Love came to town and found
no room at the inn.
But someone found
room enough—
sweeping out a stable,
tying the animals to one side
(the hearty ones left in the cold).
Mary, great—not feeling so great—with Child:
the waters above,
the waters below,
broken, now.
all creation groans. . .
the sky explodes,
new Light.
Love came to town and found
no room at the inn.
Somehow we found
room enough
for each of us, inside Love:
new Human—new humanity,
all things new.
Our journey through Advent is nearly at its end. Tomorrow is the 4th Sunday of Advent and already Christmas Eve! The light has grown, both with the warm Advent candlelight and the incremental lengthening days. There is still darkness all around, but yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.
How are you feeling right now? Excited? Hopeful? Warm? Stressed out? Anxious? Lonely? The holidays bring in their wake a mix of emotions. It seems there is always too much of something, and far too little of another thing. And beyond the holiday cheer, a heaviness hangs in the air.
We are cynical enough that we expect political corruption in our leaders, but we wonder how far it all goes. We worry about taxes, environmental destruction, systemic discrimination, and policies that break up immigrant families (to deter illegal crossings). We are sickened by the constant barrage of sexual assault news. Closer to home, we hurt when we feel disconnected and distant from the ones we love. We feel the sting of rejection when the ones we thought loved us don’t really love us the way we long. We feel the trauma of past wounds. We worry about making ends meet, our deteriorating health, and about our kids’ emotional intelligence and social development. All of this makes us feel heavy.
The promise of joy seems like an end to the heaviness. We long for the day which will be only light and warmth. Then, we will glory in the incredible lightness of being.
Hebrews 12:1-2 is a familiar passage promising us strength for the journey:
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Jesus is our exemplar. Like Him, we may cast aside every hindrance in pursuit of what is ahead. Jesus, the pioneer and perfector of our faith, endured the cross for the joy set before Him. He was glorified for it. He sits now at God’s right hand.
C.S. Lewis wrote a book called The Weight of Glory. The name is clever but redundant. In Hebrew, the word for glory, כָּבוֹד, means just that: weight and heaviness. Certainly, it has the connotation of honor and praise, presences, radiance and all of that, but underneath these lofty notions is substance and consequence. God and Jesus are forces to be reckoned with.
We see the weight of glory illustrated in 1 Samuel 4 when the ark of God is captured. When Eli heard that ark was captured, he collapsed and died under his own weight, that is his own glory (1 Sam 4:18). His daughter-in-law named her son Ichabod because the glory of the Lord departed Israel (the weight of God no longer rested on the Ark’s mercy seat, 1 Sam 4:21). Too much weight had been given to leaders and strategy (and even the magic ark), Israel did not give to YHWH his proper due. They did not follow God wholeheartedly, they gave weight to these other things. With the weight of God departed, the ark was taken away (V. Philips Long first alerted me to this weighty wordplay in Samuel).
The Joy of the Lord we await is not weightlessness. We await the day when all the stuff we face, will have their proper weight. Anxieties, worries, wounds will not weigh us down the way they do now. We won’t be heavy laden with past guilt, present danger, or our anxiety about our future. We will no longer be burdened by sin or tangled in the bramble. We will finally give weight to what matters most.
We will see the Lord exalted, high and lifted up, the train of his robe filling the temple (Isaiah 6:1). God’s glory will be revealed. And all the struggle and the pain, the scorning and shame, will no longer matter on the day when Christ comes again to reign. It will be worth the wait when we see the substantial, powerful, radiant and weighty, Glory of God. For the joy set before us, we joyfully await the glory.
I was briefly a mascot of a Christian rock band called Frolic like a Heifer. They would sheepishly admit that they got their name from Jeremiah 50:11, which described the judgment on Babylon (in that context, frolicking like a heifer was not a good thing). At a couple of their concerts, while the band played, I came out in a cow costume and danced around. One time, I almost died an ironic death.
It was at the Baptist Student Union near the University of Hawaii campus. The concert was part of a year-end party. In the middle of my dancing shenanigans, I grabbed myself a burger so I could eat it while dancing around in a cow costume. I thought it was funny, a cow eating a burger. But in the middle of some killer dance moves, I almost choked. The burger lodged in my throat. I gasped for air.
SPOILER ALERT: I didn’t die that day.
The burger dislodged and I was saved from an embarrassing end. I would not get awarded a Darwin Award for choking on a burger while dressed as a cow. Everything was okay and we all had a great time, frolicking like a heifer.
In the Bible, joy and warnings of judgment are often intertwined. Consider another dancing cow passage:
Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire,” says the LORD Almighty. “Not a root or a branch will be left to them.But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays. And you will go out and frolic like well-fed calves. Then you will trample on the wicked; they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day when I act,” says the LORD Almighty. “Remember the law of my servant Moses, the decrees and laws I gave him at Horeb for all Israel. “See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the LORD comes. He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction. (Malachi 4:1-6).
The great and fearsome Day of the Lord will come. The wicked will burn like stubble in a fire and will be trampled underfoot. The ominous threat of judgment chars the air. But not for all. The sun of righteousness will rise, healing in its rays, and cows will dance. Elijah, a voice crying in the wilderness, will turn the hearts of children to their parents and parents’ hearts to their children, averting the land’s total destruction.
We don’t much like talking about judgment (it’s so judgy!), but Advent reminds us of both joy and judgment. Without judgment, there is no justice and the arc of the moral universe bends toward chaos. Without the promise of joy—healing, wholeness and repaired relationships—we are without hope. Judgment calls us to set right whatever is wrong in our lives. The promise of joy makes us want to.
The thing is, we are all complicit in so much. Human flourishing and our standard of living in the modern West, have contributed to human suffering, injustice and environmental destruction. Where were your shoes made? Who made them? Or the tablet you are reading this on? For the most part, we don’t know, and when we do know, we try not to think about it. Each of us is a dancing cow, choking on a burger. We are happy and oblivious to our own destruction.
The promise of joy in the passage above is that when the dreadful day of the Lord comes, the Elijah will come and prepare the way, leading us to repair our broken relationships—children and parents, parents and children. With relational wholeness, on the Day of the Lord, we will frolick like well-fed calves. We will jump for joy.
I didn’t grow with Santa Claus.
Both my parents were raised with a fundamentalist suspicion of Santa. He was a distraction from the true meaning of Christmas and evidence of the secularization and over-commercialism of the season. They didn’t stop me from standing in line to see Santa at the mall or from watching Christmas movies on TV, but they made certain I knew that the presents under the tree and all the holiday fun was their doing, not Santa’s.
In my 20s, I remember conversations with friends who said they stopped believing in God when they stopped believing in Santa Claus. I concluded that perhaps my parents were right, and it was best not to lie to your kids.
So when I became a dad, my wife and I never really pushed the Santa myth on our kids. We were as generous as we were able each Christmas, filling the floor under the tree with gifts. We talked with our oldest daughter a few times on how Santa is a fun story, but that was it (though she wasn’t supposed to spoil the fun of other families).
I didn’t think my kids were really missing out on anything, until our second child, at the tender age of five asked us one evening, “Why does Santa not come to our house?” Her childhood wonder was intact, but she felt excluded. So that year, for the first time we let Santa into our home. And we’ve been doing it since.
Sometimes Santa brings a present for each kid but he always fills the stockings. Our kids are disappointed if Santa forgets to give them toothpaste and an orange, though not all of Santa’s offerings are so practical. Mostly, Santa gives our kids the same made-in-China crap our kids see at the Dollar Tree. Clearly, with more 7 billion people on the planet, Santa’s workshop has had to do its fair share of outsourcing.
For just over a year now, Santa has attended our church in Medford, First United Methodist Church (the Church of the Rogue). He came in full Christmas regalia this past Sunday, and after the service, kids and families took photos with him. It was a joy to see how excited our two-year-old was to see him. At the same age, his brother and sisters were as frightened of Santa as they would be of any bearded man at the mall who wanted them to sit on his lap. But our two-year-old smiled and shook, he excitedly squealed and in a little song voice chanted, “It’s Santa, It’s Santa. . .” Santa has also carved out time to come to church this coming Sunday as well. Even though it’s Christmas Eve and a busy day for him! Our pastor will interview him during her sermon (service at 10:30 if you’re in town for Christmas).
I had an out-of-season conversation with Santa a while back (AKA Don). He’s been doing the Santa gig for years and carries a Chris Kringle ID in his wallet. Even in the Summer, he is never totally out of character. He is the real deal.
I remember him telling me how he regards the Santa mantle as a ministry and he told me about times when kids asked for stuff that couldn’t be wrapped in pretty paper with a bow and placed under the tree. Broken families, terminal diagnoses, tension at home, Santa sees. Santa knows. When a child asks him for something which he can’t deliver on (e.g., “Santa, can you bring my dad back?”), he prays with children and points them to Jesus. Santa can’t always do anything about the things kids face, but he knows the power of Christ’s presence and isn’t afraid to tell them of the true meaning of Christmas.
When Leroy shared pictures of himself in Santa garb on social media, he got some clap back for not conforming to the dominant cultural image of St. Nick. Here was Leroy’s response:Ok I will answer publicly the behind the scenes criticism of #blacksanta
My wife and I are in the vocation of youth and leadership development. This can start when kids of color are young. The images that children of color see are overwhelmingly white when it comes to heroes. This is a big problem and it starts young kids of color to doubt themselves and their significance in the world and puts negative images of themselves in their minds. Check out doll test if you don’t believe me. Taking an image like Santa Claus and changing it to a black man does more than make for a good picture outwardly it forms a good image in the soul even if it’s fairy tale. Fairy tales helps us dream of ourselves and be inspired in positive ways. I took pictures with adults yesterday who came alone because they to need to dream of themselves differently in a world that is crushing down on them. We also had many white parents of black children who want their children to see these images, and so many families of color. I was changed as I represented the man who brings gifts and I was black. The gifting was mutual. #blackrolemodels
I hope that helps my critics to chill a bit.
Leroy as Santa subverts the dominant narrative of white supremacy and showsAfrican American children and communities of color that their skin and bodies matter too. That despite dominant cultural images which tells them they don’t matter, they do.They are children of God and yes, Santa comes for them. This is a picture of Jesus.
❆
I still sometimes say curmudgeonly slogans to my kids like, “If you re-arrange the letters in Santa it spells SATAN,” or “Santa Claus is Satan’s Cause!” But I don’t believe it for a second. Leroy and Don are both Santa’s which bring the Presence of Christ with them. They give Jesus to people.
I think sometimes about the people I’ve met who’ve stopped believing in God when they stopped believing in Santa. Maybe the image of God they held in their mind was as cultural and casual as our images of Santa. Maybe faith was just another family tradition. I am committed to showing my kids Jesus, and I have discovered that Santa is not the adversary I once imagined him to be.
It is Advent. Jesus is coming. And he isn’t the only one.
When Advent began, the Christian blogosphere was a buzz, as always, with grumpy liturgists warning us away from jumping to quickly to yuletide cheer. We were cautioned against carols and mirth, too much cookies and eggnog. Advent, after all, is about preparing. We hope, we long, we eagerly anticipate the coming of the Lord. In the liminal glow of Advent candle light, we are inviting to make our crooked roads straight and prepare the way of the Lord. A lot of the posts here too, inhabit this waiting space.
But now, two-and-a-half weeks in on a year with a short Advent season, the chorus of cranky Adventists have been drowned out by the holiday cheer. We lit the pink candle this past Sunday, signifying joy, if not the full satisfaction and fulfillment of Christmas joy, at least a foretaste of the joy that is to come. Perhaps now, we can start singing Joy to the World. And when we do, we will discover it is not a Christmas carol at all, it is Advent all the way down.
According to the fount of all knowledge (Wikipedia) as of the late 20th Century, Joy to the World was the most published Christian hymn in North America. But the 18th’s Century hymn writer, Isaac Watts did not write this hymn with Christmas in mind. There is no angelic chorus or Christmas crèche. No little town of Bethlehem and no shepherds on the hillside.
Joy to World was Watt’s paraphrase of the second half of Psalm 98. Watt’s wrote his hymn in a Christological, Messianic key, but he didn’t envision Jesus’ nativity. This hymn instead images Christ’s final coming when he will reign over all creation:
Joy to the world! the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare him room,
And heav’n and nature sing.
Joy to the earth! the Savior reigns!
Let men their songs employ,
While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains,
Repeat the sounding joy.
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.
He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of his righteousness,
And wonders of his love. (The Psalms and Hymns of Isaac Watts, “Psalm 98, part 2,” Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1998).
We sing this as a Christmas carol, mostly because of the way the first verse celebrates that the Lord has come. And yet, the rest of the hymn envisions eschaton. Then the Savior will reign and all sin and sorrow will cease. His blessing will flow into every crack and cranny where the curse is found. The Kingdom of God come in full! Righteousness, and wonder and love!
Despite it’s clearly celebratory tone, the hymn inhabits the liminal, in-between space of Advent. The world it describes, is not yet our world. It is the telos we are moving toward, that which all creation is groaning for.
The Lord has come, and will come. All hardship and affliction will cease and all creation will join in the song of praise: Joy to the earth! the Savior reigns! Let men their songs employ, While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains, repeat the sounding joy. JAll the boys and girls: joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, Joy to you and me.
(Image: Anonymous Russian icon painter (before 1917), Joy of All Who Sorrow, Wikimedia Commons)
My cross I bear is this: I remember sermons.
No, not just the alliteration, funny stories and heartwarming illustrations. And not just the pithy quotes that preachers once found in books but now find through internet memes. I actually remember the points of the sermon.
There is one sermon I remember well. I’ve heard it more than once. I don’t remember the Bible text— no doubt punched down, pulled stretched, rolled out and shaped to say exactly what the preacher was trying to say. But I remember the thesis:
Jesus didn’t come to make you happy. He came to give you joy.
The preacher would say this and pause, as though he just revealed some deep insight before moving on to articulate the technical, lexical distinction between happiness and joy:
Happiness is circumstantial and fleeting. It is a feeling based on whatever good may be happening at that moment. It is entirely external. Joy is much deeper, sustaining us through seasons of grief and suffering. It is our comfort even through anxious seasons. Joy, unlike happiness, is not based on external circumstance, but is an inner contement experienced by those who have the Grace of God, a byproduct of life lived in Him.
That is quite the distinction and boy, does that preach! There were some good things in that sermon. We do need a thick experience of joy to sustain us in the hurley burley of life. But on the alleged distinction between happiness and joy, I call balderdash! Hogwash! Malarkey, even! When the preacher preaches the dictionary, may the congregation beware!
In reality, joy, and happiness are not all that different. In everyday speech, we use the two terms interchangeably. And while there are shallow ways to experience happiness and joy there are a great many people reaching thicker versions of both. For example, Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project chronicled her year-long exploration on how to live a happy, more fulfilling life. And of course, people are exploring what on earth makes Denmark happier than the rest of the world when they are most famous for marzipan pigs, and that cranky philosopher whose name you always misspell. The Danes refer to happiness as hygge (pronounced something like Hoo-gah) denoting some like total well-being and living a fulfilled life. However you get there, you need lots of candles and cozy nooks.
The biblical authors also use happiness and joy interchangeably. The Psalmist exhorts us to “shout for joy,” a happy acclamation of ejaculatory praise (Psalm 95:1; 98:4). Happy is used to describe those who avoid wickedness, sin, and mocking, but delight in the Lord’s law both day and night (Psalm 1). Happy were those whose lifestyles marked by godly obedience to Torah (Psalm 119:1-2). That isn’t all that different than Jesus’ promise that our obedience to Him would bring us the fullness of joy (John 15:10-11).
So Joy and happiness are near synonyms. Why it matters is this:
Jesus came to make you happy.
Jesus first Advent was not about an inner state of serene joy. It was a real-world, circumstantial, happening. It changed the world, If you were there and sensed what God was doing, a smile would spread across your face. The way we know Mary who really did know, smiled happily as she sang her song.
When Jesus comes again and all sorrow and terror cease, it will be a real-world, circumstantial ‘happening.’ When suffering reaches its end and only Shalom, wholeness and life remain, we will be happy. The Christian joy (or happiness) we experience in this moment, exists between these two happenings. The incarnation opened up a new way for us. And we now live in happy anticipation of New Heavens and New Earth.
And yes there is grief and pain and there is real evil in the world still. There are times we are heartbroken and hurt. We lose loved ones and feel like we’ve lost our sense of self. We feel discouraged and worried, and full of doubt. Happily, this too, shall pass. All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.
When I was in college, my friend Eric and I came up with a worship leader comedy routine. Eric would stand with his guitar. I’d pick up my Bible and turn to the page I had bookmarked so I could read the way worship leader’s sometimes read Bible passages between songs. Eric would tilt his chin upward, eyes closed, a pious smile on his face.
I would inhale and in one breath read:
ThewordoftheLordthatcametoZephaniahsonofCushi-thesonofGedaliahthesonofAmariah-
thesonofHezekiahduringthereignofJosiah
-sonofAmonkingofJudah:
Eric would nod and smile, and occasionally he’d interject with a yes Lord or an Amen as I continued to read, only slower now, pausing for emphasis:
“I will sweep away everything
from the face of the earth,”
declares the Lord.
“I will sweep away both man and beast;
I will sweep away the birds in the sky
and the fish in the sea—
and the idols that cause the wicked to stumble.”
“When I destroy all mankind
on the face of the earth,”
declares the Lord,
“I will stretch out my hand against Judah
and against all who live in Jerusalem.
I will destroy every remnant of Baal worship in this place,
the very names of the idolatrous priests—
those who bow down on the roofs
to worship the starry host,
those who bow down and swear by the Lord
and who also swear by Molek,
those who turn back from following the Lord
and neither seek the Lord nor inquire of him.
Then I would close my Bible and bow my head in silence. After about 10 or 15 seconds Eric would launch into song, ” ♪ ♫ There is joy in the Lord, there is love in His Spirit, there is hope in the knowledge of Him . . .”
I don’t think we ever finished the song. The juxtaposition of one of the judgiest Bible passages (Zephaniah 1) with happy-clappy, contemporary worship made us laugh. We enjoyed the joke more anyone else did. Everyone thought we were irreverent.
The joke was better than Eric and I realized. The Joy of the Lord came as a happy surprise to those who only heard words of judgment and destruction. As goofy and impious as we were, we managed to touch on and demonstrate something of the joy that came with Jesus.
Christ’s Advent was the start of a great reversal. Though the world dwelt in darkness, full of wounded and dying people, living fragmented life, the promise of Christ opened up new possibilities: hope, shalom, wholeness, well-being, healing, deliverance, salvation. Though “weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5).
✧
J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy coined a word to describe this sort of reversal, eucatastrophe. In his essay, On Fairy Stories, he described a cataclysmic shift in a story where certain destruction is averted by a joyful sudden turn of events—the consolation of a happy ending:
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
Anyone who has read the Lord of Rings knows these eucatastrophic turnarounds (think Gandalf’s return or the eagles). But of course, eucatastrophe is not just an element in fairy stories. We see it Romantic Comedies where the despised jerks (Mr. Darcy!) turn out, in the end, to be truly quite wonderful. Good jokes, too, have this kind of joyful surprise. The eucatastrophe is written into the fabric of reality:
[I]n the “eucatastrophe” we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world. The use of this word gives a hint of my epilogue. It is a serious and dangerous matter. It is presumptuous of me to touch upon such a theme; but if by grace what I say has in any respect any validity, it is, of course, only one facet of a truth incalculably rich: finite only because the capacity of Man for whom this was done is finite
So, the gospel of Jesus Christ is eucatastrophe! Tolkien called the “Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history (and the Resurrection of Christ the eucatastrophe of the Incarnation). Jesus’ return and the New Heaven and Earth will be the eucatastrophe for which all creation groans (Romans 8:22).
✧
So here we are, the third week of Advent. The world is still dark and days short (in the Northern hemisphere). Suffering, struggle, and sorrow is what we know. Our only experience of peace is a tenuous armistice of mutually-assured-destruction. We await eucatastrophic turnaround. Though weeping may last through the night, Joy comes in the morning.
thoughts, prayers & songs: 
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