Advent Reflections
Sunday 15 December
Incarnation: Love and Joy
What is joy? Willie James Jennings defines joy as “an act of resistance against the despair and the forces of despair. The forces of despair, all the many ways that drive us toward death. Death, not just the end of life, but death in all its signatures: war, violence all the ways in which life can be strangled, making it worth living. Joy then in this regard is a work, that can become a state, that can become a way of life.”
What is joy? For me, it this the will to live, to live fully, to reach for the full dignity and flourishing of life in all its abundance, for oneself, for the all people, for the world. It is a grounding of one’s choice to live and love fully in the deep saturating knowing that love holds all. Despite all the loud expressions of hate and death that shape our world and how we live in it. it is the choice to live life and one’s full humanity from the knowledge of being loved and being made to love.
What is joy? It is an outrageous hospitality, a decadent generosity, a stubborn resolute posture and open-heartedness, tuned into readings the ebbs, flows and invitations to embrace love in all its complexity and to ride its rhythms and rhymes in ourselves and the world, welcoming the moments, the spaces, the times for life-in-all-its-fullness to thrive.
Such a simple word for something so complex and intense.
What is joy? This week’s lectionary readings for the third Sunday of Advent orientate us to explore the contours of joy. Zephaniah, Isaiah and Philippians entice us to “Sing aloud”, to “with joy draw waters from the wells of salvation”, to “rejoice in the Lord always”. These are not invitations to an experience of anesthetizing truncated joy that often come to us as pre-scripted ideals of commodified pleasure/distraction/comfort. Rather it is a joy that is born out of the courage to both name and confront the ways in which the systems of death, hate, dehumanization and oppression shape our world and how we live in it. These voices from the scriptures call us not only to name the ways death and hate systems allure us, but they also call us to challenge these systems and reimagine the ways we think about God, about politics and power so that we don’t continually entrap ourselves, our humanity into these systems of hate which use power to “other”, exclude and hurt people and the planet. Joy is a way of being that chooses the courageous complicated paths of loving people, loving all of us in creation over and above our comfort or pleasure.
What is joy? Zephaniah a prophet writing in the period of the reformation initiated during the reign of King Josiah (640 – 609 BCE). Invites the people to embrace an understanding of a God that exalts those whose bodies are considered sites of shame, pollution and disability. The prophet upholds a religious and political reformation that collapses the theology of an empire-building warrior God into that of a joyful queered warrior who sings love and exalts the bodies and beings that empires oppress and exterminate. The same cadence holds together the writings of Isaiah as the prophet invites those who hear to sing for joy for a reimagined idea of salvation that is good news to the poor the collateral damage to the aspirations of comfort and power of the empire, a release to the captives stuck on the underside of the systems of power that benefit some and dehumanize so many others, a recovery of sight to the blind lost in the survival game, selling out to the systems that oppress them, and ultimately liberation and wholeness for all of us oppressed and oppressor, captured in the systems of hate. This is also the voice that cries out in the desert framing the embodiment of the love and salvation that walks with us in the advent of Jesus.
What is joy? John the Baptist walks this path of joy and shows us how to journey within it. The call is to confront how we are complicit and complacent to the allures of pleasure and comfort that come to us in the disguise of a sanitized and sanitizing joy within the empire. A feeling of bliss that is formulated in participating in the polite ways of hate and despair and othering baked into our systems and institutions. The tax collectors, military, religious and political elite were all confronted and named and shown a way into the topography of joy. It is through getting real with themselves, choosing to reimagine another way language in the prophets, believing and participating in the grounding of love, a love that chooses to undo the forces of despair and death in the world. This open posture to live and love fully, just might be what joy is.
Readings:
First Testament: Zephaniah 3:14-20
Psalm: Isaiah 12:2-6
Epistle: Philippians 4:4-7
Gospel: Luke 3:7-18
Lauren Matthew, Patron
Sunday 8 December
Expectation
As we stand at the edge of darkness, we see a faint, golden light breaking the horizon. The long night is nearly over, and the promise of dawn draws us forward. Expectation—not passive waiting, but a hopeful yearning. God's presence, guiding us, pulling us gently toward the fulfilment of Their promises.
Advent is a time of tension between "now" and "not yet." It invites us to embrace the stillness of the present while holding tightly to the hope of what is to come, then stepping forward with boldness. On the 22nd of this month the light is beginning to grow stronger, Advent reminds us that God’s faithfulness is certain, the sun will rise. The world waits not in despair, but in eager anticipation for the light of Christ to illuminate all that is dark and broken.
As we journey through Advent, let this image inspire us to trust the gentle pull of God’s hand, leading us to the horizon of hope. The breaking dawn assures us that the wait will not last forever. Goodness is on its way—Jesus, the light of the world, is near.
"And do this, understanding the present time: The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armour of light." Romans 13:11-12
Dawn Savidge, Patron
Sunday 1 December
Joy
I sometimes forget
that I was created for Joy.
My mind is too busy.
My heart is too heavy
for me to remember
that I have been
called to dance
the Sacred dance of life.
I was created to smile
To Love
To be lifted up
And to lift Others up.
O’ Sacred One
Untangle my feet
from all that ensnares.
Free my soul.
That we might
Dance
and that our dancing
might be contagious.
Hafiz
“’Tis the season to be jolly!” We are entering the season where joy and dancing and being jolly will be ubiquitous, maybe even if it’s enforced! Advent as the season of preparation doesn’t always come across as the season of joy, it’s almost the bit we have to get through before we can truly have fun, before we can truly know the joy of Christmas.
But that’s not really the case, there is joy in preparing, there is joy to be found in the putting down of things and the leaving behind of stuff so that we can have the capacity to fully receive the joy of Christmas.
I think that’s what the poet Hafiz is trying to tell us here. In the busyness of the seasonal build up, in the heaviness of present buying or budget balancing, in the whirl of events and services we often forget that this is a joyful season and that you and I were created for joy, we were created to dance.
Now, I cannot dance. So, every Christmas when the idea of dinner, drinks and dancing comes up a little bit of me dies inside. But the idea of the Divine Dance of joy and being invited into that, not having to worry about whether it’s Dad Dancing, or Strictly level dancing, that does fill me with joy. To smile, to love, to be lifted up, to lift others up, for Hafiz that is the Sacred Dance, and surely that is an Advent faith too?
Leaving behind the things that tangle our feet, yes even the tinsel, we can find the joy that there is in the Christmas feast, and Advent is the time when we untangle ourselves. In the hymn Lord of the Dance, we are reminded “I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth, at Bethlehem I had my birth.” The response to that is “dance then, wherever you may be.”
As Advent begins it is a good time to ask, “where is my joy?” Has life and even faith become so busy or heavy that joy has been squeezed out? Are your feet too entangled in the practicalities of work, family, service to be free to dance? Are you too tired to smile or to lift others up? Then this is the season to ask for your feet to be untangled, for your soul to be lightened, for your body to smile. Because Advent prepares us for the best dance of all, the dance of the one who is God with us, holding out a hand for us to join the contagious dance of joy.
Fr Lee Taylor, Chaplain to Rhythm and Member Care
