Sadness Before Joy: 3rd Sunday of Advent, Year C


Readings for the Day:
Sermon:


Original Manuscript:

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In the film Inside Out, two of Riley’s emotions, Joy and Sadness, are struggling to get along. Joy is trying to make sure everything is going well and that Riley is happy. Joy’s desire extends to the memories Riley holds dear. She wants them to filled with joy.

Sadness, on the other hand, has this unexplainable urge to touch Riley’s memories and turn them into sad ones. As Joy tries to stop Sadness, she sends them both into the depths of Riley’s mind as they make their way back to the emotional control station.

In the meantime, the other emotions are lost and don’t know what to do without Joy at the helm. Riley’s family has just moved to a new city, meaning Riley is far away from all her friends and what she has previously known. Without Joy, Riley panics and tries to run back to where her family moved from.

Meanwhile, Joy and Sadness keep making their way back to Control. As they journey, Joy comes to a realization that the memories Sadness feels compelled to touch eventually turn to Joy. There is Sadness that Riley is far from what she knew, but Joy in what she experienced in the past too. There is a way in which Joy and Sadness can live in harmony. This allows them to help Riley out of her funk and into a more healthy place emotionally.

It is helpful for us to see that Sadness and Joy can have their place side-by-side, especially because of what we see in our readings today. We don’t need to shun one or the other emotion, but we can embrace them both.

Now I often hear confusion over sets of readings like ours today not unlike what Joy first experienced in Inside Out. On the one hand, we hear a great deal about rejoicing in our readings. We see this spelled out in the clearest possible way with the start of our reading from Philippians: “Rejoice”.

On the other hand, we have our reading from the Gospel according to Luke. There we have a much more negative tone. John the Baptist begins our reading by saying to the crowds coming to him, “You brood of vipers!” He mentions that there is “wrath to come” and that the people cannot even rely on their status before God since “God is able from those stones to raise up children to Abraham.” “Even now”, John the Baptist warns, God is ready to cut down the trees and throw those that cannot produce good fruit into the fire.

The confusion I hear expressed is why we have these words of rejoicing interspersed with warnings of the wrath to come. Often I’ve heard a desire to only focus on the positive and never on the negative. Some might even want to ask, ‘why have these words of wrath anyways?’

When we express confusion over taking the negative with the positive, we forget many things. We forget the emotional maturity that Inside Out calls us to for one.

We also forget how Scripture itself works. We have songs of praise interwoven with songs of despair. The Book of Psalms alone shows us this. In fact, we have one of the most famous psalms of praise, Psalm 23 “The Lord is My Shepherd”, immediately following Psalm 22, which our Lord quotes from the Cross with His words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Both of these psalms too were written by the same person: King David.

As we see in the Book of Job, we experience good and bad times. Do we not wish, as Job is really getting at, to find our Lord there with us in each of these times, the bad as well as the good too?

But the true answer as to why we must experience wrath with praise comes from our Gospel reading itself, as well as the core of our Faith. When John the Baptist warns of the wrath to come, he is asked by the crowd what they are to do. He tells them to repent. He even tells the tax collectors, the worst of the worse in his time, how they can do so, how they can repent and return to the Lord.

Then John the Baptist points to the One he is really calling the crowds to follow, the One he has been called to proclaim. John the Baptist declares that the Messiah will come after him and that he will be the one who will save them.

We cannot rejoice until we make it through the wrath.

We have all sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God. We have to recognize that because if we don’t, we won’t realize the need we have to take the hand Jesus is offering us.

We cannot make it to the good if we don’t realize the bad before us first. We need sorrow before we can rejoice. We need Sadness before we can experience Joy.

It may seem strange that we get John the Baptist’s cry “You brood of vipers!” today, but it is necessary. To receive God’s Grace, we must first realize that we need to repent. When we do that, we can experience the unimaginable love of our Lord who was willing to come down to this earth, be one of us, and die for us so that we might continue to have life even though we do not deserve it.