Second Sunday of Christmas 2026: Year A - Joy Returns - Jeremiah 31:7-14

(The following was first preached at the 8th Street Church, Oklahoma City, USA)

Jeremiah 31:7–14

This is a text of joy.

And there are people who are just… bad at joy.

You know them.

They’re not unkind. They’re not pessimists exactly. They’re just constitutionally incapable of enjoying a good thing without immediately qualifying it.

You say, “The weather is beautiful today,” and they say, “Yeah, but it won’t last.”

You say, “The kids are finally healthy,” and they say, “Well, something’s always going around.”

You say, “Christmas is coming,” and they say, “Sure… but January winter is right after that.”

Some people clap when a song ends.

Others immediately start evaluating the acoustics.

I will confess, I can be one of those people.

A few years ago, my wife Holly and I were watching one of those movies — you know the kind. Hopeful. Comforting. Slightly predictable. Everything is clearly heading toward a happy ending.

About a quarter way through, Holly said,

“This is nice. I like this movie.”

Without even thinking, I said,

“Yeah… but something bad is definitely about to happen.”

She just stared at me and said,

“Do you hear yourself?”

That was a moment of clarity.

I think this sort of sentiment leaks out of me without even knowing it sometimes. Every year Greg White creates a Christmas card for the pastoral staff.

Notice what this year’s card was…

Here’s the truth:

I trust suffering.

I understand grief.

I know how to preach lament.

Joy makes me nervous. Because I fear it’s fleeting.

And, that’s probably why Jeremiah has always felt so familiar to me.

Jeremiah is not known for joy.

He’s known for tears.

Warnings.

Collapse.

Consequences.

Scholars call him the weeping prophet. And they’re not wrong.

If you read most of the book, Jeremiah sounds like the person at the party who gently takes your drink away and says, “We should talk.”

Like the world where we live, wars and rumors of war surrounded him. Babylonian CNN talking heads were always reaching for clicks, sixth century BC Fox News pumped a conservative agenda, and ancient MSNBC tried to counter that on the other side.

He lived through foreign invasion, political collapse, exile, and national humiliation. Regimes were conquered. Empires flattened his world.

And Jeremiah stood in the wreckage, faithfully naming what had been lost.

That is where we are. That’s what we’ve tried to do around here.

And for a long time, as a pastor—and especially over the last ten years—I’ve leaned into that part of the story.

I’ve taught us how to lament well.

We’ve named grief.

We’ve honored pain.

We’ve refused denial.

We’ve told the truth about loss.

And honestly?

We’re good at it.

We know how to sit with sorrow.

We know how to hold complexity.

We know how to pray when answers don’t come quickly.

But that’s why this text matters today.

Because Jeremiah 31 does something unexpected for us.

Right in the middle of all the devastation—right between chapters full of bad news—this poem shows up like it took a wrong turn.

Right in the middle of a day and time when a country is being split, when we're unsure about our future, our present, or our neighbor…

Jeremiah offers us something.

Suddenly there’s singing.

Dancing.

Feasting.

Joy.

And it comes to us in a divine command.

It’s almost suspicious.

If you’ve read Jeremiah, this chapter feels like the prophet has been replaced by a completely different person.

This is like your most serious friend suddenly saying in the middle of a funeral,

“I made a playlist. Let’s dance.”

You don’t trust it at first.

You start looking around for the fine print.

But here’s the thing.

Jeremiah isn’t canceling the concern, or the worry, or the grief.

He’s interrupting it.

And that is what matters.

Because joy here isn’t naïve.

It isn’t earned.

It isn’t a reward for good behavior.

It’s a declaration.

God says:

“Sing.”

“Shout.”

“Dance.”

“Feast.”

Not because exile, or difficulty, or worry, or concern, or fear, or hurt didn’t or doesn’t happen.

But, because:

God refuses to let suffering be the most interesting thing about this grand story.

God refuses to let pain be the headline.

God refuses to let grief define the future.

God refuses to let loss have the final edit.

And that is deeply inconvenient for those of us who are very good at lament.

Lament almost feels responsible.

Joy feels risky.

Lament feels honest.

Joy feels like tempting fate.

We worry that if we enjoy something too much, it might be taken away.

That if we celebrate too freely, we’ll jinx it.

So we hedge.

We qualify.

We say, “This is good, but…”

And Jeremiah 31 doesn’t allow that.

There’s no “but.”

There’s just singing. And dancing.

Which brings us to the part of this sermon where I need to confess that preaching this text make me uncomfortable—not because the promises are big, but because they’re joyful.

As a pastor,

I don’t like promise-preaching.

I don’t like transactional theology.

I don’t like the idea that God is predictable or manageable or obligated.

And Jeremiah 31 could easily be misread that way.

But that’s not what’s happening here.

Because the key line—the line that unlocks everything—is easy to miss:

“I am Israel’s father,

and Ephraim is my firstborn.”

This isn’t God making a deal.

This is a parent speaking to wounded children.

And that changes everything.

Not long ago, Holly and I were raising teenagers in the middle of a pandemic. Annabelle was early in high school. Watson was in college, trying to decide whether to go back or take a gap semester because nothing made sense anymore.

And here’s what you learn when your kids grow up:

You lose control.

You don’t get to manage outcomes anymore.

You don’t get to fix everything.

All you really have… is a word.

There were moments when all I could say was,

“Trust me.”

And I could say this because I loved them.

Because I wasn’t going anywhere.

Because I had a longer view.

That’s Jeremiah 31.

Right in the middle of chaos, God doesn’t offer an explanation.

God offers presence.

“I’m still your Father.”

“You’re still my children.”

“This story isn’t over.”

And then God does something remarkable.

God talks about joy before everything is fixed.

There’s dancing before the empire falls.

There’s singing before the rebuilding starts.

There’s feasting before the story is resolved.

Which tells us something important about God:

Joy is not a denial of reality.

Joy is a refusal to surrender hope by being surprised by joy.

And maybe that’s the pastoral move we’re being invited into this Christmas.

To stop letting lament be the whole story.

To enjoy a good thing without immediately bracing for loss.

To celebrate without apology.

To trust joy without footnotes.

Jeremiah—of all people—gives us permission to do that.

Which might be the most surprising miracle of all.

And I think that is the kind of joy Jeremiah is expressing… a surprising joy… is what we now know is a Christmas joy…

And the response to that joy is celebration. Singing. Feasting. Dancing.

——

I grew up in the Church of the Nazarene. And if there was one thing we were known for was that we didn’t dance. Dancing wasn’t exactly a holiness activity. Some Nazarenes were concerned it was a slippery slope. It could lead to sex.

Other Nazarenes were concerned that sex could lead to dancing.

So, I remember very clearly my very first dance.

The sixth grade Christmas dance.

John Adams Middle School.

Mason City, Iowa.

1989.

I was 12.

It was held, of course, in the gym-a-cafa-torium—the one room in the building where everything happened and nothing ever felt right. The Parent-Teacher Organization had transformed it with crepe paper, dim lights, and the unmistakable confidence of adults who believed this was what kids liked.

Harry O’Neil from the local radio station—KLSS—was the DJ. He was a real DJ. Which meant this was serious business. The lights were low. The music was playing. And in the most predictable formation in adolescent history, all the boys were pressed flat against the one wall with the punch table… and all the girls against the other wall with all the snacks… and an eternal chasm separated us.

We all wanted to dance.

We all wanted to be brave.

We all wanted to touch someone of the opposite sex and not immediately die.

The moms stood along the edges of the room like park rangers observing a fragile ecosystem, whispering things like, “Oh my gosh, look at them,” as if we were baby giraffes attempting our first steps.

If purgatory exists, I’m convinced it looks exactly like a middle school dance on a Friday afternoon in the month of December. And if penance isn’t paid, you’re doomed to stay there forever—suspended in terror, gangliness, and unchecked puberty. Pimples. Elbows. Knees. Feet that seemed far too large for the rest of the body.

We all knew it: someone had to make the first move.

We were ready.

The overwhelming cloud of Ralph Lauren Polo cologne was proof of that.

I was dressed for the occasion—Z Cavaricci jeans rolled at the bottom, boat shoes, and a turtleneck with a Christmas sweater layered confidently on top, put on to cover up the incredible insecurity.

It was… a look.

All we needed was one brave soul to break the seal.

We were frozen in a moment that refused to move.

And then Harry O’Neil did it.

He played a slow song.

A song from the era of my dad. A Groovy Kind of Love updated by the great Phil Collins proving that even in sixth grade, our love lives were already deeply middle-aged.

And that’s when he stepped out.

I watched as my friend Jack bravely broke ranks, walked straight across the room to a little blond girl that I had secretly been crushing on. My heart dropped as I could see how it was all going to play out in my mind’s eye. He’d sweep her off her feet. They’d start going together, be the high school sweethearts, win homecoming king and queen, rush off to college together, and then into a life of happiness.

I stood stunned, horrified, that he was going to capture the moment that I had been dreaming of and that I was going to miss.

It all was happening in slow motion.

I watched him as he walked up to her with the confidence of every teen heartthrob we’d ever seen on television, and said loud enough for everyone to hear, “Chris wants to dance with you.”

And before I could protest, deny, or fake my own death, a mob of middle-school maniacs shoved me forward into the open chasm no one had dared to enter—while the girls, apparently operating under the same unspoken agreement, shoved her toward me.

Suddenly, there we were.

My hands—somehow—were on her waist.

Her arms—somehow—were around my neck.

We were face to face, body to body. No instructions had been provided, so a nudge from the side got us started, and we began swaying with the confidence of people assembling IKEA furniture without the directions.

I couldn’t believe it. Our faces were merely inches apart, and she was smiling as she looked at me!

And a perfect circle of a hundred other middle schoolers surrounded us, watching in stunned silence.

They were all terrified someone might force them to do this.

And secretly hoping someone would.

And my heart soared.

In the middle of insecurity and locker-slam anxiety—there it was. Joy. I was dancing. Dancing with my feet, sure… but mostly dancing with my heart.

And once that dam broke, there was no stopping it! There I was, all in.

The robot.

The running man.

The sprinkler.

Fast dances.

Slow dances.

On and on and on.

Dancing to Foreigner, Richard Marx, Def Leopard, Lionel Richie, Paula Abdul, New Kids on the Block, Bobby Brown, Tiffany, George Michael, Chicago…

I danced like a kid who had just discovered gravity didn’t apply to him anymore. I danced for the rest of the night—or at least for the next 45 minutes until our parents showed up in minivans to take us home.

But for that brief, glorious window of time, I had found something I wanted to capture. Bottle up. Save forever.

Because for one junior-high evening, in a gym-a-cafetorium decorated by well-meaning, giddy moms, joy showed up…

…and somehow, incredibly, it asked me to dance.

That night taught me something true—not just about dancing, but about life. Joy rarely begins with confidence. It usually begins with fear. With hesitation. With someone—sometimes not even you—taking the first step.

And maybe that’s part of the good news of faith.

That God doesn’t wait for us to muster up the courage, get the rhythm right, or stop being awkward. God steps into the room first. God breaks the silence. God reaches out a hand and says, “Come on. Trust me.”

And when we finally let ourselves be moved—clumsily, imperfectly, joyfully—we discover what we were made for all along.

Not just to stand frozen against the wall…but to dance.

So maybe the invitation today isn’t to grit our teeth and believe harder.

Maybe it’s simpler than that.

Maybe it’s to laugh.

To sing.

To dance.

To enjoy what’s happening in life without qualifying it.

Because Christmas shows us that God refuses to let life’s difficulty be the most interesting thing about the story.

And that, friends, is very good news.