Our faith must be alive. It cannot be just a set of rigid beliefs and notions. Our faith must evolve every day and bring us joy, peace, freedom, and love. -Thich Nhat Hanh

Does your faith bring joy?
Does your faith strengthen you and lighten your spirit,
or is it a yoke to weigh you down?
Is your faith ever-growing and changing,
or has it become static?
Is your faith a garden teeming with new life,
a place where you feel enlivened and free,
or is it a chiseled monument to tradition,
a place of uneasy pilgrimage?

Can your faith still surprise you?

So often, I see Christians treat Advent as a somber and reflective season,
a time to meditate on our great need for Jesus’s coming,
yet on this third Sunday,
we’re reminded not just of the problems and suffering of the day,
but of the great joy which looms on the horizon.
The birth of Christ brings with it unimaginable joy and celebration.
The angels and the stars dance and sing together to announce his arrival.
Shepherds nearby and astrologers far to the east all behold the joy in the skies.

But what of those of us here on earth in the present day?

Two millennia later, do you feel the joy too?

Has the joy been bogged down, stifled, and set into stone,
or can we simply let it grow and thrive as it was always meant to?
Can we set aside our maturity and our gravity
and just let Christ fill us with joy?

This is the gift of Advent
which is also its challenge:
to receive and revel in great joy,
for God loved us so much that Jesus came to live among us.
This is the original Good News
around which the whole rest of Christianity takes shape.
Hear this news, and let yourself be joyful today.

The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh passed away in January of 2022, so to celebrate his life and teaching, each post this Advent is guided by a quote from Nhat Hanh’s Living Buddha, Living Christ.