozed your house because you put on an extra room for your son and daughter-in-law can’t diminish a joy that it is based on your hope in the Kingdom of Heaven.    

III.

After experiencing the angels these shepherds go immediately up the valley to Bethlehem to see for themselves.  And all they see is a new-born baby sleeping in an animal feed trough in an obscure corner of the crowded town.  Once again it seems like there should have been a woman with them to ask for directions.  Such circumstances seem rather unlikely for the arrival of God’s promised Messiah.  Spectacular heavenly choir! — smelly and sweaty barn?

But the shepherds go back still praising God, which tells me that joy becomes real in its expression.  They trust the angels’ appearance, which after was a pretty remarkable thing to witness.  Better than the aurora borealis!  Praise is the visible demonstration of joy, as well as faith and hope.

I am reminded of the ending of my favorite Christmas TV special, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (not the ghastly Jim Carrey abomination, but the original animated version, narrated by Boris Karloff).  After the malicious Grinch destroys all the trappings of the holiday, from food to presents to decorations, and carts it all up to the top of Mt. Crumpit to dump it, the little Who people wake up on Christmas morning.  And instead of moaning in grief, horror, and rage, they gather holding hands in a circle in the village around the place where the tree had been, and still joyfully sing their “welcome Christmas!” song.

I love that!  The superficialities and the material trappings don’t matter!  Our own losses and hurt and suffered injustices don’t matter either!  All that matters is the joy, the togetherness, the gratitude, and the song.  Unlike mere happiness, joy is within us, and it gets revealed when we show that it can’t be derailed by circumstance or bad events.  It cannot be taken away from us.  It is part of who we are.  It is part of the way God made the world itself.

Joy is embedded in the fabric of creation itself; it is in our bones and our sinews.  We get in touch with it by expressing it, even if we don’t feel it and even if we don’t see any evidence justifying it.  Joy is life!

So we sing these Christmas songs now with full hearts, embracing and joy and the praise, the gratitude and the wonder.  Relying on the hope and the trust that because of this baby in this manger we know that God is with us, and everything will be good.  Everything will thrive and glow.  Everything will be made right.  Because Christ is born in Bethlehem!

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