If we read them as a whole, our three lectionary passages this morning come together as a meditation on the miracle and mystery of joy in 3 Acts.
Act 1: The Prophet Isaiah Fortells A Desert Garden Blooming
Some years ago, the poet Ross Gay wrote a book of essays entitled Inciting Joy. Normally, of course, we think of violence as something we incite, something we provoke or stir up. But he’s interested in those places, moments, and experiences that instead fan the flames of joy. And he begins in perhaps an unexpected place, in the first essay, remembering in detail some of the final minutes he spent with his father, alone with him in his hospital room as he neared the end of his journey with cancer.
He writes that he can’t recall if he’d been sitting in the waiting room down the hall or standing at the nurse’s station, but “the animal inside of [him] was pacing and shifting and sniffing and pawing and looking for a way out,” until the nurses finally gave him permission to go in the room where his father lay. He opened the door to find the room nearly silent, no TV on, just the subtle whir of the dialysis machine against the wall, which was “plugged into his father,” who was on his back and looked to be sleeping. His mouth and eyes softly closed, breathing quietly, blanket pulled over his chest, hands at his side.
He says in that moment, that same “animal” inside him knew it was official, that it was over now, and so he did what you do when you realize this, he came to the bed and put his hand on his father’s chest and shook him ever so slightly, asking, Dad, can you hear me? And then the tears came, hard, and he was kissing his father’s face, and telling him he loved him, and he writes that there, as he held his father’s face, he saw it as something new—he saw what he’d never seen before, which was that it was “the softest face in the world.”
He never knew this before that moment, had never touched his father in this way. But now he was so close to him, with their foreheads pressed together, and his hands on his father’s cheeks, and he saw “that [his] father had freckles sprinkled around the bridge of his nose and his upper cheeks. It was like a gentle broadcast of carrot seeds blending into his skin, flickering visible from this [close] distance.”
“It was through my tears,” he writes, that “I saw my father was a garden. Or the two of us, or the all-of-us, not here long maybe it is. And from that,” he wondered, “what might grow.”1
The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the prophet Isaiah wrote centuries before to a people in the exile of loss:
desert shall rejoice and blossom;
like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,
rejoice with joy and singing.
Strengthen the weak hands,
he writes,
make firm the feeble knees.
There is a moment in every human life when we come face to face, sometimes literally, with this deep and abiding truth about joy, which is that it has always grown in soil watered by our tears—often in those desert places, those places of wilderness where nothing could possibly grow, and yet, there it is, one small, but bright, unmistakable bloom.
Act 2: Mary Sings of a World Not Yet Here
In his poem, “First Song,” the American poet, Galway Kinnell, describes in rich detail the advent of a boy’s childhood joy. He writes,
Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy
After an afternoon of carting dung
Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing
Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall
And he began to hear the pond frogs all
Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.
Soon their sound was pleasant for the boy
Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall
Of Illinois, and from the fields two small
Boys came bearing cornstalk violins
And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins
And the three sat there scraping of their joy.
It was now fine music the frogs and the boys
Did in the towering Illinois twilight make
And into dark in spite of a shoulder’s ache
A boy’s hunched body loved out of a stalk
The first song of his happiness, and the song woke
His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.
So much darkness in this poem about joy. And yet, as we’ve seen, there must be. A young boy, “weary to crying” after a long day of hard labor (carting dung!), is welcomed by the song of the pond frogs croaking at dusk. Soon, two other boys join him, bringing corn stalk violins. They all sit there and play together in the twilight, in between two worlds: day and night, childhood and adulthood, and now—shoulders aching, and finding their own raw music in tune with the wild call of the frogs,—sorrow and joy. It is unsettled, and yet aren’t all moments of awakening?
Centuries earlier, a young girl, not in the fields of Illinois, but her cousin’s living room in first-century Bethlehem, uttered, too, a song. This song, recorded in the Gospel of Luke and remembered in the church as the “Magnificat,” was, too, a song that “woke” her heart “to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.”
‘My soul magnifies the Lord, she begins to sing,
my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.
, from now on all generations will call me blessed.
And yet, as she continues, the lens is widened, and we see more fully the conditions that made this sign from God come upon her necessary and this joy possible: God scattering the proud, bringing down the powerful, filling the hungry with good things, and sending those with too much away empty. Injustice, disparity, poverty, hunger. Young girl that she was, she still understood the stakes of this new life growing inside her.
In the liturgy of the broader church, the Magnificat is traditionally sung at Vespers, the service of evening prayer that typically comes just at nightfall, a time in between, when the pond frogs begin their singing, and when the church acknowledges the many ways that life is lived in between, yet chooses to sing a song of joy against the coming night.
Act 3: John’s Disciples Ask Jesus if it is Safe to Rejoice
Madeleine L’Engle is known to many as the beloved author of A Wrinkle In Time and other books for young readers. But she also wrote stirringly about faith and scripture, including the brief but potent poem, “The Risk of Birth, Christmas, 1973.”
This is no time for a child to be born,
With the earth betrayed by war & hate
And a comet slashing the sky to warn
That time runs out & the sun burns late.
That was no time for a child to be born,
In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;
Honour & truth were trampled by scorn —
Yet here did the Saviour make his home.
When is the time for love to be born?
The inn is full on the planet earth,
And by a comet the sky is torn —
Yet Love still takes the risk of birth.
The comet she mentions is the comet Kohoutek, hyped as “The Comet of the Century,” which was predicted to appear in the night sky from December 23 to January 2 in 1973.
However, it turned out to be nothing but an anticlimactic, faint spot in the sky—disappointing for observers, but a worthy illustration of the tension of this season. The tension, we often say, of “here” and “not yet.” It is the tension of anticipating and waiting. The knowledge that Christ has come, and yet our world is still far from perfect. The same tension, I believe, that is somewhere near to the heart of faith itself. It is not a small or accidental thing that this is where the church, through the generations, has chosen to start our year together: not in settled resolution, but expectant longing. This is, after all, where we spend so much of life.
The Gospel of Matthew tells us that after John the Baptist was thrown into prison, he sends his disciples to find Jesus and ask him, in their fear and longing, Are you truly the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another? In other words, Are you really worth all this?
And Jesus, as was his way, doesn’t answer them directly. He doesn’t speak of himself at all, but redirects their attention to the world around them. He says, Look around! What do you see? If you look closely, people are being healed. First steps are taken every day. Life is breaking through where there once was death. Abundance where there once was want.
What do you hear? There is music being made—new music, sounds, and melodies never heard before. Are you listening? If you listen closely, you will hear forgiveness is being offered and received. Babies are singing their first songs and hearing their first lullabies. In your fear, you see only lack and want and wounds. But look closer. The world you are waiting for is already happening in your midst. Even within you.
When is the right time to risk love and joy and peace and hope? Jesus seems to be asking. Are we to wait until everything is perfect? Or must we look closer and find the life that is already there, already germinating under the soil, already alive in the womb? There is always risk in bringing anything new into the world. The question is whether we decide it is worth it.
The rabbis wondered if this was something God thought about at the dawn of creation. They wondered if God knew the risks involved in creating the world. Creation, they said, was really God choosing to give up God’s perfect oneness in favor of a universe filled with creatures of all shapes and sizes, and even humans, who were made in the divine image, yet given the freedom to do something other than the will of God. The freedom to hurt each other, to kill, to destroy the very creation of which they’re a part. Even the freedom to forget where or from whom they came. The rabbis wondered if God thought about any of this.
And they determined that God must have, and so they asked themselves, Why would God do this? Why would God open up all of the madness we know in creation? And the answer they came up with is that for God, the risk of creation was worth one person to share it with. They thought that if God could share in the goodness and blessing of creation with just one other, if God could grieve and hold the losses that would surely come with just one other, then all the rest of it would be worth it.
There is a risk to every birth. There is a risk to every stirring, every inkling of joy. Every bud that pokes out from once dry, desert sands, every song lifted against the encroaching darkness. There is risk to all of it. It may be struck down before it can begin. it may fade or wither. It may, it may, it may.
But the story we begin to tell again in this season and that will unfold and unfurl before us in just a few weeks’ time—the Christmas story, which is the gospel story—is that it is worth it. It is worth it, in the end.
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1 Ross Gay, Inciting Joy, 26-27