On this third week of Advent, I was invited to light the candle of Joy in church and to speak about the joys which God is bringing me in the world. As I sat down to reflect on this, I immediately began to wonder why I had agreed to talk about joy in such a personal sense. 

For one thing, I couldn’t say–at least at first glance–that the last few years have been the most joy-filled. Personally, in light of the pandemic and the experience of becoming a mother in the middle of a pandemic and attempting to deal with all the impossibly difficult choices and the loneliness that has involved, it’s safe to say the last few years have included a lot more valleys than peaks. 

But as I committed myself to surveying my life for times that joy has shown up, I remembered an occasion just a couple of months ago, when I was home visiting my family in California for the first time since the start of the pandemic. My parents put together a little party in their backyard with my sisters and me and all our families. And as the evening wore on, the music got turned up a little louder and we started to dance out on the patio. The women in my family love to dance. And at one point I took a break to sit back and observe my mother dancing with my seven-year-old niece. And my heart swelled with an incredible gratitude and awe, a deep sense of love and being awesomely blessed by the presence of these people in my life. And, it seemed, no sooner had this feeling of pure joy welled up, than it was suddenly replaced by an immense weight on my heart. My joy was squelched down by dread, as I thought about how, in just a few days, we would all be apart again in the separate cities where we live throughout the country. And I grieved how fragile and fleeting our lives were, and was overcome with sadness at how little time we had before we died. So, in a heartbeat, I went from joyful elation to utter despondency and “We’re all going to die.”

And I share this story with you expecting that you might be able to relate: to the rapid 180 from a feeling of joy to imagining how that joy will be taken away, and in the process we sabotage our ability to remain present to that experience of joy. That’s because, as the social worker and author Brené Brown has taught me, as beautiful and desirable as joy is, it is also deeply–terrifyingly–vulnerable. We experience joy with our hearts fully exposed. And that which is exposed can be hurt. So we play it safe by burying our joys in apologies, in excuses, or–in my case–in catastrophic counter-narratives. 

The challenge and the gift of Advent is that we don’t have to play safe with our hearts: we put our deepest longings on the line–longings of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love–expecting they will indeed be fulfilled because God has already fulfilled them. God has already come into our word through Jesus Christ. And God will come again.

God takes so much joy in us that God became completely vulnerable, becoming a baby, in order to be part of our mess and our party, that we might experience God’s joy, completely and without inhibition.

And so, we light the candle of Joy this Advent, welcoming God’s joy into our hearts and our world.

Let us pray,

Holy One, ignite a joy in our hearts that never burns out. May your joy be our joy. And may our joy be complete.

Amen.