3 Advent

Gaudete Sunday

 

December 17, 2023

 

Isaiah 61.1-4, 8-11;1 Thes. 5.16-24; John 1.6-8, 19-28

 

+ As you know, I just got back from a several days in Las Vegas on Friday night

 

I had a great time.

 

But yesterday, I posted on Facebook a photo of a priest in a rose-colored chasuble, and wrote, Tomorrow is Gaudete Sunday. You know what that means…”

 

 

Fr. John Floberg, the priest who serves on Standing Rock, responded by saying,

 

“By the looks of your facebook posts last week I would imagine that you might not need to relax your Advent Disciplines very much this week. LOL.”

 

I responded:

 “you should've seen how disciplined I was in Vegas...”

 

Fr. John then said,

 

“I bet you abstained from meat the whole time!”

 

Which I did!

 

See how ascetic I am!

 

The fact is: I was very disciplined in Vegas. Trust me.

 

I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t gamble. And yes, I do not eat meat.

 

And this time, my cousins Renaye, Mandy and I only spent a little time on the Strip.

 

We instead explored some strange and kitschy places like the Golden Tiki, a retro Tiki bar which has amazingly realistic shrunken heads of celebrities on the walls, Omega Mart and Area 15 which was some kind of psychedelic grocery store that was amazing, saw a mind-blowing movie at the brand-new Sphere and visited Zak Bagan’s Haunted Museum.

 

But Fr. John Floberg is right.

 

Gaudete Sunday is a day in which we get to take a little break from our Advent disciplines.

 

That is, if we have been disciplining ourselves during Advent.

 

Gaudete Sunday, or Rose Sunday, is always a special Sunday here at St. Stephen’s and for the Church as a whole.

 

Traditionally, on Gaudete Sunday, we light the lone pink candle on the Advent wreath.

 

Lighting the pink candle is a sign to us that the shift has happened.

 

Now there are more candles lit than are unlit on the wreath.

 

The light has won out and the darkness, we are realizing, is not an eternal darkness.

 

But most importantly, Gaudete means “rejoice.”

 

And that is exactly what we should be doing on this Sunday.

 

We should rejoice in the light that is winning out over the darkness.

 

We should rejoice in the fact that darkness has no lasting power over us.

 

We should rejoice in all that God has done for us and continues to do for us in our lives, in our ministries and here particularly at St. Stephen’s.

 

This Sunday sets a tone different than the one we’ve had so-far in Advent.

 

We find this word—rejoice—ringing out throughout our scriptural readings today.

 

It is the “theme” of the day.

 

Rejoice!

 

It is the emotion that permeates everything we hear in the Liturgy of the Word on this Sunday.

 

In our reading from the Hebrew scriptures, in Isaiah, we hear

 

I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,

my whole being shall exult in my God;

 

In our Epistle, we find even Paul—who seems a bit, shall we say, dour at times— rejoicing.

 

“Rejoice always,” he writes to the church at Thessalonika.

 

And, although the word “rejoice” cannot be found in our Gospel reading for today, the sentiment is there.

 

John the Baptist, we are told, was not the light, but came to testify to the light—that light being, of course, Jesus, God’s Messiah.

 

Again, that is something about which to rejoice.

 

Even when it seems like the Light is still far off, even then we rejoice.

 

This emotion of joy is something we oftentimes take for granted.

 

Let’s face it, joy doesn’t happen often enough in our lives.

 

It certainly doesn’t happen enough in my life.

 

I wish it did.

 

It is a rare occurrence for the most part.

 

And maybe it should be.

 

It is certainly not something we want to take for granted.

 

When joy comes to us, we want to let it flow through us.

 

We want it to overwhelm us.

 

But we often don’t think about how essential joy is to us.

 

Joy is essential to all of us as Christians.

 

It is one of those marks that make us who we are as Christians.

 

Or it should anyway.

 

We should be joyful.

 

We have a God who loves us, who knows us, who wants the very best for us.

 

We have a God who reaches out to us in the Light of Jesus, God’s Son and our Messiah, that we celebrate at this time of the year.

 

That alone is a reason to be joyful.

 

But, sadly, as we all know, there aren’t always that many joyful Christians.

 

We have all known those dour-faced Christians, those Christians who are angry or bitter or false.

 

And right now we’re seeing a lot of crazy, insane Christians acting terribly in the name of Christ.

 

To me, any act of hate or lawlessness in the Name of God is nothing less than sacrilege!

 

There are those Christians for whom a smile is a chore.

 

That is not what God intends for us.

 

We all should be joyful Christians.

 

“Should” is the word.

 

Still, as we all know, there are moments.

 

There are moments when we simply cannot muster joy.

 

No matter how much we try to break the hold the hard, difficult things of life have placed on us, it is hard sometimes to feel real joy.

 

Cultivating joy in the midst of overwhelming sorrow or pain or loneliness or depression or estrangement can seems overwhelming and impossible.

 

That’s why joy really is a discipline.

 

When things like sorrow or pain or loneliness or depression or anger or resentment descend upon—and they descend upon us all—we need, in those moments, to realize that joy might not be with us in that moment, but—and here’s the important thing—joy always returns.

 

Joy always returns.

 

We need to search deep within us for that joy that we have as Christians.

 

And when we search for it, we will find it, even when life seems so miserable and so overwhelming.

 

That joy often comes when we put our pains into perspective.

 

That joy comes when we recognize that these dark moments that happen in our lives are not eternal.

 

They will not last forever.

 

Darkness never lasts forever.

 

That, I think, is where we sometimes fail.

 

When we are in the midst of those negative emotions in our lives, we often feel as though they will never end.

 

We often feel as though we will always be lonely, we always be sad, we will always mourn.

 

As Christians, we can’t allow ourselves to be boxed in by despair.

 

As Christians, we are forced, again and again, to look at the larger picture—at God’s larger picture. 

 

We are forced to see that joy is always there, just beyond our grasp, awaiting us.

 

Joy is there when we realize that in the midst of our darkness, there is always light just beyond our reach.

 

And when it comes back into our lives, it truly is wonderful…

 

Because that is what God wants for us.

 

Joy not always something one is able to identify in a person.

 

Joy doesn’t mean walking around smiling all the time.

 

It doesn’t mean that we have force ourselves to be happy at all times in the face of every bad thing.

 

If we do that, joy becomes false and forced.

 

True joy comes bubbling up from within us.

 

It is a true grace.

 

Remember last week when I talked about grace.

 

Last week, I defined grace in very simple terms:

 

Grace is a gift we receive from God we neither ask for nor anticipate.

 

In that way, joy is a gift we are given that we simply don’t ask for.

 

Rather, it comes from a deep place and it permeates our whole being, no matter what else is going on in our lives or in the world around us.

 

It is a joy that comes from deep within our very essence—from that place of our true selves.

 

And, let me tell you from my own experience, joy can still be present in times of mourning, in times of darkness, in times of despair.

 

It might not be joy at its greatest effect, but there are glimmers of joy even in those dark times.

 

Advent is, as I said on the first Sunday of Advent, essentially, a penitential season.

 

It is a time, as Fr. Floberg referenced, a time of discipline.

 

It is a time for us to recognize that we are slugging through the muck of our lives—a muck we are at least, in part, responsible for.

 

But Advent is also a time for us to be able to rejoice even in the midst of that muck.

 

It is a time for us realize that we will not be in that muck forever.

 

The muck doesn’t win out.

 

God wins out.

 

Christ’s light in this world is more powerful than any darkness.

 

And Christ’s light always wins out.

 

Our light—the Light of Christ within us—will outlast whatever darkness we are experiencing right now in our own lives or in the world.

 

See, even in the face of darkness, we find hope and we can find joy.

 

The joy we carry deep within is too powerful to die.

 

This powerful joy will win out and outlast any darkness.

 

So, this morning, let us remember the joy we feel at seeing this pink candle lit.

 

Let us carry the spirit of this rose-colored Sunday with us.

 

Yes, I will say it: let us look at life with rose-colored glasses (we can legitimately do that today!)

 

We have made it this far.

 

The tide has shifted.

 

The light is winning out.

 

The dawn is about to break upon our long dark night.

 

As we ponder this, as we meditate on this, as we take this with us in our hearts, let us pay special attention to the emotion this causes within us.

 

Let us embrace that welling up of joy from deep within.

 

And let it proclaim with our lips the words we, along the prophet Isaiah, long to say:

 

I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,

my whole being shall exult in my God!

 

Let us pray.

We rejoice greatly in you, Loving God; even in our darkness you send us Light—the Light of our Savior Christ. Even when we feel alone and abandoned, you come close to us and hold us close. We rejoice in you today, and all our days, who comes to us again and again in the person of Jesus our Lord, in whose name we pray. Amen.