Thankful Memorial Episcopal Church, Chattanooga
Year C, Advent 3

Zephaniah 3:14-20
Canticle 9 (Isaiah 12:2-6)
Philippians 4:4-7
Luke 3:7-18

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

The third Sunday of Advent is known as “Rejoice” Sunday.  And you can see why:

“Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel!  Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem! […] The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst,” cries out the prophet Zephaniah.

And “Sing the praises of the Lord, for he has done great things […] Cry aloud, inhabitants of Zion, ring out your joy, for the great one in the midst of you is the Holy One of Israel,” sings the prophet Isaiah.

And “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. […] And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus,” exults St. Paul in his letter to the Philippians.

Deep into the sometimes somber and reflective season of Advent, these spokespeople for God exhort us to joy and celebration as we look forward to the coming of the Lord. 

And then comes John the Baptist in Luke’s gospel.  Wah-wah.  Like a storm-cloud of doom, like some biblical Eeyore, John interjects into all the joy of the previous readings with a very different-sounding cry: “You brood of vipers!”  He says the one who is coming “will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.  His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”  Eek.  Despite the narrator’s insistence that this is the proclamation of “good news,” John the Baptist seems a little lacking in the joy department.

But, honestly, right now, I find John’s words more welcome than not in this particular season.  And I don’t mean the run-up to a secular Christmas with local radio stations playing 24/7 Christmas muzak and the shopping frenzy in full swing.  I mean the season we as a country, as a global community, find ourselves in:

The pandemic is very much still going strong as poorer countries and nations plagued by conflict struggle to get their people vaccinated.  Here at home, there are plenty of people who are eligible for the vaccine but refuse to get it because they prioritize personal freedoms over the communal good.  Racialized violence against black and brown folks seems endemic to our systems and therefore insurmountable.  Climate change wreaks havoc in the natural world and we suffer the consequences like the tornadoes that happened just this weekend.  And then there’s yet another school shooting, this one at Oxford High School, for which we once again have no words. 

I don’t know about you, but with all of that as the backdrop to our daily lives, Zephaniah’s and Isaiah’s and Paul’s demands that we rejoice sound awfully discordant and, frankly, a bit cruel.  Give me a little more John the Baptist right now, someone to remind us of the “unquenchable fire” that awaits the chaff, someone to call us out for behaving like a “brood of vipers.” 

And yet, the wisdom of our lectionary, the wisdom of our scriptures, is that these texts do not cancel each other out.  We don’t have to choose between John the Baptist’s gloom-and-doom reality and the others’ exuberant joy.  Indeed, we must not choose between them; this is not an either/or.  Instead, these texts are interconnected and in conversation with one another.  And, when we look at them that way, perhaps we will find that there’s not such a big gulf between joy and judgment, between the calls to repent and to rejoice.

Because, actually, Zephaniah and Isaiah and Paul all knew a thing or two – or three or four-hundred – about the brokenness of the world and the depths of human sinfulness and suffering.  Zephaniah and Isaiah speak from their own historical contexts of political upheaval, corruption among the powerful, and existential threats to God’s people – a dark and scary reality that at least rivals our own modern experiences!  And Paul writes his letter to the Christians in Philippi from the dank confines of a Roman prison cell, fairly certain of his own grisly death on the near horizon.  For all these writers, their joy sits alongside a crystal clear perspective of the reality around them.

As commentator Debie Thomas puts it in her essay for this Sunday’s readings, these texts require us to “hold onto two realities at once: the reality of the world’s brokenness in one hand, and the reality of God’s love in the other.”  For the ancient writers, the call to “rejoice” in spite of and in the midst of whatever terrible context we face is not some Pollyanna-ish denial of reality but a call “to lean hard into our longing for God’s perfect [peace] to break into this suffering world and make things right.” 

Understood this way, then, to rejoice is a courageous and rebellious act against the evil we see around us and the evil we try to avoid seeing in our own hearts.  To rejoice is to proclaim an insistent, stubborn faith that the goodness of God always has the last word.

But such faith doesn’t come easy – how could it given all that we know to be true of human life?  So joy – the act of rejoicing – requires practice.  And that’s exactly what Zephaniah and Isaiah and Paul want us to do.  Their exhortations for rejoicing challenge us to practice joy, to exercise the muscles of our faith, to continuously develop the skills of seeing and hearing the presence of God in all times and all places and all circumstances and to participate in the work of revealing that divine presence to others.

Which brings us back to good ol’ John the Baptist.  When he calls out the brokenness and sinfulness he sees before him, the anxious crowds cry right back: “What then should we do?”  And, hidden in the spaces of John’s words about vipers and fire is a surprisingly familiar answer.  Share what you have with those in need, John says.  Treat people fairly and with dignity.  Be honest.  In other words: practice joy!  Amid all the hardships of this reality, insist on finding God’s presence in the here and now.  Live your daily lives as though the kingdom of God is already here – because it is.  Trust in the vision for creation that you believe God still has for us and longs to usher us into.  Change your behavior to reflect that vision.  Change your heart so that it delights in God’s will.  Proclaim the good news that God sees the world – sees each and all of us – rightly and has the power to separate out that which is rotten and save for eternity that which is beautiful and good and true.  Repent.  Rejoice.  Amen.