Our Joy: Discovery of the Now (3rd Sunday of Advent, Luke 3:1-8)

 

This joyful spirit is marked by the third candle of our Advent wreath, which is rose color. Let me start with a prayer from Henri Nouwen for this third Sunday of Advent:
Lord Jesus, Master of both the light and the darkness, send your Holy Spirit upon our preparations for Christmas.
We who have so much to do seek quiet spaces to hear your voice each day.
We who are anxious over many things look forward to your coming among us.
We who are blessed in so many ways long for the complete joy of your kingdom.
We whose hearts are heavy seek the joy of your presence.
We are your people, walking in darkness, yet seeking the light.
To you we say, “Come Lord Jesus!”

This Christmas we need to pray with longing hearts, “Come Lord Jesus!” to experience the joy of this Advent.

We are simple in our correlation of happiness and joy and the opposite. When things are good in my life, God is good. When things are bad in my life, God is missing, or I have done something that prevents God from being present to myself. God’s presence, however, is not correlated with our emotional states. God is present whether we are happy or whether we experience life as going poorly. God’s love is not conditional. The joy of Advent does not simply happen to us.

God call us to a relationship with God’s self. It requires a relationship with God whether I am experiencing life as good or not so good. Our relationship with God journeys through the beautiful and painful parts of life. It doesn’t take a break.

God is not Santa Claus, checking whether we are good or bad, naughty or nice. When God enters relationship with us, it is for the long duration despite whether we turn our backs on God and Christmas or embrace Christmas. God is not good to us only in the times where we feel it and notice it. God is good to us all the time. God is present to us all the time and love us continuously.

Advent is practice of waiting for Jesus to come. “Joy to the world, the Lord is come. Let earth receive her King. Let every heart prepare Him room and Heaven and nature sing.” God has come and when I choose to live in this truth that Christ has come, I live with hope that we will be restored, that we will live in God’s peace. God loves me all the time. We have journeyed together and we will continue. God will never leave, and I have no need to be afraid. In the moments where I realize this and choose to believe this, despite what all may be going wrong…something deep in my soul smiles. Something deep in me rests. And there is peace.

I may not be content with what is going on, but I rest in the truth that I am loved by God. This is joy to me. Jesus coming to earth as a man, living a life of humility, extending friendship to those on the margins; this is joy! The truth that we have another way, that we can live in a way that breaks oppression and extends love; this is joy! Learning to live in the broken places, amidst injustice, loving those who are hurting, and seeing the face of God in those around you…this, this is joy of God’s incarnation. It is not just once a long time ago; God’s incarnated one continues to be incarnated in the now moment, before us, in faces around us, faces in need.

How do I reach this joy? I choose joy right now. Let me tell you a Zen Buddhist story: There was an ordinary person, like you and myself, who asked his Zen teacher whether he would write a few sentences of his wisdom. The Zen teacher took his paint brush and wrote the “Be Mindful.” The person asked is that all? Would he not write more? The Zen Teacher wrote again, “Be mindful.” The person was disappointed in what his teacher wrote. Now the Zen Teacher wrote it a third time, and he said, “Be Mindful means be mindful now!”

To be attentive in the now is the simplest thing in the world and yet the hardest thing to teach another. Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that there are many ways do things but we seldom just do in the present moment. Being mindful and being present to a beloved person in my life or the stranger in need rests in our attentiveness in the present moment. Thich Nhat Hanh notes, “When you are being carried off by your sorrow, your fear, or your anger, you cannot really be present to the people and things you love!” The focus is to be attentive to the present moment; it is moment of grace; it is the moment of the discovery of a full relationship with God who has arrived. Thich Nhat Hanh has dedicated his life to help people experience the present moment, and he exemplifies this by his beatific smile. He says: “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.” It is not surprising that our most revered images of God-inspired or God-illuminated persons are of them smiling. Such images inspire us to readily access the joyful peace they feel inwardly as that which we desire ourselves.

And I believe in being attentive or mindful to the present moment because we miss so much—and to find God in what is right in front of me.
In a speech at the United Nations in the 1980s, the poet and musician Pablo Casals he addressed the General Assembly, thinking of the children as the future of the new humanity:

The child must know that he himself is a miracle, that from the beginning of the world, never has there been another child just the same, and that in the whole future, there will never be another child like him. Every child is unique, from the beginning to the end of time. That way the child assumes a responsibility, as he confesses: it is true that I am a miracle. I am a miracle as the tree is a miracle. And being a miracle, could I do evil? No, because I am a miracle. I can say God or Nature, or God-nature. That’s not that important. What is important is that I am a miracle made by God and by nature. Could I kill someone? No. I cannot. And could another human being, who is also a miracle, kill me? I believe that what I am telling the children, could help bring about another way of thinking of the world and of life. The world of today is bad, yes it is a bad world. The world is bad because we do not talk to the children as I am talking to them now, in the way they need us to talk to them. Then the world will have no reason to be a bad world.

Leonardo Boff comments on Casals’ speech about children:

Great realism is revealed here: every reality, especially human reality, is unique and precious, but at the same time, we live in a conflicted world, contradictory and with terrifying aspects. In spite of all that, we must trust in the strength of the seed. The seed is filled with life. Every child that is born is a seed of a world that can be better. Because of that, it is worth having hope. A patient in a psychiatric hospital that I visited, printed with fire on a small board that he later gave me: “Every child who is born is a sign that God still believes in the human being.” It is not necessary to say anything more, because in these words lies the meaning of our hope as we face the evils and tragedies of this world.

During this third week of Advent, we ask the question of the Magi: “Where is he who has been born as king of the Jews?” (Mt. 2:2) If you are to experience the ever-present and ever-coming Christ, the one place you have to be is the one place you are usually not: NOW HERE! Everything important that happens to you happens right in the present moment. The reason we can trust the present moment is because of God taking flesh and God’s Spirit continued Indwelling. Christians carries the promise that the Word has become flesh, that God has entered into the human, and the human soul is the temple of God.

From the beginning of time billions of years ago, God had hope in this planet Earth, in life, and in humanity. God was born in a stable, a cave, laid in a manger as a sign that God still believes in us. We wait this third Sunday of Advent in darkness and embrace the quiet still moment of life with mindful joy and a smile.

We love by opening ourselves to the moment’s grace and trust in the uncertainties of life, and we realize in that moment of trust and openness the joy of being attentive to grace of the change—a change in our vision, in our lives where we behold in the moment a light shining above and in our hearts breaking the limits of darkness. God has the best chance of getting at us is in the momentary gaps, in the discontinuities, in the exceptions, in the surprises of the now.

The Zen Teacher tells us: “Pay attention to the moment.” Because in paying attention to the moment, the most sublime mystery of the universe takes place again and again: What this moment reveals, this now offers us is God’s grace–the birth of Jesus. Be awake in the moment and entertain the anticipation that God could be coming to me in this moment! Look around and see with faith. For this birth expresses a joyful awareness of the hope and joy for the world.

And the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart writes,

God is present, effective and powerful in all things. He is only generative, however, in the soul. For all creatures are a footprint of God, but the soul is formed like God, according to its nature. Whatever perfection is to enter the soul, be it divine, unique light or grace or happiness, all of it must come into the soul of a necessity through this birth of divine awareness and in no other way. Wait only for the birth of Christ within yourself, And you will discover all blessing and all consolation, all bliss, all being, and all truth.