Joy

 This last Sunday, the third in Advent was the joy Sunday.  Are you all feeling joyful? 

There's a good chance that you're not. Far from joy, it's actually relatively uncommon for people to be even contented right now.  There's a good chance that you're tired, worn out, or in some other way relatively disturbed.  There's a good chance that you're not doing as well as you'd like.  There's a good chance that you, like the rest of us, are living under restrictions that you weren't planning on living under.  Your family may as well be miles away, your friends are locked away from you, and you're going to have to work very hard indeed to get anything done.  It's all hard, all difficult, and all unpleasant.  This world that we're living in right now is a world that we are stumbling through, and most of us can just barely get by.  

So where's the joy?  

Well if joy was to be synonymous with happiness, then you'd probably be out of luck.  That is, there's a very good chance indeed that your happiness is miles away. And although I do it surprisingly rarely, I'd like to run that through the lens of a reasonably popular Christmas tune.  

Have yourself a merry little Christmas,

Make the season bright.

From now on our troubles will be out of sight.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas,

Make the yuletide gay,

From now on our troubles will be miles away.....

Really? Because it doesn't seem like it.  It doesn't seem like it at all. In fact, it seems for all the world like our troubles are right here, and right now.  And they're surrounding us and swarming all over us. If you've had a particularly troublesome year, it becomes more and more difficult to engage in the 'xmas season,' you know. That is, the season in which we engage in what I have been calling 'enforced merriment.' And merriment is a tricky customer, because at this time of year, we are all asked to behave as though the song lyrics above were universally true.  This turns the Christmas season, so focused as it is on merriment, into a burden on people.  They are tired, burned out, and sad.  The only thing that could make it worse would be an invalidation of their feelings of grief or weariness, and a focus on the idea that they should be having fun.

But fun and joy, happiness and joy, aren't the same things.  They may overlap, which they do, but they're not identical.  Rather, they have large, pronounced differences that speak to the nature of the holiday for you.  If the season is all about family and friends and togetherness and a big meal and that warm feeling when you have hands to clasp, you're only going to be miserable this Christmas. You'll be miserable because you've spent a long time confusing joy with happiness, then have no joy to fall back on when the happiness gets removed.  But the happiness that you were promised was, itself, the illusion.  I'll explain what I mean.

A long time ago, someone very clever made some deductions about the Christmas season. They looked at the season and saw that people were buying and selling, and that it was an immensely profitable season.  And said individuals said 'you know, things seem to be going well, but not everyone is buying and selling at this time of year.  What can we do to increase the commerce?' So they hit upon a brilliant plan - to throw open the season not just to the Christians who were celebrating anyway, but to everyone, by encouraging buying and selling, partying and revelry, to absolutely all people.  That worked fine for its purposes, but you have to play a very careful game on this one.  You can't just tell people 'you need to buy things from us because it's the end of December.'  Even with our jaded outlooks, we would resist such naked consumerism.  So, you have to couch it behind some other reasoning, some sort of emotion, which would induce your consumers to, well, consume.  So, instead of making it about the birth of Christ, which is exclusive, you make it about family and togetherness - which is not.  Even in Grinch terms, Christmas is about family and clasping hands and singing.  With the fig leaf of family and togetherness in place, you are free to ramp up the consumption on emotional grounds.

This year, though the family and togetherness just aren't there.  And if they're not there, but the consumption remains, what on earth is going to be bringing you the happiness you were seeking? As I said earlier, if you take out even the fig leaf, you're not going to like what's underneath.  

And that brings us neatly to joy.  Joy as something different than happiness.  You should know that for most of human history, they celebrated the birth of the savior in far more meager circumstances than we do today.  That is, they shuffled around with a low life expectancy, in miserable conditions, polluted and afflicted, but they still managed to rejoice.  They had very few if any gifts, and nothing was easy or pleasant. So how did they celebrate with joy?

 Joy and happiness are blessedly different things.  And Paul tells you as much when he discusses the situations of his own life.  Paul tells us in 1 Thessalonians when he was free to rejoice, but also tells us to rejoice in Philippians, while he is in chains.  How can he do both? Because he knows what the source of joy is - the victory of Christ Jesus over sin, death, the devil and all the forces of scarcity and misery in this world.  Paul knows that the world is a dark and brutal place sometimes, where things can go in your favor, but they also may very well not.  And if you're only capable of experiencing joy while things are going well, then you're going to find that most of the time, there's not going to be much joy to be had.  But if you can learn the secret of being intact in plenty or in want, with a full stomach or empty, then you will be able to find joy.  Because the things of this world cannot bring joy.  They can bring happiness, even if it is only for a short time, but they cannot bring joy.  Even the people of this world, on their own, cannot bring joy.  They can bring happiness for a while, but not joy.

True joy is to be found in Christ, who brings not happiness, but joy.  He does say that in this life you will have trouble, and we believe him in that, but he promises joy.  He promises that because he lives, we will live too.  Because the grave could not hold him, it can't hold us either.  And he promises us that the ones we love who die in the faith will be with us for eternity.  That's joy, and it doesn't depend on this particular Christmas being just so.  It depends on Christ and what he has already done.

With the focus in the right place, you can have an intensely joyful Christmas, full of faith and confidence in what Christ has done already.  And that can't be taken away.  It's the same yesterday, today, and forever.  It points to a definite time and place in history where Christ stepped into our world, passed through it like a flame, died the death we deserved and rose again so that we, and those whom we love, would not have to be apart forever.  This Christmas will be painful, with not being able to see one another.  But Christ's work is to ensure that this pain is temporary.  

Joy is eternal.