Traditionally this Sunday of Advent was called Gaudete - a Latin word that means rejoice! I suppose in contemporary language it might be translated “Don’t worry; be happy.” Crank up the jollies. Rejoice. Cheer up. But what if you don’t feel like it? What if you feel overworked, overwrought, over whelmed, tired, cramped, besieged and alone? Sometimes the most useless thing to say to a sad person is “Snap out of it.” Yet in some ways that is what the readings of today’s Mass seem to insist on. Zephaniah tells a timid, disheartened people, “Fear not, be not discouraged...God will rejoice over you with gladness.” To rub it in, the psalmist, despite our fears and weaknesses, cheerfully demands that we cry out with joy, that we be confident and unafraid. You might as well say, “Have a happy day,” or pass out smile buttons in the intensive care unit of the hospital.

St. Paul is just as bad. To a bickering, fearful and restless community he writes, “Be unselfish. Dismiss anxiety from your minds. Just trust our God and present your needs.” Then the church, supposedly will be flooded with peace, understanding and harmony. But what if it doesn’t work? What if Advent does not take? What if things get worse or the pain does not let up? The themes of Advent: happiness and hope, can annoy someone who hurts. When you are burdened with the weight of anxieties or overwhelmed with problems, when the darkness of life seems to have trapped you, forced joy or canned glee disgust the best of us.

Yet, it is nothing but our losses, our sadness, our fears, our darkness, our weight of sin that Advent confronts and calls us out of. Somehow it is this feeling of our own melancholy, our own frustration, our own sadness that must be laughed away. It is our sense of exile, our sense of confinement, the emotional baggage that must be burned off by the fire of love.

The crowds that John the Baptist encountered had, themselves, little reason for joy. They were an oppressed crowd well aware of their own need for deliverance, they felt a glimmer of anticipation that John might be the messiah. John proclaimed justice and righteousness, but the promise of new life that he spoke of was something far more than they might have suspected or wanted: “I am baptizing you with water, but there is one coming who is mightier than I. He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and in fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn in unquenchable fire.”

I used to think that this passage referred to the contrast between the saved and the lost - the good and the bad. My prayer was that I would be happy in the granary where all the wheat had been gathered, not burned in the fire. But this is a misreading of the Baptist’s words. The fire is part of the baptism in Jesus and his Spirit. Fire is not the fate of the lost, but it is the refining of the blessed. We all have our chaff, our waste, our failures, our disappointments, our sins, our darkness. We all have our winnowing, our time of struggle, of purifying, or separating, of cleansing. And it is the fire of Christ that will burn away our failures, our grief, our disappointments, our sin. The burdens of life that we carry do not make us unfit for Advent’s message of joy and hope. Those burdens make us prime candidates for Advent’s hope and joy. We who are overwhelmed by life are the prime candidates for this season of Advent.

We have all heard of Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” The only exit from Dante’s Purgatorio was a wall of fire. Once the pain was burned away by love, the other side was Paradise, sheer joy. Today, Gaudete Sunday, is a day for those who struggle, those who are disheartened, those caught in darkness, those overwhelmed by life - the message of God is clear, it is light, it is joy - do not be discouraged - the love of Christ transforms darkness, it brings us into eternal light. Trust the light of God!