Advent Joy: Awakening to the Nearness of God

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Third Sunday of Advent by the Rev. Holly Huff, Deacon.

First things first—what’s with all the pink? Those of you newer to liturgical time may have walked into the cathedral today and wondered if you need your vision checked! After adjusting to the past couple weeks of Advent blue—the color of waiting, anticipation, and the Blessed Mother Mary, today everything is pink! Or rose, technically. The church uses color as well as clocks to tell time, and liturgical colors are visual markers of the seasons of the Church year. They signal to us what kind of time we’re living through. As an element of embodied liturgical worship the colors highlight for us different emphases and moods of the season, and they direct us to the attitudes and postures of prayer each season is slowly teaching us, year after year. The disposition being patterned in us during Advent is one of waiting, expectation, and anticipation, reflection and repentance, signaled to us by blue, or sometimes a more penitential purple.

  Today, the third Sunday of Advent, is also known as Gaudete Sunday. Gaudete means Rejoice—a reference to today’s Epistle reading—and on Gaudete Sunday our emphasis shifts slightly, and lightens. Expectant waiting cedes the stage to a present and realized Joy, signaled by Rose vestments and hangings. So on third Advent we wear pink! In the midst of this season of anticipation and preparation looking for the Lord’s coming, today we are reminded that our joy is not just reserved for the future—no, the Lord is near, the Lord is here! 

  So let’s hear again the words of Paul’s epistle to the Philippians that give the day its name. And as you listen I’d invite you to hear these words not just as words conveying information, propositional assertions or a vaguely God-themed moralistic list of dos and don’t, but as words of blessing, words that effect something, that make something happen. Scripture is after all not a history book but a living Word conveying God’s loving presence to us here now. So let these words flow over you and let them work on you. Opening your ears to hear in this way, let these words gently clear away some of the clouds that cover over our awareness of God’s presence shining in and through all things, irrespective of circumstance:

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:4-7)

Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say, Rejoice. How is it that Paul can say this?

He is not someone who has had an easy life. Remember, the man has endured shipwrecks, imprisonments, and beatings. The joy he’s talking about is not a superficial optimism, a flimsy chipperness that falls apart at the first hint of suffering. Later on in this passage he says it explicitly: 

I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me. (Philippians 4:11-13)

Paul has learned this secret: joy is not dependent on external happenings or the day-to-day happenings of our lives. True joy comes from the grounding awareness of God’s nearness attitude which receives everything that happens day-to-day, fair or foul. Just as gratitude is more than a superficial inventory of the things we like or find pleasant—it’s a global posture of faithful openness, a way of receiving our life, whatever it brings—so too joy is not dependent on external circumstances. 

St. Augustine put it this way:

There is a delight which is given… to those who worship you for no reward save the joy that you yourself are to them. That is the authentic happy life, to set one’s joy on you, grounded in you and caused by you. That is the real thing, and there is no other. … The happy life is joy based on the truth. This is joy grounded in you, O God, who are the truth. (Confessions X)

God’s presence is a truth that is deeper than circumstance. There is a fountain of joy and gladness undergirding the simple fact of our being alive—we are created, and our existence is always held in God, and it is possible to open to that, rest in it, and yes, from that place, rejoice in the Lord always, even when everything’s falling apart. “Rejoice, always, in the Lord. Be gentle and soft, remarkably gentle and soft, and do not worry.” The Lord is near. Very near—nearer than your own self.
Augustine again: “You are in me deeper than I am in me,” “more intimate to me than I am to myself”!

Denise Levertov gets at this in her poem “Flickering Mind,” which I pray over and over, and have almost quoted in every sermon I’ve preached. Today’s the day. It goes like this:

Lord, not you,

it is I who am absent.

At first

belief was a joy I kept in secret,

stealing alone

into sacred places:

a quick glance, and away—and back,

circling.

I have long since uttered your name

but now

I elude your presence.

I stop

to think about you, and my mind

at once

like a minnow darts away,

darts

into the shadows, into gleams that fret

unceasing over

the river's purling and passing.

Not for one second

will my self hold still, but wanders

anywhere,

everywhere it can turn. Not you,

it is I who am absent.

You are the stream, the fish, the light,

the pulsing shadow,

you the unchanging presence, in whom all

moves and changes.

How can I focus my flickering, perceive

at the fountain's heart

the sapphire I know is there?

There the poem ends, with this question of perception. How can we perceive God’s unflickering, steady presence at the heart of reality, holding all reality? The Lord is near, “the unchanging presence in whom all moves and changes.” Yet our fretting, our worries, the darting minnow of the mind, makes us a stranger to our own life and keep us from knowing that life to be held in God. How can I perceive at the fountain’s heart the sapphire I know is there? And what keeps us from seeing that the Lord is near? What keeps us from joy?

This is how our Gospel text comes in, I think. We all need our vision checked, turns out. Despite the blue and the purple and the pink—remember these liturgical flourishes are always pointers, not ends in themselves—repentance and joy do actually go together. John the Baptist’s call to repentance isn’t at odds with the other songs of rejoicing after all. His exhortations to “bear fruit worthy of repentance” are also good news. Repentance is long-suffering word burdened by its connotations (chiefly the self-flagellation of sinners in the hands of angry God) yet beneath all that obfuscating haze, repentance as a liberating practice inviting us into joy, inviting us into joy, simply means turning to God. To repent is to turn. It is a change in orientation, one we make over and over. Over and over, we re-turn, clearing out the idols that keep creeping into our hearts to hold clear an open space once again for the living God, who is not angry by the way but desires communion with each of us, and who exemplifies the gentleness and meekness we find so difficult. And when I say we repent over and over I mean hundreds of times each day, gently turning back to the one who is always at home in us, the unchanging presence in whom all moves and changes. “Not you Lord, it is I who am absent.”

God wants us to be present, to be real and sturdy and solid, exactly ourselves. God created us in love so that we would exist! And God is faithful; God will see us through. The danger when we hear John the Baptist’s call to bear good fruit and this warning that every tree that does not bear fruit or does not manifest what it was created for will be chopped down—the danger is that this warning which is meant to cleanse the lens, sharpen our perception, and invite us into the joy of abiding in God’s presence will instead conspire with our own self-loathing. We are I think many of us, so ready to believe that God wants to destroy us, that the essential truth of who we are will finally be revealed as unworthy, unlovable, unwanted, unsalvageable. Damaging beliefs imparted by trauma, past hurts, and relational wounds shade our ability to see reality as it is. We tend to hear John’s wild-eyed words and think, I’m one tree, either fruitful or headed for the furnace. I’m one plant, either wheat for the granary or chaff for the fire. And the threat of destruction leans in. But as you listen to locate yourself in this gospel passage, consider—what if you’re not one tree or one plant, but a whole orchard, the planting of the Lord? A field of wheat and tares, growing up together, to be sorted out not by grinding self-effort, rooting up and destroying what you have decided is undesirable in you—very often God uses what we most despise in ourselves!—but tended and sifted by the only just judge, Jesus, who holds the winnowing fork in his merciful hands. And so there is no cause for fear.

Repentance, like prayer, is something God does in us. We have to allow it, we make our requests, we offer our consent, but it’s God’s work. And it’s something God is eager to do in us, because repentance is just another word for healing. It restores our sight, brings us back to ourselves, hands us over to our lives as they are, shows us that God is here. And here, in God’s presence, there is fullness of joy, freely offered, and a peace that passes understanding, a peace for which we were made. “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking!” The One we are looking for this Advent is already here, and very near.