Advent Week 4: "Growing Hope"

Print created by R. Sawan White

Advent is a waiting period that leads up to the joy of a Christmas miracle: a Savior that became a vulnerable baby born into want but beloved both on earth and celebrated in the heavens.

Joy is a discipline, and it’s one that we tend to neglect. Christian discipline involves a lot of talk about accountability, faithfulness, gratitude, prayer—even love. When it does come into the conversation, joy is elusive: “the joy of our salvation,” which certainly we can all agree is central to our faith, but it seems to preclude everyday joy, the kind of joy that we tend to associate more with random acts of kindness or the occasional online video of puppies playing or a fat little bird in the snow eating a seed. Children evoke joy, often because they model it and we, disassociated from the practice of finding joy in small things, are blessed to witness their joy. It’s contagious.

Even though we so frequently miss opportunities to participate in joy, we admire it. If when most Americans thought ofChristian community they pictured people of joy, acceptance, and celebration rather than judgment, maybe we’d find more curiosity and interest in our faith. The time and patience it takesto be present and seek brief moments of joy can feel like a constraint; we are simply too busy. This goes double for holiday seasons like Christmas, despite the festive red “joy” monikers that adorn everything from pillows to coffee mugs.

It should be easier to access joy during Christmas—after all, it may be one of the only holidays reveled in by children that retains some of that glow for adults. It’s a time of year where sparkle and candy and fantastical magic and miracles areanticipated. It’s even okay to wear funny headbands with lights that blink or put reindeer antlers in your car windows, all kinds of silly festivity wrapped in shining paper and tied with ribbons.

But joy is less superficial than the glitz and holiday music; it’s a deeper magic, to quote C.S. Lewis. Joy requires attention and wonderment—not merely a willingness but a trained habit--to look for and celebrate beauty and love in unexpected places. Christ’s joy is infinitely accessible, without any qualification; it’s freely available and present in the everyday as well as blessings like babies being born or celebratory events like birthdays or weddings. No one is unworthy of participating in joy or outside of it because of who they are or how they don’t measure up.

“Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it,” wrote theologian Henri Nouwen. “It is a choice based on the knowledge that we belong to God and have found in God our refuge and our safety and that nothing, not even death, can take God away from us.” This is our challenge and our privilege as Christians, to be a people anchored in the joy that comes from Christ with us.