Joy to the World

Luke 2:8-20

December 24, 2022 (Candlelight) • Mount Pleasant UMC

Christmas Eve is always a challenge for any pastor. We tell the same story every year, and we have extra services crammed in with all the normal stuff making it one of the busiest times of the year. One pastor was feeling the pressure, but he managed to rise to the occasion and put together what he thought was a brilliant Christmas Eve sermon. It was all about the mystery of the incarnation and how God became flesh in Jesus to live among us. He had crafted the words just right, and it was powerful, even if he did have to say so himself. As he and his family got in the car to drive to the church, he began rehearsing the sermon in his head, and as he mentally patted himself on the back for putting together such a great sermon, he heard his son call out from the back seat: “Dad, are you going to let us enjoy Christmas this year or are you going to try to explain it?” (Harnish, All I Want for Christmas, pg. 40). There is nothing like a child for going right to the heart of the matter!

Well, I’m not going to try to explain Christmas tonight, as if I could. Tonight, we come to celebrate, to experience the baby of Bethlehem, to remember why he came and to sing of his birth. We come to find joy—joy that is available to all the world. If you’ve been journeying with us through Advent, you know that we have been exploring the “Roots” of Jesus, the people, places and story he came from. Tonight, we come to the moment when he was born, and when you read the story, especially as Luke tells it, you can’t help but notice that everyone in the story is singing. I believe that’s at least part of the reason why music is so popular and so pervasive this time of year. Now, if I were to ask you what is considered the most popular Christmas carol of all time, what song would you guess? We sing it every year at the end of this service. Yes, [SLIDE] it’s “Joy to the World,” which, oddly enough, was not written for Christmas, nor was it originally intended as a celebration of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. Read the words carefully and you’ll find no mention of shepherds, angels or mangers. Rather, Isaac Watts wrote this song as a paraphrase of Psalm 98 as an anticipation of Jesus’ second coming—the day when Jesus returns to reign over the world forever. Over time the first half of the hymn was lost to history and the second half—the verses we sing still today—were used to celebrate Jesus’ birth. And while it may not be what Watts intended, those words certainly are in the spirit of the first Christmas night, when an outdoor field was witness to the very first Christmas concert. An angel choir came to sing to shepherds outside the town of Bethlehem, and the world caught its first glimpse of the joy that is offered to everyone on earth.

Can you picture those men—and, likely, they were all men—sitting on the ground, outside the cave that served as a sheepfold, perhaps in a circle, maybe even around a small fire that would push away some of the chill in the air? These are hard workers, “salt of the earth” sorts of people. Yet, as I shared a couple of weeks ago, they weren’t liked by too many folks, partly because they had a tendency to let their sheep graze on other people’s property. You know how you feel when the neighbor’s dog comes over and does his business in your yard? Yeah, that’s how people felt toward the shepherds. They were poor, unclean and no one really wanted them around. In the first century, there are five lists of “forbidden” jobs for good, religious people; “shepherds” appear on three out of the five lists (Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, pg. 35). They are outcasts, unwelcome in town, unwelcome in church, unwelcome as witnesses in court, unwelcome pretty much everywhere (Card, Luke: The Gospel of Amazement, pg. 48). They are perhaps the most unlikely people to be told first that the Savior of the world has arrived—mainly because no one would listen to them. No one would believe them! And yet they are the ones to whom the angel comes and says, “I bring YOU good news that will cause great joy for all the people” (2:10).

And that makes me wonder: who are the shepherds today, in our own time? Who are the people we’ve come to believe are the least likely to receive the good news? Who are the unloved, the disrespected, the outcasts? I remember having a conversation several years ago with a parent around Bible School time who said they had thought about asking a neighbor kid to come to VBS, but then they thought better of it. I asked why, and they said it was because the kid acted so badly he would probably just cause trouble here. And I didn’t say it at the time, I wish I had, but I thought that’s just the kind of kid who ought to be invited. That’s the kind of kid to whom the good news most needs to go. That’s who God sent the angel to. There were, I’m sure, plenty of respectable people in Bethlehem, and certainly there were in the nearby city of Sepphoris (where the “important” people lived), but God didn’t send the angel to any of them. Instead, the good news went to the shepherds, the outcasts, the unwelcome. Because if it’s good news for them, then it really is good news for everyone.

And it’s “good news that will cause great joy,” the angel tells these lonely workers. Good news that will cause great joy. Joy is different than happiness. Happiness depends on our circumstances, and we can be happy one minute and deeply distressed the next. But joy is deeper. Joy is that deep-down assurance that life is good, that God is good. It’s not something we can create or manufacture on our own. Joy is something that comes from outside ourselves, something that is brought to us, given to us. That’s what the word the angel uses indicates. Joy comes from outside of us. From God. From the baby born in the manger. The angel announces great joy that night because a baby is being born, and that changes everything. Everything! That’s certainly what Isaac Watts was proclaiming in his carol: “Joy to the world, the Lord is come! Let earth receive her King!” Joy has come because of this baby born in a manger.

And then, right there in the field outside the sleepy town of Bethlehem, the sky exploded with the very best concert ever heard. Over the years, I’ve been to many concerts. Especially this time of year there are a lot of Christmas and “holiday” music concerts. We have enjoyed several this year, in person and online. But no matter how good the concerts here are, none of them can compare to the music and the celebration the shepherds witnessed that night. It was as if heaven had waited forever—which, in fact, it had—to announce the birth of the savior, and once the news was out, once he was here, they couldn’t wait any longer (Card 49). The sky erupts with so many angels no one could count them, and the angels sing: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests” (2:14).

Most often, we get the song of the angels backwards, or at least out of order. We hear the part about “peace on earth,” and we set about trying to make that happen on our own. We work for peace, we try to live in peace, and we hear politicians promise that if we elect them, we’ll finally have peace. “Glory to God” seems somehow intangible, distant, something we only do on Sundays, or on special days like today. But I think the shepherds heard it right and certainly the angels got it right. They knew that the first calling of every human person is to give glory to God. That’s why, after they see the baby, their first response is to return to their fields, as Luke tells it, “glorifying and praising God” (2:20). If we want peace in our world, peace in our lives, peace in our hearts, we have to start by connecting with God. Like joy, peace cannot be manufactured or even really brought about through political means, but only by giving glory first to God. Without God’s presence, no true peace will ever happen. Or, as Ellsworth Kalas puts it, “The first substantial step toward peace might be a right and profound recognition of God” (The Scriptures Sing of Christmas, pgs. 23-24). When we abandon God, when we lose our sense of our need for his presence in our lives, we lose our regard for truth, justice, righteousness and respect for self and others. The angels call us to sing “Glory to God” first. When we do, that’s when joy will come.

This baby who is born in the manger is not coming to make us “happy.” He is coming to bring us joy, and that joy is not just “happy feelings.” It also involves judgment. To have true joy will mean we have to remove from our hearts and lives those things that stand between us and God. The psalm that Isaac Watts used as the basis for his carol reminds us of that truth: “Let the rivers clap their hands, let the mountains sing together for joy; let them sing before the Lord, for he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples with equity” (Psalm 98:8-9). Now, when we hear the word “judgment,” we think of a court and perhaps a jury and people fighting it out and a process that’s generally not very pleasant. Maybe we think of words like “vengeance” or “payback.” And so, when we hear that God is going to judge us, that Jesus is returning one day to “judge the living and the dead” as the Apostle’s Creed says, it may cause us to have some fear. And yet, as Watts rightly paraphrases, “He rules the world with truth and grace!” Truth and grace. Judgment co-mingled with grace which will end in joy. This baby comes not to condemn us, but to save us (cf. John 3:17), to offer us a place in his kingdom forever. That’s what the angels were singing about. That’s why Jesus was born. He’s coming to make the world right. He’s coming to bring us joy.

In 2012, I got to take Rachel with me to the Holy Land for the first time; she was only twelve but really took it all in. On that particular trip, we went as we always do to Bethlehem, to the Church of the Nativity, and it was hot, it was crowded, and people were pushing and trying to get into the grotto, the cave where it is said Jesus was born. And there were people along the side who wanted to sell us candles. And Rachel started to get a little queasy, a little nauseous because of the heat. But she still wanted to see the place where Jesus was born. Eventually, after a couple of times where the line had stopped, we got down into the cave, and if you've been there or if you’ve seen pictures, you know there are a lot of candles and incense pots and things covering it. It doesn’t look much like a cave anymore. It doesn't look like a birth place anymore. It certainly looks nothing like any of our Christmas cards or children’s pageants! And yet, if you can get past all the trappings, if you can put aside all the religious stuff, there’s still something holy about that place. It's not the silver star, although it’s very cool to touch the star where tradition says Jesus was born. It’s not the manger off to the side, although it’s very cool to see the feeding trough that Jesus may have been laid in. There’s something holy about that place, because this is where joy came. This is where Christmas began. In spite of the troubles in the Middle East, in spite of the wall that surrounds the city of Bethlehem and hampers their economic development, in spite of all of the issues that we bring in our own lives to this time and place, Christmas still comes. Joy still comes.

You see, joy is not something you will find wrapped under the tree tonight or tomorrow. Joy can’t be bought at Wal-Mart or Meijer or even on Amazon (and they sell everything!). Joy is something only the Christ child can bring. So is there, as Isaac Watts’ carol asks, room in your heart for him this Christmas? Do you know the wonders of his love? Does your life, this Christmas, repeat the sounding joy?

Near the end of the story, Luke includes a marvelous detail that, I think, could only have come from Mary herself. Luke writes it this way: “Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart” (2:19). Can you see Mary there, some time after everyone has left, over in the corner of the stable? There is joy on her face. I believe she could hear echoes of the angels’ song in her soul, and that somehow, even though the difficulty in her life was not yet over, she knew it would be all right. Joy had been born, Jesus was here, and nothing would ever be the same again. You see, Christmas is not something we can ever explain. It’s something we have to experience. Let every heart prepare him room, and let heaven and nature sing! Amen.