Advent Sunday 2, 2019: Pursue True Joy & Happiness, Find Divinity & Social Justice

Dec 8

Written By Swedenborgian Community

Today's message can be found below.

All Are Welcome

Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee Sister Act 2 - Lauryn Hill ft. Whoopi Goldberg

Grace Will Lead Me Home David Dunn

Opening Readings

From Biblical & Hebrew Scripture

Habakkuk 3:17-19

Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines,

though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food,

though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls,

yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior.

The Sovereign Lord is my strength;

he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,

he enables me to tread on the heights.

Psalm 118:15-24

Shouts of joy and victory resound in the tents of the righteous:

“The Lord’s right hand has done mighty things!
The Lord’s right hand is lifted high; the Lord’s right hand has done mighty things!”
I will not die but live, and will proclaim what the Lord has done.
The Lord has chastened me severely, but he has not given me over to death.
Open for me the gates of the righteous; I will enter and give thanks to the Lord.
This is the gate of the Lord through which the righteous may enter.
I will give you thanks, for you answered me; you have become my salvation.

The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone;
the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes.
The Lord has done it this very day; let us rejoice today and be glad.

Pursue True Joy & Happiness, Find Divinity & Social Justice Rev. Cory Bradford-Watts

If there’s one emotional that I associate with people during the Christmas Advent Season, its joy – even for the many people who celebrate the season but might not believe in its historical roots, which there are many, they approach this time as one of joyfulness. I can’t help but imagine families in cozy clothes, playing in the snow, warming themselves by a fire and catching up, connecting, and sharing the many gifts of the season within the trappings of Christmas. I hope such a family oriented time is a reality for you too, in one way or another.

Scriptures talk a lot about joy and about people having joy in the presence of Divinity, indeed scripture also talks about God’s joy when God is able to connect in health with her people (in this interfaith community, grounded in mystical Christianity, we believe that God is inclusive of all the good things in the universe, including humanity made in his image and likeness - men and women. Many faith traditions, including Judeo-Christianity, describe or allude to God as a mother and woman). So, when we ask ourselves, what is the Christmas or Advent season all about, I think part of our answer has to center in God’s work uplifting joy. That’s part of the reason the Advent calendar is often broken up into four topical Sundays leading up to a Christmas service: on Hope, Joy, Peace, and Love. But what does that mean in the light of Christ’s gospel ministry of transformation, social justice and openness? And what does that mean for our lives? As we explored last week, God’s advent (coming-into-being) in our lives must connect back with allowing God’s passions impact how we feel and live.

A lot of my formative pre-teen and teenage years were spent at the Salvation Army in my Missouri hometown. Like my biracial+ background, the wonderful Christian community there (yes, the Salvation Army is a Protestant church!) was very diverse and intermixed, and many people in it, like my family, were close to the poverty line. Part of that was because due to the Salvation Army’s social outreach, they do a good job connecting with people in poor areas, working to uplift health, shelter, and ultimately, joy in those who need it most.

It was a second home to me. My friends at that church and at that Salvation Army region’s summer camps helped to carry me through my feelings of hurt, awkwardness and ostracism at school and aspects of my familial life. They were my family, despite the fact that I didn’t believe a word of religious thought.

It’s often in that lens that we continue in traditions that we might not 100% believe in: the hope, the peace, the joy that community brings. And, in a way, I think that this is Divine. This is holy in and of itself, because God is those things, literally and metaphorically. God is all goodness and life and we are but “cups,” as Jesus says. Further, for me this community sowed many seeds that I hope are continuing to take root and bloom.

Another reason that that community was so joy-bringing for me, although it often was also an aspect that irked me, was because the Salvation Army is a useful church. How else can we put it? We have to hand it to the organization: it gets things done and truly uplifts many suffering people through diverse means, including shelters, food pantries, thrift stores, rehabilitation centers, disaster relief, toy drives, and more, throughout the world in many countries. It’s sad to say, but as a kid at this church, I was often a little annoyed by some of the visits to nursing homes, the bell-ringing and the many other social efforts that the youth groups tended to participate in. I, like many teenagers, was self-centered and would’ve rather hang out with my friends at the church, not realizing that it was this spirit of usefulness and engagement that grounded our feelings of joy, connectivity and community.

And in the Christmas season, as we all know, the Salvation Army seems particularly active. Why is that? I think it’s because this time of giving, this time of joy, is also a time of strife for many people locked out in the cold, the hungry, the addicted and hurting – and the ministry of the Divinity that we should ultimately celebrate in this season was one of uplifting these downtrodden peoples, of giving to them. The founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth, knew this, and he also knew and said that people couldn’t hear much about God if they were starving, drunk, and unsafe. As human beings, as God-uplifted peoples, we are called work to transform the lives of those in the world so that they too can find joy, peace, hope and love.

Indeed, it was this Christian mission, as the Salvation Army put it, that the Christ (the “Savior”) entered the world: to empower, to uplift, to save peoples’ souls, minds and bodies from the hell that we often make. We see it in every aspect of his ministry: working to break down the religious dogma of the gospel-described Pharisees, to break down the judgmental barriers between his ancestral people and others, and most repeatedly, doing Divine work to bring joy through the transformation of lives towards receiving more of God’s advent in their lives.

That’s what the Advent season seems to be about in scripture. Even the details of Jesus’ birth point to the need of social reform – born in some of the poorest and most oppressive circumstances of history but having the greatest of Spirit within, the source of our spirit. God incarnate, born in a manger of a woman and man, Mary and Joseph, in social ostracism due to their willingness to say yes to God’s call to do the hard work of allowing Joy Itself to enter the world. God’s advent is an image of the need for social justice, the power of saying yes to God’s requests in our personal lives, and the joy that can be wrought even as things seem at their poorest.

Our scripture reading today paints such a picture of joy even in the face of a world at its bleakest. Those verses seem all too poignant today with cataclysmic climate change in the making as well as the great disparity between the rich and the rest of us due to inequitable pay in an unjust and unbalanced system. Often in Christmas we like to look past these things to our own comfort, selectively giving to a choice charity but not truly striving to receive Christ’s social justice ministry as our own.

The ground-breaking-scientist turned-mystical-thinker, Emanuel Swedenborg, who inspired the likes of Helen Keller and Emerson, as well as preempted many of our modern discoveries in psychology, neuroscience, and physics, had something to say about this subject too. He, much like the Salvation Army, emphasized that doing useful work in the world to uplift others is the quintessential essence of having a relationship with Divinity as well as finding joy in our own lives.

His idea of usefulness is a popular one among Swedenborgians for good reason and transcends just doing our jobs well. No, it more appropriately points to us doing God’s job well, accepting that its God’s strength and goodness in our lives that lets us start to do so – which means doing transformative, social and personal work for our own joy’s sake, as well as for others. This means that yes, it’s often useful to take time for ourselves, and it’s also useful to start to upend the selfish ways that we tend to approach our lives in community, both mentally and in our actions.

Ultimately, we as a society, especially in this season, point to the pursuit of happiness as a key driver of our lives. What we’ve discounted is that our own happiness and joy is contingent on our striving to uplift the same in others, starting by working to ensure the most basic levels of health and safety. This is what scripture keeps telling us – that true joy is found through a right engagement with our lives and world through the pursuit of health, social justice and usefulness. This brings us into deeper joy and connection with community and especially God, as his life on earth exemplified.

When some of us gather as families, cozy on the couch this holy-day season, let’s reflect on those in our midst that don’t have such luxuries: those on the streets, in hurtful environments, or locked up in our prisons and at the border. Let’s start to be emboldened by what we secretly know through our own love of those close to us and the joy that we feel as we engage with them in celebration and gift-giving: when we lean into God’s love of community, safety, and connection, when we work so that we’re all warm roasting chestnuts by the fire, we find the joy of our lives is amplified by the joy in others.

Joy to the World Pentatonix