Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness,
    you who seek the Lord.
Look to the rock from which you were hewn
    and to the quarry from which you were dug.
Look to Abraham your father
    and to Sarah, who bore you,
for he was but one when I called him,
    but I blessed him and made him many.
For the Lord will comfort Zion;
    he will comfort all her waste places
and will make her wilderness like Eden,
    her desert like the garden of the Lord;
joy and gladness will be found in her,
    thanksgiving and the voice of song. (Isa. 51:1-3 NRSV)

Hope to the Exiles

One of my favorite Christmas songs is O Come O Come Emmanuel. It is probably one of the oldest songs we sing in church, being written in 800 AD (1200 years ago). This old hymn was sung by monks as part of their Christmas vespers or prayers.

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel;
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

One thing I love about it is its slow and lamentful tone, as well as its proclamation of hope and joy.

This verse speaks to what this passage in Isaiah is really talking about: the difficult joy of God’s hope. The people are in exile and ruin. Their capital city, Jerusalem, Zion, with its temple, the centerpiece to how the people relate to God, how they know God is present to them, has been leveled to the ground and burned, reducing the countryside, as the prophet describes here, to a waste.

They have experienced the loss of their homes. Many of their family members were killed, and the people were divided. Poor peasants were left to the broken countryside of a now vassal state for an oppressive empire. If you were educated or useful in some way, you were taken captive in Babylon to serve the imperial house in some way. Many of these people were innocent people. These were not sinners being punished, but people who sought righteousness, the text says, yet endured the trauma of seeing Jerusalem fall and the hardship of exile. This is what Daniel and others faced, and they wondered where God was in all this. Why wasn’t God coming to their rescue? Why did it seem like they were getting punished with the rest of Israel that went the ways of idolatry and corruption? It did not make sense.

Captive Israel, that mourns in lowly exile here.

And while the people of God were able to come back to their homeland after the exile, they still faced the oppression of being ruled by tyrannical foreign powers till the time of Jesus. One empire after another oppressed God’s people in history: the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and, finally, at the time of Jesus, the Romans.

Year in and year out, the people had to live with a sense that things were not right; things are not as joyful as they were promised to be.

Difficult Christmas

I think many of us can feel the same way about Christmas approaching, that it is not as joyful as it should. I don’t know what it is about this year, but I feel like I have heard a lot more about people having a hard time finding joy at Christmas. I don’t know why.

I spoke to one lady. We talked about favorite Christmas traditions. I had just put up my tree with my kids, which I love doing because we have so many ornaments on our tree that represent different memories and milestones for our family (I also have a sweet set of Star Wars ornaments).

She turned to me to confess that she really could not get into the Christmas spirit because of how bad her relationship was with her father, who was particularly mean around the holidays.

Another told me that they don’t really do much for the holidays since they don’t have family in the area. They were probably just going to treat Christmas Day as a day off and watch TV; otherwise, remembering it was Christmas just made them feel really alone.

I spoke to another person who just said that the expectations of Christmas, whether the food or the gifts, or the winter heating bill, were always so expensive, and it was always hard to get into the Christmas spirit amidst all the worries about money. For some, the Christmas holidays are often just one day off, packed with more busyness than one is expected to do, all before having to go back to the grind of working a difficult, stressful job.

Another person voiced to me that this year, the state of the world has impacted them so severely: the wars that are happening, the political turmoil, and climate change. It makes any privilege we do have to feel bittersweet, even joyless. It is hard to celebrate and be merry when it feels like the rest of the world is burning.

This week, we light the Joy candle, but sometimes, we have to recognize how difficult joy can be in our world. It does not come easy. Have you felt that? Have you had a Christmas that just did not feel joyful? Perhaps you are having that season now?

The holiday season does something: it often amplifies whatever you are feeling. What do I mean by that? If you are having a pretty fortunate year, if you have lots of family and food around you, Christmas can just magnify those feelings of gratitude and fulfillment. However, if your year just isn’t going well, you are feeling down on your luck, feeling a bit alone, Christmas can intensify those feelings also, not to mention you can feel guilty for not feeling happier.

Can we be honest about those feelings? Because if I am honest, I sometimes feel those things too. I often feel them around this year, but especially this year.

Tuesday, Dec. 17^th, will mark the 15^th year since my mother died. That has been really weighing on me. Let me tell you the story. Forgive me for dumping my emotions on you this morning, but here it goes…

My mother died of breast cancer that went to her liver. Meagan and I had gotten married in May of that year.  She looked well at our wedding like she had beaten the cancer. That is what we all thought. She had been battling it since I was in high school.

Then, the cancer returned according to a diagnosis in the early fall. It was everywhere. My mother was obsessed with new-age alternative medical treatments, thinking they would do something, but they didn’t work. I got a text from my brother, “Spencer, the doctors say she only has a few more months to live.” She was in denial at first, but we all knew it was true. She did not want to go to the hospital, so my sister, who lived at home, cared for her for the most part. Meagan and I came on the weekends. Her physical condition got worse and worse.

It finally came to the point where she had to go into hospice care. It was approaching Christmas time. There was no snow on the ground in Hamilton, but it was bitterly cold with strong winds off the lake. My brother, who lived down in the US, flew in to be at her bedside. We all took shifts, but we more or less all lived at the hospital for the next week. We survived on cafeteria food and coffee.

A lot of relatives and friends came by to visit my mother at this time.

Her state worsened over the next day or so. I just sat with her. She was awake less and less. In the moments then, I just kept telling her that I loved her and I would pray. Her breathing took on a rattle. Someone remarked that it sounded almost like coffee percolating—thanks to whoever said that—because for almost a year after, I could not be in the room while a loud coffee machine was brewing (and if you know me, you know that I love coffee, so that was awful).

The time had come, the nurse informed us. The family was all there by her bed. Someone invited me to pray. I prayed, thanking God for her and inviting her to go and be with Jesus. My mother took her last breath, and that was it.

We sat there for a few minutes in sober silence. The nurses came in and took her body away.

We slowly turned to practical matters like planning the funeral. We had the funeral the day before Christmas Eve. I don’t remember a lot of the service, but I do recall a friend of the family playing “In Christ Alone” for the service.

That Christmas, my family was all assembled at my mother’s home: my brother, sister, Meagan, and I.

On Christmas Day, we all sat together around the tree. There were no gifts because none of us really thought about buying anything in all the chaos.

I used to hear that some people did not like Christmas, and I thought those people must be some sort of mean, Grinch-like, Ebenezer Scrooge-like, Baw hum-bug grumps.  Now I understood it. The next Christmas just was not all that enjoyable. Everything reminded me of my mom when I heard Christmas music, like my mom’s favorite Christmas song, Feliz Navidad. The lights, the food, the sounds, the ornaments—the expectation of being merry did the opposite.

Finding joy was difficult.

The Shepherds

It is in this context, this place, this space, this situation of joy being difficult, that we find the Christmas story. Or better stated, the Christmas story finds us. The reasons it was for them back then is different from us today, but we see a promise that applies to both.

There are many folks in the Christmas story that we could describe as in a place of difficulty.

I think of Mary, the poor young girl who agrees to bear Jesus. Joseph, who now had to navigate this strange new relationship and responsibility, how this will look with his family and his reputation in the community, how he had to flee political threats now from Herod.

But I am drawn to the shepherds in the Christmas story, in Luke chapter 2.

Shepherding was one of the poorest jobs one could have in that society (and not to mention dangerous, out in the wilderness with the elements, wild animals, and bandits). It was a job for outcasts. It is a job for people who were down on their luck.

Remember that King David was once a shepherd. He wasn’t one because the job was prestigious. He was the youngest of a large family, and so his father gave him the least desirable job in the household, tending flocks out in the wilderness. It was a job for the unwanted.

What would be the equivalent of their job today? Overnight Gas station attendant, perhaps. People who work at call centers are forced to do telemarketing because they need the money. People who have to drive taxis for a living. These are, according to reports, some of the least desirable jobs in our communities. Shepherds were marginalized folk, folk that did not have a lot to be joyful about in their lives.

Yet, this is who the Gospel is announced to. The angel announced, “Do not be afraid, for I bring you glad tidings of great joy for all people.”

Sometimes we can hear “good news for everyone,” but it can sound like “good news for people except me,” or “except for them.”

Isn’t it interesting that while the glad tidings are good news for all people, the angels did not appear to everyone? They appeared to the shepherds as if to say, if this is good news for you, for the least fortunate of society, then people can understand that this is good news for everyone.

The shepherds go and find Jesus, and the angels say that you will find your messiah wrapped in ragged cloth and lying in an animal feeding trough, a manger, and these things will be a sign to you of God’s good news for everyone. Most commentators of this passage say that this sign is just how to find the messiah, sort of like if you meet a person you have never seen, and they text you saying I’m the one wearing a red shirt.

However, I think it is more than that. These things are a sign to you. You will find the messiah born into poverty, lying in a dirty feeding trough, wrapped in rags, not expensive clothes, not in a golden crib. This messiah is a messiah for those in difficult circumstances. He is your king.

This is a sign that God understands us. God understands what we are going through. God is with us.

Since God is with these folks, we know God is with everyone.

If this event were to happen here, what would be the equivalent of the manager? We have such a whitewashed notion of the manger scene, so clean and regal. It is not a dirty alleyway stable; it is in so many nativity scenes.

It was this kind of space that Jesus was born in, wrapped in someone’s tattered second-hand coat. Who might come to see him? The poor, the drug addicts, the folks that work night shift struggling to get by realize if this baby is going to be our leader, things are going to get better, but he’s one of us.  

Today in Kentville, you could imagine Jesus being born by the dumpers in a parking lot at Center Square.

A messiah born into poverty rather than power and privilege: This messiah is good news. He gets us. He is on our side because if God is on the side of the least of us, God is for everyone.

These are glad tidings of great joy that will be for all people.

You don’t have to love all the running around, all the expenses, or all the expectations of Christmas. You don’t have to love eggnog fruit cake or turkey (although I don’t know how anyone could not like those things). You don’t have to love movies with Macaulay Culkin or Chevy Chase in them (again, I don’t know how, but everyone is different). There is a lot about Christmas that can be exhausting and difficult, with or without carrying heavy emotional burdens. We can admit that.

However, we can still have joy, joy for the least of this world, joy for all.

How do we live joy?

How do we live joy when it does not come easy? It got easier over the years, and here are the things that worked for me. Let me give you a few things I learned over the years.

First is to rest in Jesus, rest in the joy of Christ: the truth that God understands us, God has drawn near to us; God is with us; God is for us.

Take time in all the business for prayer, reading scripture, sitting in silence, or perhaps just listening to the words of some Christmas carols and reflecting on their words. It might not be immediate as healing takes time, but doing these things keep our hearts prepared for better things. And better things will come.

The second is to cherish the simple good things that remind you of the good around us.

I remember when my mother died, and we all sat around the tree with no presents under us; I remember thinking that the gift we had that year was simply each other.

There is something about the pain we feel, when it reminds us about the fragile nature of life, it can also remind us of the preciousness of life.

Third, it will be different for everyone, but for me, have our kids made Christmas enjoyable again, whether it was watching Home Alone with them or decorating Christmas cookies. Seeing their joy at Christmas became a source of joy for me.

Perhaps that was one of the most significant ways I learned to have joy at Christmastime, when I realized bringing another joy deepened my own. Bringing joy to another helps us to have joy ourselves

Enjoying another’s joy. It reminds me that the year after my mother died, I worked as the coordinator of a soup kitchen in downtown Toronto. It was a rough job as I worked with homeless people, people facing really difficult circumstances. Many of the people I worked with had been abused by churches and pastors. They had been abandoned by Christians.

Yet, I remember doing our Christmas meal at the soup kitchen, and afterward, we sang Christmas carols. Suppose you can imagine a whole gym full of folks singing Joy to the World. I was struck by seeing people whose lives were so much more difficult than my own, people whose stories involved so much more hurt than my own, singing Christmas carols with joy. It changes your perspective. It permits you to have joy again.

Fourth, being in a space like that reminds you also that there is a responsibility to joy. As I sat with people who were homeless or in severe poverty, I often felt challenged. Many folks in poverty were not the lazy people who were draining my hard-earned tax money, a notion I was taught growing up. These were people often with mental health or physical disabilities, people who faced terrible abuse when they were young, or people who faced tragedy.

The terrible fact was that I could have just as easily been one of those people. We do not choose the family we are born into or the circumstances of privilege we are given. We don’t choose our brains or our bodies, nor do we choose what tragedies we will experience.

That means there is a sort of responsibility to joy. If we have been blessed, if we have been fortunate, Jesus’ way implores us to look for others to help, to bring joy to, to help those in need in our communities.

I feel like we have not been doing a good job here. So many of us have been so concerned with our financial hardships, we have forgotten others that are in more need than us.

Do you know a man was found frozen to death in one of those tents down by Miner’s Marsh? A 52-year-old man named Bobby Hiltz, a man that struggled his whole life with addiction and mental health. He was forced out of his home because his landlord spiked their rent. I wonder: What would have been a sign of glad tidings for Bobby Hiltz?

I believe our community has failed to address the poverty and care for the marginalized around us. We have failed to bring joy to those who need it.

We have glad tidings of great joy for all people. Will we live that this Christmas for everyone?

Will we be that sign?

The Christmas message is that God is bringing about God’s kingdom, where the first will be last, and the last will be raised up first. If you have experienced God raising you up, will you turn and do that for another?

Luke, two chapters later, says, it is the message of good news to the captive, recovery of sight to the blind, and letting the oppressed go free.  I am reminded of the verse in Joy to the world that says

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, 
Far as far as the curse is found.

Christmas is the sign that God keeps his promises. God’s blessings flow as far as the curse is found. God will undo and restore all that has ever gone wrong in this world, making it new.

As Isaiah says, he will comfort Zion and he will turn her wastelands into Eden again.

Are we preparing ourselves to let that reality into our lives this season?

Are we prepared to live that reality for others?

That is, as I have learned, a difficult but also beautiful joy.

Let’s pray.

God of all hope and comfort, God of all goodness and joy.

God who has come in our lord Jesus Christ, Immanuel, God with us.

God, we bring our struggles to you, our burdens, our worries, and maybe perhaps our frustrations and hurts.

God, remind us that you know us; you are closer to us than even we are to ourselves. You know what we have gone through, and you have seen our lives with perfect mercy and grace.

God, remind us of all the good things around us, the small graces we sometimes forget. God, give special gifts of your comfort and joy to those who especially need it this season.

God, also give us the eyes to see and ears to hear the needs for comfort and joy around us. Give us opportunities to be your hands and feet this Christmas.

God, our joy is your gift of hope, that you are a God of love and grace, that you have come to redeem us from our sins, to heal this broken world, to set right all that has gone wrong, to restore all things.

God, you give us so much. Give us the joy of thankful hearts in you in these coming days.

These things we pray in your name, amen.