Joy Sunday, Celebration Sunday

It’s Joy Sunday! Before Advent candles were all blue, three of them were purple with one pink candle for Joy Sunday. Purple for penitence. Pink for joy. Today is pink.

More than memories of Advent traditions past, today's scripture readings resound with joy and rejoicing. With John the Baptizer’s warning to “You brood of vipers!” as the exception to prove the rule.

“Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel!
 Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!”

“With joy you will draw water
  from the wells of salvation.”

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.”

This joy is no chiding to stop crying and get over it. Instead, it’s the promise that mourning will be turned into dancing. Naturally, at the right time, with no need to force or enforce it, by the power of God’s uncontrolling love.

In fact, grief becomes joy every day. If not for us, then for someone. And these small, hidden miracles are foretastes of the feast of joy to come. A feast for all.

Christ is the seal on this promise, and by the loving truth of his very birth, in this strength, we can choose joy over despair. This is the joy of the defiant who refuse to grant to this world and these circumstances the authority to define all of reality.

Grief is also defiance. A refusal to stop loving. A refusal to stop caring. Such is the Homeless Memorial Service that Zion hosts this coming week, along with other more private griefs we carry in this season. The grief of the defiant who refuse to let indifference and impatience dictate the terms of life.

This is why joy and grief are friends, not enemies. They both express fierce and defiant love.

Fitting then that today should also be Zion’s Celebration Sunday. Knowing fierce and defiant love in Christ Jesus, we give voice to fierce and defiant love in making today our 2025 Estimates of Giving.

Here is an act of joy in a world of despair. It is no small thing. Do not diminish it.

Today, with a simple Estimate of Giving card, you give witness to abundance, generosity, freedom, hope, purpose, and love. Here is a joy the world did not give to us, and the world cannot take away.

Thank you for your promise of sharing in the gospel financially in the coming year. Thank you for your witness to joy.

And thank God for you, who are worth inestimably more than your money.

Pastor Clark Olson-Smith