Songs of Christmas fill the air with joy

Songs of Christmas fill the air this time of year. I like to take a word or phrase from a carol and make it my own. This year I chose the phrase “joyful and triumphant” from “O Come All Ye Faithful.”

Why do these words stand out in December of 2020? Maybe because I recognize I need them.

Joy is such a powerful little word. It dances, even when it's quiet.

There's a wonderful story in the Bible about Peter and John — two of the inner circle of the twelve disciples of Jesus. They were in Jerusalem heading to the temple for the hour of prayer. There was a man who was unable to walk being carried to the temple gate.

He'd been born lame — which made him unable to earn a living in that day. So he begged. And three p.m. was the perfect time with all the faithful coming to pray.

He called out to Peter and John without really looking at them. He must have felt ashamed, there on the ground, to have to seek the charity of others. The lowest of the low.

They said to him, “Look at us,” offering him dignity. He turned his face to them expectantly. Here were two men who would give him a few coins. But that's not what happened.

Peter said, “I do not possess silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you....” He grabbed him by the right hand and invoking Jesus' name told him to walk.

The man's feet and ankles were strengthened and with a leap he stood up and began to walk for the first time in his life. He entered the temple — another first — “walking and leaping and praising God.” The people who knew him as a lame beggar were overwhelmed with amazement.

They looked at Peter and John as if they were what in our day would be super heroes. Peter was having none of it. He basically told them to stop saying, “Why do you gaze at us, as if by our own power or piety we had made him walk?”

He gave credit to faith in the name of the resurrected Christ. What's always interested me in this story is it was Peter and John's faith that reached out to the lame man. That brought about this intense joy and triumph. All the lame beggar did was ask for a little money. Instead he received the priceless gift of healing.

“O come all ye faithful, Joyful and triumphant, O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem.” The song tells me that if I will keep on keeping on — keep trusting the birth, life, death, and resurrection of the Bethlehem baby called Immanuel, “God with us,” — then that faith will rise up in me in joy and triumph and touch others.

Together — even now in December 2020 with all its “lameness” — there can be “walking and leaping and praising God.”