The Levity of Angels

A Defense of Joy

Luke 2:10 “But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people.”

The coming of Christ to earth is good news that “causes great joy” for ALL people. We are called to welcome, experience, practice and share with all people this “great joy”.

How is your joy today?

The Christmas story invites us to participate in the joy of heaven. Christ is the gift of all gifts given to humanity.

He is the “cause” of “great joy”.

We can’t not muster up heavenly joy, it’s a fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:23-24). Nehemiah reminded the people of God that: "The joy of the Lord is your strength" (Nehemiah 8:10).

Joy comes from heaven. It’s connected to Christ in apprehension and in comprehension. He’s the vine, the grape, the wine and the levity it produces.

We are called to conquer, but not through sanctimonious seriousness or saintly sourness but through the gift of joy that comes from the indwelling of God’s Spirit within us and the revelation of the truth found in the riches of Christ. Christ causes great joy!

Heaven came down to Earth in starry brilliance. Heaven’s minstrels played symphony to a world lost in the mirage of the promises of lowly kings, temporal treasures and precarious peace brought by wars, stolen wealth and vain human wisdom.

The birth of Christ in a manger is the riotous romance of heaven being born of an untouched virgin into a world teething on juvenile Greek tragedies. Swooning on temporary and tawdry love stories, caught in self-immolated cataclysms perpetuated by loving lesser things.

Heaven’s joyful ambrosia pours from the cup of Christ’s bosom, with delights that Aphrodite’s lips couldn’t awaken. But I fear the lusty leeches of lasciviousness have attached themselves to the faint veins of our virtue and sucked out the passion of our piety.

We are the gospel christened joy-bearers, anointed shepherds, visited by serenading angelic hosts, commissioned to search out Christ in all his hidden hovels, hotels, hospitals and homes.

Our joy is not just a promise of post-apocalyptic finalities, we gobble up the “powers of the age to come'' and cry out in worshipful bliss.

Our witness to the invitation to “taste and see that the Lord is good” is a hearty AMEN! to the cook who provides abundant fullness to the famished.

Did the cellars of Heaven run dry? If not, then why are the wedding guests being served the worst wine?

What happened to the godly gaiety that once filled our mouths with shouts of praise and drove us to sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with unashamed zeal?

Where’s the dangerous intoxication of faith that once propelled people to surrender all to the lost continents of Africa or to scale the precipitous perils of marital life and parenthood?

Where’s the flirtatious flush of faith that once warmed our faces? What happened to the infatuation of the Divine that lured us into the depths of scripture on sacred journeys of truth that lit our darkened hearts and minds?

Where’s the roaring fires of faith’s furnaces stoked with pages of highlighted passages and memorized texts of chapter and verse?

Where’s the blaze of the book that once lit our faces like Moses coming out from the supernova of Jehovah's glory?

Why are the church’s forges silent and saintly steel is no longer taken to flame from the hot sparks of discipleship’s holy hammer and anvil?

These are the arresting invitations and penetrating questions of the Christmas invasion of heaven to earth.

The holiday traditions we practice during Christmas are reminders of the combustible elements of the Nativity tender.

These stories are both porcupine quills and goose down, given to poke and comfort. The warm glow of our holiday practices are intended connections between earthly experience and eternal truth that leave us trembling in sheep fields bathed in celestial glory, unsure if it’s the tragic end or the beautiful beginning of our lives.

We have an unsettling story to tell and we do it in gathered circles of family and friends, with extravagant feasts, meaningful gift giving, acts of charity, and intrusive neighborhood caroling.

We beautify our homes with colored lights, Christmas trees, candles and a menagerie of ornaments, decorating our own mangers as it were with gold, frankincense and myrrh. We are the continual actors in a pageant play that has never stopped playing on heaven’s Broadway.

All of our laughably normal or ludicrous and lamentable stories mingle with the tales of temple shepherds, rich astrologers from the east, paranoid kings and terrorizing tyrants, pregnant mothers, confused and concerned fiances, government imposed censuses and taxation and financially struggling families.

We are visited yearly by heavenly messengers, celestial choirs, and stars and signs all meant to lead us to outburst of joyous worship in public or private.

The music we have heard on high was given to those in the cold monotony of the night shift. Its sanctifying sounds are at home in a pub or pew. Good News knows no limits of its joyful embrace of the intoxicated or indoctrinated.

Yet...we often wrestle with how to revel in joy during times that press us towards anxiety, fear, sadness, suffering, anger and confusion.

There’s a backdrop behind everything and it's a dark one that threatens to swallow up the light or become the contrast that makes the light stand out more brilliantly.

Will we be lifted up with the levities of Angels or be dragged down by the laments of Devils?

The choice today is ours.