Resistant Joy

Sermon

As you read from Isaiah, I’d encourage you to look at the bulletin cover piece, called “Blossoming Desert,” by artist Hannah Garrity… what do you recognize there? What is confusing? What seems scary or joyful?

Isaiah is a frequent scripture as the calendar year closes, as Christmas nears. There is repeated beautiful imagery of peace, of lions and lambs eating together, of provision without competition. I had a friend in college who said Isaiah was her favorite because it’s often very beautiful and very much toward the middle of the Bible, so sometimes a Bible will just open to it.

Isaiah is a big book, often divided scholarly into three books, and you might remember a few weeks ago that we discussed that Isaiah may also be one great prophet but was probably many prophets or a community of prophecy. Isaiah the book or books tracks the rise of the Babylonian Empire and the following exile of the people of Israel as they were scattered from their homes or worse. I spent some time reacquainting myself with the empire this week and you can Google and see there were good things that came from it, but like all empires, including ones we know, there was a lot of injustice to process.

Isaiah’s description of a blossoming desert here, a fruitful wilderness, a coming home, is meant to be encouraging in what would have no doubt been a scary time and with scary events to process for centuries.

This is the wilderness, and yet, this passage starts and ends with great joy. And great comfort: there’s water for your thirst, there are flowers and plants that are a feast for the eyes, there’s beauty, safety, and singing, and you can’t get lost going the Lord’s way, even as a fool—what a line… and whew… and greater yet, no one threatening or dangerous will approach you there.

And toward the middle there are notes that I understand, but I know I’m bothered by them (because of the times we find ourselves in). Strengthen yourself sounds a lot like “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” And then don’t be afraid right next to it sounds a lot like “calm down.” And I’m sure you all know that a worldwide study was done over a long period of time with great care and contrast to show that no one ever calmed down by being told to calm down.

And joy? Now? How could we? We try not to get apathetic because that doesn’t help, but joy, joy seems mean. And unless a verse about strengthening hands and knees comes with some new divine arthritis gel, I think maybe that verse is also a bit mean. I know we have had knee and hand pain among many of us, and there’s greater psychic and societal pain, too, that is disabling.

And yet… I still hear two restorative techniques of celebratory change mentioned here. I’ll get the most annoying one out of the way first.

We can literally strengthen our hands and knees, or we can figuratively try to embrace that strength. And, limiting as this can sound, I do think it’s possible. There are things we can do—I even see the artist’s rendition at the top of her piece as paths we can take. Maybe they’re even ways we’ve already tread and found helpful and need to remind ourselves to tread again, or maybe they’re paths we took that weren’t helpful, or are no longer helpful, and now we know not to go back that way. Either way, the repeat of the wilderness as often as joy, these verses should remind those who have tread the wilderness before that we can do this. God is here. We’re not on our own.

We can do some things. We can literally use our arthritis gels when we are in pain. We can move with care for ourselves; we can stop and not go back to things that didn’t work physically for us or politically for our society. We can follow up with doctors when possible and keep our therapy appointments; we all feel and look better when we follow up with professionals and keep our therapy appointments. Even if we speak with a professional, realize we are strong, and leave, we’ve done something; that should be celebrated with joy.

Celebrating is also good strengthening exercise. We can come here, maybe we can even be so bold as to become church members or ushers, or try to attend worship four weeks in a row or try to come four times a year, or be wonderful leaders for 40 years. I often think of worship like exercise or going to the gym; I don’t often want to go, but I rarely leave not feeling better.

There are ways we can strengthen our joy and care for it. Wisdom is proved right by her deeds as we read earlier. If we recall the things that have strengthened us and brought us joy, I imagine many of them involved doing something: reminding us of our critical connections outside ourselves.

Do (those) things. And be open to surprising joy that is out of your control. As far as I can tell, no one sent any emails or had any meetings to work on making these plants in the desert. No one went to the grocery store or fretted about the equity of Amazon deliveries, so there would be pools and fountains. NO WORK was done to weed or beg the flowers to bloom. Doing nothing, stopping, resting, is sometimes the very best something that you can do. It can open us up to seeing or receiving joy, and to being surprised by God.

I was reminded of joy like that this week when a dozen of us watched a beloved member of the Westminster community’s celebration of life together, unplanned. It was accidental and special to get to be together and celebrate the great Margi Brown and the love of her family and friends and the churches she loved and who really loved her, and to be reminded Margi was open to joy, learning the joy of children and in unlikely divided spaces.

So, do something, do nothing, strengthen yourself for joy—but still, why? Or why now? Shouldn’t we wait until everyone has healed from the exile? Shouldn’t we wait till the empire is over? And yet Portland proves that joy is the best protest, whether you’re doing Jazzercise in hot-pink tights outside an unjust government edifice to the poppiest music or you’re at a No Kings/No Bullies parade, as we called it, while dressed as a pink frog.

Groaning and grief, sorrow and sighing will be no more. I know this, and yet I am still confused, and I especially struggle with being told to not “be afraid.” I know that it’s one of the most repeated phrases in the Bible, and I’m glad for that, and yet I still struggle. Often the loudest, strongest voices telling us to calm down are the ones we’re most afraid of, the very voices the communities we adore and worry about receive scary threats from.

One thing that has brought my wife and I joy that required strength and surprised us is our son. We got to love the end of preschool and have adjusted to the bigger newness of kindergarten. One throughline has been our son’s love of learning and learning to love music. We’ve strengthened this by steering him away from too much K-Pop Demon Hunters or playing any other song or album more than three times in a row. We’ve been surprised by the music he’s taken to: Rick Astley, Bad Bunny, Starship, Lady Gaga, Dolly Parton…

We took him to his first real concert. It was a band we all love called Lake Street Dive. If you don’t know them, you should look them up because they are timeless; they’re one of those everyone-can-love-them bands.

Even their harder songs are bops. One of my favorites is “Being a Woman.” And my five-year-old son hums along to learning how there’s no equitable pay. Most of the time the world’s women are doing much of the world’s labor without pay at all, and every year it seems like there’s a study on it, and whether women report an unbearable workload or the unbearable presence of ICE, we are told to calm down. We’re told to calm down, but we can’t stop.

From the lighter stuff like the weight of the holidays to much heavier issues that intersect with larger systems of oppression. Women, those who identify as trans or queer, persons of color, really anyone who doesn’t want to identify with this empire of now—we are this afraid, this aware, this hyper vigilant because we’ve been socialized to be this way, to be prepared, and yet power finds this annoying, so we’re told to calm down. But then if we don’t prepare for the very thing we were taught to be afraid of, we’re punished. Groan.

Sigh. Isaiah, “strengthen weak knees” should really come with a good arthritis cream, and “fear not” better have some serious salve, too. Why shouldn’t we be afraid? We’re trying not to despair, we’re doing things, cultivating joy, and trying to be open to joy as a surprise, and joy as our resistance, of course, but are you aware our neighbors are being taken?  And that the healthcare we use to care for ourselves is only accessible for some, and for some times? Many of us cry and aren’t heard; why on earth would we say “fear not!”?

If this verse doesn’t come with some kind of cure, then we should at the very least tread with care and ask why we are saying it.

I can only imagine this is the way because the very next line is: Here’s your God. The banner next to “fear not” is “I am with you.” This is the time for celebrating resistant joy, joy that groans with us and asks just questions; because in brief shining moments we know that there is a time when sighing and sorrow flees. There is a way, without jackals, where we can’t get lost but where we can be surprised by God in the wilderness.  So be it.