Sunday, December 12, 2021
/The Third Sunday of Advent
The Rev. Clint Brown
Themes: Sing; “spilling over;” Beethoven Op. 132; God “spilling over” into our world (the Incarnation)
The prophet Zephaniah says, “Sing aloud…shout…Rejoice and exult…” (Zephaniah 3:14). And the First Song of Isaiah says, “Cry aloud…ring out your joy…Sing the praises of the Lord...” Singing, shouting, praising, rejoicing. This is the work we are given to do this day on Gaudete Sunday, the Third Sunday of Advent, “Gaudete” being the Latin imperative meaning “Rejoice!” We are joyful because a child is soon to be born in Bethlehem who is the Savior of the world. We are joyful that all our longings will be fulfilled and that ancient wrongs will be righted and justice will reign on the earth. We are joyful that no matter our circumstances, no matter how bad things look on the outside, on the inside we are confident that our faith in Christ is neither misguided nor misplaced. So whether we feel in the mood for it on this particular day or not, there is reason to be joyful. “Rejoice!” we are told, and it is a command.
Our model for this, of course, is the Apostle Paul who, when writing to the Philippians, wrote: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice” (Philippians 4:4). But as Jeff Bohanski reminded us last Sunday, this letter to the Philippians, so suffused with joy was not written while Paul was lazing about in comfortable retirement on a beach somewhere. Rather, Paul was under house arrest. At the time he wrote it, Paul was well aware that his life’s work, in the many churches he had founded, was being undermined and even undone by rivals, and, after twenty years of hard traveling in service to the Gospel, he was tired and weary. No one could begrudge Paul if, for just a moment, he wanted to complain a little or express some regret. But rather than complain, he tells the Philippians in his introductory remarks that life is about distinguishing the greater from the lesser (1:10), and that he counted his imprisonment as among the lesser things. Five times the word “joy” appears in the letter (1:4, 25; 2:2, 29; 4:1) and the verbs “rejoice” and “be glad” no less than eleven (once in 2:28; 3:1; 4:10; and twice in 1:18; 2:17, 18; 4:4).
What is apparent from even the most cursory reading of Philippians is something that many of us have come to realize in our best moments – something that we need others’ help reminding us when we are not at our best – that circumstances are not the thing upon which our happiness depends. Even when confronted with the worst that life can dish out, we can yet feel a confidence, a sureness, that everything is alright. Paul was fond of calling this life the life “in Christ,” in Christ being his image for suggesting submersion and suffusion with the spirit of Christ. At all points the life that’s possible through the glorified Christ penetrates you, lends it a totally different quality from one lived without him. A truly Christian life is one so full that it spills out of us into all the life around us; into the lives of the people we know; into our awareness and perception of the world itself. And that’s what we mean when we speak of joy. It is not denial. It is not putting on a happy face and pretending everything is okay. It is a life of abundance. Joy is life in excess. It is the overflow of that which cannot be contained within any single person[1] and must reach outside.
No wonder, then, that we must sing. Zephaniah, Isaiah, Paul – each of them knew that we need a more elevated language for joy, and that language is song. “Sing the praises of the Lord, for he has done great things, and this is known in all the world.” “Music…stands quite alone,” wrote Schopenhauer. “It does not express a particular and definite joy…but joy [itself], in the abstract, in [its] essential nature…[enabling] us to grasp and share [it] fully in this quintessence.”[2]
Most people nowadays are unaware that in 1825, two years before he died, the ailing Beethoven suffered a dreadful bowel inflammation that interrupted the composition of his last five string quartets. Throughout the spring and summer, he endured the trauma of not only the condition, but also the appalling medical science of the time, such as it was, that ended up killing more people than all the Napoleonic wars put together. That recovery from the illness was not assured can be surmised by his handling of the third movement of Op. 132, which he took up when he resumed working again. At the top of the score he wrote an inscription, “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart,” “Song of Thanksgiving, in the Lydian Mode, Offered to the Deity by a Convalescent.” The impulse to sing, you see, was irrepressible.
And so it is for us. We have to sing and rejoice because we have no other option. That is what you do when your heart is so full of thanksgiving, when the news you have to share is so great. It is joy – our joy – spilling out into the world around us, to tell a grieving, hopeless, pandemic-weary world that God is coming to be with us – Immanuel. Joy is spilling over. God is spilling over into our world.
[1] Eugene H. Peterson, introduction to Philippians in The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2018).
[2] Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I, 52.