Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
Joy in Challenging Times
Scripture: Isaiah 61:1-4; Luke 1:46-55
Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights started recently and CBC reporters interviewed several Jewish leaders. A common theme to the interviews was whether it felt okay to be having a joyful celebration while so much violence was happening in Israel and Palestine.
I was uncomfortable with some elements of this. Depending on the reporter, it might seem that people were being encouraged to feel guilty about expressing joy while so many others were suffering.
We could ask the same question of any Canadian. Here we are safe in this country while Russia is invading Ukraine, while small but deadly conflicts happen in the middle East, in Africa, in Asia and local violence happens in the Caribbean, Central and South America.
What do we do with joyful celebrations like Hanukkah and Christmas while others are suffering?
Some version or other of this has been an issue for centuries. Just ask Charles Dickens and his characters in A Christmas Carol, where he asked the same basic justice question, not about violence, but about the uneven distribution of wealth and about poverty and starvation in the midst of the wealthiest city on Earth at the time.
He was treating it as a prophetic call to the wealthy, to share the wealth with those around them; an ancient call of both Judaism and Christianity, one that we’ve tried to address through taxation and social reforms, but still needs a lot more work.
This year the same basic question has been raised around other kinds of suffering: war, terrorism, a profound lack of peace in a season when peace is celebrated.
I would start to answer this question by looking back at scripture. Peace, war and violence are all ancient themes and frankly, the birth of Jesus addresses all of them.
Our Isaiah lesson promises a return home. People who had been taken from their land as prisoners of war, as a captive population, were promised a return after 70 years as refugees. The joy of this lesson is palpable. The people were still in captivity when this was written and first proclaimed but the joy it offered would have been all the sweeter in contrast to the suffering they were experiencing. This was a joy that would have come mingled with hope, and a vision of lasting peace in a safe homeland. In that very difficult situation there was lots of room for Joy.
Christians have always interpreted Isaiah’s words as bringing a vision of what Jesus would offer in his ministry: a hope beyond what was fulfilled in Isaiah’s own time; a reconciliation that went beyond Judah and Israel to become available to all oppressed people.
Mary’s Son of Praise, often called the Magnificat, reveals much the same thing. She is giving a prophetic utterance: in which the proud and powerful are brought down; the hungry are filled with good things; the lowly lifted up; and ancient promises to Israel are fulfilled.
(I am particularly impressed with the line “he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.” We have seen that the proud in modern times have pretty stubborn imaginations of themselves, and I like this image.)
Matthew’s gospel tells us that Jesus was born near the end of the reign of Herod the Great, 3 BCE, and makes it plain that Herod ruled by terror, if the massacre of the innocents is any measure. Luke tells us that Mary said these words before Jesus was born, but Luke wrote all this down many years later, after he had seen the Romans toss out Herod’s incompetent son from ruling in Jerusalem and replaced him with a Roman governor who ruled with standard Roman brutality, including mass crucifixions, crosses lining the highways after a rebellion and of course, the crucifixion of Jesus himself.
Luke would have expected his readers to remember all of that when hearing Mary’s words. Indeed, he would have expected them to remember the destruction of Jerusalem just a few years previously and the ongoing military occupation and violent suppression by the Romans.
So, Luke boldly presents Mary’s joyful message of God’s fulfillment of ancient promises in the middle of a terrible, violent time where peace was hard to find. Clearly, Luke believed that a message of Joy was important in a time of strife.
It makes sense, doesn’t it? When do people need a joyful message more deeply than when joy seems most elusive? That bizarre situation from World War 1 when Allied and German troops put down their guns and played soccer on the battlefield between the trenches at Christmas, 1914, in a number of places on both the Eastern and Western fronts, speaks to a shared and deeply felt need for joy, for hope, for celebration in the midst of our most difficult times.
A celebration of a holy day that you know you are sharing with other people in other parts of the world can remind us that we are linked through God in connections that transcend space and time. This can provide comfort to people who are in the midst of great suffering.
Even having a celebration with no special food, with the simplest of gifts or no gifts at all is like Mary’s words: it is a call of defiance; a cry out against what feels like an overwhelming and uncaring world; a way of saying that we still hold on to something bigger, not only bigger than us, but bigger than the troubles we face, bigger than the people who are trying to push us down, no matter how powerful they imagine they are.
The world needs joy in the midst of crisis. It is one of the powerful things that can see us through whatever is happening. And if we have guilty twinges about our own celebrations in the safety and prosperity we enjoy in this country, let’s not question whether Joy is appropriate, because it is. Let us, rather, try to imagine what we can do to change the lives of people who are not in safe places and how we can help to make their joy complete so they become able to celebrate as freely as we do.
Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 