Be Joy Isaiah 61:1-4

A friend of mine recently turned 50 years old. To celebrate, she gave herself a party. She invited friends, and asked each person - in lieu of gifts - to make a donation to one of a number of organizations, from those that serve those in need in their local community, to Heifer Project International. At the party, she provided materials about each of the organizations she had chosen, as well as the materials needed to make the donations. A couple of weeks later, we each received a card in the mail telling us how much money had been given in her name. A couple of evenings after her 50th birthday party, my friend was able to sit down to tally up the gifts that had been given. She learned that her friends had donated over $ 2000.00 in her name to support the needs of people locally and around the world. She was delighted! As she sat there and thought about the gifts, she realized that she was truly happy, even joyful. She reflected, as she told me about this, that she had grown up not knowing what happiness was. Her life as a child had been unhappy, and she carried that unhappiness into her adult life. Now, at 50, she knew happiness, maybe for the first time. *** The ancient people of Israel, the ancient Hebrews, knew a kind of happiness and even joy. First, they remembered their happiness upon the exodus from slavery in Egypt; later, they celebrated with shouts of joy their return from exile in Babylon, freedom at last. They shouted and lept for joy on their way home, free at last! - perhaps even dancing on their way. They must have known a certainty then that God's ancient promise to Abraham and Sarah - mother and father of the Hebrew people - that they would have many descendents and a land of their own. Surely, surely, this was the time. Years later, the people were struggling, however. Returning home - to a relationship that needs healing, to rebuilding after a disaster - is not the same as restoration. When we are returning with joy to the place we have longed for so long, we imagine it to be as we left it. That is the return we expect. Instead, we are met with the reality that things change over time, and that something new must be rebuilt out of the ashes of the old. That is restoration. When the ancient Hebrews who had been in exile returned to be reunited with the community that had stayed, there was a struggle. The returnees are depicted as trying to control the community they re-entered. Were those who had been left to fend for themselves the oppressed, the broken-hearted, or were those who had returned to a land they no longer knew the oppressed, the broken-hearted? Whatever the answer to that might be, we know that the infrastructure of their society had collapsed on all levels. The task of rebuilding was formidable. As to rebuilding from the ground up, workers were needed for that. As to rebuilding the community spiritually, prophets were needed for that. Enter: third Isaiah, called to bring the people of Israel back to power and constructive action as a community. More than hard crime, debt was the common reason for imprisonment at the time of the writing of Isaiah. "Release for the captives" would be a call to release those who has accumulated debt they could not repay. These were the oppressed, these were the ones in need of the words of the prophet. We can relate today, especially in these last months of 2008, when we have seen the dissolution of world markets, based on the enormous debt of people all over the world, and based on the greed of those who provided the avenues to that debt. We can relate today, when we who sit here are waiting for the economy to unfreeze - what will come first? Will we begin spending again, or will we continue to be held hostage by our fears? What of those who do not have jobs, who received pink slips this last week, who go to bed each night wondering if they will have a job at the end of the month? These, truly, are captive, these, truly, are people longing for release. This, truly, is captivity. I heard a report this past week from the U.K. The government is urging people please not steal to buy Christmas presents for their children this year. "Please don't cross that line," the government warned, letting people know that these are difficult times, but to not live out of their desperation. We are surrounded by desperate people too, here in the U.S., and I think no one of us is exempt from feeling the fear. But like the prophet, we need a different way of looking at things. That is the purpose of the prophet: to explain things to the people from the perspective of God. How will we rebuild our cities, our states, our schools, our government, our health-care system? How? How? What of those people who are not even counted in the unemployment statistics, the permanent underclass in this great nation? What is to become of them, forever unseen? Our task, like the task of the ancient Hebrews who were called to re-build their community from the ground up, is the same. We must rebuild. And perhaps that is the "release for the captives" in these moments in 2008. Perhaps this current time of shifting markets and unknown responses and cities and states going broke, thousands of jobs at stake, perhaps this is just the time we need to rebuild community in a new way. That's what the prophet was calling to the people: see the work of God in these unsettling times. See the work of God when you are feeling the most vulnerable. See the work of God in the despair, in the hopelessness. The world we have built for the last 50 years is collapsing around us. The structures we had built to save us cannot save us any longer. So often lately, I've been hearing people talk about how quickly things have changed over the years of our lives. "Do you remember," a friend asked me, "when credit cards first came out? They told us we wouldn't need money, only this little plastic card!" I can remember a time when our family had only heard of color television, and we sat in front of our black and white tv, glad to be able to watch television at all. I can remember when all I knew about computers was that they took up a lot of space; the first office I worked in for Social Security had a large room that housed the computer which connected us to the main computer in Baltimore. Now, we have computers on our desks, in our homes. We consider ourselves oppressed if we do not have a computer. And we know people who have a television set in every room. What does it mean to "proclaim release to the captives" today? We have all been held captive by our way of living. Our spiritual basis for living has been destroyed, and we don't know how to restore it. Like my friend, who grew up without knowing happiness or joy, we do not know true joy. We have lost touch with the deepest human need to be connected with one another, to be safe, to be free. And we have done this all by having our lives filled with more than enough objects. Advent calls us back to these things: to hope, to peace, to joy. None of these things can be bought, none of them can improve our ability to connect to the internet. Instead, these are the things that can save us. These are the things: hope, peace, joy, that can get us through these difficult times. All of the things we own cannot save us. Hope, peace, joy: these are those things that can restore us to our spiritual life, to our true humanity, to our sense of connection to the cosmos and to one another. None of us needs another credit card. Every single one of us needs a way to connect to the deep love and joy and hope and peace that lies within. "We who must die demand a miracle." - W.H. Auden --December 14th, 2008

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