Sermon: Second Sunday in Epiphany 2021

Text: John 1:43-51

[Preached at Saints Peter & Paul / Santos Pedro y Pablo Episcopal Church, Portland OR]

“Queen of Heaven, Queen of Thieves”

“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

Can anything good come out of the trailer park?

Can anything good come out of the rez?

Can anything good come out of the projects?

Can anything good come out of the county jail?

Can anything good come out of the trap?

Can anything good come out of the stroll?

Can anything good come out of the encampments lining each underpass?

Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

*****

In July, the Times of Israel published an interview with British-Israeli archaeologist Yardenna Alexandre. Alexandre has done several excavations in Nazareth—not just within the contemporary city limits but within the very small area of the village of Nazareth that existed during the early Roman Empire—the Nazareth of Mary, the Nazareth of Jesus.

Nazareth was not an important place at this time. It wasn’t on the roads. Likewise, the people of Galilee, and of Nazareth in particular, were not considered important: the Jewish families who ended up there were families who had been displaced from Jerusalem. Who couldn’t compete with the pressure for land there and were dumped off by the Hasmonean Empire, which pushed them out to settle in some isolated backwater. Alexandre says the history shows there was a lot of unemployment among these families, a lot of conflict, a lot of struggling for daily survival. She said “people didn’t go through Nazareth unless they specifically wanted to go there”—because it wasn’t on the way to anything.

At her dig sites, Alexandre found this whole system of dug-out pits dating back to the Iron Age. The pits were made by hewing out the soft chalk bedrock underneath the homes of ancient Nazareth, and they were storage pits: for water, for grapes, for oil, all of that. But she found something more than that. Beneath the first level of these dug-out units, there was usually a second level to the pit. And then sometimes a third, altogether going about sixteen feet down. Then some of the dug-out units in each household connected to units in other households through an extensive series of underground tunnels—even though, during that era, people were living their daily lives above ground.

So what were the hidden underground pits and tunnels for? Alexandre says they served two purposes. Some of you, especially if you’ve had the chance to travel to Nazareth, probably already know that the later use for the deepest pits and the underground tunnels, Alexandre says comes about shortly after Jesus’ death. Starting around the time of the Great Revolt—the first Jewish war against the Roman Empire—people used these pits to escape and to hide from the Roman army.

The other use for these pits was less well known until recently. Yardenna Alexandre says that the hidden levels of the pits allowed families in Nazareth to practice extensive tax evasion from the Roman Empire. The empire took too much from the people (what’s new!). The people needed to survive, and so they hid a significant amount of their produce, their harvest, whatever crops they had that Rome would take in taxes. She says that based on the dating of the pits, this was widespread and common practice in Nazareth at the time of the Annunciation to Mary, and during the lifetime of Jesus. It more than likely happened in Mary and Jesus’ own home. So Jesus is not only born in a poor, rural, isolated backwater—but he is also born into community of shrewd hustlers. God sends the angel Gabriel to a household where people are breaking the law in order to survive, tells Gabriel, “That’s where you will find the young woman I am looking for, the One to whom I’m entrusting my life.” It’s worth noting that the earth beneath the Basilica of the Annunciation is absolutely packed with these units. Almost as if Mary were the literal queen bee of this underground economy.

So these are Jesus’ people. This is Jesus’ family. This is the place that shapes Jesus’ mind, identity, and early orientation to the world. And this, I think, is exactly what Nathanael is asking about when he asks, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Can anything good come out of a people so hard-pressed that they’re all committing crimes of survival, all on the wrong side of the law because they’d rather feed their families than fall in line? Can anything worthy come from a place where everyone melts into the hillside when the police show up?

I loved coming across this history because it speaks so immediately to the reality and the spirituality of our congregation at Chaplains on the Harbor. I’ll tell you more about us after the service but for now: we are a parish of 500 poor, homeless, and incarcerated people in rural Grays Harbor County, Washington. We are a church of the streets, the camps, the cellblocks, the flophouses. I think most nice Episcopalians understand us as a ministry of charity because we do a lot of charitable stuff: we are constantly feeding, sheltering, clothing, and pastoring people. But the basic equation most people assume about our work is that we are doing ministry in a place and among a people with only despair and lack to offer. A gaping hole of need. And certainly despair and lack are present: there are generations of poverty, generations of trauma. But as with Nazareth, there are also generations of resistance to the imperial order. And I’m not talking about respectable, righteous-sounding, or attention-grabbing kinds of resistance—not particularly notable marches with highbrow speakers. I’m talking about the kind of resistance that poor people always mount under empire, because poor people’s survival always demands disobedience to interests of the rich and powerful.

More than once I’ve heard Christians in this country say they really value international mission trips because the conditions of life in other countries are more parallel with the conditions of life in the biblical era, and thus make the meaning of biblical texts more apparent. Whenever I hear someone say this, I wonder how much time they’ve spent in the homes of poor people in the United States. In our congregation, we have pastored people who have made their homes by digging out tunnels in the earth in order to hide from the police—because their poverty has placed them on the wrong side of the law. Just about everyone in our parish has a criminal record. Just about everyone has been trespassed from WalMart for theft. Just about everyone has been involved in the street economy: trading in stolen goods, or drugs, or sex, because these are the economic opportunities to which they have access. Aberdeen is Nazareth. People choose survival even when their survival is made illegal. And there is nothing glamorous or romantic about that reality, but it is incredibly clarifying. It exposes all the lies we tell in this society about equality, about liberty and justice for all, about our government fundamentally valuing us. Under empire—including the US empire—we are all varying degrees of disposable. Poor people are never allowed to forget this. And yet poor people choose to live anyway. Even when it is a crime. Even when they risk being beat bloody by the police for stealing food from Safeway (which has happened in our ministry), people choose to assert their right to life. Even when told the lie that poverty strips them of the fitness to parent, people choose to raise children—like Mary did. And people find ways to provide for their children even when it’s illegal—like Mary did.

I think about God scanning the map, deciding where to send Gabriel, when Nazareth comes into focus. God needs to be born someplace off the beaten path that won’t attract much attention. God needs to grow up in a place where the way of the people is to choose life regardless of whether the power structure says they are entitled to life. And God—in the soft, warm, completely vulnerable body of a newborn human—needs provision despite the odds. There is Nazareth, and right in the middle of it—at the center of the underground hive of oil, wheat, and wine that the people have taken back for themselves—is Mary’s house. I imagine God chooses Her residence because it is the most comfortably stocked with stolen merchandise: so full that She is able to share with all her neighbors. “Yes,” God says when Mary comes into focus, “She’s the one.” Mary, Queen of Thieves. Mary, Queen of Daily Bread.

Anytime poor people come together with that level of organization and collaboration in the service of collective survival, God is bound to be born in the midst of it.

Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

How could it not?

Remarks: Fall Sounding @ Seattle University

I was so grateful to be invited to take part in this fall’s Sounding at Seattle U’s Center for Religious Wisdom & World Affairs–moderated by The Rt. Rev. Dr. Edward Donaldson III, with my co-panelists Marlon Brown, Dr. Erica Lee Martin and The Rev. Dr. Mark Kelly Tyler. My remarks are below, responding to the question:

What should be the religious response to the Movement for Black Lives in light of the US Presidential Election?

I’m really honored to be here with you all. I’m with the Poor People’s Campaign, and I work for The Episcopal Church as a rural anti-poverty organizer out on the coast of Washington State, at Chaplains on the Harbor. We aim to build what Dr. King called “the freedom church of the poor.” We’re a parish of 500 poor, homeless, and incarcerated people and we organize around projects of survival and dignity: we feed people, we shelter people, we run a farm, we distribute Narcan, we do street and jail outreach, we offer supportive employment for people getting off the street, out of jail, and in recovery from addiction. Maybe most relevant to this discussion: through our pastoring and organizing in a mostly poor white community, at Chaplains on the Harbor we also work to counter-recruit poor white people away from white supremacy and into movement for the liberation of poor people across racial lines.

I think the religious response to the Movement for Black Lives in light of the US Presidential Election remains the same regardless of which candidate wins: preach good news to the poor, proclaim liberty to the captives, set the oppressed free, bind up the broken-hearted and break every yoke. The legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, of racial terrorism and Jim Crow, of the rise the prison-industrial complex will not be atoned for by either party through elections alone. Elections are one tool in a belt containing thousands of tools—we should use them according to their purpose and scale. But if we as religious people are genuinely seeking justice for all God’s people and the whole creation, we have to get real that elections will never let us off the hook for mass civil disobedience, direct action, political education, organizing, and oppressed people taking back land and the means of production. It didn’t take four years for this country to reach its current state, it took four hundred.  What we are seeing now, what has been coming all along, is the fall of the American empire. The Roman Empire that lynched Jesus ran for about 400 years before it entered into its 100-year fall and so I think, as religious people, much more than a four-year election cycle, this is the sort of timeline we should be thinking along. What moves do we make in the collapse of the next 100 years? How will we organize to fill new voids of power, in a way that serves the poor and the oppressed, knowing we are not the only forces seeking to fill that void?

The answer on the ground where we work, at Chaplains on the Harbor, has been in no small part to win poor whites away from the networks and ideologies that seek to pit them violently against other poor people. We love our community, so we do this work out of love, but we also understand it is strategic. It is neither fair nor possible to hold people of color solely responsible for the fate of racial justice in this country—at some point, simply due to numbers, coalition work is required. At some point, strictly based on numbers, white communities have to be effectively brought into this project. For context: Grays Harbor County where I’m based is extremely poor and heavily criminalized. The Harbor is mostly white, with a sizeable number of Native people, and a growing number of Latinx people. There’s a very small number of Black families in the area and they deal with even harsher conditions than most: about 50% of African American school-age children in the Aberdeen school district are homeless. 100 years ago, Aberdeen was the timber export capital of the entire world. As that industry pulled out and went south, incarceration grew up as a replacement industry. This has meant the construction of Stafford Creek prison, which incarcerates almost entirely Black and Brown people—but it has also meant the expansion of county and municipal incarceration, which incarcerates mostly white and Native people. A few years ago, Grays Harbor ranked first for incarcerating local children for nonviolent/non-criminal offenses at a higher rate than any county in the nation. In terms of elections, Grays Harbor is one of the handful of counties that went to Obama twice and now to Trump twice.

This June, as protests and uprisings were erupting across the US, our team decided to organize a small vigil in downtown Aberdeen. We did this in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and also in honor of our local loved ones who were killed by law enforcement. Most of the local folks we were remembering were white, a few were Native. As we marched over to the park where we’d planned to gather, we were rushed by several heavily armed men claiming to be militia members, pointing their weapons at us. A larger crowd had gathered with them, screaming and spitting every slur you can imagine in our direction.  This is a small town, so we knew just about everyone on both sides of the divide (and both sides of the crowd were mostly white). People who knew one another screaming things like, “I knew your brother, he was a junkie, he deserved what the police did to him, he deserved to die.” For us, it was a crystal clear moment exposing the reality that white supremacist capitalism is a weapon wielded against poor white people, too: if you are struggling, if you are poor, if you are addicted, if you are killed, you deserve it.

We live in an empire. Both of our political parties are ultimately beholden to exploitive, violent, imperial interests. One party masks this somewhat, the other party does not. The success of every empire hinges on its ability to divide and conquer. Divide and conquer isn’t just a military operation, it’s an ideological operation. And this is where imperial co-opting of religion becomes so critical. We know that Jesus was killed by the Roman Empire in a manner of execution reserved specifically for rebel slaves. We encounter in the bible long, fraught diatribes against empire and against the concentration of wealth, land, and power. And yet: the birth of my denomination in this country is inseparable from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Jamestown Colony in Virginia, the site of the first holy communion service in North America, was also the site to which the first kidnapped Africans were taken on this continent—as a replacement labor force for the 80% of European indentured servants the Virginia Company starved to death in the colony from 1609-1610. This same site of death and exploitation was the site of the very first election, held in the first church on this continent. The wealth and power born in that sin endures in my denomination today: Trinity Episcopal Church on Wall Street, founded by the colonial ruling class in 1696 and physically built by congregation members’ slaves, manages real estate properties with a combined worth of over $6 billion as of 2019.

This is a staggering legacy to consider. What keeps me grounded and keeps me going is the knowledge that there are other legacies to hold onto. The American imperial project, corrupted from the beginning by the sins of genocide and captivity, has also—since the very beginning—been resisted powerfully. When my partner and I visited Jamestown a couple weeks ago, we also drove near the Great Dismal Swamp. For ten generations, from the colonization of Jamestown to the end of the Civil War, the Great Dismal Swamp was a destination and a permanently organized community: for Native people fleeing the encroaching frontier, for African people fleeing enslavement, and for white indentured servants fleeing the law. People raised crops and livestock and sunflowers in the swamp, set up their own governance, held their own religious life centered on African spiritual practices—for ten generations. This was a literal Exodus-to-the-wilderness story, happening right in the belly of the imperial beast.

We probably aren’t as far as we want to be from having to figure out what new wilderness we’ll be facing as this empire continues to rot. And that’s a frightening thing. But we know from our history and from our faith that God meets us in the wilderness. The solution to the Hebrews’ troubles with Pharaoh wasn’t to elect a kinder, gentler Pharaoh—it was about breaking Pharaoh’s system by getting free from it. The fight over chattel slavery in this country wasn’t about implementing a kinder, gentler plantation system—it was about abolition. Each time, the solution God points toward is to pull together leaders from the bottom of the imperial order to point toward radical transformation. I think the religious response to the Movement for Black Lives should be to remember that truth, nurture that truth, and put resources toward defending that truth.

Freedom Church of the Poor: Week 16

Entrance to the Ganienkeh Territory, original photo here.

Text: Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

[Preached at Freedom Church of the Poor Gathering, July 12th 2020]

“Seeds of Sovereignty”

Tonight we’re simply sharing a round of testimonies that answer this question, posed by the gospel reading for today: What watered the seeds of God’s word within you, bringing you to this movement for justice? What first woke you up and got you to sprout? What sustains your growth and tends your roots? With countless ongoing protests continuing to erupt across the globe, we see that God is sowing MANY seeds in this moment. How might we prepare good soil in which these seeds can land?

In 1974 in rural Upstate New York, a group of traditionalists from the Mohawk Indian Nation reclaimed a tract of uninhabited land within their own historic territory via armed takeover. After three years and 200 rounds of negotiation with the New York State government, they won. The families—about twenty five of them—agreed to move onto 600 acres further north, near Altona NY. Their territory is named Ganienkeh. The State of NY granted the land back to the Mohawk through an intermediary trust. The Mohawk claim full sovereignty in the territory, including exemption from taxation and any claims of jurisdiction made by state and federal agencies. Up until 1990, outsiders were still not permitted to enter the land. That year the people of Ganienkeh engaged in an eleven day armed standoff with the state police, who attempted to enter the territory after a National Guard helicopter was shot down in the area.

In 1992, when I was seven years old and about to start second grade, I went to Ganienkeh with my family and my church. My pastor was head of the Turtle Island Trust (the intermediary body to which the state had granted the land), and he was a key negotiator in the armed standoff. The community at Ganienkeh invited our church to come learn about their history, and work alongside them in their fields and at their fishponds.

I think when we are children, the way we take in the world is very concrete and physical. There’s not a lot of abstraction—it’s not ideas as much as it’s observations and sensations pulsing their way through our bodies. So my memories of this visit are very bright and very physical. And I remember feeling very good in my body—in a way that stands out singularly in my childhood. I remember heat, I remember sweat, I remember lots of bending over to check plants in the field for potato bugs. I remember long, dark-colored fish in the fish ponds that seemed enormous to me. And I remember playing with two other kids very close to my age—one in a black swimsuit, one in a blue dress and hat.

I knew these kids were poor. I knew everybody in this community was poor. I understood they all worked very hard to survive—to survive the cold in the winter especially. What I did not understand—what was both completely foreign and powerfully magnetic to me—was these kids’ lack of shame. I knew the physical sensation of shame very well by this point in my life. I knew how it felt twisting in my stomach, I knew the heat of it in my face, I knew how it came out in other people: in angry harsh words, in doors slammed in your face when you show up to someone’s house offering charity, in slamming the door on others who show up to yourhouse offering charity. Shame was old news to me by the time I was seven years old and I understood the rules for dodging it, navigating it, mitigating it. So I really could not understand how these other poor kids I was meeting seemed to carry none of that. And very honestly there are still parts of me that do not understand it—it remains about as strange and mysterious to me as God’s own self.

As a child, even though I didn’t have the words for it, I could see very clearly the embodied truth of liberation in those two kids I met at Ganienkeh. They were the first generation of children born in the territory. Born free. Born sovereign. As headline-grabbing as the armed reclamation of the Ganienkeh Territory was, the siege itself was a fraction of the project of establishing sovereignty. Since that moment, the community has devoted itself completely to setting up a fully cooperative governmental and economic system. They have not only established their own systems of sustainable food sovereignty. They have also revived the Mohawk language. They have set up a natural healthcare clinic that serves the entire region, which is mostly poor whites.

I think the seed that was planted in me during that trip—the holy observation that began clicking through my body from that moment on, and the truth I continually find myself reaching for—is an answer for the question, “What is the opposite of shame?” When I think back on that experience, and everything I have learned since then, what I believe deep in my soul now is that the opposite of shame is sovereignty.

The opposite of shame is sovereignty.

The opposite of humiliation is the collective self-determination of a people.

This is so much bigger than pride, although pride is one of sovereignty’s outcomes. Sovereignty is more deeply about power, autonomy, collective commitments, collective love, collective sacrifice and collective healing. Shame is not simply about feeling bad. Shame is rooted in conditions. When we are poor we feel shame over our very existence—for the physical conditions of our children’s hunger, for the damp that seeps into our sleeping places and the mold that spreads there, for the pain and sickness in our own bodies that have been crushed and poisoned by horrible working and living conditions and then on top of that been denied access to healing. The solution for this kind of shame is not self-help books or self-esteem workshops. The only fix for this kind of shame is to take power. To take the means of life back, however we can grasp it.

Amen.

Freedom Church of the Poor: Week 14

Text: Hebrews 4:1-13

[Preached at Freedom Church of the Poor Gathering, June 28th 2020]

“Whatever It Takes”

God rested.

God rested on the seventh day.

Hebrews 4:9, “So then, a sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; for those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labors as God did from Hers.”

We will not encounter the living word and the living God if we refuse to encounter ourselves and one another as vulnerable, finite, exhaustible humans. We are not machines. We are not objects. We are not subjects from which this sick system is entitled to wring every drop of blood, sweat and tears. The purpose of sabbath is to remind us of this spiritually, economically, politically, and socially. To remind that us we belong to God, not Caesar. Those who belong to God must emulate God—not only in God’s insatiable hunger for justice and not only in the power of God’s sacrificial love but also in God’s rest, God’s joy, and God’s thriving.

The punishment for the violation of sabbath is stoning—the most severe punishment in all of Jewish law. Why? Maybe because sabbath is how human beings remember in our own flesh and blood that our bodies are sacred and we are born free. Freedom is not an idea. It is not abstract. It is an earthly, bodily, material reality and in the final measure we only get it by taking it.

I mean “we” as humans and I also mean “we” as in the whole of creation. Sabbath is for us as God’s people and God’s movement. Sabbath is also for the earth. Just as the codes governing sabbath take our sovereignty as human beings seriously, so do they also take the living power of the earth seriously. This is a fundamentally different posture than paternalism or charity. When worldly empires refuse to give the poor, as God’s chosen people, a fucking break, then God requires us to take it ourselves: to gather power and take back our healing, our thriving, our lives, our dignity by any means necessary. Likewise when worldly empires do not give the earth itself a fucking break, she will take back what’s hers by any means necessary. Wendsler Noisie of the Apache Stronghold, addressing the spiritual warfare being waged against the poor and the environment in our country, said of the earth, “She will do whatever it takes.” We see clearly, in the codes and the scriptures around sabbath and the sabbath year, this same holy fear of the agency and power of the poor and the earth:

From Leviticus 26:33-35, “I will scatter you among the nations, and keep the sword drawn against you. Your land will remain desolate, and your cities in ruins. Then, as long as the land is desolate and you are in your enemies’ land, the land will enjoy its sabbaths. The land will rest and enjoy its sabbatical years. Thus, as long as it is desolate, [the land] will enjoy the sabbatical rest that you would not give it when you lived there.”

From 2 Chronicles 36:20-21, “… And them that had escaped from the sword carried he away to Babylon; and they were servants to him and his sons until the reign of the kingdom of Persia; to fulfil the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had been paid her sabbaths; for as long as she lay desolate she kept sabbath, to fulfil threescore and ten years.”

Even the mention of Joshua in Hebrews 4:8 resonates with this. Amid the desolation and wreckage wrought in the wars between Israel and Canaan, human societies did not rest, but the land still found a way to take what was hers. Joshua 11:23 reads, “Then the land—the earth—had rest from war.”

This passage from Hebrews is not about the afterlife. It is not about passively and patiently enduring in suffering until we get to heaven. It is not about pie in the sky. This text is about the long-haul strength, vision, and stamina we are required to build as a movement. Central to our cause is the recognition that we have no hope of victory if we do not revere God’s commandments regarding sabbath.

But this text is not only an exhortation for those seeking to do God’s will. It is also a history lesson on how, even from the get-go with Moses in the wilderness, human societies have been inclined to sabotage the sabbath—through the hoarding of power, through the concentration of wealth, through golden calves and imperialist military campaigns. This passage from Hebrews is as much a promise to us as it is a warning and a threat to our adversaries: people can only be pushed so far. The earth can only be pushed so far. There will be a reckoning one way or another. There will be judgment for those who rob the poor and the earth of rest and health and joy and it will be a judgment in this world, not the next. The sabbath is the foundation of the word of God and, ^“Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before her no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.”

Sermon: Freedom Church of the Poor, Week 9

Text: Deuteronomy 24:17-22

[Preached at Freedom Church of the Poor Gathering, May 24th 2020]

“Higher Law”

I go back and forth in my mind a lot about the law, and all that it has meant for poor people throughout history. Today, in the richest nation the world has ever seen, 99% of the time the law is used as weapon: used to control and repress desperate and suffering people, used to kill folks in the service of racist terrorism, used to cage people because they dared to cross a border or chose some illegal hustle to feed themselves and their children rather than respectably and quietly starve to death.

Mostly the law has not been a friend to our poor and homeless congregation at Chaplains on the Harbor in rural Grays Harbor County, Washington State. To our parish the law can look like police officers letting their dogs take some time to chew on you while they arrest you. The law looks like rampant sexual predation at the hands of jail and prison guards. Sometimes the law looks like the city rolling tanks or bulldozers into a homeless encampment. Other times the law beats you bloody and then tazes you while you’re on the ground in a mud puddle, because you stole food from the grocery store. These are all true stories, we’ve got many more like them, and each one—each violation of one of our beloved family—keeps me on my guard from making a false idol out of the laws under which we live. And then I read this text from Deuteronomy, and I wonder: what else might be possible for us, under the law?

And how can we get there? I wonder about all the orphans and widows and immigrants who must have agitated this ancient society real hard to make sure that the laws of Deuteronomy served and protected them, too.

A year ago this month, I was sitting at the US District courthouse in Tacoma WA. Our priest and ten homeless people in our community were suing the City of Aberdeen for violating their human and constitutional rights. The city had passed a slew unjust laws making it illegal to sit down or lie down on the sidewalk for longer than three minutes, illegal to pitch a tent anywhere in town, illegal to push your belongings in a shopping cart, and now they were attempting to bulldoze the largest homeless encampment in the county without providing folks anywhere else to go. People, of course, broke these laws constantly because they had no other choice and could not afford the punishments and repression that resulted. So we went to court. One of the plaintiffs, Misty, was the widow of a man who died at the camp, with Rev. Sarah performing last rites over him in the mud outside of the small cabin he’d built there. The judge was annoyed that our case had come to court at all and said as much from the bench. But something happened in that courtroom. This is what I wrote about it later that day:

“That Republican judge damn near got slain in the Spirit. I watched the Holy Ghost work him over right before my eyes. I watched a lot of sick, deceitful rhetoric about homeless people spill out of his mouth until he was just about emptied– like a purge. And then I watched him, a man who has probably been in control of most of his interpersonal interactions for the vast majority of his life, lose control of his own internal narrative. In his own courtroom. In front of homeless plaintiffs. In front of two dozen clergy from the diocese who turned out to support us. Time got weird. It was a perfectly clear and sunny day but the room got hazy.

He wasn’t sympathetic. He didn’t have the correct analysis. He said all the wrong things. He ruled in our favor anyway. He looked up at all the priests in their collars right before we adjourned and awkwardly stammered out, ‘My family has always lived in neighborhoods with poor people and it has been, in many ways, a great blessing.’…

I think we played our strategy very powerfully. Our lawyer [was] a shark who ran circles around the city attorney. But there was something else happening, too. It felt like a spiritual jailbreak. Like the Holy Dove was breaking and entering to crack a squat in federal court for an hour, to protect Her people. And She got away with it.”

“Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. That is why I command you to do this.” The Freedom Church of the Poor translation of this text reads, “No more fucking stealing from poor folks, no more degrading poor folks, no more leaving poor folks for dead—no matter where they’re from, no matter what kind of family they have or don’t have. Remember how Pharaoh did you back in Egypt? You’re not setting that shit up again, not on my watch. Love, God.”

Every time our movements push back against unjust laws, we are pushing the law of God forward. Every time the Fight for $15 strikes for dignity on the job, every time Put People First! PA does an action to fight for universal healthcare, every time the Poor People’s Campaign refuses to comply with this goddamn death cult of government we’re living under—God not only sees us, God is right there beside us making cracks in the dam that will not be able to hold us back forever, and God is rejoicing, because we are fighting for a higher law.

Sermon: Good Friday 2020

Text: Luke 23:43

[Preached for Greenleaf Christian Church’s “Seven Last Words” service]

The second saying—“He replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’”

What is Paradise?

We have a small newsletter in our ministry at Chaplains on the Harbor. It’s called “The Holy Hustler.” It circulates through all the jails in Grays Harbor, and every prison across Washington State as local people are transferred out of our rural county to serve longer sentences far away. I know several people incarcerated in jail and prison right now. I have read and transcribed their poems. I have copied and pasted their black-and-white drawings of dream catchers and wooden ships and stylized crosses into the pages of the newsletter. Some I knew before they were locked up—we met each other on the streets, in homeless encampments, at organizing meetings and church dinners. One: I had the honor of being present at the hospital during the birth of his youngest child. Another: I had the honor of watching him cuss out a pastor who truly deserved it.

What is Paradise?

I cannot find words desolate enough to express my grief and rage that my friends may die because our government refuses to lift a finger to prevent this pandemic from ripping through the prisons like wildfire. Some states have begun to reduce their prison populations through early releases but in Washington State, Governor Inslee has refused to do this regardless of prisoners’ vulnerable age, compromised health, pregnancy, or with soon-to-be-released dates. He has not even released mothers who are incarcerated with their children in prison nurseries. So people right now are sitting inside their cages, knowing what is coming, frantically calling and writing their loved ones on the outside if they can, as they wait for death to slip through the bars and under the doors. Women locked up at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma have been on hunger strike for several days protesting their conditions. On Wednesday, over 100 inmates at Monroe Prison demonstrated in the wake of an outbreak there, spread by the guards. They were met with pepper spray, sting balls, rubber pellets, and zip-tied hands and feet.

What is Paradise?

The Bible says Jesus was crucified between two thieves but empire makes thieves of us all. None of us have clean hands in this sin-sick society—if we’re not selling drugs we’re selling our labor dirt cheap to multi-national corporations, or forking over all our money to them because we need food, we need healthcare, we need medicine, and this economic system does not offer us any choices untainted with the blood of the poor and the destruction of the earth. But just like the Roman Empire did to the thieves who died by Jesus’ side, our own empire stays busy locking up poor people who are labeled thieves for trying to survive—they don’t lock up the thieves on Wall Street, or the thieves who steal elections and voting rights, or the thieves who made money hand-over-fist cashing in their stocks when they got word this virus was coming. The biggest thieves in this story are not the poor people strung up on Jesus’ left and right. The biggest thieves in this story are Herod and Pilate and Caesar.

What is Paradise?

I had a friend named Zack who went to Walla Walla prison at 18 years old for stealing from Wal-Mart. He survived that. He survived living on the street. He once survived being crushed nearly to death when the dumpster he was sleeping in was picked up by a garbage truck. But a few years ago when he was 24, Zack caught pneumonia and he did not survive that. He did not survive it because he was turned away from multiple hospitals for treatment. He was turned away because the hospitals had labelled him a “drug-seeker” due to his history of addiction. The coroner told our pastor the local hospital would be cleared of any wrongdoing because the only story to counter their official version was that of Zack’s friends and, in the coroner’s words, “we don’t accept the testimony of active drug addicts as legitimate.” She didn’t know Zack. She didn’t know he was smart, and funny as hell, and brutally honest. She didn’t know how once, when he was in lockdown at the Grays Harbor County Jail, Zack shouted our newsletter through the metal toilet drain at night so it would echo into the cells of everyone else there, spreading words of encouragement and love and prayer.

What is Paradise?

I don’t know. I only know that my life has been graced and made profoundly richer by talented, brilliant, creative, kind people left to die in both literal dumpsters and in the social dumpsters of the prison system. And I know that when any single one of them goes down, Jesus Christ himself is nailed to the cross once more.

Sermon: First Sunday in Lent 2020

Photo: encampment along the Chehalis River, Aberdeen WA [photo credit to AP]

Text: Matthew 4:1-11

[Preached at St. John the Baptist Episcopal Church, West Seattle]

“Jesus, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”

Good morning! It’s wonderful to be with you all today. Thank you so much to Rev. Kate for letting me share this pulpit, and for hosting me and my incredible coworkers—Tracy and Skye Clayton—to teach about our work this morning. We work at Chaplains on the Harbor—a mission station of this diocese located out on the coast, in rural Grays Harbor County. We are a parish of around 500 poor, homeless, and incarcerated people based in one of the poorest counties in the state, so the way we do church is rooted in collective survival. We run six feeding programs a week, host a cold weather shelter, distribute Narcan (the opioid overdose reversal drug), do street outreach, make weekly jail visits, publish a jail and prison newsletter, offer supportive employment for people getting off the street and out of jail, operate a four acre farm, run a community center, do weekly worship, popular education, and human rights organizing. Last year we settled two federal lawsuits against the City of Aberdeen for violating the human and constitutional rights of homeless people. In our work with the Poor People’s Campaign, we’ve been honored to walk alongside incredible leaders as they’ve made the journey from homelessness, incarceration, and addiction to directly addressing and sharing their truths before the highest levels of governance in this country. We have eleven people on our staff right now, eight of whom are formerly homeless. They run all our programs and organizing on the ground, keep track of our local political terrain, have testified before US Senators, attended hearings of the House Budget Committee, interrogated presidential candidates on the failure of this richest nation in the history of the world to end poverty, and more! We are so excited to tell you more about all that after church. For now, though, it’s Gospel time. It’s Lent.

Grays Harbor County is the very first place I think about when I read this scene about the devil tempting Jesus. I know on a certain level that’s silly, because Jesus and Satan are the desert and you can’t get further than the desert than Aberdeen. It’s WET. Every damn day! So when the text says “Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness” I know I should be picturing dry, hot, rocky hills but what I see is moss, ferns, rain, and old growth forest. But God knows how to meet us wherever we’re at, so hear me out.

In our work at Chaplains on the Harbor we meet people who know the wilderness well. Not in any romantic, idyllic way either. We know folks who know the wilderness well because the wilderness is where they survive and the wilderness is how they survive. It’s a hard way to live. It’s cold. It’s wet. It’s lonely. It can be dangerous. It’s also quiet. It is gorgeous. And it is, in a way, free. I don’t mean “free” in terms of cost—there’s a cost to every way of living. I mean “free” in terms of liberated from the suffocating weight of a society that despises the very sight and sound of poor people.

When I think about the people we know who have learned to live in the wilderness—without waiting for permission from any official or property owner or timber corporation to do so—it makes sense to me that Jesus would go there to prepare himself to face off with evil. And I wonder what those days were like for him. We talk a lot about the back-and-forth he and Satan have in this passage; we talk less about the forty days leading up to that conflict—the forty days we’re supposed to be imitating right now. All of the lived, physical, embodied experience of Jesus’ wilderness time is incarnate in the daily survival struggles of homeless people here and now, in 2020. The bible says Jesus fasted the whole time, and was famished. I imagine this as involuntary fasting—the fasting of the poor. The earth is rich but learning to survive off it takes skill, patience, and luck. I wonder if the cycle of his days and nights were marked by checking traps, foraging, sleeping at odd hours when the temperature was most ideal and the risk of encountering hungry wildlife or hostile parties was lowest. I bet he was bored and more than a little grossed out by the stink of himself. I bet those forty days in the woods got pretty damn tedious. I bet his joints felt like fire when he finally stopped moving. I bet he was tempted to self-medicate. I bet he was lonely as hell.

We’re real cutesy about Lent, as the church. We give up chocolate and caffeine and try new fad diets or workouts—using Jesus as an excuse to shed a few pounds. This is how I was raised to participate in the season so don’t get me wrong, I’m fully including myself in this indictment when I say: none of this is the point of fasting. Ever. None of this is what God is asking us to do. None of it is about our individual holiness. I had the great blessing, when I lived in New York City, of being invited by one of my Muslim friends to fast with her in solidarity during Ramadan for two years in a row. Her instruction on the importance of this month-long fast, from sunup to sundown, was so simple and clear that I have never forgotten it. She told me: “We fast because God wants us to always remember, in our bodies, what the poor experience. So that we will always be generous.” Not only as individuals but as a whole society.

How can we find our way back to this kind of collective holy discipline? We say we follow Jesus. Jesus was poor. Jesus was homeless. Jesus was an outlaw drifter survivalist trying to make it in the wilderness when he encountered great evil and stood against it. In this season of fasting and honest self-examination, I wonder if we—as the church—can fast from our prejudice and mistreatment of the poor. Can we fast from calling the police whenever we find a homeless person sleeping on our front steps? Can we fast, in the words of Father Greg Boyle, from standing in judgment of the poor—instead of in awe of what the poor are forced to carry? Can we fast from criminalizing people who are forced into impossible choices by this impossible economy? Can we look at ourselves as an institution honestly: happily worshipping a homeless thirty-something-year old on Sunday and then crossing the street to avoid one on Monday? Can we get real with ourselves about what we are missing when we behave that way? We are missing God. We are missing critical truth about our world! We are missing the 140 million people in this nation who are living in poverty! We are going out of our way to avoid pain and risk and in doing so, we go out of our way to avoid real life, real love, and the hope of real transformation! If our quiet solemn liturgies are not making the voices of the poor ring more loudly and powerfully in our ears, we are doing Lent wrong.

If we cannot hear the poor, we cannot hear God.

If we cannot hear the poor, we cannot hear God.

If we cannot hear the poor, we cannot hear God.

Sermon: Third Sunday after Epiphany 2020

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis arrested on the steps of the US Supreme Court, June 12th 2018

Text: Matthew 4:12-23

[Preached at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Medina WA on January 26th, 2020]

“Holy Hustlers”

Good morning, it’s wonderful to be with you all today! Thank you so much to Rev. Lex and Rev. Sarah for letting me share this pulpit. My name is Aaron Scott. I work at Chaplains on the Harbor—a mission station of this diocese located out on the coast, in rural Grays Harbor County. We are a parish of around 500 poor, homeless, and incarcerated people based in one of the poorest counties in the state, so the way we do church is rooted in collective survival. We run six feeding programs a week, host a cold weather shelter, distribute Narcan (the opioid overdose reversal drug), do street outreach, make weekly jail visits, publish a jail and prison newsletter, offer supportive employment for people getting off the street and out of jail, operate a four acre farm, run a community center, do weekly worship, popular education, and human rights organizing. Last year we settled two federal lawsuits against the City of Aberdeen for violating the human and constitutional rights of homeless people. In our work with the Poor People’s Campaign, we’ve been honored to walk alongside incredible leaders as they’ve made the journey from homelessness, incarceration, and addiction to directly addressing and sharing their truths before the highest levels of governance in this country. We have eleven people on our staff right now, eight of whom are formerly homeless. They have testified before US Senators, attended hearings of the House Budget Committee, and interrogated presidential candidates on the failure of this richest nation in the history of the world to end poverty.

Some people think we are an exciting and new kind of church. We are not. There is nothing older in the Christian tradition than a bunch of poor people taking care of each other while causing a ruckus and speaking truth to power. Case in point, today’s Gospel reading:

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

“Immediately they left their nets and followed him.”

“Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.”

This story is the dream of every organizer who’s ever called for a wildcat strike. How bad of a gig must this have been, that Peter, Andrew, James and John were so ready at a moment’s notice to walk off?

We can guess pretty easily that fishing in the ancient Mediterranean was neither the safest nor most comfortable job. History attests to this. Fish was a staple food across the ancient Roman Empire, consumed by all classes, and fishing was a major industry. You had the people who caught it, the people who built the boats, the people who sold licenses and collected taxes on it, the police who cracked down on illegal fishing, the fish processing facilities, the merchants who shipped it. All of this was taking place, of course, in a society where the vast majority of people were living in poverty and barely surviving day to day. There is no middle class in Jesus’ historical moment. There are the elites and then there is everyone else—not so unlike today.

Fishers are in that “everyone else” group. Slave fishermen were numerous. While fishing was recreation for the elites, romantically depicted in their ancient art, the everyday people who actually fed the empire through their labor and risk “remain almost invisible” (at least outside of the Gospels).

The Bible remains some of the most enduringly positive media we have about poor people. Where else do we consistently, repetitively hear the message that poor people doing the dirtiest, most dangerous, most undervalued work are chosen by God as leaders in this world? Where else do we hear the message that poor people are allowed—or even called by God!—to walk off their dirty, dangerous, undervalued jobs in order to help God change the world? We don’t hear that on the news. We don’t read it in the newspapers. Liberal and conservative pundits and bloggers alike generally fail to see poor people as moral leaders and true authorities on how best to transform this unjust society. Thank God for the Gospel for holding out this truth for us.

I serve on the National Steering Committee for the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. As part of the campaign’s activities two summers ago, nine interfaith religious leaders were arrested on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.—essentially for praying, and for refusing to disperse as they prayed. They were held overnight in jail. After they were released two of my friends, The Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis and Shailly Gupta-Barnes, shared with me that they’d spent a long time talking with other inmates while they were being held on the women’s side of the jail. All the inmates were poor women. As Shailly and Liz and the other protestors talked about the Poor People’s Campaign, sharing how they’d risked arrest to bring attention to the staggering rates of poverty in this wealthy nation, the women began to tell their own stories of surviving poverty and fighting against it.

One of them was suffering from domestic abuse and in jail because she fought back. One of them was late to work and arrested for running a stop light. One of them was a fast food worker, named Baby. She didn’t stick to the limits that her employer put on how much food went to each order. She knew people were coming in who couldn’t afford what they needed and she piled on extra meatballs and toppings to their orders. No one would go hungry on her watch because they couldn’t afford to eat. Rev. Theoharis said, “Baby told us we should come into her restaurant and have other Poor People’s Campaign folks come in to get free or reduced priced meals so we could continue the fight—so she was for helping random poor people as well as supporting the cause of the poor organizing for justice.”

If you’re not convinced that petty theft from a giant multinational corporation—for the sake of feeding and organizing the poor—is God’s work, let me read you something about the Bible days:

In general, the economy of the Roman Empire [a giant multinational power!] was extractive insofar as production and distribution served the interests of the powerful, not those who actually performed the labor. Peasant fishers and processors had little to no control over fees for fishing licenses or tax and toll rates. It is reasonable to conclude that such an economic situation was largely one of exploitation. This exploitation may have intensified in the Galilee during Herod Antipas’s reign, due largely to his increased commercialization of fishing and his own luxurious living. At any rate, fishers, farmers and other laborers in the Galilee sought ways to resist exploitation by hiding goods, lying about the size of their families in order to pay fewer poll taxes, and other covert strategies. Knowledge of the Galilean fishing economy raises interesting questions about the various “fish traditions” throughout the gospels. What are we to make of the catch of 153 large fish, for example, that, instead of being shipped off to those who could afford them, are eaten for breakfast by Jesus’ disciples (John 21:1-14)? Might this story have a subversive quality that has otherwise gone unnoticed?

What kind of leaders is God calling right now, to spearhead the salvation of this broken and beautiful world? Those living comfortably at the top, or those risking their very lives and livelihoods to do the right thing—to feed God’s people, to keep one another alive when the powers and principalities turn their backs on the poor? This world has more than enough for all of us to thrive, but when we run off the rails, God is always always choosing folks from the bottom to get us back on track. Why? Because people at the bottom are the ones who know up close and personal how profoundly things need to change. That’s why Jesus called these four. That’s who Jesus is inviting us to hear today, too: leaders from the bottom. Fast food workers. Prisoners. Homeless people. The Gospel is for all of us—God’s dream is for all of us—but to bridge the gap between this burning world and “earth as it is in heaven,” is going to require us to search out a very particular kind of leadership.

It’s the kind of leadership that knows how to make a way out of no way.

It’s the kind of leadership the Poor People’s Campaign encountered in that cell at night in the D.C. city jail: devoted to human kindness and uplifting the hungry even when doing so breaks the law. At Chaplains on the Harbor we call these kinds of leaders “holy hustlers” and we are powerfully enriched by their spiritual gifts.

It’s the kind of leadership we see every single day on the streets of Grays Harbor County: speaking out and speaking up about what all God’s children deserve, even when you have been stigmatized as “unclean” and “undeserving” because of your criminal record or your track marks.

It’s the kind of leadership that responds to the call of God in real time: dropping the nets to the floor of the boat and walking away from exploitation and toward redemption of the whole world—no matter the risk.

Sermon: Second Sunday after Epiphany 2020

Jack Rottier Collection/George Mason University Libraries. Activists marching under the NWRO banner in the Poor People’s Campaign, Washington, D.C., May–June 1968

Text: Isaiah 49:1-7

[Preached at St. Augustine In the Woods, Whidbey Island WA January 19th, 2020]

“Kings Shall See”

Good morning! It’s a blessing to be with you all and an honor to share your pulpit, particularly on the Sunday before MLK Day. My name is Aaron Scott and I’m one of the co-founders of Chaplains on the Harbor. We are a mission station of this diocese located out on the coast, in Grays Harbor County. We’re a congregation of around 500 poor, homeless, and incarcerated people based in one of the poorest counties in the state, so the way we do church is rooted in collective survival. We run six feeding programs a week, host a cold weather shelter, distribute Narcan (the opioid overdose reversal drug), do street outreach, make weekly jail visits, publish a jail and prison newsletter, offer supportive employment for people getting off the street and out of jail, operate a four acre farm, run a community center, do weekly worship, popular education, and human rights organizing. Last year we settled two federal lawsuits against the City of Aberdeen for violating the human and constitutional rights of homeless people. In our work with the Poor People’s Campaign, we’ve been honored to walk alongside incredible leaders as they’ve made the journey from homelessness, incarceration, and addiction to directly addressing and sharing their truths before the highest levels of governance in this country. We have eleven people on our staff right now, eight of whom are formerly homeless. They have testified before US Senators, attended hearings of the House Budget Committee, and interrogated presidential candidates on the failure of this richest nation in the history of the world to end poverty. Yes, I am bragging on my team. I will always brag on them. Shamelessly!

It is in that spirit that I have been reflecting on today’s reading from Isaiah. It’s a good one for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day—for all the obvious reasons, and for some that may be less obvious. I know later today you all will be studying and reflecting on the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 (the last campaign of King’s life, and the one for which he was killed), as well as the new Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. I serve on the campaign’s National Steering Committee. We are uniting poor communities, faith leaders, and people of conscience all over the country to fight five interlocking and inseparable evils: poverty, systemic racism, the war economy, ecological devastation, and this nation’s distorted moral narrative. This campaign is co-chaired by my mentor, The Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, and by Bishop William Barber. This campaign is also carried by the thousands of brilliant minds and devoted hearts of poor people in it. We too often in history look back at social movements and attribute them to just one or two big names. We certainly are often guilty of that on MLK Day. But that is not how social movements happen. What makes a movement is the many, not the one. So I’m going to re-read just a small piece of this Isaiah passage, and then I’m going to read you a story straight out of the history books on the first Poor People’s Campaign.

“Thus says the Lord,
the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One,

to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations,
the slave of rulers,

‘Kings shall see and stand up,
princes, and they shall prostrate themselves.’”

***

“Kings shall see.”

***

I was first introduced to the following history on the first Poor People’s Campaign by the Kairos Center:

“In early February, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., was coming to Chicago to meet with [National Welfare Rights Organization founder George Wiley] and his executive board—at NWRO’s demand. It promised to be a showdown. King was planning a ‘Poor People’s Campaign’ for Washington, D.C.—a tactic born in desperation, as the Civil Rights Movement was in shreds. King had failed, during the previous two years, to solve the riddle of further effective action against northern racism and poverty. The new campaign called for thousands of the poor to encamp in Washington, dramatizing the issues for Congress and the country. The campaign needed foot soldiers. Wiley had them—ten thousand paying members in one hundred functioning chapters—and felt that King was trying to divert NWRO members to the Poor People’s Campaign without any recognition of NWRO and its own purposes, program, and strategy.

When King walked through the lobby of the downtown Chicago YMCA on February 3, 1968, he was immediately surrounded by admirers—a crowd seeking to glimpse or touch the famous, charismatic leader. He moved upstairs, with his lieutenants—Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Bernard Lafayette, and Al Sampson—to a meeting-room where Wiley and his thirty-member committee sat waiting. There were place-cards around the big rectangular table so that Johnnie Tillmon would be seated in the center, with Wiley on her right and Dr. King on her left. King would be separated from his lieutenants, who were surrounded in each corner by the welfare-recipient leadership. Tim Sampson characterized Wiley’s seating arrangement as ‘a grand piece of psychological warfare.’

To the ladies, King and the SCLC’s Poor People’s Campaign was a threat. They were angry that King’s lieutenants had moved around the country contacting local welfare rights groups, asking them to join the banner at the cost of abandoning their own welfare-organizing efforts. ‘The women’s concern was that they had a major constituency organization,’ said Sampson. ‘They had created it with their blood, sweat, and tears, and it was something magnificent to them. Not to be recognized was an attack on their very being. And to have it taken away was unthinkable.’

While Johnnie Tillmon presided, holding her grandchild in her lap, King waited quietly until each woman introduced herself. He then began to describe the purposes of the forthcoming Washington campaign. ‘We need your support,’ he concluded.

Then Etta Horn opened the barrage: ‘How do you stand on P.L. 90-248?’ Puzzled, Dr. King looked toward the Reverend Andrew Young, his executive director. ‘She means the Anti-Welfare Bill, H.R. 12080, passed by the Congress on December 15, and signed into law by Lyndon Baines Johnson on January 2,’ interrupted Mrs. Tillmon. ‘Where were you last October, when we were down in Washington trying to get support for Senator Kennedy’s amendments?’ Beulah Sanders held up a copy of the NWRO pamphlet The Kennedy Welfare Amendments.

King was bewildered by the technical discussion of the new law as his staff tried to fend off the women’s hostile questions. Finally, Johnnie Tillmon said, ‘You know, Dr. King, if you don’t know about these questions, you should say you don’t know, and then we could go on with the meeting.’ ‘You’re right, Mrs. Tillmon,’ King replied. ‘We don’t know anything about welfare. We are here to learn.’ The NWRO members proceeded to bring Dr. King up to date on the history of what they saw as welfare repression in Congress and the nation.”

***

Who is the prophet in this story? Who is posing the challenge to power? Make no mistake: King was devoted to Gospel justice so fully that it cost him his life. But was he alone? Did he find his way there all alone? Or did he have teachers along the way? Did he ever end up having to be led by people who were seen—not by God, but by the powers and principalities of this world—as less important than him?

We like our prophets to be sainted, polite, and safely dead. Too bad for us. That’s not who God sends. Isaiah went around naked and barefoot for three years. We love to read his words but we would probably call the police on him if we met him in the street today. And yet God keeps sending us these messengers anew in each generation. We meet them every day at Chaplains on the Harbor on the streets and in the jails. King himself met them in that upper room of the Chicago YMCA.

***

The Lord called Johnnie Tillmon before she was born,
while she was in her mother’s womb, God named her.

God made Beulah Sanders’ mouth like a sharp sword,
and hid her in the shadow of God’s hand.

God made Etta Horn a polished arrow,
in his quiver he hid her away.

***

For all three of these prophets—true revolutionaries who had both nothing and everything to lose, poor Black mothers scapegoated, or as Isaiah might say “deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slaves of rulers”—God made sure that a King would see them and stand up. If there is a lesson Dr. King can teach us on this day, let it be this: that the poor stand in their own authority, and have the authority to lead our whole society toward God’s dream of justice and love, and if we want to follow Jesus we need to follow not only the likes of St. Martin but also the likes of St. Johnnie, St. Beulah, and St. Etta.

Sermon: Third Sunday of Advent 2019

Image by artist Ben Wildflower

Text: Luke 1:46-55 and Matthew 11:2-11

[Preached at Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Mercer Island WA]

“Sing the Rulers Down”

My own prayer life was barren for several years before my child, Moses, was born. I was working for the church through most of that barren stretch. I was doing good work, too. I helped cofound Chaplains on the Harbor during that time, and we are an incredible ministry (I will say more about us at Adult Formation after the service!). But despite that good work, I lived mostly inside my head during this period of years. For a number of reasons I was deeply and damagingly vacant from my own body, my own heart, and my own spirit.

When Shelly, Moses’ mama, gave birth to him a little over three years ago, God came crashing back into my life like a semi-truck plowing through a guardrail into oncoming traffic. Crashing through all the deadening walls I had put up around myself, my identity, my thoughts, my feelings. It was terrifying. It was painful. It was a mess. I was a mess. I still am a mess, though at this stage I’m becoming a mess with some basic internal sense of direction.

In that messiness, at one particularly low point for me, I reached out in prayer for Mary the Mother of God. I reached for Her because I was lost. I reached for Her because I needed a mother.

She found me.

She came for me the way good mothers come for their children when their children are acting out: with both love and power, with both understanding and correction. She showed me who I had allowed myself to become, and She brought me back home to try once more to become the person She was encouraging me to be.

I share this personal experience because I find it to be consistent with who the Mother of God is politically, structurally, and economically. Her love for us is never confined to our private emotional landscapes; She is here inside our hearts with us and also, simultaneously, always out there with us. Seamlessly. I know this because I have seen and experienced it myself. I also know this because the set of readings we have for today demonstrate it powerfully.

The Magnificat, the Song of Mary, takes place in a very intimate setting: at Elizabeth’s house. Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist, and Mary, pregnant with Jesus, appear at home alone together in some tiny unnamed town out in the sticks—exclaiming, crying out, and singing to each other with joy when these words spill out of Mary’s mouth:

“God has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly;
God has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”

When, in The Episcopal Church, do we ever talk about God this way?!

When is the last time you heard a preacher stand up and say “God is two pregnant women in a colonized backwater shouting joyfully to each other about political insurrection and the redistribution of wealth?”

I guarantee, given the state of our world, that none of us here have heard that message often enough. But this is how the Mother of God loves us!

Fast-forward thirty some years: Elizabeth’s baby is all grown up and in jail for doing the work she raised him to do. Mary’s baby isn’t far behind. Through it all, these two sons of two prophets keep checking in on each other—even when they are separated by prison bars, the Gospel tells us they kept sending messages back and forth. I don’t know it for sure but I like to think this is because their mothers raised them not only to turn the tables of the empire but to also be extremely tender. To be caring and careful with one another, despite a world that was not careful with them. To be careful with each other so that they could be, in the eyes of the empire, dangerous together.

Do you ever wonder what people whispered about them? Do you wonder what the gossip might have been about their families? I do. I can imagine Elizabeth’s neighbors out in the Judean hill country swapping opinions on how she just let John run wild, how she wasn’t hard enough on him, how she didn’t train him to walk through the world with the correct posture of shame that might have protected him from King Herod’s police—how he was always too free, too proud, too honest, and now he was in prison paying the price.

And Mary’s child: I wonder if the neighbors said he never had a chance at a normal life. I wonder if they ran their mouths a little about the timing of Her pregnancy, how it didn’t quite line up with the timing of Her marriage to Joseph. How there were rumors that sometimes She heard voices which She claimed were messages from God, and isn’t that a little crazy? Isn’t She a little crazy? Isn’t She a little too mouthy about local politics, isn’t She a little careless about who might overhear Her say these things? Putting some big ideas in Her baby boy’s head about poor families like theirs being more precious to God than any ruler. That kind of raising will get a child in trouble later on.

Well. You know who else got in trouble later on for the way Mary raised her son, don’t you? Herod! Along with the whole web of the empire’s rulers. Along with anyone else who stood to lose a profit with the last becoming first.

I’m not sure, but I think if Elizabeth’s house was in the Judean hill country—as the Gospel of Luke tells us it was—it might have been possible for her and Mary to look out the door and across the Dead Sea and, on a clear day, just make out the outline of Herod’s palace on the other side of the water.

Herod’s palace: the place where Herod tried to get the three wise men to snitch out the location of the manger.

Herod’s palace: where, after Mary gave birth and escaped to Egypt, Herod issued his order to kill all the Judean boys in Bethlehem under age two.

Herod’s palace: where Elizabeth’s son John would eventually be thrown into prison and executed by Herod’s son.

Herod’s palace: the seat of local power which eventually worked in full collaboration with Pontius Pilate to send Mary’s son Jesus to the cross.

This place across the water haunted both these mothers for their whole lives. It hunted their children for their whole lives. The traumatic grief both of them came to know was probably never quite a sudden, total surprise—it was a prophecy and a looming terror they carried all along.

And still, they faced one another at Elizabeth’s house that day and Mary sang.

Mary sang Her child into power.

Mary sang Herod right off his throne.

Mary sang the poor into authority.

Mary sang food into the stomachs of the starving.

Mary sang the rich into empty pockets.

She is still singing. As long as there is need, no matter the peril, Mary’s song is still ringing out through the universe if we choose to listen to Her.

Mary sings the walls of the detention centers down.

Mary sings the homeless right on inside, past the bolted locks and security alarms, into the softest warmest luxury housing.

Mary sings clean water into the pipes of every home in Flint.

Mary sings the guns out of the hands of the police.

Mary sings the Herods of our time off their thrones.

Mary sings the power out of the ruling class’ hands and into the hands of the poor, the criminalized, the degraded, and when we do this kind of work in the world, we honor Her. When we labor to bring the kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, we are singing right along with Her.

She has mercy on those who fear Her

in every generation.

She has shown the strength of Her arm,

She has scattered the proud in their conceit.

She has cast down the mighty from their thrones,

and has lifted up the lowly.

She has filled the hungry with good things,

and the rich She has sent away empty.

Glory to the Mother, and to the child, and to the Holy Spirit:

as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever. Amen.