Living Witness - A Reflection on Joy and Lament

Today is the last day of Christmas! Tomorrow we celebrate the feast of Epiphany. (A few years ago, I described Epiphany as a season rather than a feast and was corrected that the weeks following Epiphany are 'after Epiphany' or 'ordinary time' not a season as such.). 

Still, I think there's an inner logic to the Christian calendar that goes like this. 

- The Christian New Year begins, (with Advent) not with a raucous celebration but in quiet hope. We confront the longings, needs, disappointments, and struggles of a world that needs salvation, healing, justice, and peace. (This season cultivates longing and hope.)

- Then... CHRISTMAS! We celebrate for 12 days the generosity and mystery of God coming into our world. We set our minds (not on toys, food, and resolutions), but on the lavish (and mysterious) generosity of God in Christ. (This season contemplates gratitude and joy.) 

- Then, remembering the dark and needy world we considered in Advent, we go to into that dark world to give first-hand authenticated witness to the joy we've celebrated in Christmas. 

These rhythms are designed to overlap and interrelate. 

Do you see the pattern?  Longing breaks into joy. Joy bubbles over into witness. We look out at the world, then into the mystery of God in Christ, then back out into the world.  

When our faith practice ignores longing, lament, and grief, we are vulnerable to idealism.  Twenty-four years ago, inspired by a vision of impossible community across our racial, class, and cultural divides, I immersed myself in ministry.  I served and befriended the homeless, housed the stranger, and imbedded myself in communities of color, working for racial justice.  Within a few years I was disillusioned, the communities I was serving dissolved, and some of my closest partners left.  I felt abandoned, guilty, ashamed, betrayed, and alone.  Idealistic faith will always crash on the rocks of complexity, complacency, and compromise.  

When our faith practice ignores joy, we become spiritually anemic.  When our spirituality over-indulges in lament, circumspection, and critique we lose sight of any real hope.  Jesus becomes little more than a companion in suffering.  We stop praying for transformation, our own and others, out of fear that we don’t want to offer a false hope.  

G. K. Chesterton famously quipped, "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried." These natural rhythms of Christian practice invite us into the full range of human experience.  The world is a mess.  God is not silent.  Jesus comes in weakness and vulnerability.  The resurrection of Jesus breaks the power of death.  We hold all of these in our minds and hearts, and shaped by them, have confident and joyful hope in a needy world.   

Have we contemplated the mystery and generosity of God sufficiently this Christmas in celebration that we are ready to give joyful witness?