Third Sunday in Advent 2019

Isaiah 35: 1-10

Psalm 146: 4-9

James 5: 7-10

Matthew 11: 2-11

December 15, 2019

Steven H. Strain

An elderly Cherokee brave was sitting by the fire with his grandson and he told the boy of the battle which is waged inside all people.

Inside each of us are two wolves; one is evil, the other is good. The wolves battle one another. The evil wolf is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.

The other wolf is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.

The boy thought about all this for a minute and then asked, “Grandfather, which wolf wins?”

To which the grandfather replied: “the one you feed.”

The Sundays in Advent are each represented by a particular word. The first being Hope, then Peace and today the word is Joy, or Gaudete Sunday. It is the Sunday in Advent “when we turn from preparation and judgment towards expectations of joy and fulfillment.”

Our readings for today start with rejoicing:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing.

Picture the desert after a rain. It bursts forth with color as seeds, long dormant, blossom with brilliant color. What was once a brown, dreary place becoming a blanket of colors, a place of beauty. A place transformed by God.

Isaiah describes waters breaking forth from the ground “and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water…”

God’s hand also touches the wild beasts as we read last week from Isaiah that:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,

The leopard shall lie down with the kid,

The calf and the lion and the fatling together,

And a little child shall lead them.

Isaiah tells of the desert rejoicing and then he calls on the people to prepare to see “our God:”

Strengthen the weak hands,

And make firm the feeble knees.

Say to those who are of a fearful heart,

Be strong, do not fear!

Here is your God.

One commentator wrote that it is “the promise of divine presence that strengthens” the hands and knees. Isaiah writes of the transformation of the desert; God’s presence in creation and the healing, the bringing of life to the barren waste of the desert. Think of His presence in our lives; in our barren waste.

This time of year, we tend to focus on all that is to be done in preparation, not for the coming of the Lord, but in preparation for the coming of the holiday guests, the gifts, the decorations and all that the holiday entails. And happiness and joy become intertwined. But they differ; one being fleeting, the other staying with us.

The theologian, Henri Nouwen distinguished happiness and joy, noting that happiness depended on external circumstances whereas joy is “the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved and that nothing – sickness, failure, emotional distress, oppression, war, or even death – can take that love away.”

Our psalm for today begins,

Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob,

Whose hope is in the Lord their God.

The happiness is not that from “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Christian Scharen, a theology professor writes of this:

No, happiness here is about flourishing. From ancient times, the stark choice has been set before the people of God: walk the way of life or the way of death. This psalm is about walking the way of life. Deep gladness may get at the sensibility of life lived in response to the God described in this psalm.

It is the Lord who sets the prisoners free and brings sight to the blind; who watches over strangers and upholds the widow and the orphan. In our reading from Isaiah the coming of the Lord heals the afflicted: the “the lame shall leap like a deer.”

When John the Baptist sends his disciples to ask Christ if he is the Messiah, Jesus answers saying:

Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear. The dead are raised, and poor have good news brought to them.

In the midst of the celebration of Christ coming, this Sunday of Joy, we have the letter of James telling us to be patient. It is almost like someone turning up the lights at the dance. Or trying to quiet the exuberant, running children. When I first considered this reading from James, in conjunction with Isaiah and the psalm it seemed totally out of place. It was the dampening of the joy of this third Sunday in Advent. It is almost as if the lectionary is saying, “be joyful, but not too joyful.”

Martin Luther read the epistle of James as being a bundle of “straw.” Patrick Howell wrote:

The Epistle of James, Luther contended, burdened the human spirit by laying out what we had to do, rather than what we gratuitously received through the sheer mercy of God.

Advent is a penitential season. We don’t say Hallelujah during Advent. And yet we have this third Sunday of rejoicing. There is tension in this. We are penitent and we celebrate. Yet paradox is part of our faith, beginning with Christ, who is both fully human and fully divine. Christ who preached in the temple and the on a hillside in Galilee. He dined with the wealthy and the poor. He died and rose again.

There is tension in this day of rejoicing with the sorrows that afflict us all. There are the homeless and the hungry. There are family issues. Perhaps a job issue. The worries of day to day life exist with the expectation of the “Holy Way;” the highway Isaiah describes. The highway that even “fools” will not go astray on. This highway takes the people from a place of desolation to Zion where “everlasting joy shall be upon their heads… and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

Ignatius of Loyola, who was a contemporary of Luther wrote of the paradox of works and faith saying:

“We pray as if everything depended on God and work as if everything depended on us.”

A friend of mine who converted to Christianity from Judaism told me that he had a different understanding of the Bible because he saw it from a Jewish perspective. Jesus and his contemporaries were Jews. Patrick Howell wrote of Jews who became Christian:

The Jews who have become Christians must take their faith seriously in their daily lives. The must translate faith into action. What is the use of faith that does not bear fruit? It is an empty show.

There is a tendency to look at acts of faith only as acts such as feeding the hungry, working at the food bank, visiting the sick and other such acts. All the physical things we do are serving the Lord. Yet works go beyond these matters. Works also dwell in the heart.

James tells us;

“Beloved, do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged.”

How many of us abide by what James says? Think of the evil wolf from the Cherokee legend.

Anger. Envy. Jealousy. Greed. Self-pity.

Do any of these bring us closed to our Lord? Do any of them bring us joy?

When we grumble about someone does that bring us joy? In our day to day life there are people who have offended us, irritated us; people we don’t want to forgive. We want to hold on to our anger, our irritation and in doing so we feed the evil wolf.

And which wolf wins the battle? The one we feed.

We will soon celebrate the birth of Christ. Our Lord who is among us today. Kathleen Norris wrote of processing in with the sisters at a women’s monastery. The prioress told her that we bow to Christ on the cross and then face one another and bow to the Christ in each other. Which we do here today.

My father called Christmas “the annual experiment in giving” and wrote of the “exquisite pleasure of love communicated.”

Feed the good wolf:

Joy. Peace. Love. Hope. Kindness. Faith.

Be patient and kind. Go forth with love.

Amen.