Resurrection for Real

MCCNY
March 22, 2026

^{Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, ‘Lord, he whom you love is ill.’ But when Jesus heard it, he said, ‘This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.’ Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.} ^{Then after this he said to the disciples, ‘Let us go to Judea again.’ The disciples said to him, ‘Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?’ Jesus answered, ‘Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them.’ After saying this, he told them, ‘Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.’ The disciples said to him, ‘Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.’ Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.’ Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow-disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him.} ^{When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Your brother will rise again.’ Martha said to him, ‘I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.’ Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?’ She said to him, ‘Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.} ^{When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, ‘The Teacher is here and is calling for you.’ And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ They said to him, ‘Lord, come and see.’ Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him!’ But some of them said, ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?’}

Jesus says today, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

I know that for some folks here today, these words already make perfect sense, maybe because you grew up with a bunch of people telling you what they wanted you to believe they mean. But I want us all to return to confusion, go back to that first- or second-century, first audience utter bewilderment at hearing or reading these words. Jesus says that people who believe in him will not die … right on the heels of saying that Lazarus is dead. He first says it allegorically or something, and the disciples were all literal, “Oh, he’s sleeping? Excellent, so everything is fine.” And then Jesus says it plain, like he’s exasperated, “No, I meant that he’s dead. Lazarus is dead, and we’re going to Bethany. Oh, and people who believe in me won’t die.”

But Lazarus did die. He was in fact extremely dead. You might think that dead is something you either are or aren’t, like pregnant, or unique, but the text is emphatic about how dead Lazarus is. The gospel gets kind of graphic about it. There were probably a couple of reasons why, and I have decided that one of them is to let Jesus off the hook for waiting two days to leave. The LOLCat bible says that Happy Cat (LOLCat bible calls Jesus “Happy Cat”), Happy Cat “ttly took his sweet time getting ready, liek 2 hole daze.” But Lazarus was extremely dead when Jesus arrived, like four days dead, which absolves Jesus for waiting so long to leave.

We don’t know why Jesus waited two days, but I’ve made up a bunch of reasons, like rush hour. You know, a two-day rush hour he was trying to avoid. Like at the Holland Tunnel. My favorite explanation is that maybe there was already a two-day line formed for healings and feedings and exorcisms. Does that happen here, at the grocery store when a clerk wants to close the lane, everybody already in line still gets to check out? (Do you still buy groceries at the store?) Jesus had a line at his check-out lane. I think this is at least part of why John says again and again how much Jesus loved Lazarus and his family, to balance this delay and make sure we won’t think Jesus was unfeeling or uncaring for waiting to leave. It seems unfeeling and uncaring.

Another reason for emphasizing how dead Lazarus was may be tied to the Jewish tradition that the soul lingered after death for three days, and only after that is the life truly ended. I don’t understand what difference it would make had Jesus arrived when Lazarus was already dead but the soul was still hanging around. But, you how it wasn’t enough to just put Houdini in a straight jacket. They also dangled him upside-down from a skyscraper. Maybe it’s like that. So now people couldn’t say of Jesus, “Well, anyone could have resurrected Lazarus, his soul was right there, still lingering…” Maybe the ultimate objective is to establish that Lazarus is really, really, unquestionably dead. Very dead. He has begun to decompose; his body was rotting. It stank; the gospel makes a point to talk about the smell and the point I think is that Lazarus is completely beyond mistake or misdiagnosis. He’s unquestionably dead. Like Ezekiel’s dry bones. Like people crucified left on to poles to be eaten by dogs and birds.

It feels important to tie this John gospel story of an extremely, graphically dead Lazarus to right now in the US and globally. For fourteen months I’m carrying a weight again in my chest, maybe you are too, trying to find some magical fulcrum where I can stay informed and not look away and engage meaningfully, but also function. Trying to find hope – Harvey Milk said we have to have hope – among the attacks not just on trans healthcare but our very existence, our very sense of self. Among the attacks on not just so-called civil unlawful entry but on Latine names and speech and co-existence, where children and parents are separated, where people are wrenched undressed in the night from their beds, when people are targeted at home improvement outlets trying to work and in courtrooms trying to enter lawfully, when citizenship and documentation is irrelevant and ethnicity is the point. Trying, if I’m being honest, to find hope among the frustratingly late realizations among white folks that power corrupts, that power is corrupt, that none of us are free until we are all free, that frustratingly slow, well-meaning people only now cry fascism when every infringement of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness they recognize has been withheld from Black folks in this country from its inception. In today’s “On This Day” from EJI, the Equal Justice Initiative, they end an account of a white woman and Black man arrested for walking on the same sidewalk and maybe talking for a minute with this, “The narrative of racial difference created to justify slavery – the myth that white people are superior to Black people – was not abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation or the Thirteenth Amendment.” (I’ll presume to add that, looking at the carceral complex and the money bail system, slavery was barely abolished by the Proclamation or the Thirteenth Amendment.)

And Jesus says, I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. And maybe we’re confused by this. And I am.

There’s something else that fascinates me about this story. People keep saying to Jesus, if only you had come in time. It seems very much like they mean, If you had come beforehe died you could have kept him from dying. This is weird. For one, because if they believe that Jesus can keep people from dying, then why don’t they trust he can raise people from death? And is saving people on the brink of death even his thing. He made a ton of sick people well. He healed a ton of people with long-term conditions, like leprosy and hemorrhaging and healed people with disabilities, I guess, which feels wrong to say without taking a minute to unspool the ancient and modern practice of disability porn, and which so-called healing I like to pretend was really about destigmatizing disability and bringing community back into oneness with people and body difference. But that’s this sermon. Jesus fed literally thousands of people in the gospels with literally jack. But did Jesus ever really keep people from dying? Okay, yes, he did save the Roman centurian’s lover and the ruler’s son from dying, totally fair of you to bring it up. But still I will point out that even then, both times, Jesus doesn’t go there. He didn’t need to go anywhere. He says instead, “You go on back, the boy lives.” Jesus didn’t need to come at all, let alone in time.

As you probably know, I think John is an extremely strange gospel as a rule, but this is extra-strange enough to feel important. Lazarus is exceptionally dead, and Jesus is too late. All is lost. When all these people say, If only you had come in time, it’s their hopelessness. They’re saying, Things might have been okay under different circumstances, at a different time, before, but not now. Maybe there’s also shaming. Maybe they’re also saying, Things might have been okay had you gotten here sooner, had you left right away and arrived while the soul still hovered, had you come without being called, had you done something different. Jesus.

But it is defeat. Nothing can be done now. In this hopeless state, the best Martha can manage is resignation. She makes an incredible statement of who Jesus is, one that rivals Peter’s confession. She says, You are the anointed, the Child of God, the One. Yet it means nothing, I think. It’s just words. It’s like she’s saying, “Yes, you’re very special and important, but Lazarus is dead.” Jesus, however magnificent his title, is useless. If he had come in time, hope would be possible. But as things stand, she can only await the final resurrection at the last day, whatever that’s worth. (Nothing.) It’s rote; she’s on auto-pilot. It’s a mechanical faith and it speaks of a distant hope. A disconnected rescue. It’s a meaningless future so much in the future that it has no bearing on today, on right now.

But what if the whole point of this story of Lazarus and Mary and Martha and that crowd outside and Jesus waiting two days and him dead four, what if the whole point of all of this is to make clear to us utterly that it is not ever too late? Never? It feels impossible, like giving away everything we have to people who can’t pay us back. It feels unbelievable, like justice ever rolling down like a river. But I think maybe this is what this Jesus wants us to trust. Do you believe this?

I don’t know if I do. But I want to. But I need to. Fourteen months I have been carrying a weight again in my chest that has made it difficult to live, to function. Maybe you too. If I’m being honest, I have never been so emotionally and spiritually unwell and also sober, and it’s reminded me why I’m an alcoholic and how absolutely delicious it is to be numb to national and global realities. It’s given me a renewed resentment toward my sobriety, and fortunately also a renewed appreciation of it, and of me. Maybe you too; keep coming back.

I named trans people trying to live our lives being erased, and Latine people and families trying to live their lives being kidnapped and caged, and Black folks ever trying to live their lives being infantilized and dehumanized and brutalized. And this brief, soul-crushing list is the tip of a melting glacier of recent and historical national and global corruption and graft and warmongering and election tampering and suppression of speech and faith in the press and trust in our system of government and our league of nations and international law and any sense that none of us is free, or well, if we are not all well and free. Gaza, Iran, Lebabon. All of this, of course, layered over and on top of our lives already peppered with exhaustion and worry and grief, broken hearts, broken cars, unpaid bills.

Today’s strange and confusing passage from this strange and almost absurdly counter-canonical gospel arrives at a moment I am so resistant to hearing it and so desperately need it and struggle to grasp it. Maybe you too. What if “I am” is literally resurrection and literally life in real time, now? What if those who believe, though dead, live right now for real? And everyone who lives and believes will honest-to-Pete never die? I don’t know for sure what that means, and I’m so deeply cynical and suspicious of hope or of the substance of things hoped for. But what if it means that it is real and never too late.

I want this story to be literal. I want it to mean something immediate, something for right now. Not later, not in the end times or on the last day. And I do think we’re not truly hearing the story, we’re missing out on something vital if we don’t. Martha’s statement of faith was so profound, and so limited. Jesus, you are the anointed. You are the Child of God. You are the One. It’s too bad you didn’t come sooner.

Mary, too. When she hears that Jesus wants her she jumps up and runs to him. She falls exhausted at his feet, the place where she sat in that other story, when Jesus says that she has chosen the better part. She demonstrates with her body and her tears who Jesus is to her: Beloved. Teacher. And yet her words to him are the same as her sister’s: It’s too bad you didn’t come sooner.

The people in this gospel story who follow Mary have seen Jesus do a number of signs and miracles. They’ve seen him turn water into wine. They’ve seen him heal that ruler’s son with his word alone. They’ve seen him heal the man at the Pool of Bethsaida on the sabbath. They’ve seen him feed five thousand families. They’ve seen him give sight to the man born blind at the Pool of Siloam on the sabbath. With spit. They’ve seen him walk on water, for crying eye! The people who follow Mary know what this Jesus can do and have witnessed miracles. They have seen his magic. And they mutter, It’s too bad you didn’t come sooner.

I feel like this gospel is being incredibly tender with us, and generous. I think, as with many gospels and narrative stories of Jesus, our disbelief and our hopelessness and our easy head-in-the-sand and cheap grace thinking is understood as part of how difficult discipleship can be. It’s never okay, I’m not saying anyone is saying it’s okay to half-hat it. In fact, the “Jesus wept” bit here is largely understood by dorks who study the language and stuff to be Jesus weeping with rage and frustration at all the head-in-the-sand cheap-grace thinking going on around him. But I think this gospel knows that it’s hard, that it will be hard, that it is supposed to be hard. All of these people who knew Jesus, who loved Jesus, all these people who hated Jesus but who all knew what he could do – Martha even gets really close to expressing exactly who the gospel understands Jesus to be –they all still absolutely, completely believethat he is too late.

But it wasn’t too late. It wasn’t too late. At the risk of hitting you over the head with it, I’ll repeat that this may be the whole point. It wasn’t too late, and it isn’t. Jesus mucked around for two days, Lazarus’s corpse reeked, the soul was long gone, and Lazarus was returned to life. (It doesn’t help my sermon, but I have to note that Lazarus was raised and there’s no fanfare or so much as a thanks, good to see you. It was pretty anti-climactic, though that may be because they’re saving up for next month.)

Jesus is not too late. That power that he represents to create change for the family he loved so much has no dependence on circumstances or time or arriving in time. They and maybe we believethat death is final but Jesus and Thich Nhat Hahn say that there is no death.

This brief nerd time-out for folks who don’t already know: when Jesus says I Am the resurrection and the life, he is repeating what God says to Moses from the burning bush when Moses asks for God’s name. I Am. Jesus makes seven of these statements in this gospel. In Hebrew, I Am is the name that in English we spell Y-H-W-H and presume to pronounce. The name is sacred and unpronounceable and unsaid in Jewish faith. The gospel community is probably aligning Jesus and his life and ministry (and martyrdom) with the God and the faith and the community and social ethical culture of all time, the gospel begins with the words “In the beginning,” and I can’t help but point out that the name I Am is ontological. It is existence itself and outside of time, borne on the breath of dawn.

This Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

I need this now. I need this resurrection today. I need this today, not later. Not some imagined hypothetical future before a throne being asked, What have you done that I should let you into my kingdom? (P.S., God isn’t going to ask you that. That may be another sermon. That also may still be this sermon.)

In 2000, James Dale lost his legal case with the US court system when the Supreme Court enshrined homophobia as a legal discrimination and a valid interpretation of the BSA code to be “morally straight.” Remember that? I do. I was at Lambda then. We didn’t have marriage or custody of our kids, were getting fired from jobs and couldn’t be boy scout leaders. This SCOTUS decision was the end of the road for James Dale and for however many hundreds of hundreds of morally straight gay boys and young men who knew themselves to be leaders. Evan Wolfson and David Buckel and Pat Logue, who argued the case for Dale with Lambda Legal, said after the demoralizing decision that The Supreme Court doesn’t have the final word.

It was a strange and confusing thing to say. I remember repeating it to Bob Hollinger here and I remember his confused and almost angry reaction. He thought it was ridiculous and absurd. But what happened in the years that followed that shameful BSA fight and SCOTUS decision was that people who supported the inclusive and community foundation of the Boy Scouts started to act within their families and neighborhoods and communities. They withdrew the special rent-free leases and other privileges the organization had enjoyed. They stopped making donations to the BSA. They withdrew their children from membership and enrolled them in other groups that didn’t discriminate, like Boys and Girls Clubs of America. By 2015, the BSA, which had long, long included Jewish scouts, Black scouts, Latine scouts, even in the face of Klan threats, by 2015 the BSA lifted the ban and added gay scouts and leaders to its commitment and ethics.

It feels like a quaint example now; twenty-five years later it feels almost nostalgic. I don’t tell it to equate it with the violences and oppressions we’re witnessing and surviving and not surviving today. But it does work as an illustration of what “though they die, yet they live” might mean for today’s discipleship. It’s a powerful and successful example of how “not too late” can play out in real ways for us.

Discipleship today won’t look the same for all of us, or the same all the time for any of us. Rumi tells us this: there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth. Some folks are following and videotaping and questioning ICE and NYPD and other law enforcement. Some are being shot and killed. Some are writing op eds in school papers and being arrested, making art and being arrested. Some folks are building mutual aid and communal care networks, figuring out how to get groceries and clean laundry to people sheltering in place. There are courts, slow and sure. So so slow, bless them, and not always sure. Folks are shopping local as a discipline and tithing as a protest. Folks are standing on corners and in street for No Kings and other civil disobedience. And there are things we always have layered over and on top of it all: making our friends laugh, smiling at a stranger, ordinary moments of tenderness and generosity.

And also caring for ourselves, which is as much a part of discipleship as anyone else’s wellness and freedom. Noticing beauty. I’m going to the Whitney biennial later, by god. Feeling love and tenderness, when we feel it, and the tenderness of patience, when we give it, and generosity. Noticing the cat scratching to climb your lap, as well as the picket line and the election canvassing. You hold the key to love and fear, there in your trembling hand…

John’s disciples know how easy it is to keep grace cheap and half-hat. To say this is too big for me, it’s too late – to say it’s been too late for ten years, to say there’s nothing for me to do. I know that voice, I hear it too. I know that fulcrum between being informed and being functional is paper thin and a moving thing. But I think we are asked today, do we believe in resurrection and life. And I, suspicious and cynical, cynical and really struggling to function, I trust this much, this first step at least: that there is always something for us to do, that we all have a part to play, that it is not ever too late. And I hope – Harvey Milk says we have to hope – I hope it is real as your beloved face, so real it’s almost anti-climactic.

I love you. Peace.

There’s Still My Joy

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.