The child, sleeping in the night, will bring us goodness and light.
Rejoice! Goodness and light…hope…is on the way.
Rejoice.
In the Christian calendar, we have reached the mid-point of Advent, the season that points toward the coming of hope.
This middle Sunday is called Gaudette Sunday. Gaudette means Rejoice. Rejoice, because hope is on the way.
I want to acknowlege that getting to joy…even getting to hope may feel like a pretty steep hill to climb for a lot of us this season.
I almost never preach from gospel texts, but I checked the lectionary, the list of Bible texts for each Sunday…I checked for this Sunday…for Rejoice Sunday… and discovered that the Gospel today it’s the call to repentence from the John the Baptist story.
So, here we go.
Many of you, I expect, will remember that John the Baptist is protrayed in the Gospels as almost a wild man…he lived in the wilderness…ate locusts…wore a hair shirt…
He was the original baptizer…sent to prepare the way for Jesus.
John was…a truth teller would be the polite way to describe him…he didn’t mince words…he called his audience a bunch of vipers…snakes…no more pious than a pile of rocks. He was serious when he told them they needed to repent.
“What should we do?” the crowds asked him. This is from the Gospel of Luke. “Whoever has two coats must share with someone who has none…”
If you have more than you can use, more than you need…if you have an extra coat…give it away. Go to Goodwill or the Rescue Mission and share with those in need. That was John’s instruction for most people.
But even tax collectors came to be baptized. “What should we do?” they asked. John told them to collect no more than the amount prescribed…don’t collect more than you are supposed to.
Seems a pretty modest ethical standard.
Soldiers asked what they should do. “Do not extort money by threats or false accusations…and be satisfied with your wages.”
Some of our political leaders would have a hard time with those tests…I’m just saying…
But for all his reputation as a wild man and a radical…what John told his audiences…if you have more than you need, be generous and…if you are in a position of power… don’t be a crook or a bully.
Hardly a traditional standard for holiness…
And it wouldn’t pass for radical in most circles today either…even most conservative circles…
John was preaching repentence…metanoia is the Greek work…repentence…conversion…a change of heart.
And John was trying to describe, to give specifics for what that repentence would look like…in practice…when we’ve had that change of heart.
For John and for Jesus later, the ritual…the outward sign of the inner truth of repentence was baptism. It was a tool that those prophets used to open hearts and to symbolize conversion. A tool to build, person by person, the Beloved Community.
As we wait in this advent season, as we prepare ourselves to welcome the birth of hope in our hearts…
What tools do we need to build a world worthy of being called beloved? A world in which we can find hope?
And what tools should be off the table?
“…the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
Do you remember Audre Lorde’s most famous quote? Have you heard it used in progressive circles? Yes?
Have you used it? (Raise hand) I have.
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
The year was 1979 and Lorde had agreed to be one of the speakers at an NYU sponsored conference on feminism, which was a hot topic in the academy.
But when she spoke, she offered a biting critique of the conference.
“I stand here as a Black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of Black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable…And what does it mean…when the two Black women who did present here were literally found at the last hour? What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy.”
As long as we use the master’s tools…”only the most narrow parameters of change are possible…”
“…the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
Her words became transformative. Still are for many of us. Because we know…almost instantly…and intuitively…what they mean… and know, somehow, that they ring very true. Or at least we think they do.
Nothing can be solved by becoming the thing we want to dismantle. If we move into the master’s house and use the tools of control that the master used, we’ve only changed the master…we haven’t changed the control, or the violence or the oppression.
Amen. Right?
I wonder though if Audre Lorde’s words have come to be misused. Or at least incompletely understood.
Micah White, one of the co-founders of the Occupy movement, describes Lorde’s phrase as the ‘atomic bomb of discussion enders.”
“it can be applied to absolutely everything from language, to violence, to art. … If the master’s tools cannot be appropriated (and used) then, in an age where capitalism claims ownership over everything, only resignation is possible.”
We should just throw up our hands and give up. I guess. Or should we?
What tools can we use?
Let me give one example. The 14th Amendment, written and passed to free the enslaved population of the US, was later appropriated and used to enshrine corporations as people …leading in our day to the Citizen’s United decision and so much that we progressives decry.
Master’s tool if there ever there was one. Right?
Does that mean that we should abandon the 14th Amendment? Just give it over to the corporate lobbyists? Let it go?
Or should our work be to reclaim that tool as our own? And question whether it was every really implemented as it was intended.
The tool of the masters that Audre Lorde focused on most was exclusion. It was the exclusion of categories of real lived human experience that she critiqued most effectively.
“For women,” she wrote, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive. … Interdependency … is the way to a freedom which allows the ‘I’ (the individual) to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative.”
In order to be creative.
It was the exclusion of all those human truths that point toward interconnection and compassion…that was the ultimate master’s tool. Exclusion. Leaving us with only competition. And scarcity. Just Win-Lose.
No space for the valuing of difference.
“Difference,” Lorde wrote, “is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.”
Is it possible…just possible…that our real, lived experience, our varied and particular real lived experience can be the source of our power?
Is it possible that our differences can become the incubator of compassion. Not the source of fear or hatred. But compassion?
Is it possible, that despair is not our destination?
“Gather yourselves,” say the Hopi elders. “See who is in the water with you and celebrate.”
And celebrate. Rejoice.
Exclusion says…keep that extra coat…you can’t spare a coat… ever…you can never have too many coats…you need every coat you can acquire.
It is the old story of who is in and who is out, the sheep and the goats…
The privileged and the expendable.
It is a question…at heart…of who we are and who we want to be.
Are we…do we want to be…merely homo economicus…the capitalist ideal…interested only in acquiring more and more and more for ourselves…never satisfied…as long as one of our neighbors seems to have more or bigger or better than we have…
Is that who we want to be? Is that how we want to live?
Acquiring and hoarding what we acquire?
Operating out of scarcity even in our privilege? Willing to bribe and bully to stay ahead?
Is that where our hope lies?
The study of our close cousins in the primate world tells us we have a choice. Primatologist Sarah Brosnan, offered two apes, in adjacent cages, pieces of carrot as rewards for performing a simple task. Both apes were happy to perform the task over and over. And enjoyed the carrots.
Occasionally, however, she would give one of them a grape, the favorite reward…desired much more than a piece of carrot. When one received a grape, the other would refuse to perform the task or even throw the carrot back at the researcher.
That was the expected result. Homo or Primate Economicus. Competititve. And greedy.
What they did not expect was that the grape recipient, the ape who got the grape, might be upset as well.
What they discovered, is that the grape recipient would often refuse the grape unless their partner, in the adjacent cage, also got a grape.
Fairness. Equity. Connection. Relationship.
Apes, chimpanzees, and small children…this experiment has been done with all three…they all usually prefer rewards to be equal, complain when rewards are unequal…demonstrate what we would call compassion…feeling with and for the other…rather than greed…
I do not want to pretend that this is all simple, that we just have to choose hope, choose collaboration, choose compassion, choose love…
We are all too familiar with how the ways of the world live within us…not just around us.
And there is a very different conversation needed with and about those who are truly in need…the hungry and the houseless.
But at the mid-point of this advent season, I think it is critical that we remember that we do have choices…they may not be simple…they may not be easy… but they are choices…
Repent, preached John the Baptist.
But when he was asked what that would look like, the examples that he gave were not all that radical…
Share with those in need. Don’t lie. Don’t cheat. Don’t be a bully.
These are things we hold out and hold up to our children as values to live by.
Rev. Deanna Vandiver: “To our dominant culture framed by a scarcity narrative, I offer this truth… When we see that our days are replete with abundance, we are less afraid. When we are less afraid, we connect more. The more connection we see in our lives, the more abundance we notice.”
It becomes a self-sustaining prophecy.
This is not easy. Welcoming the rich diversity of human experience, making sure that those who are on the margins are welcomed in and into leadership, trusting the miracle that happens when we actually listen and learn from one another…
This is not easy.
Deanna goes on “sometimes the abundance will fill us up. Sometimes it will wear us out. It is however [and without doubt] a more loving way to move through the world than a life lived out of scarcity. …Choose to err on the side of love and generosity.”
The master’s tools of divisiveness, of pitting some of us against others of us…
The master’s tools require life to be grim, always a competition… require us to be on guard…its win-lose all the way…
Being on guard makes it almost impossible to feel joy.
Oh, we may feel some satisfaction at a victory or two along the way, when we have defeated someone else…but I believe real joy is hard to come by…
Perhaps the most radical thing I have to say to you today is that joy, delight in each other, awe at the diversity of the complex persons with whom we journey…
Joy may be the most radical tool in our toolbox.
From a conversation between Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, in the recently published reporting of conversations between them called The Book of Joy:
Words of the Archbishop:
“hope is the antidote to despair. Hope is … nurtured by relationship, by community, whether that community is a literal one or one fashioned from the long memory of human striving whose membership includes Gandhi, King, Mandela, and countless others. Despair turns us inward. Hope sends us into the arms of others.”
Hope sends us into the arms of others.
Here is the hard part and the hope.
The master’s tools are in us… in all of us, I believe.
That is the hard part.
But there is more in us that just that. That is the hope. There is the impulse to fairness. The instinct for compassion, and the capacity for joy. All of those are in us as well.
I began with John the Baptist. On this December morning, let me conclude with a bit from the Santa Claus tradition. Rev. Lynn Ungar writes:
“what if there is no list of who is naughty and nice, and no one is checking to see if we measure up? What if the whole scheme rests, not on the threat of punishment…[or on a belief in scarcity]…but rather on the premise that we long to give back as we are given to, that we find joy in returning to the world as beautiful a reflection of what we are given as we can muster?”
“I’ll say it,” Lynn writes. “I don’t believe in Santa—not the one with the twice checked list at any rate. I am, however, a steadfast fan of the reindeer, who are so in love with the idea of delivering gifts that they are, despite all reason…able to fly.”
It is a choice.
We can become more gentle and more compassionate…brighter, more empowered, less fearful…
It is a choice.
Hope is a choice. It is a life choice.
The life we will risk everything for. The only life we have.
Rejoice.
Prayer
Will you pray with me?
Spirit of Life. Spirit of Love.
As we move into the heart of this holiday season,
Help us remember that we have tools enough, and strength enough, and faith enough to choose hope.
Help us remember that we can trust our instincts for fairness and our impulse for compassion.
Help us remember that although everything is not in our power, we have the power to bring more love into the world.
It is a choice. And so it matters how we live.
Help us remember to be thankful and whenever and wherever, and however we can…to rejoice.
Amen
Topics: Birth