Disruptive Joy

22 December 2024 – Advent IV

First Reading – Nikki Giovanni, The Women and The Men (1970)

if it does not sing discard the ear
for poetry is song
if it does not delight discard
the heart for poetry is joy
if it does not inform then close
off the brain for it is dead
if it cannot heed the insistent message
that life is precious
which is all we poets
wrapped in our loneliness
are trying to say

Second Reading – Micah 5:2-5a

Third Reading – Luke 1:39-55

Sermon

We are the blessed stewards of an amazing pipe organ, and the blessed partners with an amazing Music Director and Organist, so I do not begrudge the sermon-free Sundays of Lent III and Advent III. In fact, preachers in liturgical settings missed Advent III for decades, as this was the week traditionally sacrificed to Christmas Pageants. Still, Gaudete Sunday, with its pink candle and theme of joy, is unique, and worthy of our attention, so I am going to attend to our week four theme, love, while also leaning into last week’s theme. And we’ll start with our reading from the Gospel According to Luke the Physician, Mary visiting Elizabeth, and giving us the lines that came to be known as the Magnificat, “My soul magnifies the Lord,” and so on.

We could embrace our not particularly well-hidden cynicism, and problematize the entire story, that of an unwed teen who either lies about her virginity or is involuntarily impregnated, by the divine or a cad of the more common variety. Neither approach offers a promising start to a story of salvation. 

But I understand why early Christians came to believe in the virgin birth, how it fit into their pre-scientific understanding of purity and sacrifice and a transactional god, how they were interpreting the ancient prophets. I just don’t believe in that transactional god, and I’m not sure Jesus believed in that transactional god, so I’m not ready to let salvation hang on the two Nativity narratives. 

Jesus saves by changing the way we understand God and therefore the way we understand ourselves, blows right past all of the traditional Jewish notions of who is in and who is out, who is clean and who is untouchable, and replaces judgment with grace. This is a rather important detail, for drawing lines and pursuing retributive justice are the most human things to do, and pre-rabbinic Judaism had always responded to cultural pressure by doubling down on what set them apart, on odd practices in diet and dress and worship. The weirder they seemed to others, the more they felt themselves, much like today’s rich and famous.

Jesus didn’t do that, didn’t care about in-group and out-group, and for all we might criticize Paul, the evangelist to the Gentiles, the end result of his mission is a religious community defined by choice, not race or ethnicity.

Still, some want Mary to be a virgin, choose Matthew’s kings and Luke’s manger, even want the brutality at the end of Christ’s life to be rendered a “Good Friday,” and if that works for you, hey… go for it. 

Jesus and John as cousins makes sense, miracle babies leaping in the womb maybe less so. Though I can totally roll with Mary’s words about divine reversal, the rich and powerful brought down, the lowly lifted and filled. The meme that circulates every year about this time nails it… these two pregnant women are sitting around talking about a revolution.

Joy might be excessive in describing Mary’s situation. Relieved that she hasn’t been stoned in the street seems more likely. And we are mindful that while some expectant mothers are joyful, like Elizabeth, many women who find themselves pregnant are not joyful, and even in that ancient context, they could make decisions about their own bodies.

And again, joy might make sense through the lens of a post-resurrection theology, but let’s not forget that there are dead bodies everywhere in this story, from the slaughtered toddler boys of Bethlehem in Matthew’s nativity narrative to the head of Elizabeth’s son on a plate, to Mary’s son brutally tortured and publicly executed.

I want to suggest that joy is appropriate and is an incredibly subversive and a necessary spiritual practice, one that reflects something at the heart of a progressive and reconstructive Christianity. 

While Fundamentalists preach a transactional god who is at best co-dependent and at worst a perpetrator of domestic violence, we preach a God of creativity and grace. 

While they preach original sin and a world that is corrupt and broken, we preach a world filled with blessing and beauty. 

While they preach damnation, we preach possibility. 

And as they wait to be raptured out of their luxury SUVs, we’re out there living meaningful lives right now, trying to make the world a better place, and experiencing joy because God is good, filled with sweet sweet things, from that glass of summertime tea to the first chiming notes of Carol of the Bells.

They want us to believe that we are brutish animals climbing our way to the top of a rancid pile in a capitalist battle royale, keep us angry and isolated and worshiping all of the wrong things. 

And we say “Nope. Hard pass. We choose community and caring and a really good curry with friends on a Friday night.”

Nikki Giovanni, the poet who wrote our first reading, was a queer black poet in America, three times marginalized, and yet she came to be associated not only with the Black Arts Movement, but also with “black joy.” And let me tell you, black joy is revolutionary. Just ask any woman of color who has been told that her joy is too loud, for black girl joy is always too loud to those who would oppress.

Every single celebration of Queer Pride is an act of revolutionary joy, even if I don’t have the abs to ride on a float topless down Main Street. And let me assure you, I don’t.

And love is every bit as revolutionary as joy, for all their talk of family values is empty when their family value is patriarchy and control, the misogyny of the Taliban but with better PR. 

When women empower women, when women celebrate the accomplishment of women, it is an act of defiance.

The 1759 French satire “Candide” by Voltaire pokes fun at an empty-headed optimism. It was the author’s response to two truly horrific events, the Seven Years War and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that killed tens of thousands. That is not the sort of fantastical optimism I am suggesting as a Christian spiritual practice. We are still finite creatures dancing on a razor’s edge between life and death, delight and despair, subject to natural processes of destruction and re-creation, earthquakes and disease, and to our own cruelty and stupidity as a species. That is a reality and we deal with it, in functional and dysfunctional ways.

The bottom line is you did not call yourself into existence. As the great German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher noted in his 1830 dogmatics, we are absolutely dependent on a mystery he and we choose to name as God. And while not everything can be rendered a good, not even a life, there seems to be a final surplus of beauty and love, of creativity. There is absolutely no reason the self-organizing cosmos required the creation of our little blue marble spinning in one solar system in one galaxy, and yet it did. There is absolutely no reason the mechanics of evolution required the creation of woodpeckers and dandelions and Nikki Giovanni, and yet, there they are, joyous testaments to a good God. There is no reason the Christian faith, constructed to help us find meaning, required an understanding of God as creation and grace, and yet that is our faith.

Of course for-profit health insurance is a bold structural evil! Profit over people is always evil. We need to articulate real alternatives to structural evil. But we can’t just stand in wilderness in our hair-shirts all the time. We burn-out and people tune out. 

We use a placeholder we call God for all that is love and creativity and grace flowing through our lives, and accept that the people around him experienced those forces in the presence of Jesus, that those forces are still present with us in the world. The bad god in the sky may be dead, and rightfully so, but our God is alive, still speaking creation, still calling prophets, still feeding the hungry, still dancing in the kitchen while dinner cooks.

Those who preach fear and division may win for the day, may misappropriate the name of Jesus, but they will never defeat our love, our love expressed in resistance, our love expressed as joy. As the carol proclaims, “Joy to the World,” for God is here.

Amen.