I want to tell you a story about how I became known to an entire conference full of pastors as the ‘NO BOOKS’ lady. If you know me, this is hilarious, because I actually really love books.
Back in 2021, four pastor friends and I were part of a continuing education program through Princeton Seminary. The idea was that each small group would design their own learning goals and spend 6 months working on whatever they felt would make them better preachers. At the end of that six months, everybody would get together at Princeton for a few days for a conference, to share what they’d learned.
We were all a little burned out after a year of navigating lockdowns and online worship for the first time, so my group decided that our goal would be to ‘rediscover the joy and delight in weekly preaching.’
And so, my beloved friends, who could not be any more stereotypically presbyterian, immediately started working up a syllabus. We could read a book a month about joy, listen to some podcasts, maybe watch a documentary or two, and get together via Zoom each month to discuss.
After a few minutes of this, I piped up and said ‘listen. If you try to demand joy from me, to make a feeling into a homework assignment, my brain is immediately going to reject that demand and I’m going to be crabby at you and about you for the next six months. What if instead, we focus on doing the things that actually bring us joy. To be mindful of those joyful moments, to cultivate joy in our lives and our ministries, and then come together and reflect on those things.’
We went with that idea, and by the time the conference rolled around, we were so glad we did. Instead of studying joy as a concept and then trying to apply that to our ministries, we intentionally made space in our everyday lives to experience joy, to notice it, and reflect on that together.
One person told us about taking his kids to their first concert that summer. Another adopted a dog. Another reflected on a family reunion with all their adult children and their families present. We rejoiced in the magnolias, in hiking trips, and in food, music, and church life, and we shared one another’s joys.
But of course, when it was time to present our learning at this conference, the one doing the presentation got up and said: “we were going to read a bunch of books, but Sarah said ‘NO BOOKS!’, so we did this.”
So for the rest of the week, people would come up to me and be like ‘NO BOOKS!’
Joy is one of the things in this life that cannot be assigned or demanded. It cannot be made into homework.
In the same way, this story that we tell every year is more than words on a page—it is a promise that we live every day. When God took on flesh and bone and moved into the neighborhood, the story of God and the story of humanity were forever inextricably intertwined. And so, this celebration of incarnation reminds us that no matter where we go, how we feel, what we do, what others do to us or around us, God is with us.
One more story. Some of you have heard this before, but it’s worth telling again.
When I was fresh out of seminary, I spent a couple years doing children’s ministry for a large church. We had a Sunday school hour that was broken into two half-hour segments: half an hour for a lesson, and half an hour for music.
Every year, one of the first songs the preschool and kindergarten classes learned was ‘Go Tell it on the Mountain,’ which they would sing in worship during Advent. They loved this song.
We also had a program for smaller kids during worship, and we always gave the kids the option to start with a song. I usually asked something like ‘what should we sing today?’ You can see where this is going.
You have not experienced the full joy of Go Tell It On the Mountain until you have 25 3-5 year olds screaming it at you at the top of their little lungs…in July.
I could wax poetic for another 20 minutes, but tonight, instead of offering you more and more words about the joy of Immanuel, God-With Us, I’m going to invite each of us to practice that joy as we sing Go Tell It On The Mountain. Let your inner child out, and lean in to the loud joy as we proclaim the good news with singing: Jesus Christ is born!