A Sermon on Luke 1:46b-55 and Matthew 11: 2-11
by Rev. Chris Bohnhoff
On Thanksgiving Day, there was a beautiful profile of Annunciation Catholic School Principal, Matt DeBoer, written by journalist, Reid Forgrave and published in the Minnesota Star Tribune. Forgrave was with Principal DeBoer for the first all-school mass after the shooting that occurred on August 27. Forgrave reports that an injured student read, “Though I trust in your mercy, let my heart rejoice in your salvation.” Another prayed for politicians, school leaders, and the families of the two children who had died.
Speaking of that first mass, of the tender, scary experience of returning to the scene of such deep and present trauma, DeBoer said, “The first time we do anything, it’s hard emotionally,” he said. “But people are reminded — there’s so much joy, right? There’s so much love. There’s so much goodness here. We can do the hard things.”
So much joy.
Will you pray with me? Holy heart of love, we await your arrival. In the long nights of the season and our lives, we search for signs of hope, dream of peace, and, sometimes, in the least likely places, we find ourselves in the wide-open field of joy. Guide us to joy, merciful God, we pray.
What is joy? It’s often equated with happiness, but it’s not the same, is it? If Principal DeBoer had said that there was “such happiness” at that first mass, we would call him a Pollyanna or question his mental state. But joy. . . we can somehow understand joy in that space.
To be happy is to feel personal pleasure, personal contentedness, fun. Joy also feels like pleasure and contentedness, but its locus, its center of gravity, is somewhere else. Joy touches happiness, but it also touches other emotions.
Another quote from the profile of Principal DeBoer hints at this complex location of joy. Reflecting back to the early moments after the August shooting, Forgrave writes,
“Later that morning, students gathered in the school gym to reunify with their families. They recited the Lord’s Prayer. For DeBoer, hearing part of that prayer — ‘as we forgive those who trespass against us’ — was hard. ‘We were so trespassed against,’ he said.
“But then he saw a police officer in SWAT gear, tears streaming down his face as he prayed alongside students.
“’To see that, and to be able to look out at everybody — we’re going to get through this,’ he recalled.”
Part of the holy mystery is that pain is a gateway to joy, its seeming opposite; that sometimes, in the midst of incredible unraveling, God’s Spirit comes to us, pulls back the veil of existence, and reveals that, despite all present evidence to the contrary, all will be well.
We hear it in Mary’s song, sung in response to the news that she would bear a very special child. A teenage girl, not yet wed to her betrothed, in occupied Israel, Mary’s response to the angel Gabriel telling her that she has found favor with God, and to her aunt, Elizabeth, who calls her blessed among women. She sings, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant.” (Luke 1:46-48) Despite the uncertainty of the road ahead for a young family in an occupied country with few economic opportunities, contrary to how the world would view her pregnancy, in our sacred history, Mary is given a glimpse of the good that would result, the larger story unfolding, and the love and care underneath it all. And she rejoices.
We hear it, too, in Jesus’ words to the followers of John the Baptist, who had come to Jesus with a straightforward question: are you the Messiah? Will it all be OK? Because, from a personal perspective, it was all definitely not OK with John. Imprisoned by King Herod for speaking truth to power, John must have known that his execution was all but certain.
Jesus responds not with words meant to make John happy by reassuring him that a rescue team was on its way, but with words pointing to the larger story of the coming of God’s commonwealth into the world. He lists the markers of that coming age that had been prophesied by Isaiah centuries earlier: healing of the sick and encouragement of the poor. I have hope – I have faith – that John received these words with joy, because they spoke to the fact that his ministry had served a purpose, that he was a part of the web of creation that God used to bring good things to the people in John’s world who were in need.
That we are beloved and important in God’s eyes, and that we’re a part of a plan of care and love: that is joy.
As Robin Wall Kimmerer teaches, all thriving is mutual, and joy serves a foundational role in our mutual thriving. We all know that to say that pain is a gateway to joy is not nearly the same as saying that everyone in pain will feel joy. We know that this is not the case. We know that there is no guarantee that pain, trauma, and despair will end. But when the sacred gift of joy is received, it invests the receiver with the hope that all is not in vain, and with courage to persist, despite whatever hopeless messages the world may bombard us with.
To feel and proclaim joy is a countercultural act, a prophetic witness. In this world that unceasingly tries to tell us that happiness is the goal – the personal happiness of endless consumption and instant gratification – to find joy is to point to something deeper, something outside ourselves, bigger than us, rooted in benevolent mystery. It is to witness to God’s infinite economy of grace at play underneath (and sometimes even through) the pains of our existence. My friends, as we know, we cannot always be joyful or rely on joy’s presence. But when joy is here, may we give thanks, because it means that God is near. Behind the veil of our complicated lives, underneath the pain, the divine mystery is near, always. Thanks be to God.
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