Joy to the World
December 24, 2017
Christmas Eve
Luke 2:1–20
Brookside Community Church
“Joy to the earth! The Savior reigns,
Let [us, our] songs employ;
While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat, repeat the sounding joy.”
— Isaac Watts
I am always surprised at how many times growing up I sang Isaac Watts’s Christmas carol announcing joy to the world and never once caught its radical vision of freedom and justice.
On this Christmas Eve, I want to challenge our congregation’s imagination to hear the radical voice of the gospel, groaning with labor pains, eager to give birth as we sing together the words this hymn — a song of joy about a world that is pregnant with promise. I want to take a moment to explore the beauty of the way the song takes on new life when heard in the context of the birth of a Christmas People. By Christmas People, I don’t just mean a people who go to church services Christmas Eve. (Yes, I know our sanctuary is full tonight of people who mostly go to church only twice each year. We’re glad you’re here. But what I mean is that the Christmas vision asks more from us than that.) By Christmas People, I mean that the birth of Christ was also the birth of a new people, it was a call for a new way of life. Modeled after the teachings of Jesus and inspired by God’s deep and abiding love for the world, Christmas People are a people of faith committed to living in communion with each other and with the earth, this sacred home we all share, in ways that bring freedom and joy for everyone — for all of Creation.
By the birth of a Christmas People, I mean what the Apostle Paul was talking about in his letter to the Romans:
“For Creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God, for Creation was subjected to futility [i.e. it was made to be pointless, disenchanted, it was desecrated — its sacredness was stolen from it] not of its own will but by the will of those who subjected it. But now there is hope that Creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole of Creation has been groaning in labor pains until now” (Rom 8:19–22).
A retelling of a prophetic vision from deep within the psalms, Isaac Watt’s Joy to the World echoes the Exodus story with its Jubilee expectations, where an enslaved people are freed and delivered into a promised land overflowing with blessings. By taking the words of the psalms and making them sing, Watts caught wind of a promise gestating deep in the belly of the Biblical story — the birth of a promised people, of a Christmas People!
This traditional Christmas hymn — and we have all heard it a million times — takes on a radical new meaning if you actually hear it as it speaks about heaven and nature singing. Heaven sings, nature sings, and together they repeat a sounding joy! Creation sings with a resounding joy because Christmas has finally come. Salvation is here — and Creation knows it! It’s not just about a salvation for Christians. And it is not about disembodied spirits making their way into a paradise in the afterlife. (We can believe those things, if we want. But the imagery here is mightier than that. It’s about a salvation in this world, a salvation that all Creation participates in, in the here and now.) It is about a disempowered people finding restoration and healing and wholeness and life! It is about a desecrated world being made new with the birth of a new kind of people — Christmas People.
Isaac Watts’s Joy to the World calls us to hear the thunder of Christmas reverberating across Creation as fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains resounding in joy. Trying to capture the essence of Jesus’ words in Luke, who was himself was merely reworking the words of Isaiah, this song declares an end to sin and sorrow, as blessings endlessly flow to erase the curse the world around us has been suffering under, a curse that was brought about by the warring death systems we all have been enslaved to. It is about a world of darkness being brought into the light of a God who brings freedom to oppressed peoples and interrupts death with newness of life.
It calls us to see that the Christmas story is not just about the birth of a child who would bring salvation to individual, independent, disconnected souls. It is about a complete restoration of the human condition and the communities those souls live in. Christmas — as it is envisioned here — doesn’t just revitalize communities, it “makes the nations prove the glories of God’s righteousness.” It stands in judgement of entire nations! Watts was reworking Psalm 98:2: “The LORD has made salvation known and revealed righteousness (tsedeq) to the nations.” Like Shalom or Shabbat, Righteousness, tsedeq, is one of those central Hebrew words with deep theological significance — justice, rightness, fairness, equality. “God makes the nations prove the glories of his justice, tsedeq.” And what does that justice look like? Nothing less than the wonders of a divine and never-ending love that causes creation to resound with joy!
Over the past year, our congregation has studied the teachings of Jesus — especially in Matthew’s gospel. I have tried to help us see Jesus’s announcement of the incoming “reign of heaven” in concrete terms. Often, for those of you who have trekked through it with me, you have heard me use Dr. King’s vision of a Beloved Community as a way of stirring our imagination about what Jesus meant by the reign or kingdom or empire or basilea of heaven. The Beloved Community is a global vision Dr. King called us to imagine in which all people share together in the wealth of the earth. It’s about our ability to respond to conflicts nonviolently. It’s about becoming mutual caretakers. It’s about the beauty of us all discovering the ways our gifts and skills as individuals fit with the wider hunger and need of the world around us. In short, the Beloved Community is a vision of the love of God come to life among us, the Word of God made flesh — not just in a manger two millennia ago, but empowered by the Spirit and embodied in a community of people committed together to learning to really love of the world. Dr. King’s dream of the Beloved Community is a vision of the birth of a Christmas People.
But the vision Isaac Watts has put to music, using the words of the psalms, calls us to imagine the Beloved Community as extending beyond an anthropocentric vision. It’s not just about people learning to love their enemies, ending war and hunger, and creating communities where every person is loved and valued. Joy to the World’s Christmas promise is about the birth of a Christmas People who are committed to an Ecological Beloved Community. It’s not just a community of people, but a community that also includes all of the natural resources that sustain us. In other words, Creation resounds with joy at the birth of a Christmas People because they are a people whose deepest commitments call them into solidarity with Creation. Creation repeats the sounding joy because we have finally learned from Jesus what it means to be human, to be caretakers of the sacredness of this earth that we were formed out of, to embrace that vocation envisioned by the Apostle Paul, to commit ourselves to the liberation of Creation and all its inhabitants — rich and poor; black, brown, white and everything in-between; straight and gay; Jew and Gentile; but also the rocks and the hills and the air and the water.
So here is my prayer for us today: May we become Christmas People. I pray that as we sing our Christmas hymns, especially Joy to the World, we sing them with all of the passion of the groaning of Creation, bracing ourselves to endure through the labor pains ahead as this ancient Christmas vision becomes a reality; as God gives birth in us and among us to this promise of a new people with a life-loving faith, a faith that longs to hear the resounding joy of a creation that has finally been set free!
— Merry Christmas, May it Be So!
