"Be Joyful"

Friends in God: At last we're "live" and this 'blog is active!

We're finishing the week of "Gaudete"--"Be Joyful", in the midst of the culture's demands of the season, in a time of anxiety and uncertainty. It has been a fragile time in the parish. But faithful joy is not a matter of just "cheering up." It is found in the reality of our lives. We were gifted with a stunning sermon this past Rose Sunday by Rev. Tamara Yates, and the text is below--kn

3 Advent A RCL
Today is the Sunday in Advent when we get to be joyful. Our candle today is pink, beckoning us to a lightheartedness in the midst of the more somber purples of the season. Our Old Testament text from Isaiah is sort of like that too—a brief flash of pink in a purple sea of pain and suffering. Isaiah was preaching to the Israelite people when they were in exile in Babylon—uprooted from their homes, their land, the religious context of their temple, they were forcibly taken to a foreign land. To these dire circumstances, Isaiah spoke of a way, a highway, a road through the desert that would lead them back home. Even though the road passes through the deepest, darkest, most dangerous parts of the wilderness, Isaiah promised that no one, not even fools would go astray. That no wild beast would devour anyone, and that water would gush forth and beautiful blossoms abound. That God would save God’s people and lead them home safely. “And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” Gaudete! Be joyful! It sounds great! And we certainly know about exile. It is all around us: geographic exile of refugees—forced from their countries and having to learn a new language, new customs, new everything; exile from family in this transient and mobile society; exile from our deepest, truest selves. How do we find this road home? This road that will lead us away from exile and to this everlasting joy. From the disconnect we feel in our world and in our own lives to something more real and life-giving? In the text, the people who are walking this road, are the blind—who can now see, the deaf—who can now hear, the paralyzed who are leaping like the deer, and the mute—now singing for joy. That’s great for them, but what about the rest of us? How do we get there?

In our gospel reading, Jesus doesn’t seem to offer much help with this question. John sends a similar inquiry from prison, Are you the one who is to come or should we be waiting for another? Are you going to lead us to this highway, to this path that will turn everything around, that will overturn the injustice we see all around us? Violence is escalating around the world from Iraq to Afghanistan to Darfur. Our environment is suffering. Our children go without healthcare. People all over the planet are starving. And so we ask with John: Are you sure you’re the one who’s going to turn all this around? Or should we be looking for another? But Jesus doesn’t even seem to answer the question. He just goes back to these blind and otherwise impaired people. All he says is that blind people are made to see, deaf people are made to hear, those who are paralyzed are walking, the lepers are cleansed, the poor have the good news preached to them. As a matter of fact, he seems to talk about these folks a lot—in the beatitudes, they are the poor in spirit, and later in Matthew 25 they are the least of these – the hungry, those in prison, the people who don’t have enough money for clothes. These are not the people who are affecting global politics—Jesus, you’re not gonna get very far with these folks. In fact, they don’t seem to have much to do with anything in our lives. What on earth do these people—these nameless, faceless, weak and defenseless people have to do with salvation? What role could they possibly have to play in God’s coming to save us and to bring us this everlasting joy?

As many of you know, I am an assistant at the L’arche community here in Portland: L’Arche Nehalem. L’Arche is an organization that was founded in 1964 in France by a man named Jean Vanier. It is a place where people with developmental disabilities and assistants who are not disabled live, work and pray together-where they create home together. It is a community built upon the belief that people with a developmental disability are uniquely equipped to reveal that human suffering and joy can lead to growth, healing and unity. That these folks have an incredible gift to give our world, that they can be a source of hope, peace and even salvation if we are open to them and if we welcome them. Vanier has written prolifically about the mission and spirituality of L‘Arche. In some lectures given at Harvard, he makes a comment that I think might help us get at what’s going on in today’s texts. That might give us a better sense of how we find this road through the desert that will take us home. Vanier says: People may come to our communities because they want to serve the poor; they will only stay once they have discovered that they themselves are the poor.
Talk about the deep, dark dangerous wilderness! That is not something most of us want to discover. In fact, we spend enormous amounts of energy convincing ourselves of exactly the opposite. We work very hard to prove to ourselves and everyone else that we’ve got things covered. That we are good enough, strong enough, mature enough, economically secure enough, smart enough, lovable enough to lead successful, happy lives. And our society pushes us in every way imaginable—and in many ways that we can’t even imagine—to maintain and fortify these illusions with this car, that academic degree, this kind of clothing, that house in that neighborhood, this prep school for our children, that spiritual program, this romantic relationship, and on and on.
The people Jesus is talking about have an extra-hard time holding onto these illusions. For Vanier, it is the developmentally disabled. Jesus includes the blind, the paralyzed, the deaf, those with communicable diseases, the poor, even the dead. And the psalm for today talks about the oppressed, the hungry, those who are bowed down, the orphan, the widow. These people know that they aren’t enough. They’re on the fringes of society and every time they walk out into public they get smacked in the face by outside-ness. By their own fragility and vulnerability.

In this way, they can guide us to God. They are the road through the desert that can take us home. They take us there by opening us to the truth of our own poverty. There’s the kicker. If it were really just about helping the poor, it wouldn’t be so bad. A little annoying, but do-able. Unfortunately, though, Jesus calls us to seek out the poor, to reach out to them because when we do, we will eventually be confronted with our own blindness, our own deafness, our own paralysis, our own inability to speak what we truly want to communicate. We don’t want to walk that road. Everything in us recoils from that, we’ve spent our whole lives trying to forget our own vulnerability, so much so that we associate it with death. And in some ways it is a death.

But let’s not forget the pink—the way that looks like death, like dying of thirst or being devoured by wild beasts—will be a place of safety, with abundant blossoming- as much as the crocus, where waters gush forth and no one goes astray. And our impairment, our incompleteness will be made whole—God will heal us and restore us to our truest, deepest, most precious selves. This is the God who comes at Advent. This God comes as an infant, with no defenses, no plan of attack. This God invites us to take off our own armor, to step out of the cages of our carefully constructed defenses and to live in freedom. This God beckons us into poverty, into weakness, brokenness because that’s where we’ll find God’s healing, companioning presence. Vanier says it like this: Our God is not a God who wants to hurt us. Our God wants us to be free, to be happy, to be joyful, even to be ecstatic. The big question is: where and how do we find this joy? This is precisely the secret of the gospel. We discover the immense joy God wants for us by meeting Jesus in the poorest, the weakest, and the most broken. Gaudete! Be joyful!