#Unmute #FakeNews

for #UNMUTE an Advent Reflection on Psalm 27:12

I am convinced the last four years had little to do with policy, lawmakers, securing the judicial branch, or a white ethno-state. It wasn’t about an impossible border wall as a solution to the effects of neo-colonialism and cowboy imperialism. Nor was it about the orgy the capitalists had while using grandma’s retirement to wipe themselves afterwards. 

It was about the human spirit and how to break it. I don’t mean in a theological or existential sense. 

I quite mean literally, Beloved. 

The fear, the anxiety, the trauma, the sleepless nights, the bags under your eyes, the hardening of your heart, the tears, the fractured psyches, the grief, the sorrow, and you: finally breaking. 

That was the point. 

The breaking of the human will and the rending of hope.  

Over and over again, every time you cried out, they feasted on your pain while fucking on God’s table and they made us all watch. 

 The point wasn’t truth. That was never on the table. 

Evil often hides its poison in the truth. It's easier to get us to swallow it. 

The truth is, it was all #FakeNews. 

And we all fell for it. 

Evil doesn’t stand a chance at victory. Its very nature denies that possibility. 

The point was to terrorize you until you forgot the truth; your Truth. Until we were unable to recognize each other as siblings.  The last four years was meant to draw battle lines through living rooms and to shatter the dry bones of a weary people. 

I really want you to sit with that for a second. The highest office in the republic became the seat of power for radical evil in such a profoundly overt way, it was broadcast to your living room every day.  All the while, this administration tried to systematize our historically worst instincts as a people--encode them into our souls, write them in their law books, and inspire an entire worldview to be carved into the marble hallways of democratic decadence. 

The point was to render us like Pilate. So, when we were confronted with Love and Truth chained, beaten, whipped, naked, and scourged, we too would scream for a lynching for the sake of the nation. 

As a nation, we, too would sneer; we, too would ask, “What is truth?” 

Psalm 27:12 NRSV: Do not turn me over to the desire of my foes, for their fake news rises up against me, spouting malicious accusations. 

When you ask all of creation, “what is truth?” it tends to answer the fuck back. And not in the way those who dared ask expected. 

It answers in rising tear gas clouds over once-laid-back liberal cities. It answers on the border, with joint services held through the fence of two nations under direct threat from the State itself. It answers in fierce defense of a republic by a people who have never enjoyed its rights or privileges as citizens. It’s in the times we got punched in face while marching for freedom. It’s in the children who rose up and asked their parents when they would say something. It’s in the hundreds of little organizing meetings you had. It’s in the scarred back of a king-turned-murder-victim by the state. It’s in the Psalmist who begs God to ward away the false words of the enemy on behalf of an already harried nation and people. It’s in two theologians who have gathered for four Advents in a row to give us a word of hope. It’s in the long lines at the polls in neighborhoods just like the one I grew up in. It’s in the rural towns that said not here, and not now. It’s in the courage it takes to back up “never again”. It’s in the mystery of God and Advent, in the inky ebony and gloriously dark luminous beings speaking of liberation enfleshed. 

It tells us “Be not afraid”, and it points to a God who steps into human history for the express purpose of salvation, that is called collective liberation for the world over. 

It speaks good news over the #fakenews of the enemy.