I don’t know who came up with the idea of taking a new liquid dish soap for the kitchen and calling it “Joy,” but I bet they’re someone with a real sense of humor.  

Either that, or they’re someone with very strange ideas about housekeeping.  

As someone once said, “The problem with life is that it’s so daily.”

In that regard, housekeeping is about as ‘daily’ as it gets.  

And yet, some do find joy – a deep, if surprising delight – in its rhythms.  

(At least, so they tell me.)  

The composer Ludwig Von Beethoven had something to say about joy, too, putting a famous poem of his time to music which then found its way into hymn form as the “Ode to Joy.” 

We still sing it.  

If you look at the lyrics closely, it’s not entirely clear if joy leads us to God or if God leads us to joy, but maybe that’s just me being picky.  

Surely the point is that God and joy can tell us a lot about each other.  

And when the hymn says, “hearts unfold like flowers before Thee, opening to the sun above,” we’re back on the power of delight again, and how its rhythms seem to loosen something in us…to open and unfold us in some way. 

That’s why it makes sense to speak of “joy” at Christmas.  

Christmas can feel like our best shot at opening and unfolding after being all wrapped up in ourselves for way too long.  

It’s like the moment on a plane when the captain turns off the seatbelt sign for good, and you finally get to stand up and uncramp yourself, knowing that you’ve arrived at last.  

Can we learn to live that way for good?  

Christmas seems to think we just might.  

That said, the Church has always tried to maintain a distinction between happiness, which we might find in many ways throughout our lives, as opposed to joy, which it understands as more connected to God. 

The Church understands joy as more of a gift.

For that matter, it would go on to name joy as one of those gifts that is beyond our power to make happen, whether for someone else or even simply for ourselves.  

Some argue that, unlike moments of happiness, stories of joy, in fact, begin as just the opposite of where they finally land. 

They emerge out of “disunion, rupture, lack, and suffering.”^[1]

And yet somehow, they end in “union, plenitude, and harmony.”  

To a religiously minded person, wherever the shift occurs is where you should look to see the hand of God.  

If you think about it, the story of the first Christmas is just such a story.  

Each person who gathers around the manger is a person already or soon to be under threat, or at least suspicion, and each of them except for the baby knows this all too well.  

Yet when the angel summons them to give up whatever safety they had previously known, and to come and see the beginning of this new thing that God was determined to do, they go for it.  

That’s about joy.  

And yet, if that’s true, then maybe there’s a difference between happy people and joyful people.  

A happy person may be someone who is temperamentally “bright-sided,” and that’s great. 

It’s wonderful that they are.  What a blessing for them and for those with whom they come in contact.  

But if that’s true, then a joyful person must be a little different. 

A joyful person is someone who’s seen some stuff. 

They’re the people who have been out there alone in the rough country, who have driven along some bad road, and run on fumes or even run out of those, too, and found themselves lost. 

They know the other side.  

And because they do…because they have an old life…they don’t take the rhythms of a new one for granted.  

Because the air smells different, and the light looks different to someone who’s been holed up a long time for whatever reason. 

And there are some silences that really are golden when your world has been full of sheer noise for too long.  

You feel a kind of freedom and appreciation that other people can’t quite grasp.  

That’s joy.  

And if so, then maybe joy points to something that is actually tougher and more durable than what we usually think of as happiness.  

Joyful people understand the wonder of the gift they have received and can point to the giver.  

A little while ago, we heard the words of the Apostle Paul to his beloved friends in Philippi.  

“Rejoice in the Lord always,” he writes. But to underline his point, he continues, “Again, I will say, Rejoice.” 

“Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.  Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” 

“And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”  (Philippians 4:4-7)

His words are beautiful, of course. 

Paul cares about joy because he knows its power to sustain survivors, even if life turns hard again in new and unexpected ways. 

Joy makes and keeps them free in a way that others just can’t quite seem to muster.  

Part of me wonders, though, if he’s telling his friends something that they, as joyful people, already know.  

Paul wants them to make sure they don’t forget, but there’s no danger of that, because there’s no way they’d ever take it for granted.  

By its very nature, joy knows better than that. 

So, I’m always hoping for a happy Christmas and most years, I manage to have a pretty merry Christmas.  

If I do say so myself, I am a pretty merry person. 

But this year, I’m leaving a light on for joy. 

I’m looking for those things that remind me of lives that go from being scattered to gathered, broken to mending, darkness to light.  

And I’m keeping an eye out for God’s hand in those shifts. 

Christmas is about how eager God is to see our hearts unfold, our minds open, and our lives become a triumph song. 

It is God’s eternal call to become people of joy. 

Amen.  

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^[1] This is from Adam Potkay’s terrific book, The Story of Joy: From The Bible to Late Romanticism.  The quotation is found in the equally terrific book by Angela Wlliams Gorrell, The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found, 189.