Transcript
Gift to the City: Joy First Baptist Richmond, December 15, 2024
The Third Sunday of Advent
Luke 3:7-18
As the people were filled with expectation and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water, but one who is more powerful than I is coming….”
Somewhere on the Internet there is a video called “Laughing Quadruplet Babies,” and that’s exactly what it is: four little girls zipped up into identical blanket sleepers, lying on the bed with their exhausted mother, looking up and laughing hysterically at their father, who is holding the camera. i I don’t know what he’s doing, but it’s working. As the mother puts it he’s a “regular standup comedian.” The video goes on for a minute and forty-five seconds, and by the end of it even she is laughing. She can’t help herself. Her children’s joy is contagious. So, I was thinking that on this Third Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of Joy, it might be fun to just put that video up on the screen in a continuous loop and let it play for the next twenty minutes, just to see if, at the end of it, we were all laughing hysterically, too.
But the lectionary had a different idea. It thought that on this Third Sunday of Advent what would really get us going is a reading from the third chapter of Luke’s Gospel, where John the Baptist says to the people, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”
One of the commentaries I read said, “It’s not exactly a joyful message. And yet, hidden in John’s sermon is a profound word of joy: ‘One who is more
powerful than I is coming,’ John says. His task is to prepare the way for Jesus, and that preparation is serious business—repentance, confession, bearing fruits worthy of God’s kingdom. But make no mistake, it’s all leading to joy.”
I talked to a friend about that who said:
“At first glance, John’s call for repentance might not seem like good news. But isn’t it true that joy often follows preparation? Think about it: a well-planned party, a meticulously rehearsed concert, a carefully cooked meal—joy is magnified when we’ve done the work.”
Well, that’s true, I thought. That concert we had last Sunday night, “Joy to the World,” probably wouldn’t have been nearly so joyous if the choir and orchestra hadn’t rehearsed.
My friend said,
“John’s call to repentance isn’t about guilt or shame; it’s about clearing the way for something better. He’s inviting people to prepare their hearts for the Messiah, who will bring salvation, healing, and hope. The joy isn’t just in what’s coming—it’s in the anticipation itself.”
That’s true, too. I love anticipation. I sometimes enjoy planning for a big trip as much as taking one.
He said, “We all know this feeling. It’s like Christmas morning, when the presents are still wrapped, the coffee is brewing, and the air is full of expectation. Joy often begins long before the first gift is opened.”
All of that is true, and if this were an ordinary Advent, I might spend the rest of the sermon talking about that. But this is no ordinary Advent. This year our theme is “A Gift to the City,” and the gift is Jesus, the one who brings Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. We’ve talked about those first two things, but today I want
to ask, “How do we share the gift of Joy with the city?”
I’ve been thinking about children, and how much joy they seem to have. I’ve been wondering, “Where do they get it, and how can we share it?” I talked to Amanda Lott, our Minister to Children, and one of the things she said was, “Children live in the moment.”
That’s true. I see this sometimes out the window of my study. We have this wonderful preschool at First Baptist, with an enrollment of nearly 200 children. And even though it’s not free many of the parents I talk to say it is “a gift to the city.” They say they don’t know where they would be without it and I don’t want them to have to find out. But it’s also a gift to me, because in a job where I do most of my work with adults the preschool keeps me connected to children. I see them in the hallways when I come to work. I see them taking walks around the neighborhood. And I see them on the playground, which is just outside my office window (I have to confess that since my grandchildren started coming to school here I’ve spent a good bit more time looking out that window, seeing if I can spot them).
Sometimes I will see a toddler fall down and start to cry, but then she sees her teacher blowing soap bubbles and she gets up and starts chasing them around the playground, laughing and clapping her hands. The fall is completely forgotten; it’s all about bubbles now. Children live in the moment, and if it’s a happy moment they’re happy.
I talked to Amanda about that a little further and at some point I mentioned this thing I’ve heard from time to time, that we humans “come from God and go to God.” Amanda had heard that, too, and seemed to agree. If it’s true it would mean that we human beings are somehow with God even before we
are born.
There’s a story I’ve told you before that seems to support that theory. It’s a story about a three-year-old girl who wanted to spend a few minutes alone with her brand-new baby brother, with the door shut. In fact she insisted that the door be shut, and that made her parents nervous. What was she planning to do to her brother? But then they remembered the baby monitor in the nursery, and realized that if they heard anything strange they could be there in two seconds. So they let the little girl go in. They closed the door behind her. They raced to the baby monitor and turned up the volume. They heard their daughter tiptoeing across the room. They imagined her standing over the baby’s crib. And then they heard her say to her two-day-old baby brother, “Tell me about God. I’ve almost forgotten.”
What if it’s true? What if we come from God and go to God and newborn babies know some things about God that the rest of us have already forgotten? Here’s one of my beliefs that I may not have ever explained to you in just this way. I believe that the “eternal life” we talk about so often in church is not just one day after another for eternity—that’s quantity—but the kind of life we were born to live—that’s quality. And I believe the quality of eternal life is the experience of living in the moment with God forever.
Maybe you’ve heard me say it this way before: that we live our lives on the timeline, with one second always ticking into the next, but God exists in the “eternal NOW.” When we die we step off the timeline and into the presence of God, and suddenly there isn’t a yesterday, today, or tomorrow anymore: there is only NOW forever. That’s eternal life. And that’s what very young children seem to understand, maybe because they’ve had some experience with it: they seem to
understand how to live in the moment without worrying about the future or dwelling on the past, and as I said, if it’s a happy moment they’re happy. They chase soap bubbles around the playground, full of joy.
How do we give that gift to the city? Well, one way we do it is by celebrating Christmas like Christians. Think about it this way: if being in the presence of God is being in that place where time comes to a standstill, where you find yourself living in the moment and the moment is a moment of pure joy, then think about what it was like on that first Christmas morning, when a baby was born and wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger and his mother looked on his face in the lamplight and realized she was looking at Emmanuel: God with us. It was the first time God had ever been with us in the flesh, and for that reason it may have been the most joyful moment in human history! It may be why we continue to celebrate it all these years later and it may be why children get so excited about it. It’s not just stockings and candy and presents under the tree, although those are wonderful, it’s the idea of being in the presence of God again. Maybe it stirs up within them—within us!—some dim memory that we had almost forgotten.
Today is the actual anniversary of one of the most joyful moments of my life. It was at 4:32 on the morning of a certain December 15th that my daughter Ellie was born, and in that moment my life was divided forever into before and after. Before I had only been a husband; afterward I was also a dad. The nurses took Ellie from the doctor’s hands, scrubbed her up and wrapped her in a receiving blanket, and then they put her in my arms. She was so tiny! I held her as if I might break her, looking at her beautiful face, and marveling at the miracle of it all. In that moment I wasn’t thinking about the scary ride to the hospital the
night before, when the wind had almost blown our Volkswagen Rabbit off the road. I wasn’t thinking about the difficult delivery Christy had had to go through to bring this little girl into the world. I wasn’t thinking about that moment a few days later when I would have to write the biggest check of my life just so we could take her home. I was just looking at her face. I was living in the moment.
And I want to say out loud: that little girl brought me more joy than I could have ever anticipated. Maybe it’s because she was always living in the moment in those days. I was the pastor of a little church in Kentucky, trying to finish up my Ph.D. I still have a picture of the time Ellie and I took my aluminum john boat and put it up on top of some big, round hay bales in the empty lot next to our house, and then got into the boat as if we were out on the rolling sea. It was a silly thing to do, and we were laughing about it, and Christy stepped out and took a picture. I’m glad she did, because it captured the moment, and in that moment I wasn’t thinking about how it wasn’t very dignified for the pastor to be sitting in a john boat on top of a row of hay bales, and I wasn’t thinking about how I was going to finish the last three chapters of my doctoral dissertation; I was just laughing in a boat with my daughter, having an experience of pure joy.
These days it’s harder. Ellie has learned to live on the timeline. She’s running her own public relations firm and managing a busy household and raising two small children. She doesn’t have a lot of time to get into boats. But her children are teaching her about joy; we talked about it only yesterday. She said, “I think just allowing yourself to be fully present with them, you know, putting everything else aside and just focusing on them, that’s where the joy comes from.”
So, I’m refining my hypothesis: it’s not just living in the moment. It’s living
in the moment and being fully present with someone you love or someone who loves you. Ellie and I talked about how it is when her son, Leo, wants to show you something, and you put down your phone and take his hand and he leads you outside to the place where he has turned over a rock and wants to show you how the ants are crawling around underneath. To be fully present with that beautiful boy in that moment of wonder is an experience of pure joy. And Ellie and I had another one, just last week.
She and her family had stayed the night at our house while some work was being done at hers. I came down to breakfast and found two-year-old Vivi sitting at the kitchen table crying her eyes out. She had this little bracelet she loved—just a piece of string with a few beads on it—but it had broken and now she was inconsolable.
Or so we thought.
While she was weeping into her Cheerios Christy went upstairs and got the necklace she had planned to put in Vivi’s stocking. It wasn’t much; just a pink ribbon with some big, flashy costume jewelry on it, but when Vivi saw it she gasped, her eyes got wide, she reached out for it with a squeal of delight and clutched it to her chest. Ellie and I agreed later that we had never seen anything quite like it. All the sorrow of those previous moments was forgotten. All that was left was joy—pure joy.
I was present for that moment. I was living in it with Vivi, my precious granddaughter. And it was one of the most joyful moments I have ever experienced. If it’s true that joy is found in being fully present in the moment with someone you love or someone who loves you, then imagine that what God wants ultimately is to be present with his beloved children in a moment that goes on
and on forever, an eternal Christmas morning when he is with us and we are with him and it’s all any of us will ever need or want again.
And then let’s practice.
When the sermon is over I’m going to sit down and One Accord is going to sing the offertory. I’d love for you to put something in the plate when it comes around, but maybe you could also spend some time just living in that moment, looking around you at the beauty of this room, the faces of people you know and love. And then I’m going to dedicate the gifts and give an invitation and we’re all going to sing “Joy to the World!” And that’s where I really want you to pay attention. Because if joy is found in being 1) fully present 2) in the moment 3) with someone you love or someone who loves you, you might just begin to feel it. Because God is love, and in Jesus love has come to be with us, and if we are fully present in a moment like that one,
There will be joy.
—Jim Somerville © 2024
