When I was counselor at a United Methodist summer camp, we sometimes had to sing with the kids that song “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart.”

You know the song?

I hate that song. 

Especially this time of year. 

It’s always been hard for me to feel at peace during Advent. It’s never been easy for me to feel joy down in my heart at Christmas. And it took me a while to understand how that’s okay.

It took me a while to understand that it’s okay I don’t feel very joyfol or at peace during this season because it took me a while to understand the Gospel. 

It starts with a particular Christmas Eve when I was boy during my parents’ on-again, off-again marriage. 

My mother was working the night shift at the hospital, and my grandpa was there to keep an eye on my little sister and me. We had finished up the dishes when my father came home from whatever bar had closed early for the holiday. He was quite drunk. It wasn’t the first time he’d come home drunk, but he’d never come home drunk on Christmas. The next Christmas he didn’t come home at all. I remember my mom driving me around town to help her look for his car. He was parked in front of someone else’s home, a woman. I still remember the colored lights on whoever’s porch reflecting on my mom’s windshield.

After my parents finally split up for good, my mom struggled knowing that we weren’t having the sort of Christmas she thought we ought to have, the Christmas she thought other families gave their children. The oughts always accuse, and this ought stressed her out. Disappointed her. Frustrated her. And every year it would come to a head while we decorated the Christmas tree. Every year, trimming the tree invariably ended with me shouting unfair accusations and shedding tears and my mom throwing the treetop angel on to the floor and yelling “To hell with it all!” One Christmas, I recall, she pushed the artificial tree down on its side just as the jack-in-box from the stop- motion Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer said, “We’re all misfits.”

Call it post-yule stress disorder. Feelings of peace and joy have always been hard for me at Christmas. And, as a pastor, I know I’m hardly alone. Christians at Christmas are often made to feel guily if they’re not filled with joy down in their hearts. 

For Christians to think they ought to feel a certain feeling simply because they’re Christian, not only is that impossible— and impossibly cruel to put on others who suffer grief and depression— it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about what kind of word is the Gospel. 

The Gospel is the promise that gives you Christ and everything that belongs to him. 

And that’s enough!

Martin Luther said that the Gospel of God’s condescension to us to be with us and for us in Jesus Christ sets us free to name things as they are. You can let everything in your life be what it is, and you can let your feelings be what they are. You’re free not to pretend because the point of the promise called Gospel is not that you’re supposed to feel a certain way, joyful and at peace all time.

The point of the Gospel promise is that something glad and joyous has happened, outside of you, and, regardless of how we feel and what’s going on in our lives, we Christians agree it’s worth celebrating. 

The Gospel may not be a joyful word in you this season but it’s still a joyful word in and of itself no matter how you’re feeling or what cross you’re bearing because it’s a word that gives you Christ himself. You have him in his promise regardless of your feelings. The Gospel may not always give you a peaceful, easy feeling, but the Gospel does give you the Prince of Peace, as real and present with you by means of his promise as he was in Mary’s womb. 

And what would you rather have when the you-know-what hits the fan? 

A feeling? 

Or God? 

No matter how you feel inside, you can always cling to this promise outside of you.

Our message this season isn’t “You should feel glad and joy-filled and at peace (and something’s the matter with you if you’re not).” 

Our message this season isn’t about you at all. 

It’s “Hear the good news, for you is born this day in the City of David…a savior, the Prince of Peace, who will free his people from their sins…” 

The Gospel may not be a joyful word in you this Christmas, but it’s still a joyful word because it’s true.

And regardless of what’s true about you this season, you’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy outside of you in the Gospel. You’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy outside of you in this promise that Christ will love you, no matter what. And because the empty grave proves that Christ keeps his promises, you can rest assured— you can be at peace— that, in the end, with you, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”