I hope never to be in prison, but if I were, I hope I would find in myself some of Bonhoeffer’s courage and even joy.  This is the time of year when most of us expect to be joyful.  Or maybe some of us don’t really expect it any more, but we still wish it would happen.  Because somehow instead of feeling joy, some of us are anxious; some of us are grieving; instead of anticipating a wonderful Christmas, we’re dreading the annual onslaught of in-laws and family feuds.  Some of us started out this season feeling joyful, but now it’s getting harder to hold onto that feeling.  What robs us of our joy?   A lot of things can . . . being too busy getting ready for the end of the month to pause and feel and enjoy what’s happening right now, feeling stressed by an unrealistic to-do list, expecting that everything -- every gift, every meal, every encounter, every decoration -- will be perfect.  Those things can rob us of joy.  So can bigger things like serious loss, feeling betrayed, and bitter disappointments.

 

If we don't feel joyful, if we have been robbed of some joy that we once had, is it possible to recover it?  Is joy a transitory feeling or something more?  These are really good questions.  I hope our text will offer some answers.

 

Last week, we read in Isaiah 40 about the exiles in Babylon who were being called to return and rebuild Jerusalem which had been devastated by the war.  The section of Isaiah we read today comes much later, when the exiles have returned but the rebuilding has not happened.

 

In the time of this reading, there are two distinct groups in Judah.  There are the folks who have come home from exile. They are the descendants of the leaders, the movers and shakers, who were taken off by the Babylonians.  The other group is made of the descendants of those who were left behind, those who were too poor or lacking in social status to have been taken into captivity.  Everyone had looked forward to the end of captivity, to a great homecoming and to “next year in Jerusalem.”  But now that it has happened, there is bitter disappointment. 

 

The returnees are disappointed because the Jerusalem they returned to is nothing like the glorious place their parents told them about in the good old days.  And the ones who endured the last fifty years in Jerusalem, who looked to the returning folks to help them rebuild, are feeling betrayed by their own countrymen.  There is evidence that the wealthy returnees, used their status and wealth to grab more land and income from those who had been left behind. They used their economic and class power to influence the application of the tax and finance laws of the emerging nation to their advantage, causing huge increases in their own wealth, and poverty in others.[2]

 

Betrayal, keen disappointment, economic oppression, all combine to make for little joy in Jerusalem.  These people have known one failed dream after another.  The dream of a peaceful kingdom ruled by a king who followed God.  That dream had died generations earlier, because of politics and greed and ambition mostly on the part of the would-be kings.    And now they’ve been waiting for the godly leadership to emerge again and restore their peaceful kingdom . . . except they’re being exploited and oppressed by those who they were depending on.  It’s enough to make a person give up on dreams altogether. 

 

You might remember the move "A League of Their Own". It is a fictional comedy that tells some of the story of the real professional women’s baseball team in the 1940s.  When one couple went to see this movie, the husband was surprised to see his wife crying during the movie. After the movie he asked her why she had been crying. She said," It is not that it is a sad story. It is just that all these years I never knew that this really happened. All those years I was not allowed to play Little League baseball, because I was a girl. No one had ever told me women had at one time played professional baseball. I wept because it was an old story to many people but it was a new story to me. I wish I would have heard it long ago." 

 

Sometimes we miss out on joy because we either don’t know or don’t remember our story. 

 

Presbyterian pastor John Buchanan says that “One of the major ideas in the Bible is that when people are in dire circumstances, when people are in real trouble, when people have pretty much exhausted their own resources and concluded that there is no more hope, just when it appears that they are forgotten, utterly abandoned—just at that moment, God shows up.”[3]

 

This is that moment when God shows up.  God shows up in the form of a prophet.  God shows up in the form of a prophet who reminds them of their story.  The prophet says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. . . .He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 

 

Freedom for the captives and the year of the Lord’s favor are references to the year of the Jubilee. The Jubilee year was God’s plan for a just society in the Promised Land, a culture that systematically took care of its poor and oppressed people.  In the Jubilee year, everyone got a chance to start over.   The Jubilee year was supposed to happen every fifty years.  In that year, all debts were forgiven, across the board.  No one owed anyone any money.  Sometimes people fell on hard times and would have to sell their land to get by.  At the Jubilee, the land went back to the original owners.  Some people had fallen on such hard times that they had sold their lands and then had to sell themselves into slavery.  At the time of the Jubilee, all slaves were automatically set free.  This was to happen about once a generation to set things right.  It was to keep wealth distributed throughout the country, to keep some folks from accumulating more and more land and getting richer and richer and others who were born into poverty from getting poorer and poorer.

 

And so the prophet shows up, anointed by God, to remind the people of their story, their covenant with God, and to proclaim another one of God’s great reversals.  The prophet says that the city of Jerusalem is going to be rebuilt.  “But what is most startling is that the “they” of this passage, who will be doing the rebuilding will not be the prophet nor even God, but instead this particularly abused group within the larger Israelite community: the oppressed, the broken hearted, the captives, the prisoners and the mourners. “The spirit...is upon me...to bring good news to the oppressed....and they shall build up the ancient ruins....”  They shall raise up the former devastations, they shall repair the ruined cities. 

 

God shows up with a word of hope, a word of comfort, a word that lets people dream again – good news:  those bound by debt will be released, those imprisoned by grinding poverty will be given another way to live, the broken-hearted and mourning can rejoice. 

 

There’s a saying that has been attributed to the Hopi people.  It’s also part of a poem by June Jordan, a poet from Harlem.  The saying is “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”  Now it’s not quite what the prophet says, but there’s a similarity.  The prophet says that these people, these marginalized, pushed-to-the-edge people are the ones who are going to rebuild and restore.  They don’t need to wait any longer for new leadership to emerge, for a new godly king to take charge.  They are the ones they’ve been waiting for.  If we are waiting for our joy to be restored by someone else, perhaps we need to hear that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

 

We Christians sometimes act as though there is a major disconnect between the Old and New Testaments, as though the God of Moses and Isaiah is radically different from the God revealed in Jesus Christ.  But this text suggests otherwise.  This text from Isaiah reaches back to the time that the Promised Land was settled by Joshua and Caleb.  It is used here, at the end of exile, as a promise of God’s continuing love and provision for the people’s well-being.  And then some 500 or 600 years later, Jesus quotes this text in his inaugural sermon in Nazareth. He says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 

 

Jesus is intentionally identifying himself with all the marginalized people in his society – the poor, the captives, the blind and the oppressed. He is siding with those who are the losers in the economic game, those who are the losers in the justice game, those who are the losers in the social game, and those who are simply losers of all the games.  Jesus reveals the same God that Moses and Joshua and Isaiah worshipped, the God who is deeply invested in redeeming and restoring the world. 

 

So if joy is eluding us this season, if we are feeling robbed, perhaps we might need to step back from our busyness, from our desires that everything be perfect, from our anxiety and fear and disappointments and remember our story.

 

A week before Christmas in 1943, Bonhoeffer wrote to his fiancée “Dearest Maria, let us celebrate Christmas. . . Don’t entertain any awful imaginings of me in my cell, but remember that Christ, too, frequents prisons, and that he will not pass me by.”[4]

 

“One of the major ideas in the Bible is that when people are in dire circumstances, when people are in real trouble, when people have pretty much exhausted their own resources and concluded that there is no more hope, just when it appears that they are forgotten, utterly abandoned—just at that moment, God shows up.” . . . in the person of a courageous prophet, in a baby born in a backwater village, in the hearts of those who follow him.   Thanks be to God.