One of our favorite Christmas traditions is watching—no, rewatching—movies. We have several that we need to see at some point during the holidays to make the season feel complete: “It’s a Wonderful Life,” of course; “Christmas in Connecticut” with Barbara Stanwyck; “The Preacher’s Wife” with Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston; Bill Murray’s take on “A Christmas Carol,” which is called “Scrooged;” Will Ferrell in “Elf;” and “The Family Stone,” which has a cast full of great actors in a story that is both heartfelt and hilarious about what it means to be family.
After a chaotic scene where a number of the story lines come tumbling in on each other in the big kitchen of the family home, one of the sons—Ben (played by Luke Wilson)—leans back on his pillow with his arms behind his head and in a voice that carries a tone of wonder and amazement says, “Repeat the sounding joy.”
He says it with such beautiful force that always gives me pause—and he says it before the big mess that has the family pulling in different directions has been sorted out.
I, like pretty much all of us, have sung that line every Christmas of my life in “Joy to the World,” but I had never really thought about what it meant until I saw “The Family Stone” and heard Ben speak the words: repeat the sounding joy.
Part of what Isaac Watts was communicating in his hymn was that to be joyful was to join the chorus of creation that is already making a joyful noise.
joy to the earth, the savior reigns
let all their songs employ,
while fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains,
repeat the sounding joy
We are not singing a new song; we are repeating the rhythm of all that is swirling around us. We are repeating what we hear—if we are listening, which is what it takes to make good music: first we listen, then we sing.
Joy may be made by a practiced, hard-won achievement as much as by an unlooked for, passing act of grace arriving out of nowhere; joy is a measure of our relationship not only to life but to death and our living with the constant companionship of our immanent disappearance, joy is the act of giving ourselves away before we need to or are asked to, joy is practiced generosity.
And then he says,
To feel a full and untrammelled joy is to have become fully generous; to have allowed ourselves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear: a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness itself and the vulnerability of joy’s imminent loss, felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of the ocean, the sky, of two people dancing at sunset—and from nowhere, a sudden surge from the unknown tide now filling our lives—I was here and you were here—and together we made a world.
I was here and you were here—and so were the rocks and trees and mountains and flowers and animals—and together we made a world.
When Paul wrote to the Philippians, he made it clear that joy was a choice:
Rejoice in God always! Again I say, rejoice! Let your joy show in your treatment of all people. God is near. God is here.
Let your joy show in the way you treat people. Another translation reads, “Make it as clear as you can to all you meet that you’re on their side, working with them and not against them.”
Repeat the sounding joy.
Now I am going to repeat some things you already know, but they are worth saying again.
Joy is not a feeling; it’s a choice. It is a choice to engage, to listen, to pay attention. David Whyte is right when he says that sometimes it catches us by surprise, but we still choose to be open and receptive, and we have to choose to repeat what is sounding around us. And that is true of all the things represented by our Advent candles: hope, peace, joy, and love.
All of them are choices. Acts of will. Things we have to decide to do. So are cynicism, conflict, self-centeredness, and apathy. Joy is not the only song being sung around us. If we choose, we can see the world as one where survival is what matters most, which means I have to get what’s mine because it’s everyone for themselves. Though we hear that song blasted at high volume all around us, it is not the song of creation. It is not the song we were made to sing. It is not the song carried by the magnificent moon that hung in the sky last night, or by the smiles we share with one another when we sit together in coffee hour.
To choose to repeat the sounding joy—or the sounding hope and peace and love—is not being naïve about the reality that life is painful. Being joyful does not mean to ignore our grief. To choose joy is to go beyond our fear, to dig deeper than our sorrows, and to trust that at the bottom of life the joy and hope and peace and love are still sounding.
It is also to choose to help others hear the song. As I said at the start, we are repeating what we hear all around us. When we see others—perhaps even those sitting on the pew with us—who can’t hear the song because it is being drowned out by other noise, we can choose to sit with them and sing until they can sing it too.
God is near. God is here. So are we. God is with us.
As Ginger likes to say, life is holy and life is quick. The days we have as part of the choir of creation don’t last long, but they are rich and crammed full of the presence of God—so say the rocks and the trees, the squirrels and the sunshine, the full moon and our broken hearts.
God is near. God is here. God is with us. Repeat the sounding joy. Amen.
Peace,
Milton
