Christmas Joy: By-Product of a Journey

Pastor Chuck's Message for Sunday, December 15, 2013

Scripture   Isaiah 35:1-10

It was good to see a dozen of our number braving the elements last night for our annual Christmas Caroling at Springhouse of Bethesda. In the audience were about 30 residents. Dorothy Saporta could have been one of them.

Dorothy is a 92-years-young woman who I learned from a Facebook friend this past week has suffered much in her later years. She lost her husband a few years ago, and she has lost her sight. She was forced to move into a retirement community recently that is just – shall we say – a bit substandard.

And yet, those who know Dorothy Saporta say you wouldn’t know her pain by meeting her. She is a joyful woman. When asked the secret of her joy, she cited five rules I later found on several Google listings – with that familiar source known to us all as “Anonymous” or “Author Unknown”.

So I will cite Dorothy as my source. Here they are, then: Dorothy Saporta’s Five Rules of Joy:

 

  Hate Less.

  Worry Less.

  Expect Less.

  Live Simply.

  Give More.

Contrary to the seasonal expectations permeating our December air: For Dorothy Saporta, joy is not dependent on getting what we want. It is not presented to us.

Joy is a by-product of Journey. An Advent journey. A season – like Lent is to Easter – of cleaning spiritual house.

Four of Dorothy’s Five Rules of Joy are about cleaning house. They are about divestment, not investment. They are not about adding Xmas more. They are about freeing self from.

  Hate Less. 

  Worry Less.

  Expect Less.

  Live Simply.  

Wish someone would have shared these rules of joy with Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro, while he was busy soliciting votes for last week’s municipal elections.

On November 2, Maduro announced the official arrival in his country of “early Christmas.” He said all workers would receive the first two-thirds of their bonuses and pensions November 10-11. (And yes, his party won most of those municipal elections.) That same day, Maduro lit the Nativity lights at the presidential palace. He announced, “Merry Christmas 2013. Christmas (has come) early, (with) early happiness for the whole family.” Later, he added, “We wanted to declare the arrival of Christmas because we want happiness for everyone.”

That surprising announcement came a week after Maduro had created a new cabinet post: Deputy Minister of Supreme Happiness.

  I am not making this up.

  And we laugh.

But now that our Black Friday has dipped its claws into the Thanksgiving gravy, what digits have we left to wag at Maduro? “Early Christmas,” “(supreme) happiness for everyone”: He’s singing our song!

And then, midst this Hallelujah Chorus, we hear Dorothy Saporta speak:

  Hate less.

  Worry Less.

  Expect Less.

  Live Simply.

The path to true joy. Joy the by-product of less, not more. Not crowding our spaces with consumer trampling. But making room in our inn for God’s grace abounding.

The prophet Isaiah today envisions a desert where flowers unfold and waters spring. All originating from his people’s spaces of emptiness. All from his people’s places of less. All to a people scattered – lost – in their fragmented and fractured world of exile.

Only a people laid bare by the horrors of their Babylonian abduction could take such joy from their God of justice restoring them to their Zion home. For here, we read – among other lilting verse – “Then the lame shall leap like a deer,/and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy … the burning sand shall become a pool … the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp.”

After reading Isaiah, I no longer wonder why Gandhi smiled so much. After hearing him cry, “Glory!” I no longer wonder why Mandela beamed.

Prophets know joy! And their joy is always a by-product of a journey. “A highway shall be there,” Isaiah writes today, “and it shall be called the Holy Way.” A highway home. “And the ransomed of the Lord shall return … everlasting joy shall be upon their heads.” Everlasting joy that the first Christians understood – calling themselves not Christians, but The Way. Simply … The Way.

Prophets know joy! And they know the basis for their people’s joy.  Joy found not in getting or being given Xmas more, but found in their journey of Advent less:

  Hate less.

  Worry less.

  Expect less.

  Live simply.

… and, oh yes: One “more.” One more: the fifth of Dorothy Saporta’s Five Rules of Joy:

  Give more.

Rabindranath Tagore was a great Bengali polymath: a poet, a dramatist, a musician, an artist, a humanist … and more. Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore once wrote this – and I feel like this each Christmas “season”: “I slept and dreamed that life was happiness. I awoke and saw that life was service. I served and found that in service happiness was found.”

Friends in Christ: I invite you to wake up with me from our ‘Tis the Season stupor. Lulled into commercial slumber, visions of sugar plum innocence dancing in our heads, we are told that in order to be happy, we simply turn aside from the world’s injustices and go back to shopping.

Wake up with me and discover the life that is service. Wake up with me, and partake of this table of sacrifice. Wake up, to where happiness – joy – is then to be found.

Wake up with me, and maybe – just maybe – give gifts this season as my older brother Tom insists gifts are to be given: for a redemptive cause, chosen by the gift’s recipient.

Wake up, and hear our Lord and Savior, saying: Join me – like Isaiah – on this justice journey. Join me in partaking of the sacrifice I have made. Let the brokenness of the world and the cup of my redemption be your journey, too.

Live a life of less: hate, worry, expectation, things. Let your bread of self be broken into less, that your cup may runneth over with God’s pools of grace.

Be a pool of healing for God’s longsuffering, “early Christmas” world.

Join me on this journey, Jesus says: to the joy that cannot be attained without one!