The last time I did the sermon at church, I was about 13 years old sharing on MLK Sunday at Germantown Mennonite. I remember talking about how lucky I felt to have an ethnically diverse friend group in Philly and at my school. I really thought that by the time I gave another sermon, I would be an older, wiser adult who knew how to do it properly, not just talking about my life, but imparting sage wisdom through intelligently crafted metaphors and connections to the Bible.
Now at 29, I don’t necessarily feel any more prepared to speak about Justice than I did 16 years ago and I’m not sure how much wiser I am. Especially this week as Gaza enters the stage of mass, forced starvation, it’s hard to know what there is left for us to do as people who care about justice. I feel pretty hopeless. But our passages today speak to everything I’ve been thinking about, so I’m going to lean on them.
The Isaiah passage we heard is a familiar one, but I googled it anyway and was reminded that this is the place where we learn that a messiah is coming to restore peace – and as Christians, we recognize this figure as Jesus. “Follow Jesus” was the theme of Mennonite Convention earlier this month, so I’ve had a lot of time to think about what this means to me. We also spent four days at convention learning from those with wisdom to share from across the Mennonite Church. So in some ways, this should be a perfect time for me to share my thoughts on wisdom and justice.
But for the first time in my life, this year I’ve lost the unwavering sense of optimism that I’ve always relied on. The optimism that has steered me through my career as a political organizer for 10 years and through tough moments in my own life and global events. In these moments of real disillusionment, I have found myself longing to revisit the wisdom of those who fought for justice before me.
The week before the convention, I was visiting friends in Colorado when the BBB passed, stripping Medicaid from millions of people and effectively defunding Planned Parenthood (my employer) – amongst other devastating losses. I had been working with my team and coalition partners for months to stop this from happening. It didn’t even feel like it mattered that our target, Senator Tillis, shocked us all by voting against it. The bill passed anyway. That was the same week that Ben asked me to speak during this service. As I considered what I might share, I thought about the people and their wisdom that have reminded me of what we can get through when we’re committed to fighting for justice and each other, even in the hardest times and conditions.
Wisdom and Justice are inextricably tied in the vision of God’s kingdom that we see in the Isaiah passage. Same with the Psalm we heard: “The mouths of the righteous utter wisdom, and their tongues speak what is just.” So it feels right to draw on what I’ve learned from our elders and I want to share some sources that stand out for me during this season that I’m in:
Throughout the month of June, I read James Baldwin’s memoir about being a writer and advocate, gay and Black traveling through Europe, the South and across the US to coordinate with his comrades in the Civil Rights Movement. People like MLK, Malcom X and others who didn’t live long enough to see the fruits of their labor. Last month I was also in Memphis for work and walked over to the Lorraine Hotel to see where MLK had his last moments. This all tied in perfectly with a speaker we saw at MennoCon. Dr. Lerone Martin is the head of the MLK Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford and manages the archive of Dr. King’s life. Some quotes he shared from Dr. King stuck with me as I thought about why we do this hard work of justice when it may seem fruitless. MLK said “I have to live with my soul.” Dr. Martin also had his own reflections on MLK’s nonviolent approach – “Our means have to be as just as the ends that we seek.” This felt like it hit directly on the moment we’re in now when so many hard choices are made about how to do the work.
I’ve also been thinking about Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan whose music filled my childhood home and who drew inspiration, fun and strength from their friendships with each other. I’ve seen the movie three times now and their music has continued to remind me of why we need art to carry us through the hardest times.
In college I was exposed to the work of Octavia Butler, the Black feminist futurist sci-fi writer of the late 20th century, who imagined new worlds to help us see ourselves clearly in this one. Another vote for the arts – especially controversial material that’s now banned in so many schools.
My brother’s wisdom has also been on my mind recently. He’s always closest to the surface for me in the summertime leading up to his birthday on August 10th. He left us too early, but also left behind wisdom greater than his 22 years of life and a conviction for justice that I can only hope to live up to. I see this conviction in his friends who are still here, living out his dream of being sustainable farmers and ranchers, healing the soil and ecosystems in the face of big ag and Monsanto’s reign of terror.
I wrote these thoughts during the sanitation workers strike in Philly, which made me remember my namesake Emma Goldman and her courage to fight for working people long before women were even allowed to have a voice. She used hers anyway, including spreading information about birth control! Who does that sound like?
I think about the midwives and doulas who passed down the wisdom of reproductive healthcare including abortion, from generation to generation. We owe these Black women the science that is now used to save people in so many ways.
I think about the wisdom in the room with us. Sean, from Mennonite Action, shared during the Sunday service before convention about holding grief for the BBB and its impact that’s coming our way. Learning from each other how to hold space for this grief and the loss that we feel as organizers who spent months trying to stop it. He referred to the bill as violence and put words to exactly how I had been feeling.
So what does this wisdom from others mean for my own life and how I can remain committed to justice when it feels so hard? This past week actually provided a few opportunities to put it to the test.
On Thursday morning, I woke up around 4am to the sounds of my 20 year old downstairs neighbor having a screaming match with her ex boyfriend in the driveway. I called 911 for the first time in my life when I heard her say something about him having his gun. I am generally anti-police and believe that in many situations, they can’t be trusted to resolve conflict without causing further harm. And I was honestly worried about what it would do to our neighbor dynamic if this girl knew I had called the cops on her. But I made a judgment call in the name of harm reduction and a few minutes later 6 officers pulled up to break up the fight. She’s okay, for the record.
I think this is the simple answer to what can we do when the problems around us feel so insurmountable. I’ve learned from people I admire that we have to make choices in each moment about how we are going to live out our values – following Jesus in the pursuit – not necessarily the achievement – of justice. For me, this has resulted in a life that I’m proud of, but have to keep choosing every day, especially when those choices feel fraught.
I don’t buy from Amazon, I boycott Starbucks, I mostly support local businesses when getting presents for people, I do my best to use people’s preferred pronouns, continue learning about antiracism and trying to practice it. Maybe most significantly, I have chosen to work in a career that will never result in a cushy savings account, real job stability or easy work in my everyday life, because I feel called to Tikkun Olam – trying my best to restore the world to how god intended it to be. Rather than letting a sense of guilt for my privilege dictate these decisions, I’ve learned to focus on adding new practices into my life that feel like they bring me closer to living out my values. It’s never perfect or absolute and I have lost people along the way who chose to do things differently.
Sometimes this is as simple as sticking with a rough patch in a relationship, like the one I’ve been having with my boss this year. At MennoCon, Sarah Augustine talked about coalition work, advising that “you have to operate with a posture of loving kindness and resist the desire for individualism, because you can’t always problem solve on your own terms. Be flexible in your thinking: Get out of the villain and victim mentality. Choose compassion and solidarity.” This wisdom from a real social justice leader, felt particularly relevant on Friday as I had a tough conversation with my boss and my boss’ boss. Instead of letting the frustration of the past few months with these folks cause me to shut down or lash out, I forced myself to find new ways to articulate my feelings and speak from a place of trust that the three of us are all working towards the same goal – to protect healthcare access for North Carolinians in this increasingly fascistic political moment.
To my genuine surprise, Sarah Augustine’s advice worked! The three of us left the conversation on the same page for the first time in maybe my entire tenure at the affiliate and they offered me a potential leadership position during the upcoming midterm election cycle.
I certainly believe that following Jesus means making big, hard choices about how we spend our lives and fight for our communities and others’. Frank from Pasadena Mennonite Church spoke at convention about how liberating the oppressed will require confrontation. He said that actually putting your skin in the game to follow Jesus is terrifying and the cost can be high; which is why everyone must choose it for themselves – it can’t be imposed on others (hello anabaptism!). I fully agree with this. But I’m learning that it also means choosing to follow Jesus’ example in the ways that we show up in these seemingly small moments in life, like my work meeting or the 911 call in the middle of the night. I think this idea has brought me some solace when I feel discouraged by all of the losses we’ve faced at work and in the world over the last few months. I am reminded that many of the justice fighters I so admire never got to see the results of their work. That’s sort of the nature of advocacy – you have to be prepared to give a campaign everything you have and never see the win or how the win helps people in the long term.
It’s also the definition of our faith, as expressed in the scripture:
The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
and a little child will lead them.
The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The infant will play near the cobra’s den,
and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.
The earth is warming faster than we can build the political will to stop it, racism and xenophobia are driving our leaders to rid the US of the immigrants who make it great, women are being actively criminalized for their healthcare decisions, Israel is exterminating an entire population, gerrymandering is disenfranchising voters in every state across our country. And there’s so much more that we’re fighting to stop, repair, and improve.
These few weeks of reflection and revisiting the wisdom of those who came before me has made it clear that the unexplainable sense of optimism and determination that I’ve always relied on is fueled by my faith and by the realization that Jesus gave everything in the pursuit of justice for a world he knew he would leave before the vision was realized.
Following Jesus for me now means doing what I can to keep at it and have faith. Faith that we can make it through this moment of political violence in the US. Faith that Palestine will be free one day. And faith that the earth will heal itself after humans are gone. I just won’t be around to see it and that’s okay.
Amen.