Have you ever that felt so much joy, that you burst into song? Or have you been so overwhelmed with gratitude that you sing? The Christmas season is known for its songs. Songs of joy, wonder, gratitude, or just sheer delight. And God in his delight even sings back to us as we hear in Jeremiah this morning. Christmas is a season of joy where we hear about God breaking into our world and living among us. If you had to choose a single word to encapsulate the season, the answer in many people’s top five would be joy. God’s breaking into our world leaves us and the world changed. Of course our reaction would be joy. But what about those for whom joy isn’t the first emotion felt this season. There can be any number of reasons we may be feeling less than joyful around this time. This season can be really in your face in its relentless pursuit of joy. So for those who aren’t feeling that they can live fully into the joy of the season it can feel that Christmas isn’t for them. Or even worse, that the difficulty to feel or embody that joy means that they shouldn’t be an active participant in the Christmas season. But I don’t think you’d find support for that in Scripture.
Scripture is wonderful in its ability to encompass the whole of human emotion and human experience. The Christmas season is very in your face with joy. And it comes by that joy honestly. God has come to dwell with us. That moment has profoundly changed our world and this season celebrates the delight we feel. But even in our joy we can and do feel other things. As we hear in Scripture, the arrival of Christ is not without its problems. Let me let you in on some behind the scenes liturgical preparation. The lectionary for this week gives the option of three different gospel readings. One of them, from Luke, is the only story we have of a pre-teen Jesus. He has stayed behind in Jerusalem learning in the temple. I commend it to you for a mid-week reflection. The other appointed reading is also from Matthew and continues the story where our selected gospel ends. In the continuation of the story, Joseph learns in a dream that he, Mary, and Jesus must go and live in Egypt for their safety. Their joy of a healthy birth is tempered by concern for their lives. Herod asks the wise men to tell him where he can find the baby so that he can pay Jesus homage. Nope, nothing suspicious about that at all. And so the wise men continue their search for Jesus. The wise men’s world is shaken with their encounter with God. And they come to realize that there are others who would thwart, who would deny, who would kill to prevent others from experiencing that life changing experience. Those who put together our lectionary seem to have wanted to lean heavily into the joy of the season by skipping over some of the less joyful moments of the story. The lectionary edits out what Herod did to try and thwart the rise of a Jewish messiah or king. Wrapped up with our joy are a host of other emotions—sadness, anxiety, anger, among others. Despite the lectionary’s efforts, Scripture names and acknowledges the variety of emotions the human experience brings. There is the joy of a new child with the anxiety of needing to leave everything you know and finding a new home. There is the wonder of encountering God in a humble stable tempered with the worry that perhaps you are being used to uncover the location of someone who can’t defend themself. There is our joy of God with us tempered with the horror of the knowledge of Herod’s effort to prevent Jesus from growing up. Joy can and often does coexist with less joyful emotions. And that is the true wonder of God with us. The presence of God in our joy as well as in our sorrow. The presence of God in our anxiety. The presence of God in our rage and horror at the world we find ourselves in. God is with us through it all. The Christmas season can be over the top with its expressions of joy. It can almost feel blasphemous to feel anything other than joy during this season. But Scripture talks about the complexities of our lives and our experiences. We aren’t dishonoring the beautiful gift we have been given and the joy it brings while also feeling the feelings that are coexisting with that joy. God is with us in it all. Emmanuel means God with us. Full stop. That is the end of the sentence. Not just in our joy or just in our delight. God is with us in and through it all. God is with us in the variety and complexities of our feelings and experiences. But also with us on those unexpected pathways.
They left for their own country by another road…
I don’t know about you but I’m a creature of habit. I have the same route to work, to church, to my grocery stores. But recently, there has been some road construction that has altered my route to work. I still get to the same place, but there are a few different ways I can get there. And having to travel these different paths mean I have to be alert in ways I don’t have to on a well worn path. I’m sure the wise men fully intended to visit the Christ child and then retrace their steps home. But events intervened. As we head into Epiphany, we often focus on the life-changing experience the wise men had and the epiphanies we have had and will have in our own lives. Everything is completely new and different. But that’s not quite the case. Things are profoundly new and profoundly the same. The wise men’s encounter with the infant Jesus shakes up their world. To maintain that world-shaking influence that they had just seen the beginnings of, they avoid Herod to avoid telling him where Jesus was, preserving that possibility for the rest of us. And then they went home. They didn’t stay in Bethleham. They didn’t move to a new location. They returned home.
Often we think that a revelation, an encounter with the divine, or any other major event has to change every part of our lives. But, maybe more often than not, we are to take that revelation back home. We take it and use it as fuel to change the world around us.
We frequently fall into routines. That same way to work and home. Laundry day. Taco Tuesdays. Church on Sunday. So routine that we don’t think of them anymore. So we actively seek out God at a retreat or in some other intentional way. And there we are able to encounter God and experience a spiritual renewal or are able to discern what we are being called to do or to be. And we feel that we have made a successful retreat. Or in an unexpected moment, when we are outside our everyday, we encounter God. And we are changed in ways big and small. And here’s where we can get ourselves in trouble. The experience and encounter with the divine is divorced from the everyday and we come to the conclusion that that is how is always is or should be. We think we have to go somewhere to encounter God and not that we can bring God back with us or not realizing that God is with us wherever we are. And if we can only encounter God outside our everyday then we don’t have to let God have an impact on our everyday. A God who is at a distance from us is an idea, maybe even just an intellectual exercise. A God who is with us is life changing. And eternally life changing. God is with us in the revelations. And God is with us when we take him home. God is with us as we try to incorporate this new revelation into our everyday. God is with us as we have set backs in our calls to live into who God fully intends us to be. He is with us in our joy and our grief. He is with us in our delight and our horror. That is the one of the great gifts of our lives and faiths.
Emmanuel. God is with us.
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