When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy.

About now, each year, the newspapers will carry a story about those who are passing through difficult times and how hard Christmas is for them.

I read them, each year, and I try to be sensitive to that, but I keep wondering if the problem is not with the celebration of Christmas, but in the neglect of Advent.

You see, Advent is meant to be a season of shadows.

Advent is a time to acknowledge that sorrows abound, fears lurk, and doubts haunt us. The pain throbs and our hearts ache in Advent, as in Lent.

And even, or especially, when the stores and the commercials are proclaiming a message of non-stop Happy-Happy-Happy, Merry-Merry-Merry, there is something within us that knows that the Gospel according to St. Macy is a lie.

But we don’t talk about it because we think we are alone.

Well, let me tell you, you are not.

Right now there is an enormous amount of sorrow, fear and doubt in this room.

There are sorrows as we continue to mourn those who are no longer with us and there are sorrows as we struggle with relationships – husbands and wives, children and parents, old friends – that are exploding or eroding.

There are fears over health issues that so many of us, because we are like this, are carrying in silence and virtual solitude, there are fears as we look at jobs that have disappeared or are threatened.

There are doubts, parents who wonder if they have failed in the essential work that God has given them, young people who have so much information and so many options that they are afraid to make a choice, the elderly who have served God so well and faithfully and yet now wonder if the promises will be fulfilled.

Now you might look around at this fine looking group of people you are worshiping with, the beautiful women, the strikingly handsome men, the adorable children, you might look around and think “oh no, not these people, they can’t be like me, they can’t be tortured by the sorrows and fears and doubts that surround me. I’m the only one who lives in the shadows, the sun is shining on everyone else.”

But you would be wrong.

Wherever you are sitting this morning, you are within 20 feet of someone whose heart and mind and soul are being crippled by sorrow, fear pain and heartache.

And if feels all the worse when you let yourself believe that you are the only one in the room, or in the world, who is not obnoxiously happy today.

After all, it’s Christmas and we’re supposed to be happy, right?

Well, no.

It’s not Christmas.

Not yet.

It’s Advent.

A time to measure the ways in which we have journeyed in the darkness.

It’s Advent.

A time to recognize that we have lost our way, time and time again, confusing the priorities of God, chasing after the answers in the big and spectacular places like Jerusalem rather than finding them in the small and subtle places like Bethlehem or Clover Hill. It’s Advent.

A time for Joy, not giggles and laughter there is a time and a place for those things, to be sure, but Joy includes so much more than the music and feasting and dancing, Joy is the emotion that sweeps through us when we have the moment of realization of what is valuable and what is not in life.

Joy is what you feel when you watch Linus recite the Luke nativity story, it is what you feel when you watch George Bailey surrounded by the love of all the people that he did so much for in his wonderful life, Joy is watching Alistair Sims as Scrooge becoming giddy with the realization that he still has time to do what he had neglected for a lifetime.

And Joy doesn’t wait for Christmas.

Which brings us to the Wise Men.

A story out of season and we will get back to this story, as we always do, in January when we celebrate Epiphany and the wise men in their proper context, for despite what our nativity sets show us, the magi were not in Bethlehem on the night of the birth of Christ. They probably arrived a couple of years later.

But where we find them today is traveling in the shadowland of Advent.

Not only did they go to the wrong place, but they alerted the crazy King, Herod, to the presence of a new King and that would bring a massacre down on Bethlehem just a page or so later in the story.

But today they see the star stop above the house where the child was.

When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy.

No gifts have been given yet, frankincense, myrrh and gold are still packed away waiting to be given and they still have not seen Christ face to face, yet they were overwhelmed with joy.

That’s where we are, isn’t it?

Our gifts haven’t been given, or in my case even purchased yet, and we are still weeks away from the candles and carols and the night that gives meaning to all of our days, we are still lost in our own personal darknesses of sorrow, fear and doubt and yet we have the potential of overwhelming Joy if we follow, as best we can, the star that God has given to us and if, when it stops, we stop. Just as there are heartbreaking stories of sorrow to be told among you, so there are overwhelming stories of joy within 20 feet of where you sit right now.

Yes there are bad things that have happened to us, individually and collectively, but there are so many more good things that have happened to us.

Yes a young man with a gun took innocent lives in Omaha, but two dozen young men and women with appetites rejected food for 24 hours, here in this Church a couple of weeks ago, so that innocent lives could continue.

And that is only one example, there are hundreds and thousands and millions of ways that God is calling and leading and showing himself to us each day, but we are too busy to look up, too hurried to stop, too eager to criticize each other, too unhappy with our situation in life to let ourselves by overwhelmed with joy.

Joy is not the same as happiness, they can run together but they don’t have to. Joy is the framework by which we can view the world and it carries with it the expectation of God’s presence even when that presence can’t be seen, even when it is, as Isaiah put it just a shoot growing up from a stump of a chopped down dream or relationship or life.

Joy is a confident, serene contentment that knows, for a certainty, that God will lead us to himself, no matter how often we go astray.

When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy.

And there is one more thing about the Joy of Advent that has occurred to me this year.

We are accustomed to hearing the angels’ songs of Joy to the World and we stretch ourselves to include all people, we understand that Christ came for us and for others, “so that the whole world might be saved.”

And I have often, and will continue to, encouraged you to see beyond narrow parochialism, to see that Christ came for all Christians ands all Jews and all Muslims and all Buddhists and all those who different then we are by culture or race, all those who pray or speak or love differently than we do, “for God so loved the world” remains an all inclusive statement.

But I am becoming even more aware that the world is more than just humanity, this great creative work that God has done, this world of critters and plants, of mountains and oceans, all of these things are sacred because they have been created by our God. And when Isaiah and John proclaim, in the shadows of Advent, that valleys will be lifted and mountains shall be leveled and a straight path created in the midst of the desert, perhaps we have all been too quick to race to a metaphorical understanding.

Perhaps we need to be the tools by which God fulfills his purpose not only for us but also for the fullness of this created and beloved world of his.

Perhaps caring for the creation, the task given to Adam, is still the primary task for the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, and the air and the water and the temperatures tell us that we have neglected our task.

And perhaps when we glance out at snow-covered fields or we walk along the beach with waves crashing, perhaps then, if we are wise men and women, we can stop and look again and be overwhelmed by joy.

The opportunities surround us in this season, especially for those of us who know what it means to be lost in the darkness of sorrow, fear and doubt. Even before a gift is given, even before we see the child we can see that God is with us and we will be overwhelmed by joy.

When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy.