Advent- Joy

Welcome to the weekly Doolin Podcast, a ministry of Doolin United Methodist Church in Falls Church, Virginia. Each week, we share a short reflection on faith and life in community, exploring how God's grace moves among us and through us. We're glad you're here.

Hello, Doolin Church. It's me, James, your pastor, coming to you for another moment in the midst of a week. Just a heads up about next week's moment. Yes, next week is the week of Christmas. And since these moments normally happen on a Thursday, and since Thursday is Christmas, next week we will drop a moment.

The moment though will drop on Tuesday. We've been working our way through the four themes of Advent, the Advent candles and what those themes are. The first week was hope. The second week was peace. This week is joy.

Next week will be love. Now, because we come from Wesleyan roots and John Wesley was all about the practice of our faith. His big concern about the Anglican church of his time, he was a priest in the Anglican church, was that it wasn't simply enough to be a member of a church in name only. He wanted to see people practice their faith. And so as I thought about these themes, what I wanted to suggest to us as we look at these is ways that we could practice these themes of Advent in a practical way.

It just seemed like the right thing to do. See, when we come to a theme like joy, it seems like, and we talked a little bit about this in the sermon on Sunday, joy seems like something that happens in our minds, it's a lot like happiness. But what we discover about joy is that joy happens in the midst of our lives. It's not some kind of cheerfulness or super kind of optimism, but a deep kind of gladness that rises up from our connection to God. Wesley saw joy as a fruit of the spirit.

And Wesley was borrowing from the writings of the New Testament from Paul, in particular, in that case, a letter that he wrote to the Galatians in chapter five where he talks about the fruit of the spirit. And one of those fruits is joy. Joy comes from cultivating a consistent practice of love, community, connection. Joy sort of rises in the midst of our faith, even when things aren't as good as we might hope that they would be. So what are some practices that we could take up?

Now, admittedly, you know, since we're since this is going out live on a Thursday, we've had four days to kind of try to figure out how joy was going to fit into our lives already. I'm going to offer you a couple of practices. And they may be different than the joy practices you have. And as always, I always welcome pastordoolinchurch dot org is my email. Or talk to me after a worship experience, call us at the office.

I would love to talk to you about the joy practices that have been meaningful to you. However, I'm going to come up with a couple, suggest them to you, and I don't know, maybe they'll work for you. The first one is creating a daily habit of naming one joy in your life. And it doesn't have to be some big joy. It doesn't have to be some joy, some overall joy.

I'm so joyful for my lovely wife, Linda. I am joyful for her. But, there's no but. And I'm not always as thankful every day or as joyful every day as perhaps I ought to be about that. But there are moments that it catches me.

Maybe one day when we're sitting on the couch next to each other watching a Hallmark movie or something and we're holding hands. And I just am thankful and feel a sense of joy that we're there together. But joy can come in a morning cup of tea or coffee as you on a cold winter morning as you sit in the chair or sit at breakfast wherever you are and you're holding a mug perhaps that's warm to your hands, warm to your touch, and you're feeling the warmth in your hands, that is a simple joy that you can name. You may hear the laughter of a small child. I did as I was leaving today, as I was heading out to do this moment with a couple of the preschool children on the playground playing with the leftover snow.

Their laughter brought a little joy to my life. It could be sunlight on a wall. Quite frankly, we've just gotten all of our the final four of our stained glass windows installed in the Dulan Sanctuary. And I was standing in there in the bright sunlight looking at all six of the stories in continuity that they represent in those pictures going across that wall. And there was a moment of joy in that.

So paying attention to our day and maybe naming at the end of a day is a good time. Maybe if you eat a meal with other folks, you could make it a habit to name one joy from your day as you sit at the table. Or before you go to bed at night as you're getting ready to lay down, you're pulled the covers back and you sit down on the edge of your bed. And the last thing you do before you actually lay down is say one thing that brought you joy today. You can say it as in the form of a prayer, you could say it to yourself, maybe even as you slip off to sleep.

A second thing you could do is a joyful generosity act. Choose one act of generosity in a week to do in a joyful way. Share a plate of cookies. Maybe you're a big baker. I was talking to a friend yesterday who was helping another friend bake 20 dozen cookies.

That just is out of the realm of my even imagination, except in a bakery. And yet there they were in baking home, those cookies. Maybe you've baked some cookies and you share a plate of cookies with a neighbor you think might enjoy them. You make a donation to one of your favorite charities as a way of sharing joy. You do an act of kindness to surprise someone out of the blue that brings joy, maybe even a handwritten note to someone.

Joy grows inside of us so often when it's shared with someone else in an actual manifest kind of way. When, you know, we're getting ready to celebrate Christmas, and Christmas is all about incarnation. It's about human agency. It's about how God used a baby who grew into an adult, and that person showed us the way and that person modeled for us that we were also tools, that we were gifts that could use the gifts given us to make a difference in the world. So joy does indeed grow when it's shared.

A third practice: give yourself permission to feel. Name your current emotional state honestly. Then pray a simple prayer like, Lord, help me feel what I feel in your presence. Lord, let me feel what I feel in your presence, whatever that feel is. Now, it may not be joy in that moment, but it's perhaps an opportunity to share what you're feeling in a way that recognizes you have someone to share it with.

And in that sharing is the joy. Joy is not forced. Joy is invited in our lives. You can't force someone to rejoice, to find joy in things. I know there's a biblical verse, rejoice in the Lord always.

And again, I say rejoice. Heck, I sung a children's song about that when I was small. You know, and it was repetitive. Then I should rejoice in the Lord always. But there are moments when I don't feel so full of rejoice.

And I try not to judge myself for that. I try to name that before God and trust that joy will arise. Now that third practice may not seem like it's always going to be about joy, but giving ourselves permission to feel what we're feeling in itself is a joy because God is with us no matter how we feel. And when we come to realize and trust that to be true, sometimes, not always, but sometimes the joy can rise up in knowing I have someone who will listen and care no matter how I'm feeling and will love me regardless of the way that it is. So these are some practices I want to invite you to consider as possibilities, as a way that you could live out the joy in your life.

May I say to you this: May joy meet you in the unexpected places of your life this week, in little unexpected out of the way moments that are unanticipated by you, when you discover something that you haven't seen in a while, when you're cleaning out a drawer, something that brings joy to you, when you are sorting through old pictures and you see the face of someone who you love, who may not even be here anymore, who may have gone on, and you see their face and you remember their smile and their joy that was infectious or the way they made you feel as a person and you hold that picture and in it is joy. May you find joy in the unexpected places this week and may you practice joy in the way you live. Certainly worth doing. Remember, next week, the moment happens on Tuesday at noon, not on Thursday at noon because Thursday is Christmas. So two days before Christmas on the twenty third, on that Tuesday of next week, will be our final Advent reflection, which will be about Advent love.

So thanks so much for joining me today. I wish you all the best, and until the next time.