While a certain type of American blowhard is blathering on about “wokeness” and defunding libraries, the rest of us have been quietly getting on with the life-long process of learning.
For example, while my theology and historical understanding of the Pharisees has been appropriately nuanced over the years, a recent conversation with Rabbi Oren from Kol Ami has led me to tweak my Communion Rite, and begin reading a new book on the Pharisaic movement.
I grew up learning about and talking about “slaves.” It is only recently that I have come to understand how that term essentializes and reduces the humanity of those held in bondage. I now try to avoid the term slave, for they were people, not objects. I lean into “enslaved people,” and similar terms, making clear that slavery did not define who they were, it is something that was done to them.
For years, I’ve pushed back against the term “sexual preference” as applied to members of the LGBTQI+ community, as if everything about us was reduced to what happens in bed and being gay was a choice, like say Rocky Road ice cream instead of Vanilla. I’ve tried any number of alternatives, but in the end, gay, lesbian, and all of those other letters gets to where we need to be and reflects the diversity of folks who do not fit the majority culture constructs and gender and relationship.
There is, however, one word that triggers a certain type of privileged American that still leaves me scratching my head. I mean, they make a big deal out of Memorial Day, go on and on about “The Greatest Generation” as if no other generation was ever great. But say the word “antifascist,” and they have you pegged as a cop-killing communist. And shorten it to “antifa,” and they just about explode.
I don’t think we need to redefine or abandon the term antifascist. I am proudly Antifa. You know, like my grandfather, part of that supposedly “Greatest Generation.”
The Second World War was a battle against Fascism, one that brought allies together from the opposite sides of the political and economic spectrum. American oligarchs, European colonizers, and Soviet communists worked together to defeat the Third Reich, the Kingdom of Italy, and the Empire of Japan. Ultimately, it was a battle between not great forms of government and truly terrible forms of government.
It was an American socialist who provided our Advent candle reading for today. Woody Guthrie was a displaced Okie, leaving the Dust Bowl for California, and eventually becoming a cultural icon as a musician in the American folk tradition. He supported organized labor and migrant farm workers, and even served in that “Greatest Generation.” He was a Merchant Marine on the Sea Porpoise when it was torpedoed by a Nazi U-Boat off of Utah Beach in 1944. And he was proudly “Antifa.”
He frequently performed with a sticker on his guitar that read “This Machine Kills Fascists,” as you can see in the Library of Congress photo on your Order of Service. Because music is a powerful thing indeed. But he referred to people as machines too, as we heard, working machines, but most of all, as hoping machines.
And there we land on this first theme of Advent, hope for something better than today. It is the voice of Harvey Milk speaking into a tape recorder in his apartment in San Francisco, convinced he is going to be assassinated, explaining why he took risks, his desire to offer hope to that kid in Altoona who cannot see a future for himself.
Hope is the voice of Ezekiel, in captivity with other Israelites in Babylon, imagining dry bones coming back to life, a passage as visually stunning as it is hope-filled.
Hope, in and of itself, is morally neutral. It is nothing more than a desire for something that does not currently exist, a state or a thing, something that we view as possible, even if in some cases improbable.
I hope for a world where cops and kindergartners are not gunned down with assault weapons. But there are plenty of folks out there hoping for a return to the days when black-identified people of color were considered second class citizens, or better yet, non-citizens, when LGBTQI+ people were forced into hiding and often into suicide, when women were treated as objects and servants to patriarchy. That is still hope, though hope for things we consider evil, and fortunately, in the category of improbable, for there are many of us who have no plan to give up our place at the table.
There are Christians who hope for apocalypse, and traditional Advent is for them, focused not so much on the first coming of the Christ as the infant Jesus sleeping in a manger, but instead focused on the second coming of the Christ, with all of the angels and flaming swords and such that we discussed last week.
They are not that much different from the many Judeans and Galileans at the time of Jesus who longed for a messianic king that would overthrow the foreign occupiers, restoring an independent Davidic kingdom, one that created unity, and for some uniformity, among the covenant people. Paul, a Pharisee, is not far off, though he sees the Day of the Lord through the lens of his experience of the gospel.
The hope of the apocalyptic sort was and is mostly passive, depending on God to act in very particular ways, assuming that God shared and shares their agenda, articulated or not, whether it was a renewed ancient Israel or a worldwide Christian patriarchy.
Their hope is not my hope. For one thing, I don’t believe in their god, a god who is arbitrary, co-dependent, and cruel. I’m not actually looking for God to give me my daily bread. God set in motion the powerful forces that gives us thumbs and brains and wheat and yeast and rain and sunshine. I figure if God gets me that close to the loaf, I can do the rest. And I certainly don’t believe in patriarchy. If God is God, then God does not have a gender, for gender is a construct and the various biological means of reproduction are accidents of evolution.
No, I start with the assumption that creation is mysterious but essentially good, that on the whole being is better than never being, that beauty and even pain are part of a miraculous and mysterious system. It is true that people suck sometimes, a lot of the time if we are honest, but people can also be amazing and infinitely cool. The world is full of potential Kendrick Lamars and Greta Thunbergs and Malala Yousafzais.
Paul’s preaching leaned into the passive. Be good and wait. The preaching of Jesus was not passive. We will never know whether he really believed in a Day of the Lord and an earthly Davidic Kingdom, though he never took any action that would lead to the latter. But we know this: Jesus preached and practiced hope in action.
He preached “be good and do.” He didn’t just talk about hungry people. He fed them. He didn’t just pray for sick and injured people. He healed them. He didn’t just complain about conmen doing business in the Temple courtyard. He confronted them.
What is your vision? What is your hope?
Mine includes building a world where I don’t have to be antiracist because the powerful lie of race is no more.
It includes coming to church without worrying about a mass shooting because an amendment written in an age of single-shot muskets, meant to protect those who enslaved from rebellion by those they enslaved, has been repealed, and our government is constrained because we love freedom, not because of the constant threat of violence.
It means a world where boys can wear lipstick and girls can command the armies we won’t really need because we find our better selves as a species, protecting the planet and the amazing forms of life that have evolved on this blue and green jewel.
It means an economy where the hungry are fed and the sick are offered healing and comfort, where your success is based on your hard work and talent and not the accident of being born into a family that was once enslaved, or one that profited from the evil of slavery, a family that stole land or a family that was driven off the land.
The Second Coming folks can wait for God to come fix things. They’re gonna be waiting a long time, ’cause that just isn’t how it works.
A real Jesus people live their hope. They are Fascist killing hope machines, with deadly guitars and dragon-slaying ballots and songs of hope and brushstrokes of joy, with ripe tomatoes and warm mittens. They rush into burning towers, tackle the bad guy with the gun, weep for the night, then embrace the joy of the morning and live.
The day of the Lord? That’s today. God with us? Happened. Still happening. Hope? Well, that’s up to you.
Amen.