“Let go and Rejoice!” (St. Luke’s: Sunday, December 17th, 2017; Is. 61.1-2, 10-11; Lk. 1.46-50, 53-54; 1 Thess. 5.16-24; Jn. 1.6-8, 19-28)

What are you doing here?  Every summer from 2012 – 2016, I worked as a civilian chaplain at cadet summer camps in Valcartier, north of Quebec City.  An important place for the officers in charge of the cadets is the Mess Hall, a lounge with comfortable chairs, air conditioning, different games like pool and Ping-Pong, and perhaps most importantly, a bar.  Access to this privileged place is jealously guarded.  Only officers of the Canadian Forces, as well as civilian cadet instructors who have a contract with the military, are allowed to enter this shrine of relaxation.  A few years ago, during the first week of camp, I was sitting in a corner of the Mess Hall, in my civilian clothes, with my laptop open, enjoying the free Wi-Fi access.  All of a sudden, a uniformed officer approached me and asked me rather abruptly what I was doing there.  Not immediately picking up on the meaning of his question, I replied that I was sending e-mails.  This answer didn’t seem to satisfy him, and then it dawned on me that he thought I was some random person, perhaps a member of the kitchen staff, who, against all protocol, had presumed to surf the web in his Mess Hall.  As the officer was getting more and more flustered, I quickly added that I was the Chaplain of the camp.  Upon hearing this, the officer immediately did an about-face, stomped off and left me to continue surfing the web.

John’s world.  Something similar is going on in today’s Gospel.  John the Baptizer gets peppered with questions: “Who are you?”, “What are you?”, “What do you have to say for yourself?” … “Justify your existence!”  Now, just to be clear – today’s Gospel reading is from “the Gospel according to St. John” – and St. John the Evangelist is talking about another guy named John, i.e. John “the Baptist”.  When we think of John the Baptist, what kind of person comes to mind?  Someone who was mad, sad and bad?  (I.e. crazy, depressed and dangerous?)  Perhaps we think of some fire-and-brimstone preacher.  I suggest to you this [morning] that John the Baptist was a joyful person.  I know what you’re thinking: “Sam, we always suspected you were crazy, and now you’ve removed all doubt”.  So, let’s set the scene – the events of today’s Gospel take place among God’s people in first-century Palestine.  Like us, who are supposed to be cultivating an attitude of hopeful expectancy during the season of Advent, those who belonged to God’s people 2,000 years ago were also supposed to be waiting expectantly for something (or someone).  The first-century Jews had a Bible – what we call the “Old Testament” – and their Scriptures contained many wonderful promises about the future moment when Yahweh, the God of Israel, would once again visit and save his people.

We’ve heard this before.  Well, centuries had come and gone since these promises had been made.  Life had gone on – the harsh reality of trying to eke an existence out of the soil and the flocks, all the while being bled dry by taxes and subjugated to the daily humiliations of being a conquered people in an enemy-occupied land.  Hopes had been raised and dashed, time and time again.  Many people had become skeptical about the possibility of the promises ever coming true.  They “went along to get along”; they made the necessary compromises with “the powers that were” in order to amass as much wealth and influence as possible, all the while fulfilling their religious “duty” of managing the Temple infrastructure in Jerusalem.  And then, there were the thousands of ordinary folk who kept stubbornly going to the synagogue every weekend, saying their prayers and trying to make do the best they could.  As far as they were concerned, God was going to do what God was going to do, when God was going to do it.  In the meantime, there was shopping to be done, meals to be cooked, plans to be made, sermons to be endured, etc.  Sound familiar?

Two nobodies.  And so, in the midst of all of this, some crazy guy appears down by the Jordan River, quoting the Bible, plunging people under the water and proclaiming that the great moment is about to happen!  “The Lord is coming!  Make way for him!”  Think of those people you can sometimes see downtown.  You know the ones – those crazies who preach on the street corners or just stand there holding a sign that says “Jesus is the answer!” or “Repent!” or “The Lord is coming soon!”, etc.  That gives us some idea of what was going on with John the Baptist.  To make matters worse, crowds of people were going out into the desert to listen to him!  Word got back to the official religious authorities in Jerusalem and – most probably after a stimulating committee meeting – they decided to send a delegation down to the Jordan to find out what in the world was going on.  And so, John is asked just who he takes himself for – his interrogators trot out the profiles of the usual suspects – do you claim to be the Messiah?  No …Elijah?  Nope …“the prophet”?  Wrong again!  It’s quite a humorous scene.  John says, essentially, “I’m a nobody.  I’m just a voice calling to whoever will listen to prepare for God’s return”.  John then adds to the frustration of those questioning him.  “You’ve got the wrong guy”, John insists.  There is someone else coming after me.  As a matter of fact, he is already “among you”, but – here’s the punch line – you haven’t recognized him.  Basically, John was saying “Sorry guys, it’s too bad you went through all the trouble of coming all the way down here.  But, the fact is, you’ve gotten your panties in a bunch for nothing.  There is someone else – another nobody – who is on the way and you’ll have to do business with him.

John’s joy.  Once again, I imagine John as being a person of joy.  In today’s first reading, Isaiah talks about the moment when Yahweh’s Spirit-anointed messenger arrives on the scene; Isaiah compares the joy that God’s people will experience at that moment to the happiness of a wedding reception: “my God …has clothed me with a robe of salvation …like a bridegroom adorned with a diadem, like a bride bedecked with her jewels” (Is. 61.10).  In chapter 3 of St. John’s Gospel, people come to John the Baptist and tell him that Jesus is baptizing more people than him.  John replies: “He who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom …rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. For this reason my joy has been fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn. 3.29-30).  The coming of the Lord is like wedding guests waiting in the reception hall for the bride and groom to arrive after having had their pictures taken.  Everyone knows that once the newly-married couple walks through the door, the party can get started!  John had been proclaiming, “The bridegroom is on the way!”  John had been announcing that the celebration was about to begin.  He was calling people to get ready to join the party!

Created for joy.  It’s easy, due to the circumstances of life, to become cynical about the gospel, about the claim that what happened in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is good news.  It’s easy, if you’ve been a church-goer for a long time, to become bored with hearing the same old message year in and year out.  It’s easy, due to all the ways that the people around us let us down, to become indifferent to what God has done for us by sending his Son to be born as a human child and to also become indifferent to the fact that those people around us need us.  Cynicism, boredom, indifference – the “humbug outlook” – are common symptoms of spiritual sickness.  The antidote to this illness is joy.  The joy of God doing something totally unexpected – in fulfillment of his promises; the joy of being shocked with God’s goodness and generosity.  The joy of experiencing God’s justice and freedom.  After all, we were made for joy.  As C.S. Lewis would say, “Joy is simply reality”.  Joy is what we really desire, even though we struggle to articulate it or to imagine what it’s actually like.  As St. Augustine said, “You made us for yourself Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you”.  C.S. Lewis described his spiritual quest as a search for joy.  As he reflected on the gospel message about Jesus – Lewis, to his own surprise, was filled with an overwhelming sense of joy.  Lewis came to understand that his surrendering to Christ, taking up his cross and denying himself and allowing Christ to live through him resulted in pure… JOY.

Resisting Happiness.  Among Lewis’ many books is one called The Great Divorce; it’s about a group of souls who get to take a vacation from Hell in order to visit Heaven.  What’s more, once they arrive in Heaven, these souls are given the choice to remain there if they so desire – or go back to Hell – it’s their choice.  The thing is, in order to become “fit” to remain in Heaven – or, more accurately, in order to be able to survive in Heaven, these souls (“ghosts”) must let go of their pride, their resentment, their anger, their hatred – in a word, of everything that caused them to wind up in Hell in the first place.  As Lewis tells the tale, most souls, sadly, just cannot bring themselves to let go of their chains and embrace joy.  Most of them insist on resisting the very thing that can make them truly happy.

N.T. Wright, a British NT scholar, says the following: “Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world and to follow Jesus into the new world which he has thrown open before us.”  May the Lord whose arrival we await during Advent give us the grace to experience the freedom of true joy.  The Lord is coming!  Let us rejoice!  Amen.