Our second reading today is, like the psalm, a song. It is known as the Magnificat, or the Song of Mary. Mary, carrying the child whom the angel has told her is of the Holy Spirit, destined to have a kingdom without end, is visiting her cousin Elizabeth, who herself is pregnant. Elizabeth rejoices that Mary and the child who fills her womb have come to visit, and Mary’s joy in response is such that she just bursts into song….

I am exaggerating a bit, of course, but a member of the congregation did catch on right away, on the first Sunday of Advent, that things were somewhat different this year here in the Meetinghouse. She was right, this year there is not a rose candle on the Advent wreath. That came about because at our last Deacons’ meeting a new member of the Board asked whether we as a congregation followed the ancient custom of having three purple candles and one rose candle on our Advent wreath, and, if so, if the congregation knew why we did this, and, if not, maybe we should just have four purple candles. This sparked a lively discussion, the kind of thing that gets me jazzed about coming out for night meetings, so much more interesting than nailing down ushering schedules and the like.

By tradition, the season of Advent, spanning the four Sundays before the celebrations of Christmas, is a time for reflection, introspection, even repentance and solemn penitence. There actually is a good reason for this, one that makes sense if we know the background. The liturgical church year is basically organized around alternating times of feasting (Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, for instance) and fasting (for instance, Lent before Easter, and Advent before Christmas.) If you have ever told your kids not to snack before the Thanksgiving meal with all the fixins’, you can see where this idea came from – one can only truly enjoy a feast if you are hungry when you come to the table. Similarly, to truly enjoy the good news of the incarnation, to really embrace the joy of the celebrations of Christ’s birth, you need to spend some time in Advent solemnly considering how much you need that joy.

At the same time, who wants to be solemn and introspective all the time? So the tradition takes this into account, and makes the Third Sunday of Advent, today, Gaudette Sunday, from the Latin meaning “dare to rejoice.” It is a day when we take a break from the solemnity of Advent, and dare to let joy have its way with us. And instead of having a purple candle, representing penitence, a rose candle, representing joy, is used.

After a good discussion, the deacons opted to go with the four purple candles this time, and while it was certainly not their intention to ban joy this year, I suspect that there are many of us who might think that the decision was an appropriate one, given the circumstances they find themselves in this year. There are many these days, looking around at their personal circumstances, the conditions in the economy, and the struggles facing our communities and even our congregations, who see little reason to rejoice. And beyond all that, the holiday season is always problematic for many of us. Just as the culture tells us that we ought to be merry, we find ourselves a bit like Charlie Brown, somehow kept back from getting into that spirit. When the whole world seems to be happy, we look at our lives, at our secret addictions, at the family disappointments and conflicts, at the physical ailments we battle, the depression which is always hard to keep at bay, the fear and the battle to maintain self-esteem – we see all of this, and it seems that in the holiday season happiness is farther away than ever.

I think this is why I am so attracted to our readings for today. For both the psalmist who penned Psalm 126 and Mary, singing her song to Elizabeth, enjoyed circumstances which may well have given them pause before rejoicing – and yet, I think to their surprise, still they found themselves singing.

The psalmist looks back with nostalgia at the “good old days”, back when the community was at peace and justice did in fact roll down like waters and abundance was shared by all, back at a time when their mouths were full of laughter and shouts of joy were on their lips. That was then, but this is now, and now, the psalmist laments, their lives are as dry as a desert wadi in the middle of the hot summer. “Restore our fortunes, O God,” he prays, and one can almost hear people today pleading just as fervently, “Restore my 401(1)(k), restore my job, restore the tax base so that our village schools do not have to be closed, restore my health back to where it was when I could walk without assistance, restore my life back to when I had no need to learn a new vocabulary from an oncologist, restore our church’s endowment so we might balance our budget, restore the time when public officials worked for the common good not their personal profit….”

And Mary, what does she have to be happy about? A young woman, a peasant in a land occupied by a foreign power, finds herself pregnant, and yet not by her fiancée. In a patriarchal honor/shame culture, this is not a mere inconvenience – it is a life-threatening situation. And so Mary books it out of town, journeying alone into the hill country to take counsel from her cousin Elizabeth.

In the midst of all their sufferings, in the middle of what many would have said was the worst of times, both the psalmist and Mary rejoice. They rejoice over what had been in the past, when God had done great things, but more than that, they rejoice in what they foresee God doing in the future. The psalmist joyfully proclaims that those who go out weeping today, bearing the seed for sowing, will come home with shouts of joy, carrying their abundance with them. Mary sings of a vision of God’s future when the hungry will be filled with good things, when the proud will be scattered and the lowly lifted up. It has not happened yet, and yet each rejoice, because their joy is founded on the confidence that God is in the midst of their lives, unfolding the promises that have been spoken in our living. It has not happened yet – and yet, living as free and blessed people who have already received new life, completely changes the present. Even as they know the reality of today’s suffering, by wrapping themselves in the joy that thanks be to their faithful God new and abundant life is coming, that new life arrives.

Here is Christmas joy for us all. Not a joy that can be purchased with a swipe of the credit card at the department store check out line, not a joy which can be brought on by desperately over-imbibing at the office holiday party, not even a joy which can be guaranteed by hosting the perfect Christmas dinner for the extended family. Not a joy we make, not a joy we earn, not a joy that, like is the case with happiness, is dependent on life’s circumstances, on externalities like the condition of our bank account, the status of our employment, the quality of our relationships.

Christmas joy is the first present waiting there for you under the tree, and the most marvelous thing about this present is that just knowing that it is waiting for you there is a present all in itself for today, a gift that can transform your heart and mind right now. Even as we water with our tears the seeds of hope and justice and love we sow in these challenging days, the knowledge that God has done great things for us in the past, and will do so again in God’s future, can turn our despair into hope, and our cries of suffering, (who would ever have believed it?), into shouts of joy. --------------