LIBERATION LECTIONARY

God’s Joy is Home

“Joy begets liberation. Without it there is no freedom. It is our fuel, it is our companion, it is our north star. Joy magnifies the Lord’s liberation. Let us seek it together in this holy night. And let us get free.” Rev. Aaron Rogers

Meditation - Made for Joy

This joy that we have, the world didn’t give it to us. The world didn’t give it, the world cannot take it away.  African American Spiritual

Blessed are you who cause leaping for joy. Blessed are you who believe that joy is still possible even when the world has come so close to stealing your joy from you. Blessed are you when you for whom joy seems a distant memory, a stale taste in the mouth that can no longer taste, a memory of a sweet scent to a nose that can no longer smell. Blessed are you who remember joy, and blessed are you who have all but forgotten it. Blessed are you who have heard a rumor of such a thing as joy and yet know it not. Blessed are you who have toiled and wrestled with God day and night and refuse to let go until your blessing of joy arrives. Blessed are those who have had to wrestle the devil in order to preserve their joy.  Blessed are you whose joy leaps within your womb. Blessed are you whose joy leaps elsewhere. Blessed are you who long for the exuberance of joy leaping. Blessed are the thirsty for joy. Blessed are the hungry for joy. Blessed are those who have journeyed for joy. Blessed are those who wait. Blessed are those tired and angry and spent from waiting. Blessed are those who cannot even conceive of what joy could possibly be. Blessed are the joy-deficient, the joy-averse, the joy-desperate, the joy-longing, the joy-expectant, the joy-givers, and the ones who believed there would be a fulfillment of the joy spoken of by the Lord.

Daily Readings

Sunday – Psalm 47.1 Clap your hands, all you nations; shout to God with cries of joy.

Monday: Psalm 47.2 For the Lord Most High is awesome, the great King over all the earth.

Tuesday: Psalm 47.3-4 God has chosen our inheritance for us, the pride of Divine children, who are beloved.

Wednesday: Psalm 74.5 God has ascended amid shouts of joy, the Lord amid the sounding of trumpets.

Thursday: Psalm 47.6-7 “Sing praises to God, sing praises; sing praises to our King, sing praises. For God is the King of all the earth; sing to Them a psalm of praise.

Friday: Psalm 47.8 “God reigns over the nations; God is seated on his holy throne.

Saturday: Psalm 47.9 The nobles of the nations assemble as the people of the God of Abraham, for the kings of the earth belong to God; God is greatly exalted.

Lesson: Liberation is Joy

In our devotional for Advent, “Dwell Among Us”, we have concentrated on the theme of God’s presence making every place feel like home.

In a 1997 article by Ranajiy Guha called “Not at Home in Empire” we uproot the imbedded practice of connecting our happiness with success, power over other people, perceived legacy, influence and financial wealth. When we find ourselves at home in Empire, we might find ourselves bereft of joy. But when empire reminds us of the home we must build in spite of it - joy becomes our dwelling place. Here is an excerpt from Guha’s work:

There is something uncanny about empire. The entity known by that name is, in essence, mere territory… 

That is, a place constituted by the violence of conquest, the jurisdictions of law and ownership, the institutions of public order and use. Arid when all the conquistadors, consuls, and clerks are taken out, there is little left to it other than a vacancy waiting for armies and bureaucracies to fit it up once more with structures of power and designate it again as empire. 

As such, it requires homes, if only because the authority, the imperium, from which it derives its form, function and purpose, is easily sustained by forts and barracks and offices. 

Yet as history shows, empire is not reconciled for long to this abstracted condition. Caravans seek the shade of camps, markets their custom in the garrisons, even religion flock among war-weary souls. Towns and settlements grow, as empire too is seized by the urge to make a home of its territory. 

However, this is not an order the modern colonial empire can easily satisfy. For it rules by a state which does not arise out of the society of the subject population but is imposed on it by an alien force. 

Discussion Questions:

What does joy mean for you? How do you discuss it as different from or similar to being glad, happy, amused? Is it deeper for you? 

Do you ever have trouble seeking joy, or believing it can be helpful? What causes that tension? 

Have you ever faced displacement or oppression? How would you hold on to joy and define it for yourself? 

White British officer, Francise Yeats-Brown described his first year of a career in the British Army that colonized India as a “jolly life”. This army put people to death for not accepting the imposed foreign rule of Britain. The soldiers dragged families from their homes and temples to destroy structures and make whatever British monarchs commanded in its place. What are ways that life could have been “jolly” for a soldier? How can empire be sneaky and overt in the ways it steals joy or tries to replicate it?

Joyful Tribute - Ella Baker

Ella Baker Day is December 13th. Our Lady of Organizing and Mobilizing was born December 13th, 1903 in Norfolk Virginia, and became an ancestor on December 13th, her 83rd birthday, in 1986, in New York. This tribute prayer is inspired by the fierce fullness of her sacred work. A woman poised with a forward look, Mother Ella embodied the community powered self-determination that we hear in the song “This Joy that I Have”.  Speak the words of Ella Baker in your prayers this week and remember the spirit of power as you go before the God who sent the great organizer, Jesus Christ, to bring all power to the people. Ella Baker quotes are in italics, meditations follow.

“A nice gathering like today is not enough. You have to go back, and reach out to your neighbors who don’t speak to you, and you have to reach out to your friends, who think they are making it good, and get them to understand that they as well as you and I cannot be free in America — or anywhere else where there is capitalism and imperialism — until we can get people to recognize that they themselves have to make the struggle and have to make the fight for freedom every day in the year, every year, until they win it. Thank you.”

Thank you, Lord. We thank you, for freedom’s longings, inherited from our forebears. For the foresight and the insight that you share with your children. We rejoice in this truth, we persevere in this joy of resistance, knowing that this world was not built for our thriving. This dignity that we have, the world didn’t give, the world cannot take it away. 

“Oppressed people, whatever their level of formal education, have the ability to understand and interpret the world around them, to see the world for what it is, and move to transform it.”

Organizing God, this world we are in, didn't give us the collective freedom that we know you made us to deserve. Show us your mercy and your power, teach us the spirit of mama Ruth and mama Ella, so that we can see this world as it really is, and refuse to back down until our people are whole.

“Give light, and the people will find a way.”

For all the people who walk in sadness, awaiting an end to their dreary days, for the people living in confusion, obscurity, there is a great light. Let us know where to seek your light, Lord. Let the arriving of your light be as irresistible as a newborn baby. Let us hold on to your light as we would this child of the promise we will never let go. Great giver of light, show us more and more, lead us, Lord and let us find the way.

“My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders.”

Lord you have given us shepherds and wise men, and you have led us to work in resistance to destructive kings. Will you teach us how to guide our steps in the pathways of self-determination, and liberation for the sake of seeing one another set free? We need your power and strength, to come and shower us with joy on this long journey into a world where leaders are not the source of our purpose or our power. No church leaders, government officials, family or friends can give it, and no none can take it away. 

“We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.”
Lord, the struggle is real, and you are too. Help us to accept the struggle but to never glorify it. Give us the will to carry on towards freedom and to discover in ourselves the capacity to rest as we fight. Unlock the joy in our hearts and put kindness in our words so we do not devour those in the fight with us. Guide us to a clear understanding of rest - that it is resistance to supremacy, and not the relinquishing of strength. Carry us along and renew our courage, Lord God, so we can persevere, never give up the good fight, and finish the race.

“The struggle is eternal, the tribe increases, someone else carries on.”
As we struggle together towards complete freedom, remind us to always invest in one another. Lord help us to always remember that people are the mission, people are the prize. We walk in freedom and work for liberation, with and for one another, for each one of us carries your divine image. And while we fight this good fight, give us the holy discernment to identify leaders and build power in one another so that not one of us ever struggles alone and so that the work never depends on any one human being.

We cannot give you what is already yours, Blessed Lord God, and yet we humbly commit to you all blessing, glory, honor, power, might, and dominion. It is you, Lord, who gives us the victory. 

Amen. Ashé.