A Real Joy
Isaiah 12:2-6 2Surely God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid. The LORD, the LORD, is my strength and my song; he has become my salvation." 3With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. 4In that day you will say: "Give thanks to the LORD, call on his name; make known among the nations what he has done, and proclaim that his name is exalted. 5Sing to the LORD, for he has done glorious things; let this be known to all the world. 6Shout aloud and sing for joy, people of Zion, for great is the Holy One of Israel among you."
Zephaniah 3:14-20 14Sing, O Daughter of Zion; shout aloud, O Israel! Be glad and rejoice with all your heart, O Daughter of Jerusalem! 15The LORD has taken away your punishment, he has turned back your enemy. The LORD, the King of Israel, is with you; never again will you fear any harm. 16On that day they will say to Jerusalem, "Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands hang limp. 17The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing." 18"The sorrows for the appointed feasts I will remove from you; they are a burden and a reproach to you. 19At that time I will deal with all who oppressed you; I will rescue the lame and gather those who have been scattered. I will give them praise and honor in every land where they were put to shame. 20At that time I will gather you; at that time I will bring you home. I will give you honor and praise among all the peoples of the earth when I restore your fortunes before your very eyes," says the LORD.
Most of us need a good dose of jubilation and joy during the Christmas season, do we not? But if we are going to have joy, we also need to have the real thing. And it is to real joy that Zephaniah calls us. The Lord God is in our midst, a warrior who gives victory. We like to hear the positive, up-beat word joy in a world where pessimism often seems to be the order of the day, but certainly we do not want to be a part of any empty headed joy that has no substance to it. And that is not the kind of joy in which Zephaniah invites us to participate. The joy that Zephaniah and Christmas proclaim is this: God is in our midst.
And remember how God came into our midst. He came as a vulnerable baby, amid the sounds and the smells of a stable, surrounded by the cold damp walls of a cave. He was given birth by a couple ordered by the government to travel 80 miles to another town so they could sign up to pay higher taxes. Jesus was born into a people where the wish for God in our midst was high and the hope was low. Christmas reminds us that God is in our midst in the hard, cold reality of our days as much as He is in our midst in the warm sunny days. Christmas is the great good news that God has His heart set on our humanity in all its vitality and vulnerability, with its joys and its pains, in the routine and the unusual days, in its triumphs and its tragedies, in our nobleness and our callousness.
Christmas came to a remote little town, in a darkened corner of the village to say that there is no corner of experience so bleak that it is immune to joy. Christmas claims that there is no heart so hidden that it cannot be reached. Christmas holds out the hope that there is no moment so dark that it can extinguish the light of God’s truth and love. The real joy of Christmas is discovery of God in our midst, in knowing that there is a rightness at the essence of life, and that rightness is the person we call Jesus.
How do we find the joy that is promised in the season, that is tasted in the giving and receiving of gifts, that is sampled in the glow we often feel when Christmas is said and done? The real, lasting joy of Christmas comes to those who have had a day that has shaken them out of their superficial experience of joy. However that day comes, it must come to burn away the callous crust that is a natural by-product of our busy lives. That day must come to sensitize the heart that grows naturally dull by default.
I have never paid much attention to the Biblical command to rejoice. Have you? “Sing, O Daughter of Zion; shout aloud, O Israel! Be glad and rejoice with all your heart.” I believe that somewhere in our soul we all have a “joy muscle” and it needs to be exercised. The joy muscle has to be flexed against the resistance of our discouragement and our pessimism. It has to be pushed against the coldness and callousness of our hearts. It has to be stretched when the cynicism of our world says, “There is nothing in this world to be joyous about.” But still we hear the small voice of an obscure prophet saying, “sing aloud, shout for joy, rejoice and exalt with all your heart.” Who are you going to listen to?
From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope
© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell
No comments:
Post a Comment