As with last week’s readings, in this second week of Advent, the Hebrew Bible passages speak to national salvation for Judah and Israel and hopes for relief from oppression.   The New Testament passages, on the other hand, speak to anti-Jewish sentiments, again stressing insider/outsider polarities.

While Isaiah 11 and Psalm 72 express the hopes for a nation in terms of redistribution of wealth and protecting the rights of all people, there are drawbacks to these portrayals.  On the one hand they are patriarchal, putting entitled men in charge and expecting change from the top down.  Another problem is the hope that God will “crush the oppressor” (Psalm 72:4) and “kill the wicked” (Isaiah 11:4).  Thus, not only is violence the means of bringing about change, but God is the initiator of this violence.

	How do we create a new world of justice for all without trying to destroy the enemy?

While Isaiah uses images of different animals living in harmony (the familiar lion-with-the-lamb peaceable kingdom) as a way of talking about the idealized hoped for world, human examples might better serve today in exemplifying this type of revolutionary change.  What if the reign of God looks like a gay man and a Muslim heterosexual woman breaking bread together?  Or a Missouri Synod Lutheran heterosexual pastor and a Latina lesbian building a house together for Habitat for Humanity?  Or a transgender person finding help in selecting a new wardrobe by a neighbor who earlier had only glared and snickered?   A promise of totally transforming the heterosexist, homophobic world we now experience is encouraging, especially because “structural enemies” will become enhancers of each other’s well-being.

	Describe an encounter between a GLBT person and a member of the heterosexual community that embodies a glimpse of God’s peaceable reign.

With the New Testament passages the problem is not oppressive force destroying the lives of the indigenous people, but rather the problem becomes the people themselves.  In Romans 15, Paul interprets Isaiah as warrant for bringing in the Gentiles by way of rejecting God’s own people.  In Matthew 3, John the Baptist identifies his own people, the Pharisees and Sadducees, as the source of the problem, as opposed to the societal oppression pushed upon the colonized Jews by the Romans. 

One the one hand one can look at John the Baptist for modeling how GLBT persons and others on the margins call for repentance and change, but are often persecuted and dismissed as cranks.  Like John, LGBT folks can scare others, but we have a powerful and necessary message: The world is not as it should be, and change is possible.

On the other hand, one wonders whether John also models how LGBT people, among others, might be tempted to use threats against those they judge undesirable or dangerous.  John’s calling the unbaptized a “brood of vipers” (Matthew 3:7) may sound like the privileged gay man complaining, “You dykes and drag queens are making it difficult for the rest of us,” or a black preacher saying, “You hoodies and rappers are creating bad dynamics in the community,” or the welfare rights organizer who adopts derogatory language about so-called welfare queens. 

Holding each other accountable includes checking our internalized oppression as we struggle to create a world where oppression is no longer the norm and where even the oppressed no longer mete out “righteous” violence on those viewed as our “enemies.”

	This Advent, what is required of heterosexual people to become trusted allies of LGTB people and their justice movement?  What is required of LGBT people to advance God’s reign of justice?