A Sermon By The Rev. Marie Alford-Harkey: Advent 1 Year C
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Advent 1A 2016 Sermon
Rev. Marie Alford-Harkey
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford Connecticut
Many of you know that I’m the President of the Religious Institute, a non-profit organization that advocates for sexual, gender, and reproductive justice in faith communities and in society.
Because of that work, I was invited to a retreat with other LGBTQ leaders of faith-based organizations the week before Thanksgiving. We were asked to set about the task of using our moral imagination to dream of what is possible for a true moral awakening – an embodied movement for justice.
This was all conceived of before the results of the election were known, of course. It was meant to be a coming together about what was next for the movement for LGBTQ liberation, now that marriage equality is the law of the land and we’ve realized how many folks were left behind by that movement.
But for many of us in the room, every single one of us LGBTQ, the majority of us people of color, the results of the election meant that we were still reeling when we came together. Some of us were fearful. Some of us were angry. Some of us were determined. Some of us were surprised. I think it’s safe to say that none of us was ready to move on to hope at that point – just a week after the election.
I was ready for hard work, and I was trying to get ready for strategizing. I was, as usual, feeling a little out of place. The folks who were at the retreat were giants in the movement – people I admire and respect on many levels. On the plane I spent some time trying to think about what I would say. I tried to get ready to sound smart and to talk about the unique place of my organization in this movement for justice. In short, I was working hard out of my own ego, trying to figure out how to best represent myself and my organization at the retreat.
But this retreat defied the logic of the competitive non-profit world that I inhabit. I should have been ready for that.
We were asked to bring an artifact that symbolizes why we do the work we do. We were going to lay that on an altar at the opening worship of the retreat.
My object requires a quick story. On the Sunday evening before the election, I got a message from a former student (I used to teach high school) that another former student had died. His name was Steven. He was active in our gay-straight alliance and he was a voice for justice for himself and other LGBTQ kids at a time and in a place where it was never easy.
He used to message me every Mother's Day because he knew I had some sadness about not having kids of my own.
Despite the fact that he was always poor and struggling, he gave of himself and whatever he had out of a spirit of abundance. He just assumed that you take care of your friends, and his friends adored him.
My sweet Steven's body was found in a drainage ditch. They think he had a pulmonary embolism. He was 27.
I was devastated, as you can imagine. And so, when I went to look for an object for the altar at this retreat, I went to check my yearbooks because I was thinking of Steven and all my students. I have lots of old yearbooks with lots of mementos tucked in them. I picked up one from 2007, flipped to the back, and there was a piece of notebook paper that Steven had colored with his name in rainbow colors was right there. So that’s what I took to add to the altar. Kids like Steven are a large part of the reason that I do the work that I do.
I should have been ready for something more than a competitive strategy session and trying to position myself and my organization most advantageously, but I wasn’t. I was ready to do and plan and strategize.
But that’s not how it went. We started by creating that altar with all our artifacts and stories on it. And for the rest of the week we were invited into prayer, art, reflection, singing, bible study, quite time, and social time. We were invited to be rather than to do. We were invited to collaborate rather than compete.
We were also challenged. The group was mostly people of color. They pointed out what my wife April had also told me during election season. For people of color, the overt racism that was displayed during the campaign didn’t come as any surprise. It has always been there, right below the surface. So have all the other prejudices that came to light during this difficult season. Systems of oppression have always active in the United States, and they still are. So while we were invited to be, we were also challenged to dream about what a true moral awakening for justice could be like, and how we could make sure that we don’t leave anyone behind.
And this is the heart of Advent 2016 – tension. Is Advent about re-grounding ourselves in reflective spiritual practices? Absolutely. That’s the only way we can dream God’s beautiful commonwealth into being. Is Advent also about waking up, becoming aware of unjust systems, and taking action to dismantle them? Absolutely. That’s the only way we can co-create God’s beautiful commonwealth, which is our mandate as baptized Christians.
Our texts today admonish us to stay awake and to be ready for the unexpected in-breaking of God among us. Scholars believe that the gospel of Matthew was composed in Antioch, in Syria. The audience was “Christian Jews” who were still part of Judaism and were trying to find their place with lots of other Jewish sects in the aftermath of the destruction of the temple. Antioch was the capital of the Roman presence in Syria at the time of the writing of this gospel and it would have had the same economic and political woes as Galilee 50 years earlier when the events that are related were taking place. In both time periods the call for Jesus followers was to resist the imperial systems of domination and subjugation. The same is true in 2016.
The Romans text gives us a way to enact that resistance by reminding us of our baptism. When Paul admonishes us to be “clothed in Christ,” he is referring to an ancient and still-current understanding of baptism as “putting on Christ.”
Today, Luca, Riley, and their families will take on this covenant to be clothed in Christ through baptism. And today we too renew the promises of the baptismal covenant. These are our marching orders as we begin Advent 2016, and as we seek to find a balance between diving deeper into spiritual practices that ground us and acting for justice in the world.
The baptismal covenant reminds us to resist evil, repent, and return to God. It tells us to proclaim the good news of God in Christ by word and example. It calls us to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being.
That call to resisting evil is more important than ever this Advent. We must resist systems of empire, power, and domination, like those that the residents of Galilee and Antioch were so familiar with. As Christians we have to find ways to resist the dominant culture of 2016, and what I learned at my retreat is that resistance isn’t about competition, as if there’s not enough justice and love for everyone. Resistance is actually about being connected:
Connected to spiritual practices
Connected to each other
Connected to the earth
Connected to the struggle for justice.
So this Advent, let’s find our deep connection in the midst of an unsettling world. Let’s commit to resisting the systems of domination and oppression that seem to have a death grip on our society. What happens if we Christians live into our baptism? Nothing short of radical transformation.
Let us be bold enough to believe that God’s realm on earth is possible. Amen.