Read: Genesis 17
While joy is always present, it is not always perceptible. There are seasons in our lives when it feels like joy is absent: times for weeping and mourning rather than for laughing and dancing (Ecclesiastes. 3:4).
As you lean into the rhythm of these seasons, you may find that a different kind of joy becomes available even in the middle of weeping and mourning. Knowing that laughing and dancing will return in the future can be a source of joy right now. The joyful vision we’re waiting for and working toward, the one where God’s reign has come and God’s will is done, stands like a great big tree in the future. It casts its shadow back through time to the present moment, and the expectant joy it generates shades us from the glaring heat of ongoing trials.
Voices within the Black community in the United States offer lessons on expectant joy. Consider, for example, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech. King describes himself as happy to live in the troubled age in which he does. He is happy not because of the challenges he faces, but because he sees a vision of God’s future. The joy of that vision is a filter through which he interprets the present moment, which is charged with the potential for change.*
We find expectant joy in this week’s scripture readings, especially in Abraham’s encounter with God. God repeats and elaborates on God’s promise of descendants, making it clear that the promise belongs to Sarah, too. Remember that Abraham and Sarah have been living with God’s promise for twenty-five years at this point in their story. What joy have they discovered in their expectation?
Expectant joy is ours as we wait for God’s reign to come in fullness, flowing with streams of living justice. Like King, we are on the edge of a promised land that we may or may not enter ourselves. Like Abraham and Sarah, we find ourselves living in anticipation of a promise. But the land is there, the promise is real, and the weight of their reality reveals the expectant joy we will explore this week.