make a joyful noise
Riley leans against the kitchen counter, waiting out a two-minute timer that counts down while chunks of chicken sizzle in the pan. She holds a fork aloft as she alternately considers the cooking meat and the digital display, as she murmurs to herself about what’s next. I watch her head nod gently as she speaks, and I count grace upon grace upon grace.
Look! That once silent little girl has become this young woman who narrates everything.
Look! They used to list in paragraphs all the things she couldn’t do, and here she is now, browning chicken, whisking together ingredients for a lemon sauce.
Look! I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, God said.
Riley rehearses the steps for making dinner and I rehearse the story of a harvest God planted long ago, in what seemed, just then, to be a barren land. It always happens this way, how we least expect it, the river flowing through the driest places.
Sometimes though, we can stare at the cold, hard ground, wondering how a tender shoot could possibly crack through all that unyielding. It can be hard to believe, but God loves to bear fruit in unlikely places. It’s written right into Advent, right into the epic story of our rescue, a tender shoot growing from a dry, dead stump. For all time, this is the image of how it will always be: There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.
Christ is the shoot, bringing new, fruit-bearing life right from the dead. No one else can do that.
Look at what you’ve done, what you keep on doing, I tell God now, gazing at Riley’s back, that waving fork. I look bold at a stream flowing right out of the desert, my grin stretching wide.
I know that somewhere, someone looking for Christmas stares into the empty dark. Somewhere, someone’s fingers press hard into the splintering groove of old, dead wood, and someone’s saying it, something’s got to change, wondering what good could ever come from a place like this.
And I know that grace is the abundance of God lavished everywhere we don’t deserve Him and least expect to find Him.
Riley catches me looking, feels my eyes on the back of her head, my heart tugging, and she turns and grins back.
She beams, but I can also see she’s tired, like I am. The end of the day presses, tamping down the wild curve of her smile, dulling the brightness in her voice so subtly you could only see up close, as close as a mama gets, that she wears her limits like I wear mine. And yet, something erupts from somewhere I can’t see, and she laughs.
In this busy season of serving, I’ve been stuck on a phrase, chasing it around in my heart, the second line from an ancient song for giving thanks that urges, serve the Lord with gladness. I’ve been wondering how that ever happens when we’re all so tired. The weary world just gets wearier. Maybe all our smiles are a little less wild because all our bodies feel pushed beyond capacity.
In the original Hebrew rendering of that poem, the word translated gladness—Simchah, comes first, and it means not only gladness but joy, like the joy James described—consider it all joy, joy that is the awareness of God’s grace. Out of the stump comes a shoot, and joy is our first active response to that grace.
Simchah also means mirth. This is not just joy but giddy joy, which is exactly what I see now when I look at Riley and she catches my eyes and throws back her head, laughing like she’s laughing in the face of the weakness she feels, like she’s laughing at the days to come, like she knows that when we can’t see how or feel how or imagine how, that’s when the shoot springs forth, as He promised.
It’s everywhere on the pages of scripture, how God likes to choose the lowly and the weak and the have not, but to experience this, to actually recognize yourself as the fallow ground from which He somehow coaxes a harvest, well, that will flat out make you laugh for joy, which is why it’s the poor in spirit in whom God readily cultivates a kind of holy hilarity. Holy Hilarity is a phrase I hoarded like treasure one evening as Kevin read to me from Richard Foster’s collection, Learning Humility, wherein the author observed, “It seems to me that humble people laugh a lot,” and immediately, we both thought of Riley.
Therefore, I think well of weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, calamities, wrote the apostle Paul, because Christ’s grace is sufficient, because His power is made complete in weakness. That phrase “think well” means to take pleasure, and it seems to me the only way to take pleasure in the hardest things is to know that God is always working in them, that, as Tish Harrison Warren wrote in her book Advent, “when things lie fallow they do not lie in waste; things that seem dormant are not dead, and times of waiting are not without meaning, purpose, or design.” It’s a funny thing, how laughter can be the sound of faith.
Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth, the song says first, before it gets to the part about serving, because real joy, that collecting up of the treasures of grace, has a sound. It bubbles up in holy hilarity, when the dry ground feels the rolling rumble of the river.
It’s funny how I read those two lines all wrong for years—Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth! Serve the LORD with gladness– like the serving with joy is a just a matter of an adopted attitude or the worship of the young and comfortable, the ones living in an easier season. Because how, I wondered, do the weary-eyed look into the deep darkness of the world and serve with noisy joy? But God keeps teaching me, ever patient, keeps showing me that grace upon grace gets clearer to see if I’m looking to count on it when life is hard and I feel emptied out, when there’s no way I could ever believe I can manage on my own. He keeps showing me how serving with joy, that joy bubbling out like Living Water from so many parched cracks, is the first grateful response of a soul well-familiar with grace; the soul who has known that the fruit-bearing shoot arose from a dead old stump; the soul who knows God just keeps on making that happen.
Riley doesn’t know, her body shaking with all that holy hilarity and that chicken sizzling and that fork jiggling, her bending at the waist with the weight of glory, how God uses her now to make a picture for me, how He uses her to keep right on teaching.
“What?” I say to her, because I want to know how she can stand there in the dead weary afternoon with her body groaning and still find a way to laugh.
She lowers the fork, her eyes shining, tilts her head to consider me and says, “I don’t know; I’m just happy because God is with us and He’s our friend.”
Her tone, it says I just don’t know except what I know, the tune, maybe, of an ancient song for giving thanks. There she is, like a light dawning at dusk, her eyes wide open to grace. There she is, someone who understands Christmas; a once wordless one now birthing the truth of things in her own words. Out of the stump, a shoot springs forth. Look! Look! Do you now see it?
I read it this morning in Ann Voskamp’s book The Greatest Gift, just on the cusp of the day, my finger tapping the page, and here we are, just at the edge of Christmas: “When you light a dark world and the unexpected places with a brave flame of joy; when you warm the cold, hopeless places with the daring joy that God is with us, God is for us, God is in us; when you are a wick to light hope in the dark—then you believe in Christmas.”
I start laughing with Riley because it’s contagious, because when joy overflows, we all get carried away, and it’s a prayer in my heart, Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.
Because I realize now how God has been inviting me to this all season, this reckless response to the impossibility, that is, the possibility I just don’t yet understand, or to the weariness, or to that relentless illusion of emptiness, to whatever barren land happens to stretch out before me. What if, you could really laugh for joy? What if, He’s been saying to me, knowing what I keep doing, what I always do, you could make a joyful noise in expectation of the wild surprise of grace? What if you could serve knowing that with me, there’s always more happening than what you see?
