Is 11:1-10; Rom 15:4-9; Mt 3:1-12
Good morning, everybody. You know, Sharan always asks me to preach on the bloody, fiery, violent Sundays. I preached when Jesus said “I come not to bring peace, but the sword”; I preached on Palm Sunday; and now I’m preaching about tearing things down and throwing them into the fire. Sharan, what are you trying to say about me? I think you’ve got me figured out. I’m gonna make you proud today.
Anyway, I had help writing my sermon today. I met with Sharon Grant and Jim Luckett after mass one day and they shared some incredible insights with me, which I will try to weave together as best I can today. But it’s not going to be easy. You see, the three of us were, at the time, a little uneasy with John the Baptist’s language, about chopping down the unfruitful trees with an axe, throwing the chaff into the fire. We thought his rhetoric unduly harsh. Well, but you see, we met on November 6, two days before the presidential election. Things were different back then. Someone at Mass that day, I believe it was Don Feeney, stood up during petitions and said a prayer of thanksgiving that we were about to have our first woman president. Is Don Here? Was it you, Don? I blame all this on you, you jinxed us. I’m just kidding, Don. I blame all white people. No, that’s not fair. I blame most white people. After all, Trump won with 58% of the white vote including 63% of white men and 53% of white women; meanwhile only 8% of African Americans voted for him. And let’s talk about Christians, since we’re in the house of God. Trump won with 81% of white evangelical support. 60% of white Catholics voted for him. Note that Latino/a/x Catholics went 67% for Clinton.[i]
White people and white Christians elected Donald Trump President of the United States. We elected a man who wants to deport eleven million immigrants, many of whom risked their lives in a treacherous border crossing to escape poverty, and then he wants to build a wall to keep them out.[ii] We elected a man who proposed a ban on Muslims entering the United States, who wants to create a registry of our more than 3 Muslim American fellow citizens.[iii] Who gleefully repeated at rallies a false story about American soldiers killing Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood.[iv] Who mocked a reporter with disabilities at one of his rallies[v] and egged on violence against protestors at others (including a friend of mine here in Louisville).[vi] Who said he would heal America’s racial divide by installing “law and order” and stop-and-frisk racial profiling tactics in American urban areas, and who asked black people to vote for him because “what the hell do you have to lose?”[vii] Who wants to reinstate the use of torture by the American military and law enforcement, including waterboarding and “beyond” waterboarding, because “torture works.”[viii] Who thinks global warming is a hoax invented by China.[ix] Who boasted about grabbing women by the genitals without their consent.[x] For the first time in American history we elected somebody President who has never held elected office or served in the military.[xi] For the second time in 16 years we elected a fool, but this time we elected a fool and a bigot who is inspiring thousands of other foolish bigots to terrorize people. Who since the election has only tepidly rejected and played down the wave of hate crimes (over 900 officially reported by the SPLC in the ten days after the election) directed against black people, Latinx folks, Muslims, women, Jews, LGBTQ people, Asian Americans, and just about any other group except white straight Christian cis men.[xii] Who since the election has said that protestors who burn American flags should have their citizenship revoked (even though the Supreme Court has decided twice that this is a legal exercise of free speech).[xiii] Who since the election paid $25 million to settle a lawsuit over his fraudulent university.[xiv] Who since the election appointed as his chief White House strategist a man who has been described by numerous commentators as a white supremacist.[xv] (If you think any of this is “just words,” or if you would like resources for future family facebook discussions, there are copies of my homily in the back, complete with citations from real news sources).
White Christians did this and we have to do something about this. Standing up against Trump and the white supremacist heteropatriarchal corporate-military imperialism he represents is what it means to be Christian in America right now. If this is not what it means to be Christian right now then I have no use for Christianity, it’s a distraction and a farce.
So you can see why I’m having trouble now integrating our insights from November 6. I’m feeling ready to burn things down. I’m feeling ready to strike my axe at the root of this hypocritical, racist, ungodly, poisoned excuse for a democracy, and throw it into the everlasting fires of hell.
But I guess it wouldn’t be very Christian of me to do that, would it? I don’t know how to synthesize our readings today, because on one hand John the Baptist says burn it all down, but on the other hand, the Apostle Paul says “welcome one another as Christ welcomed you.” And presumably “welcome one another” means don’t throw the Trump supporters into the fire. Now I like John the Baptist better than Paul anyway, so normally I’d just skate over that second reading. But as Jim Luckett says, Paul asks us to welcome one another because we’re all in this together. That is as true today as ever. Anyway, if there is a fire, I guess that’s God’s job, not mine.
So where does that leave us? It leaves us in the wilderness. “A voice cries out in the wilderness,” says our gospel. There we find John the Baptist, who wears camel’s hair clothing and a leather belt, eats locusts and wild honey, and lives out in the wilderness. This notion of wilderness is not unique to John within the scriptures. Womanist theologian Delores Williams, in her book Sisters in the Wilderness, relates the story of Hagar, the Egyptian slave woman of Abraham and Sarah, who was forced to have sex with Abraham and bear his child as Sarah’s surrogate; Sarah was jealous and abusive to Hagar and, when Sarah herself became pregnant, she sent Hagar away into the wilderness. Hagar was abandoned, not only by Abraham and Sarah, but by God. And she had left her son Ishmael in the bushes, and resigned herself to their inevitable death. But God’s voice called out to Hagar, and showed her where to find water, so that she and Ishmael would survive. God does not offer liberation to Hagar, only survival and the chance to secure a better quality of life for herself and her family.
Williams says, “For many black Christian women today, ‘wilderness’ or ‘wilderness-experience’ is a symbolic term used to represent a near-destruction situation in which God gives personal direction to the believer and thereby helps her make a way out of what she thought was no way.” Whereas for white pioneers the “wilderness” was a savage land that must be tamed, for enslaved Africans, “the wilderness was a friend that often sheltered the runaway slave.”[xvi] Williams says that the African-American notion of wilderness “affirms such qualities as defiance; risk-taking; independence; endurance when endurance gives no promise; the stamina to hold things together for the family (even without the help of a male); the ability, in poverty, to make a way out of no way; the courage to initiate political action in the public arena; and a close personal relation with God.”[xvii]
I quote Williams at length here because I think it is possible that we are collectively in a wilderness moment in America. Or, better yet, white liberals now find ourselves in a wilderness moment in America. As Williams notes, black women and other minoritized groups have been familiar with this wilderness for a long time now, and are consequently more attuned to its terrain, its dangers, and its promise. Meanwhile, we white liberals were living – so we thought – in “civilization.” Now that Donald Trump is President-elect of the United States of America, we too are learning what it means to feel cast out of this country. We are learning what it means to feel isolated, alienated, afraid, angry, hopeless. We find ourselves, perhaps for the first time, in a “near-destruction situation.” But we are not alone, for in this wilderness, voices are crying out. The voice of God is crying out like John the Baptist, like Hagar in the wilderness. There may be a way out of this no way, not necessarily for liberation, but perhaps for survival and greater quality of life. What are these voices, and what are they telling us?
Jim Luckett reminds us that Advent is a celebration of incarnation, of a moment “when God-consciousness broke through to the earth-plane.” And for Sharon Grant, we are invited to embrace a new level of consciousness at each stage of our lives – from infancy, to toddler, to the age of reason, to adulthood. At each stage, we grow in maturity, but we don’t deny what we were before, we go forward and include. We learn from our mistakes, from our experience, we learn from the wisdom of others. And as we move forward, our sense of community grows, says Sharon, from clans and isolated factions to a more embracing awareness of others.
So my suggestion is that, to make a way out of this no way, we need to work backward through these readings. We begin where we are, in the wilderness, with John the Baptist, who calls out a “brood of vipers” who have been proclaiming their holiness. He warns of a coming destruction when the trees will be felled and thrown into the fire. …But isn’t that, paradoxically, how “civilization” happens anyway? It is through destruction, through the felling of trees, the clearing of land, that the “wilderness” is destroyed. And it may be that more destruction, more burning down, is coming for America. I do not know. I do know that I intend to resist with all the prophetic fire I have learned from John the Baptist, from my mentors in this room, from the activists in this city who challenge me every day.
And maybe this takes us back to Isaiah, the prophet of destruction and redemption. Isaiah lived in Jerusalem in the late 8th-century B.C., and though it’s impossible to tell precisely when this section was written, the mention of “scattered people” of Israel and Judah by the Assyrians make it likely that Isaiah is writing after the fall of the Northern Kingdom, when the Assyrians were also threatening Jerusalem and Judah. Isaiah wrote as the world seemed to be collapsing around him. He wrote to tell the leaders and the people that destruction was coming if they did not act. In that case, it came anyway. And yet, this reading from Isaiah, as Sharon Grant says, “sings of new life.” It sings of the lion eating hay like the ox and the child laying its hand on the adder’s lair. And, as Jim Luckett points out, this reading seems to begin where John the Baptist leaves off. For John speaks of a tree being felled and thrown into the fire. And where are we left, in Isaiah? With a stump. Isaiah says, “On that day, a shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a bud shall blossom.” Out of the wilderness, out of the destruction, out of the fires of Judah, of Jerusalem, and of America, new life is determined to sprout.
I spent election night at the home of two of my professors at Vanderbilt who are married to one another. They live in a lovely home in Nashville and invited a few students to come over and watch the returns. Like many of you, we watched anxiously, reassured one another nervously, and drank copiously. As the night wore on, our excitement turned to anxiety, to disbelief, to panic, to despair. We sat silently, dumbfounded, on the rug in their living room and criticized John King and his touchscreen map. Late in the evening, when the truth was clear, one of the students came into the room bringing a message from my professor’s Aunt Helen, who lives with them. Aunt Helen is a ninety-year old, sharp-dressed, clear-eyed black woman from the American South. Her message was two sentences. “Hope springs eternal. We’ve been here before.”
Hope springs eternal. A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse.
We’ve been here before. Ninety year old southern black women like Aunt Helen have been here before, they know this wilderness well. We are all here now. And yes, Paul, like it or not, we are all in this together. We are in the wilderness and it is time to listen for the voice of God, in those prophetic voices that are demanding justice. And it is time to cry out with them. Advent, Jim says, is about incarnation. It is about the divine force living in our bodies, moving in our bodies. It is about putting our bodies on the line, protecting other bodies, creating and interacting for the flourishing of all bodies in this creation. And as Sharon says, we are offered a call to move forward to a more mature consciousness. We are more aware of who we are and what this country is. We don’t dismiss who we were before, we don’t dismiss one another, but we go forward toward more expansive community.
Yes, we keep moving. Advent is about expectation, but it’s not about “waiting.” John doesn’t say, “wait for the Lord, Jesus will make things better.” John says, prepare the way. Reform your lives. May we be ready, willing and able. Amen.
Notes
[i] Alec Tyson and Shiva Maniam, “Behind Trump’s Victory: Divisions by Race, Gender, Education,” Pew Research Center, November 9, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trumps-victory-divisions-by-race-gender-education/; “White Evangelicals, Catholics and Mormons Carried Trump,” Religion News Service, accessed December 2, 2016, http://religionnews.com/2016/11/09/white-evangelicals-white-catholics-and-mormons-voted-decisively-for-trump/.
[ii] “What It Will Take for President Trump to Deport Millions and Build the Wall,” Washington Post, accessed November 14, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/09/what-it-will-take-for-president-trump-to-deport-millions-and-build-the-wall/.
[iii] Trip Gabriel, “Donald Trump Says He’d ‘Absolutely’ Require Muslims to Register,” The New York Times – First Draft, November 20, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/11/20/donald-trump-says-hed-absolutely-require-muslims-to-register/; “Donald J. Trump Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration, December 07, 2015,” accessed November 14, 2016, https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-statement-on-preventing-muslim-immigration.
[iv] “Trump Repeats False Pig’s Blood Story at California Rally | TIME,” accessed December 2, 2016, http://time.com/4312131/donald-trump-pigs-blood-muslim-story/.
[v] Irin Carmon, “Trump’s Worst Offense? Mocking Disabled Reporter, Poll Finds,” NBC News, August 11, 2016, http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-s-worst-offense-mocking-disabled-reporter-poll-finds-n627736.
[vi] Phil Helsel, “Lawsuit Filed Against Trump Over Violence at Kentucky Rally,” NBC News, April 1, 2016, http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/lawsuit-filed-against-trump-over-violence-kentucky-rally-n548896.
[vii] “The First Trump-Clinton Presidential Debate Transcript, Annotated,” Washington Post, accessed November 14, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated/; Tom LoBianco and Ashley Killough CNN, “Trump Pitches Black Voters: ‘What the Hell Do You Have to Lose?,’” CNN, accessed December 3, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/19/politics/donald-trump-african-american-voters/index.html.
[viii] “Donald Trump on Waterboarding: ‘Torture Works’ – The Washington Post,” accessed December 2, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/02/17/donald-trump-on-waterboarding-torture-works/?utm_term=.ff79874ddc54.
[ix] Donald J. Trump Verified account, “The Concept of Global Warming Was Created by and for the Chinese in Order to Make U.S. Manufacturing Non-Competitive.,” microblog, @realdonaldtrump, (November 6, 2012), https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/265895292191248385?lang=en.
[x] “Trump Recorded Having Extremely Lewd Conversation about Women in 2005 – The Washington Post,” accessed December 2, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in-2005/2016/10/07/3b9ce776-8cb4-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html?utm_term=.d8f65a53d45b.
[xi] “Where Trump Ranks among Least Experienced Presidents,” accessed December 2, 2016, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/11/08/donald-trump-experience-president/93504134/.
[xii] “Ten Days After: Harassment and Intimidation in the Aftermath of the Election,” Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed December 2, 2016, https://www.splcenter.org/20161129/ten-days-after-harassment-and-intimidation-aftermath-election; CBS News November 13, 2016, and 6:58 Pm, “Amid Reports of Some Supporters’ Violence, Donald Trump says: ‘Stop It,’” accessed December 2, 2016, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/reports-of-some-supporters-violence-trump-says-stop-it/.
[xiii] Charlie Savage, “Trump Calls for Revoking Flag Burners’ Citizenship. Court Rulings Forbid It.,” The New York Times, November 29, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/us/politics/trump-flag-burners-citizenship-first-amendment.html.
[xiv] Steve Eder, “Donald Trump Agrees to Pay $25 Million in Trump University Settlement,” The New York Times, November 18, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/us/politics/trump-university.html.
[xv] Andrew Kaczynski and Chris Massie CNN, “White Nationalists See Advocate in Steve Bannon Who Will Hold Trump to His Campaign Promises,” CNN, accessed December 2, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/14/politics/white-nationalists-on-bannon/index.html.
[xvi] Dolores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Orbis Books, 2013), 97.
[xvii] Ibid., 106.
Andrew Stone Porter 
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