Joy to the World:
Is Joy Better Than Hope?

First Sunday of Advent • December 1, 2019
Reading: Luke 1:46-56 (NRSV)
Rev. Dr. Cláudio Carvalhaes, guest preacher

Friends, it is an immense joy to be here with you all today. I admire you all and the work you do. You are a sign of joy in this island and I pray you continue with your witness and ways of living the gospel.

Rejoice in God always; again I will say, Rejoice.

We are beginning the season of the Advent and Advent is a time of preparation. We enter a time of expectation! We are waiting for nothing less than the arrival of God. Emmanuel in our midst! During Advent we prepare a room in our lives for the coming of Jesus. Prepare the way for joy!

Different places and rural areas in Mexico enact a powerful tradition that celebrates Advent. It is called Posadas and it is the enactment of the pilgrimage of Joseph and Mary nine days before December 24. From the 16th until the 24th, Los Peregrinos, San José y la Virgen María, in the format of two small statues, will be taken around the neighborhood by local people asking for a posada, a place to stay. Every home will have a Nativity scene. The hosts of the home are the innkeepers, and the neighborhood children and adults are Los Peregrinos, who have to request lodging. There will be candles and singing around a procession. Three different houses are asked to host them but only the third house will offer them a place to stay. The posadas reenact our human condition, namely, wanderers around the world, immigrants in this world waiting to find our home in God. Posadas also reenacts the material need for a home, showing the displacement of people around the world, people without a place to stay, as we carry our children or are pregnant with dreams and hopes for a new life. The border at the South are filled with Marias and Josés and baby Jesus waiting for someone to prepare a room for them, to welcome them, to say come!

During the advent we reenact the coming of God as a refugee child, as an undocumented immigrant who could have been locked in private jails at the borders. During the advent, we enact a different a story than the story we see going on now. We will make a room filled of joy for the baby Jesus to arrive among us and with that we will sing songs of joy!

“Go tell it on the mountains, over the hills and everywhere.
Go tell it on the mountains that Jesus Christ is born.”

But what does it mean to make room for Jesus? What does it mean to tell a different story, a story with a real place, engaging emotions, and working with the dispositions of our heart?

To make room for Jesus means for us as a community to prepare our hearts as rooms for Jesus, our families as welcoming places for Jesus, our homes as posadas Jesus, our churches as sanctuaries for Jesus, our world as God’s welcoming own house.

During advent no children go hungry!
No children go without a shelter!
No children go without a toy!
No children go without love and kindness!
No children go without joy!

As we start the advent, I want us to think about preparing our lives for joy, preparing our hearts as rooms for joy. Isn’t Jesus joy to the world? For joy is more important than hope! There is nothing bigger than joy. Joy is what sustains our hope.

You see, hope can be easily fabricated, it can be easily manipulated by politicians who want to get us to do what they want, by religious people who actually don’t know what else to say.

Hope can be an easy way out, a kind of fake news just to sooth the moment without really transforming it. Strangely enough, hope can be a form of denial, an impediment of transformation, a weak respond to fear. Because real hope, not cheap hope, only happens when hope is impossible! But that is for us to talk another day.

But I am making a case for joy not because I think it is nice, but because of what we hear from Mary. See what she said:

“My soul proclaims your greatness, O God, And my spirit rejoices in you, my savior. For you have looked with favor upon your lowly servant, and from this day forward all generations will call me blessed. For you, the Almighty, have done great things for me, and holy is your name. Your mercy reaches from age to age for those who fear you. You have shown strength with your arm; you have scattered the proud in their conceit; You have deposed the mighty from their thrones and raised the lowly to high places. You have filled the hungry with good things, while you have sent the rich away empty. You have come to the aid of Israel your servant, mindful of your mercy – The promise you made to our ancestors – to Sarah and Abraham and their descendants forever.”

My soul proclaims your greatness, O God,
And my spirit rejoices in you, my savior.

Alleluia!
Mary was visited by joy!
Emanuel visited her!

Joy to the joy came to her body, her life, her history.
She knows now she is blessed!
“And my spirit rejoices” she says.

The coming of Jesus is the coming of joy!
It is joy that creates history! It is joy that transformed the world! Joy!
Mary wasn’t hopeful. But once God visits her she proclaims the ways of God into the world!
When God comes to our history God comes by bringing joy to the heart of Mary!
This joy is such that her song defies all of the powers of death.

Your mercy reaches from age to age for those who fear you.
You have shown strength with your arm;
you have scattered the proud in their conceit;
You have deposed the mighty from their thrones
and raised the lowly to high places.
You have filled the hungry with good things,
while you have sent the rich away empty.

This is not a work of hope this is a work of joy!
Mary, a woman, considered impure, pregnant without a husband, says
“My soul proclaims your greatness, O God.” She sings a song of victory!

See, she doesn’t need hope: she has joy!
Her faith doesn’t falter: she has joy!
She has no doubt of God’s presence in the world for joy was the ruling emotion of her heart!
Her son was killed by the state. She cries but still, she still has joy!

Her story is the story of those who are at the end of the world. Those who have nothing but they were visited by joy.

Eliana Brum, a Brazilian journalist decided to live near the indigenous people in the amazon. Living with them, she learned that what keeps the indigenous people alive is not hope. For in their 500 years, they never had a single reason to hope. But one thing that nobody stole from them was joy. They have what she calls a “furious joy.” A joy that face the colonizers, those who killed them. A joy that make them laugh in the face of their atrocities. They walk by joy!

Unfortunately, we have attached the notion of joy with something that is always elusive. That comes and goes. Sometime joy is here and very soon joy is gone. We have learned to understand joy as a feeling only, and feelings come and go.

We have to learn joy as an emotion that guides us. Joy as God’s visit to our lives transforming us forever. God’s presence in our lives goes beyond what we feel. Once God visits us, we not only feel, we actually know. The same way, we don’t need to feel joy to be joyful, we need to know that the joy of life will never leave us.

That joy that I carry within is not elusive, it does not come and go. It is always already there! And cannot be taken away by any circumstance. God’s joy in us through Jesus is with us in every circumstance but it also goes beyond any form of predicament.

When we feel we don’t have it, do like the Psalmist who knows God:

I lift my eyes to the mountains from where will my help come?
My help comes from YHWH, who made heaven and earth!

I lift my eyes to the mountains from where will my joy come?
My joy comes from YHWH, who made heaven and earth!

All I want for my children is to keep joy in their hearts for the rest of their lives. Joy will save them! So I will keep going about life smiling, because I know where my joy is! Hoping to carry the smile of the Buddha. In whatever predicament Buddha is in, he is always smiling.

I think that Buddha’s smile is somewhat like what the apostle Paul says in Philippians 4:4

Rejoice in God always; again I will say, Rejoice.

So today:
Against a cheap grace, we will offer a joyful grace.

Instead of an irresponsible hope, a hope that is so weak that only serves to make us not despair, we will offer a robust joy that holds us up even in the midst of despair. A joy that stays with us forever!

Struggling against a sense of joy that is only individual, we proclaim the joy of the posadas, the joy of being together!

The joy of the people fighting against the wall with Mexico.

The joy of the Palestinians fighting against their ethnical cleansing.

The joy of transgender people, who are living in such dangerous times and yet, know that joy is what keeps them alive.

The joy of Mexicans who celebrate death with dance, food and celebration.
The joy of immigrants and refugees trying to make a way our of no way.
The joy of precious people with AIDS going on everyday.
The Black joy of African Americans, who know how to sing Go tell it on the mountains and be able
survive over 350 years of slavery.
The furious joy of indigenous people who have survived colonization for more than 500 years.
The joy of continuing being together when everything says you are on our own. No! Our joy is only possible if together!

As we start the advent, I want to challenge you to prepare your heart for the joy of the coming Jesus, Emanuel, God with us! For the same God who visited Mary is the same God who visits our history to transform us. The same joy that visited Mary and created a whole new history, is the same joy that God has in store for us today: through Jesus, joy of the world, joy to the world.

Are you read for joy?

Lift up your eyes to the mountains, from where will your joy come?
Look around yourself: from where is your joy coming from?
Look within yourself: from where lies the joy that is beyond any predicament?

Ah, we are the people of joy! Or we should be! For there isn’t any stronger joy than the one we already have.

Isn’t joy better than hope?

Rejoice in God always; again I will say, Rejoice.

Copyright © 2019 by Cláudio Carvalhaes
All rights reserved.

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