What’s with all this fear talk, you might wonder. Isn’t today “Rejoicing Sunday?” Isn’t it the joyful day of the Pink Candle? Today’s the day that we’re supposed to put a smile on our serious Advent faces. We’re celebrating! Christmas is almost here! The wait for Jesus is almost over! So why does our Gospel lesson burden us with fear and wrath and judgment? Can we really be saying, “Rejoice! You brood of vipers!”
As a matter of fact, the gloominess doesn’t just come from John the Baptizer. Even our other bright and joyful readings today are lifted from dark backgrounds. The entire book of Zephaniah is full of scary, depressing poetry that makes John the Baptist sound tame. The prophet Zephaniah spends whole chapters telling the people of Israel how rotten they are—and yet he ends with the beautiful, hopeful words that we hear today. The prophet Isaiah, too, is full of doom and gloom in the chapters surrounding today’s hope-filled verses. And then the apostle Paul, with his “Rejoice in the Lord always?!” As we learned last week, he’s writing from the shadows of a Roman prison cell, far from his beloved community in Philippi.
Our rejoicing is never completely separate from our sorrow, is it? Even as we rejoice with hearts overflowing before the birth of a child, there are the aches and pains of pregnancy. I remember well the waves of fear for the health of my unborn children, the worries over the changes that each baby would bring to my life. Expectant joy, mixed with worry and pain. The light of the world, born in the dismal shadows of a stable. Moments of joy seem to rise upward out of the gray everyday world, like the glorious body of Christ, reaching out to us from a tasteless wafer. Joy and sorrow are tangled and intertwined, both part of the fabric of life. Poet Kahlil Gibran once wrote: "Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain."1
To rejoice in the Lord seems to be a chosen response, an active response. A way of picking at the tangled knots. It’s not a quick emotional high, or a fake smile. It’s a spiritual practice that moves our bodies and quickens our souls. When the brood of vipers comes out from under the dock and asks John to solve their predicament, notice what the Baptizer tells them. John doesn’t tell them to grovel before God on their knees. He doesn’t tell them to believe a certain way or to do impossible tasks. His advice is surprisingly simple: in order to turn your life around, share your things—give away that extra coat or some of the food from that full cupboard. Notice that John doesn’t even require that the tax collectors give up their cushy, lucrative jobs. Tax collectors were members of a dishonest profession in John’s day, a profession full of Jews who collaborated with the hated Roman oppressors. “Just don’t cheat anybody,” John advises them. Really, is that all? And the soldiers, probably Jews forced into the army by the Romans, shouldn’t they be required to rise up and refuse to fight? To kill their generals in the Name of Israel’s God? No, nothing like that! “Just be satisfied with your wages,” John tells them, “and don’t use your power to throw your weight around.”
That’s all pretty basic, isn’t it? Share your stuff. Don’t cheat. Be honest. Be kind. Work hard. Do what you can. These are all instructions that are so clear, so uncomplicated, that we have trouble coming up with an excuse to ignore them! Look inside your own hearts: What are some things that you have done, or could do, to turn from acting in fear to acting in joy? Just something tiny. Something simple. God doesn’t ask us only to do hard things. No kindness is too small to make God rejoice.
Indeed. God rejoices. Even over a brood of vipers! Listen to the prophet Zephaniah speaking to his wayward people: “God will rejoice over you with gladness; God will renew you in God’s love; God will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival.” God singing about you and me! Can you imagine? Throwing a huge party, like the one that the Father gave for his prodigal son? That’s our real reason to rejoice. God rejoices over us, even when we disappoint God. Even when we hide in fear. Even when we fail.
It’s never too late to swim out from under the dock and do what you can. “Let your gentleness be known to everyone. And the peace [and love] of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Amen.
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