MCCNY
December 17, 2023
The spirit of God is upon me, because God has anointed me; God has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of God’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; For I, God, love justice, I hate robbery and wrongdoing; I will faithfully give them their recompense, and I will make an everlasting covenant with them. Their descendants shall be known among the nations, and their offspring among the peoples; all who see them shall acknowledge that they are a people whom God has blessed.
Greetings and blessings from the Council of Elders.
I have been thinking for a while about joy and what it is and whether I have any, and I need to be honest and warn you that today will be a struggle, mostly for me but also for you all, given that it’s Advent Three: Joy Candle Week and given that, on a basic level, I am constitutionally suspicious of joy. Joy is one of those things, like forgiveness, that people seem to talk about with a lot of certainty and confidence, like it’s inevitable or even fathomable; people telling us that we should have it and when, and what it does and how it feels. And to smile more.
We’re told I think that joy is a synonym for happiness, for example, or as extremely deep happy-ness, but we’re not really taught about how it’s different from being happy. We’re told to think of this season as intrinsically joyful and happy, we’re practically bullied into it by capitalism and compulsory Christianity. And Joy feels equated with decking halls, for example, or what fun to ride, or ho ho ho, which are all fine things don’t get me wrong. (Though all my favorite hos are homos.) Happiness is lovely. Of course, of course, for pity’s sake. I’m not a grinch. I don’t want to spoil joy. But I don’t want to keep getting battered by it, and I’d like to think about it and appreciate what it is and, maybe more importantly for me, what it’s not.
Because we are living in this terrible time. The October 7 attack of Israel was the biggest escalation since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. More than 100 hostages are still held in Gaza. In the responsive strike against Hamas, Palestinian homes, hospitals, schools have been leveled with the death number at nearly 19 thousand. Without clean water, disease is spreading. Israeli soldiers and, as of yesterday, Israeli hostages are being killed by friendly fire; journalists are being killed in record numbers, I think. In the U.S., anti-semitic attacks have increased 400% since October, but reports in April showed anti-Jewish violence already high from a worldwide spike in 2021 that never ebbed in the States all through last year and this year, including hate crimes and anti-semitic white supremicist propaganda. New York City, our own city, our home, was among the three cities named with record numbers of anti-Jewish hate crimes. And the Council on American-Islamic Relations is receiving double the number of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab reports and requests for help.
Then there’s the Movement Advancement Project, which has mapped that forty-five percent of queers and genderqueers live in the 28 states with low or negative state policy tallies. People are going after trans humans like we’re a threat to democracy. But we’re just doing regular stuff mostly, occasionally using public restrooms, sometimes but actually pretty rarely trying to play some sports, every once in a while hoping to postpone puberty in completely safe and reversible ways.
Last time I was here I mentioned the death rate for people in childbirth has increased for everyone but Black women, and still the mortality rate is most deadly for Black folks in childbirth. That’s not a coincidence. It’s not an accident. That’s the brutally logical result of racism and misogyny and the violence and weathering effect on every person who lives at that intersection.
And I feel like I can’t even scratch the surface of the actual, documented threat to democracy that we are facing and have been facing since we experienced for the first time in our nation’s history a failure to transition power peacefully from one administration to the next. The attack on journalism, on the separation of powers. Or what’s happening with reproductive freedom. A woman in Ohio was told by her doctor in the 21st week of her pregnancy that she may miscarry, and a week later she did. She was on the toilet, miscarried, was taken to the hospital for life-threatening complications. And a police went back to her home, cracked the toilet base to retrieve the fetus, and charged her with desecration of a corpse.
This doesn’t seem joyful. This seems counter-joyful. At odds with joy. It seems anti-joy. But I don’t think it’s inappropriate to attend to these violences and inequities and name them today on Joy Sunday. I feel like if folks don’t know these things are happening, we need to know, and it maybe is of concern that we don’t. And I don’t think it actually is anti-joy or anti-Christmas to hold them and feel deeply their grief and their anger. But I also struggle to *feel joy when I read the news and listen to the news. Except for Jon Lovett. My dudes. If you are struggling to stay connected to what’s happening because it feels like too much, too bad, too draining, may I please just ask-slash-urge you to check out Lovett or Leave It, which is part of the Crooked Media family and is cousins to Pod Save America and Hysteria. It’s a bunch of former Obama White House staff and other people, younger than me, smarter than me, taking on the real mess we’re in with a filter that helps me, at least, feel still able to move and act and laugh and feel.
There may be a tie-in here to the Isaiah text, which also describes oppressed and brokenhearted people and captives. This text describes the return of exiles, coming home to a country that’s been ransacked, a wasted temple, a conquered and subjugated nation. And it talks about moving and feeling and acting. In the same lines and in the same breath that the writer names prisoners and mourning, it also speaks of bringing good news, binding up the broken, and proclaiming liberty.
Of course it is possible to remain connected with joy, in times such as this and while sitting with and naming injustices. Of course it is; but is it, though? I worry about moving too quickly to optimism or positivity. I worry about skipping over the raging wildfire of awful, of minimizing the magnitude of injustice, dismissing it by taking sides or with lemonade or with quick and over-simple platitudes about God’s will and tough love. I worry about compartmentalization and dissociation. It’s more or less our nature, maybe, to want to squirm out of sitting with feelings of sadness and frustration. We are definitely not encouraged or taught how to express a full and complex emotional experience that includes a range of sadness and grief and rage and fear and also a nice selection from the joy family. Something that is joy or akin to joy.
There’s a winter hymn, an Advent hymn, my favorite, that could illustrate this, called In the Bleak Midwinter from a Christina Rossetti poem,
In the bleak midwinter/ Frosty wind made moan/ Earth stood hard as iron/ Water like a stone/ Snow had fallen/ Snow on snow/ Snow on snow/ In the bleak midwinter/ Long, long ago.
It’s describing a winter reality much like earlier cultural constructs of this season, before our current claymation-based marketing strategy: Advent used to be Winter Lent, and it used to be as staid and self-denying and bleak as any other Lent, and maybe more so because it was in the season of darkening and cold-ening rather than in spring. People would fast and pray and repent, and Lutherans would sing especially-tuneless hymns, more than usual. This hymn is brilliantly reflective of the reality of its setting, in these early lyrics and in the key of G-major; it is cold and distant and still warm and intimate: Only his mother/ In her maiden bliss/ Worshiped the beloved/ With a kiss… What can I give him?/ Give him my heart. It is bleak and iron gray and iron hard and also gently and softly joyful.
These scriptures and these hymns are clues, I think, to ways to recognize the pull and the power of joy, even in hard, awful times. That it is not always a victory march, can be a cold and broken halleluiah. Knowing that possibility and complexity I think can make it possible to be more present for our neighbors and comrades who are struggling. Knowing that grief doesn’t have to undermine joy can make it possible, perhaps, to attend to folks who are feeling estranged from community and care, folks who are grieving loss or reliving loneliness while so many others are demonstrably happy, acting like it’s the most wonderful time of the year and vomiting bows and glitter. I wonder, even, if this is exactly why the Liturgical Powers That Be placed Gaudete this late in Advent, in the week closest to the darkest day. Not because joy makes the most sense, but because it makes the least. Not as a mandate or a compulsion, but maybe they and Isaiah and Rossetti and many others are encouraging us to look for and maintain joy as a practice, as a discipline.
Some of the low-hanging fruit, when it comes to joy, is children. The liturgists and lots of people associate joy with children or childlikeness or childish wonder. Gaudete Sunday traditionally includes a blessing of the children, and a lot of the imagery and symbolism of joy, and of Advent joy in particular, is associated with children: Elizabeth’s child leaps within her at Mary’s greeting, Mary’s baby is born with a heavenly proclamation of good news of great joy for all the people, children and vipers play together in peace. I think people find it easier most of the time to talk about ideals like joy in terms of youth and innocence. And I get that. Children can be great. Some of my most uncomplicated joyful memories are of teaching my godson Alfie to ride a bike and giving him piggy-back rides on our way to the park while he narrated his world in my right ear.
But equating joy with children may be, maybe, overly romantic and incomplete. And not just because it used to take Alfie an hour and a half to eat a peanut butter sandwich. Not just because of that relentless snot situation, or watching children eat yogurt from a tube, or the struggle to have a rational conversation. And only partly because of how awful it can feel to be treated as though our families without children are not real families, or that the emotional harm of medical and athletic and legal exclusions to grown trans folks or violence to whole Black adults isn’t worth caring about or organizing around.
Part of the tension, and part of our larger-community interest in queering theology, is to find ways to reframe things that are harder and less idealistic and less common, to face things that feel hard, even when it comes to joy. It seems important and necessary to connect children to struggle, and important to relate our grown-up, imperfect lives to joyfulness and wholeness. It seems important and necessary to know that we are all children, and we are all like children, when it comes to archetypal values like worth and protection and innocence. We are all worthy. We are all precious. We are, Sarah MacLaughlin says and I think she’s solid on this, we are all still innocent. (Yeah, Adia.)
Joy can also, obviously, be felicity. It can be like that magical stuff we call grace, the kind of joy that comes unbidden, or unaccounted for, from no apparent source. That’s Isaiah today again, when through oppression breaks good news, over brokenheartedness comes bolster, against captivity shines liberty. Lots of us have experienced this, I imagine, those moments of incomprehensible peace or unaccountable bliss in the midst of chaos or terror. Something divine not in the devastation but in the healing; something holy not punishing us or testing us or building character but wanting and aching for justice and healing with us.
And joy isn’t always or maybe not even mostly a gift. Understanding joy as a discipline, as a practice, makes us responsible, too, for our joy specifically and more generally accountable for our attitudes and actions. When Isaiah asserts that the spirit of God is upon us, because God has anointed us; God has sent us to bring good news, to bind up, to proclaim liberty and release; to comfort all who mourn it seems both an assurance and a calling. It seems as much a vocation as a promise.
There’s a post-it note I’ve moved into every office I’ve had for the last ten years or so that says “emotions are habits,” I have it tattooed on my arm, to remind me mostly that I can re-learn lessons about anger, and maybe someday also shame, but also that joy isn’t a mystery, that peace isn’t only a product of my circumstances that day, that lovingkindness is almost never something I feel. Joking but also not necessarily joking, you know? Emotions come at us and surprise us, but not only; we don’t have to be and I think mustn’t be at their mercy. We can cultivate them and, at the risk of sounding like I’m telling anyone what to do, we probably should cultivate them. If we wait around until we actually feel like loving people, if we depend entirely on feeling peace or joy or patience or gentleness or self-control… I don’t know. I don’t know. These are awful times, now and throughout our whole lifetimes things are deeply jacked. Maybe peace and joy and patience and gentleness and self-control are also spiritual gifts, but it’s not even just that I think of this stuff as work we have to and *get to participate in, but also that understanding joy exclusively as a spiritual gift makes it deeply implicated in supremacy and hegemony. It makes joy one more thing in a long list of things harder to access for marginalized folks and easier to monopolize and define for privileged folks.
Reframing joy as a discipline is exciting; it’s almost subversion. It’s another way to tear down dominant empire, participate in setting and re-setting value, creating new heavens and new earths where good and nonviolent ways and eternal values set the tone and where *we name and create and broaden the definitions of peace and joy and patience and gentleness and self-control, for ourselves and with one another.
Cultivating a practice of joyfulness transcends circumstances, bad *and good. It allows us to experience and share joy in the midst of all of life, to reject pleasure as the sole determinant of when and where we will feel peaceful and joyful and content. Long live pleasure; baby, please. Nobody is doing away with pleasure. But rejecting pleasure as the force that dictates our actions and emotions? That’s revolutionary.
Imagine practicing a discipline that locates our own joy in other people’s well-being. Both sympathetic joy, celebrating good things that happen to others, and also the kind of joy being described by Isaiah, if I can characterize it as joy: a joy that is instigated by distributive justice and social activism. The Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg talks about something very similar when she says that the way to happiness is through kindness. I first learned the lovingkindness meditation from Salzberg, and then from it I *started beginning to learn to try to practice becoming someone who can more often maybe extend warmth and feel connection to more people, including those I feel indifferent toward, those I feel alienated from, those I am actively in conflict with. What I feel when I try to practice mindfulness, the equanimity I experience more often, the presence and connection and *patience and *trust that I feel more strongly more often, is so much of what I understand to be Joy: a joy that isn’t circumstantial or conditional.
And it’s when I feel unskillful, when I feel more anxious, angry, overwhelmed, helpless, when I experience those feelings more strongly more often, it’s then that I self-consciously, intentionally seek out and re-invest in mindfulness.
Look, I’m not telling you all what to do or anything. But tai chi first saved my life and then helped me live it more fully. So, you know, do what you want. You know. Don’t learn tai chi and have a better life. I’m not the boss of you.
This is subversive love as resistance as joy. Jesus said it about turning the other cheek, he said love your enemies, love those who hate you and revile you. Jesus said love extravagantly, like it rains, ridiculously, willy nilly, on the good and bad alike. Joy is exactly like that. An internal practice, a discipline free of what good or horrifying things are happening around us. It does help us to experience joy even when the world is on fire. But maybe more importantly, maybe most importantly, it keeps us from glossing over pain and injustice, and allows us to experience a kind of joy that still also attends to and engages with and feels deeply about a world that is on fire. And salves and feeds us to hope for and make change.
Peace.
Rev. Miller Hoffman 