The Rev’d Armando Ghinaglia
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
The Third Sunday of Advent
December 13, 2020
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”
Rejoice. That’s the word for today, isn’t it? In Latin, we read elsewhere, “Gaudete in Domino semper,” Rejoice in the Lord always. Always! That’s the message in all of our readings today, on this third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday. That’s the message in our rose brocade vestments, in our rose-adorned chapel, in the rose-colored candles on our advent wreaths. The rose is a reminder that this Sunday we look to the most explicitly cheery of the last four things: heaven. We should probably relish it while we can; next Sunday we turn to our last theme: hell.
For now, though, we’re called to rejoice. But I’ll be honest with you: I’m not in a mood to rejoice this week. My mind is still on our readings from Isaiah over the past couple Sundays. “All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it.” This pandemic continues unabated. Sure, there’s a vaccine; there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. But about twenty thousand Americans died of COVID last week. Like so many of you, I’m doing my best to avoid getting it. I don’t want to face its effects, but more than that, I don’t want to pass it on to my parents or my wife or others. But closer to home, on Tuesday, my family had to make the heartbreaking decision to put our dog of five-and-a-half years to sleep. We were hoping and praying he’d make it to Christmas, to New Year’s, just a few more months, despite his body shutting down before our very eyes. But it didn’t turn out that way. What we’d give to pet him and hug him and hold him again. That’d be the best Christmas gift of all. And I can only start to imagine what it’s like for those of us who’ve lost family or friends in this season, whether it happened this year or last year or decades ago. As someone rightly pointed out in one of our adult forums, it’s one thing to make peace with our own deaths; it’s another thing to make peace with the deaths of those we love. So, I hope you’ll forgive me when I say I’m not feeling much rejoicing this week. This week feels more like that verse from the funeral liturgy: “In the midst of life, we are in death.” When I hear the scriptural command to rejoice always, what comes to mind at first is a lament from the Psalms: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”
Tuesday late afternoon and evening, as we prepared for that awful last appointment at the vet’s office, a kind of abbreviated litany emerged in my mind. And it echoed constantly in those terrible hours before and after sunset: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”[i] “Blessed be the Name of the Lord : from this time forth for evermore . . . . from the rising up of the sun unto the going down of the same,” “[t]he Lord’s Name [be] praised.”[ii] Blessing and praise for a rescue animal once spared from death. Blessing and praise for his companionship and our memories. Blessing and praise for the good things and the bad. Blessing and praise, in life and in death. Blessing. And praise. And great sorrow. Because they can all exist together.
“When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,” our psalm today says, “then were we like those who dream.” Yes, indeed. But they were also as those who mourned. To be sure, their eyes were fixed on Jerusalem, their once and future home. And maybe they learned a lesson from Lot’s wife, who turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back at Sodom. But I find it hard to imagine that none of these exiles glanced back, not for the sake of Babylon or their captivity, but for the sake of their departed and their memories. These were people who sowed with tears, who buried their dead—their parents, their siblings, their children—in Babylon for centuries. Blessing and glory and praise be to God—and weeping, as so often happens when people manage to escape suffering or death.
When Saint Paul tells us to rejoice always, he’s not telling us to ignore this sorrow. This isn’t about pretending to feel a certain way all the time, or acting as if nothing bad has ever happened to us. Joy in this world is always punctuated by grief, because life in this world is always punctuated by death. But another way to think about this command is to see it as an invitation, an invitation to rejoice, even among things that are passing away.
Gaudete Sunday reminds us that our feelings and circumstances aren’t the ground of our rejoicing. We’re not called to rejoice because we feel good; we’re called to rejoice because the Lord is near.[iii] In one sense, the Lord is near to us here and now as the one who has created us, preserved us, and blessed us—as the one who listens to our cry, whether or not we perceive it. In another sense, the Lord is near in that Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. And in that second coming, Christ will restore all things and save all creation from the last enemy to be destroyed: death.
All of that is plenty reason to rejoice with “laughter” or “shouts of joy,” as we read in our psalm today. If we’re not feeling it, that’s okay, too. Grieving isn’t incompatible with rejoicing. After all, rejoicing is about giving thanks to God for all God’s gifts. And grief, so often, is about acknowledging just how significant those gifts were once they’re gone. As Christians who await Christ’s coming, we live in a strange land. Sometimes the Lord’s song is a song of victory and exultation, a bold song in major key. Sometimes it’s a song of lament, as it were in minor. But even in lament, God invites us to give thanks for what once was and now is no longer: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
In its own way, that counts as rejoicing, too.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[i] Job 1:21 (KJV).
[ii] Ps. 113:2–3 (Coverdale).
[iii] Phil. 4:5.