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Sermons

“Taking Refuge in God” based on  Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16…

  • April 15, 2019February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

I find it terribly interesting to be human, particularly
the irrational parts of being human.  For instance, I am  quite
capable of articulating the difference between God and the Church.
Here, I’ll prove it to you:  God is the creator of all that is, and
the grounding source of love that universe is build on.  The Church
is a gathering of people who have learned about God largely through
Jesus of Nazareth and try to be responsive to God, including in
sharing in the effort to make the world more loving.

OK.  I know there is a difference.  I believe myself to
be rock solid on the difference.

Except that many, many, MANY times in my life, I’ve
gotten confused between the two.  When the Church (big C) has messed
up, has proven itself to be entirely too human, has broken my heart,
and has failed to be what I think it should be – I’ve responded by
getting distant with God, as if the failures of the Church are God’s
fault.  I’ve done this repeatedly in my life, and I don’t seem to be
capable of remembering the difference between the two, even though I
already know it (mentally).

This seems like a particularly good time to remember
that God is God, and the denomination, the Annual Conference, even
this local church are not.  God is dependable, steadfast, and loving;
even when God’s people “turn away and our love fails.”  Holiness
is present, even when we don’t feel loved or heard by God’s people.
The Spirit offers us rest, support, and abundance; even when life is
feeling frenetic, unhinged, and scarce.  The Divine calls us to
healing, to wholeness, to authenticity, to full life; even when at
the same time we hear voices telling us to form ourselves into
something we just aren’t.

God is God, and God is GOOD.  God’s steadfast love
endures forever, and it is enough.  

In the language of the Psalm, God is our refuge, our
fortress, our dwelling place, our shelter.  We are at home in God,
and we are safe.  We can relax with the Holy One, we can trust in
God’s love, and goodness, and desire for our well-being.  We don’t
have to fight to be “enough” or different than how we really are.
We aren’t competing against each other for God’s love, because it is
not a finite quality.  Our natural state is “beloved by God.”  We
don’t have to earn it or compete for it.  It already is.

That, dear ones, is how grace works.  Just in case it
has been a while since you’ve remembered the nuances of grace, grace
is a word for God’s unconditional love for all of creation, and it is
God’s nature to be loving, to be full of grace.  Grace isn’t earned,
it just is, because it is God’s essence.  As followers of John
Wesley, even talk about various forms of grace including previenent
grace, the grace that comes before (like someone wearing too much
scent).  Previenent grace is God’s love for a person that comes
before that person is aware of God, or of God’s love.  

Wesleyan theology says that later on, if we become aware
of God, and of God’s love, and decide to work with God for good in
the world, we are impacted by “sanctifying grace”, also known as
the process of sanctification.   This is the process by which things
that are not loving in us are allowed to wilt away, while love takes
deeper and deeper root in us.  It is the process of letting our lives
be defined by God’s grace for us and for others.  It is letting love
take over.  The idea of John Wesley is that the work of Christians in
their own lives is to be sanctified, to become every more loving
until love is all that is left.  

I like that part 😉  

Deuteronomy is … it is many things at once.  Walter
Bruggemann, in his commentary on Deuteronomy, often talks about how
the text criss-crosses generations.  He says, “The rhetoric works
so that the speaker who is a belated rememberer of an old event
becomes a present tense participant in that old event.  In
‘liturgical time,’ the gap between past time and present time is
overcome, and present-tense characters become involved in remembered
events.”1
This gets even more criss-crossed when we attempt to put this text
into context.

Deuteronomy places itself on the far side of the river
from the Promised Land, it is a series of speeches by Moses to the
people before they finally enter the Land.  So, from that
perspective, this series of instructions of what to do with the first
fruits of the land – the promised land – is a future tense
reality.  Within the text, the people are dreaming of living in the
land, and haven’t gotten there yet.  Yet, the instructions are for
what people will say with their tithes, and the words people are
saying reflect back on the process of getting to (and into the land)
which in the story hasn’t happened yet.

If you want to add more layers (which clearly I do),
think about the fact that this was likely written down during the
exile – so a person who once lived in the land  but did no longer,
was writing down the  words of one who never lived in the land, to
those who would enter the land, about what they would say when they
got produce out of the land, about their history before they got to
the land.   Which is to say, I think Brueggemann is right, and there
are ways that time gets messy in these texts 😉

I’m interested, as well, in the fact that re-telling in
this liturgical way of the entrance into the Promised Land doesn’t
talk about the wandering in the desert.  It is huge theme in
Deuteronomy, where it is said time and time again that the people
needed to learn that they could rely on God before they could be
ready to deal with the abundance of life in the Promised Land, so
they wouldn’t think it had come to them from their own doing.  It
also functioned to led the old generation pass away, so that those
who had known the oppression of slavery were not the ones who build a
new thing. However, none of that is mentioned in this particular
piece, even though the rest of the history is.

Bishop Karen Oliveto posted on Facebook this week, “You
can take people out of Egypt but the main task of liberation is to
take Egypt out of the people. Perhaps this is why wilderness
wandering is necessary in our journey?”  That was when I noticed
that this particular text glosses over the wandering.  Perhaps it
doesn’t have to be named here, because in the idea that the person is
giving first fruits, we know they haven’t forgotten the lessons of
the wandering.  In any case, remembering that the wandering exists to
teach us liberation is definitely of use!

I’m struck by the way the Promised Land is constructed
as being itself a refuge, throughout the Bible.   Granted, just like
churches, it is an often broken one, and just like churches it gets
confused with God.  When the people lost the land they took it to
mean they’d lost God’s favor.  Yet, it might be easier to read this
text with awareness that land IS sacred, and that means land is HOLY,
and certainly for those who have been without land, land is a refuge
onto which they can build a life.  Space can become home, it can
reflect God’s own home-like attributes.

Did you hear the end of the passage?  After the first
fruits have been given and the past has been remembered, it says,
“Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside
among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God
has given to you and to your house.”  I LOVE this part.  After all
the labor of growing and harvesting the food, after all the
remembering (and bouncing around in time) the end game is a feast of
bounty to which ALL are invited.   All, including those without land.
All, including those who don’t know or worship God.  Those with
plenty, those without, those set aside to do God’s work, those who
are doing normal daily work, those who don’t have work – ALL the
people are coming to the feast.  The work that is given to God is
meant to be redistributed so that everyone can access it together.  

That Promised Land, the one the people were waiting to
enter?  It wasn’t meant to just be a refuge for them.  It was meant
to be a refuge for all.  The “law” of the Torah seeks to ensure
that widows, and orphans, those without someone powerful to care for
them, will still have enough.  The Torah seeks to ensure that
outsiders – the foreigners, the immigrants, the refugees –  will be
welcome and cared for. The Torah OBSESSES over the poor, and puts in
place practices that will prevent long term poverty and allow people
to be lifted up.  The land isn’t meant to be a refuge for some, or
for the lucky, or for those who do right.  It was designed to be a
refuge for all – a refuge that reflects God’s nature.

Now, after fussing over these texts sufficiently, I want
to get a bit practical.  God IS our refuge, and an excellent refuge
at that, but we are not always prepared to receive the goodness of
God’s gifts because we tend not to pay attention them.  We are
something, maybe too busy, too distracted, or too scared.  (Scared
because we’ve been around broken humans enough to be afraid that God
isn’t as loving as we’d hope, since humans often aren’t.)

However, the rest, the refuge, the HOME that God IS for
us, is a gift to us that we can receive if we make time and space to
do so.  I, personally, am best able to connect with this gift when I
practice Centering Prayer.  Centering Prayer is “just” being,
breathing in and out, and letting thoughts float away without
judgment or attachment.  It is a type of prayer that takes practice,
but it is transformative.  Other times, to access the rest, the
refuge, the home that God IS, I need to be in physical places where I
feel safe; other times I need to be with those with whom I can laugh.
Still other times, a quiet walk in the woods, a good deep cry, or
some time coloring mandalas will make space within me to let God’s
gifts in.  What helps you?  Are you doing it?  Do you need help
finding new or different ways to let God’s rest, refuge, offer of
home take hold in you?  If you do, let’s talk.

Because the world doesn’t need us exhausted, aimless,
and scared.   God and the world most need people being sanctified by
grace, and I think we should make space to let God help us be those
people!   Amen

1Walter
Brueggemann, Deuteronomy
(Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 2001)

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

March 10, 2019

Sermons

“Change and Letting Go” based on Psalm 32 and…

  • April 15, 2019February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron
image

As human beings, we come into the world with needs.  New
babies need milk, diaper changes, human touch, soothing, temperature
control, shelter, communication, emotional mirroring, safe spaces,
tummy time, and lots and lots of sleep.  As far as I can tell, our
needs as humans grow from there.

Our needs remain complicated as well.  We have physical
needs for food, drink, clothing, shelter, and equally important
social and emotional needs to be heard, to be understood, to play, to
find peace, to connect.  Nonviolent Communication teachers share
lists of universal human needs, the one I use most often lists more
than 90 of them.

Because there are so many, and because life is so
complicated, it is rare for us to have our needs met at the same
time.  Nonviolent Communication theory suggests that everything we
say and do is really about trying to get those needs met, and I
haven’t seen any reason to disbelieve it.  It may help to know that
needs for peace, contribution, learning, purpose, and celebration
exist – so some of the needs make space for us to want to do things
that impact others.

The Isaiah passage opens up for me the dream of having
needs being met, perhaps even to have all of them met all at once.
Without Isaiah dreaming it, I’m not sure I could conceive of this.
Furthermore, the dream isn’t of some weak, minimalistic set of needs
being met.  It is all of them being met well.  Using the direct,
physical needs of thirst and hunger, Isaiah speaks of being offered
water, wine, milk, and rich food – without having to even pay for
them!

These were not foods that average people were eating –
these were the foods of the rich, and Isaiah proposes that God wants
all the people to access those good foods.  This is an opening to
thinking about life with God, life in relationship to God, life that
is shared under God’s vision of how things are supposed to be.

How things are supposed to be is incredibly disconnected
from how the world actually was, and how it actually is.  This
passage comes from the end of Second Isaiah, which dreams of a
different life for the exiles who God is going to lead home.  The
people have been in captivity in Babylon, and their captivity is
about to be transformed.  The hope of the passage is that in coming
home to Ancient Israel, the people will also come home to God’s ways.
Walter Brueggemann writes,

“The initial verse, perhaps in the summoning mode of a
street vendor, offers to passersby free water, free wine, and free
milk.  This of course is in contrast to the life resources offered by
the empire that are always expensive, grudging, and unsatisfying.
Israel is invited to choose the free, alternative nourishment offered
by Yahweh.  Thus, although we may ponder the metaphor of free food,
the underlying urging is the sharp contrast between the way of life
given in Babylon that leads to death and the way of Yahweh that leads
to joyous homecoming.”1

The vision of Yahweh for Ancient Israel, which I believe
is still the vision of God for all people, is for the people to have
enough to survive AND thrive.  The world itself produces plenty, but
our societies distribution patterns prevent the “enough” from
getting to the people.  According to the Poor People’s campaign, in
the US today, 43.5% of US population are in poverty or are
low-income.2
Those old systems of the empires – the ones that bring the wealth
created by the many to the top – those are still happening.

It is funny to think of our needs being met, not only
because there are so many of them, but because even the idea of
universally satisfying the basic physical human needs is so far from
reality.  What would it look like if all people had enough to eat –
of nutritious and delicious food?  Can we quite imagine it?  What
would it look like here and elsewhere if the housing stock was mold
free, well insulated, repairs were up to date, water was safe to
drink, AND homelessness was eliminated?  It is a thing to ponder.
Can we imagine universal health care in this country, and one that
works?  Where people can afford both preventative care and
necessarily life-giving measures?  What about this – can we imagine
a world where there are enough mental health care providers for all
who need them, and all are offering top notch, compassionate care
(and the mental health care providers aren’t over worked, are
adequately paid, and have time and energy to do necessary self care)?
Oh what a world this would be!!  Ready for one more?  Can we imagine
a society with expansive parental leave policies for people at every
income level, with excellent nursery and day care for babies AND
nursing and adult care for adults in need, provided by people who are
adequately compensated for their imperative work, and trained to
offer it at the highest levels?

Can we even dream it?  Those are the BASICS, and Isaiah
invites us to dream them.  Those aren’t quite milk, wine, and rich
foods.  Those are merely clean water and enough bread for everyone.
Even with these pieces met, a lot of problems would remain.  But if
the BASICS were met, it would matter a lot.  And it is POSSIBLE.
This is not an unattainable dream – the capacity to make it happen
already exists.

I think it is a dream that Isaiah pushes us to
contemplate.  If we don’t dream a little bit, we can’t know what we
are working towards, and we have no chance of getting there.  

Of course, if we had a system where basic needs were
met, it would radically upend the economy, and society.  It is a very
BIG dream.  To have people’s needs met would mean that some of the
value of their labor would have to return to them, and that more the
value of all of our labor would be needed to care for those who
cannot labor.  We can’t have a system that cares adequately for all
people AND one that allows the work of most to enrich the few.  

In addition to dreaming a dream of human needs being
met, Isaiah’s passage also condemns the system as it was for how it
worked.  It indicts the labor system for enriching the empire at the
expense of the labors.  It also called out the thinking that allowed
it, called people out of the idea that working harder within the
system would find them a way to get to satisfaction.  This is one of
the hardest lessons for us today.  Working harder in rigged systems
only exhausts us, it does not get us what we need.   We still have a
system where people “spend your money for that which is not bread
and your labor for that which does not satisfy,” because the labor
is not permitted to bring satisfaction!

God’s dream is NOT a system of competition, of forced
labor, or even of economic gain over another.  God’s dream is NOT one
where people have to work harder than their neighbors into to fight
for the scraps they need to survive.  This is true BOTH with regards
to food and health care AND with regard to love and beauty.  God
wants us to have what we need, and the earth is capable of providing
it, but not when people are exploited for other’s excess.  

I suspect is is this system of thinking that is
reflected in the later words of the “righteous” and the “wicked”
– the ones who are willing to let go of the systems of exploitation
of the empire to move into God’s vision are the righteous, and those
who continue to participate in it and be co-opted by it are the
“wicked.”  This isn’t just me.  Brueggemann came to the same
conclusions 😉 (and that makes me feel SUPER smart.)  “’The
wicked’, I suggest, are not disobedient people in general.  In
context, they are those who are so settled in Babylon and so
accommodated to imperial ways that they have no intention of making a
positive response to Yahweh’s invitation of homecoming.”3

Between all of this, and the echoes from the Psalm, I’m
wondering us and about how well we are doing “making a positive
response to Yahweh’s invitation of homecoming.”  How well are we
able to leave behind the systems and thought patterns of oppression
and competition to move into a brave new world?  How interested are
we in the possibilities of the present and the future?

For me, some of the process of freeing myself from the
systems of oppression come in the practices of Sabbath-keeping and
meditative prayer.  It is EASY to get pulled in to never-ending
productivity, but when I STOP trying to be productive, I’m more able
to figure out what the goal of the production is anyway!  It is easy
to get pulled into a roller-coaster of emotions with the 24 hour news
cycle, but when I stop and get quiet, I can hear which parts of what
is happening I’m most able to respond to in a useful way.  The times
of quiet in my life are when I can hear my own soul, and the Divine
prodding, when I can let go of how I’m supposed to present myself,
and simply be.  And unless I’m doing those things, I’m VERY easily
swayed by the systems of oppression.

This is where spirituality intersects with both justice
work and my own well-being.  It isn’t healthy for us to live in the
levels of anxiety that modern life produces, but it isn’t easy to let
go of i either!  (In a different sort of church, that might merit an
“amen.”)  It is hard to focus on what needs to be done to build a
better society and world, particularly when dumpster fires are
happening all around us – but the capacity to build focus is part
of the gift of spiritual practice, as is the process of being able to
prioritize.

Beloveds of God, are we finding the ways to listen to
the Holy One?  God’s guidance is worthwhile – the Psalmist even
finds it worth clinging to.  Are we taking the time for rest, for
Sabbath, for prayer, so that we can have those needs met and be able
to envision a world where many needs are met for all people?  The
invitation is given to us – to be fed, to rest, to be filled, to be
satiated.  May we receive it, and pass it on.  Amen

1Walter
Bruggemann, Isaiah
40-66
(Louisville, KT: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998),159.

2Institute
for Policy Studies, “The Souls of Poor Folk: A Preliminary Report”
(December 2017)
https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/PPC-Report-Draft-1.pdf,
page 8.

3Brueggemann,
160.

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

March 24, 2019

Sermons

“Figuring Out Priorities, Discernment as Prayer Practice” based on…

  • April 15, 2019February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

This
Mary washing Jesus’s feet with her hair story is a variation on
stories found in the Synoptic Gospels.  Just to clarify a few things
that you might have heard:  this is the Mary of Mary and Martha, not
Mary of Magdala;  there is no reason to believe that the woman in the
story was a prostitute;  that said there were a few indiscretions
inherent in the story!  To name them succinctly:  women weren’t
supposed to be a part of formal dinner parties (then again Mary
wasn’t supposed to sit at Jesus’s feet as a disciple either),  a
woman taking her hair down in public was scandalous, and feet aren’t
always really FEET in the Bible, even though I think they are here.

Other
than Jesus, all the characters in this story are unique to John’s
version.  Given that, it is quite interesting that Judas is put in
the role he is.  It works well as foreshadowing.  It also works well
to explain a few things.  When Judas is called a “thief” in the
story, the particular verb is the same one used in chapter 10 to
describe a thief who steals sheep.  Thus, “The expression ‘not
because he cared about the poor’ echoes the description of the hired
hand’s lack of care for the sheep (10:13).  The use of these words
suggests that the description of Judas is intended to point the
reader toward the proper context in which to place Judas’s actions.
When he betrays Jesus, he betrays the sheep.”1
Thus when Mary takes care of Jesus, she takes care of the sheep too.
The shepherd and the sheep are interdependent.

John’s
version of this story sets up an interesting question: is it better
to use the super expensive (5 figure) perfume on Jesus or to sell it
and give the proceeds to the poor?  The answer most theologians have
given is that it is good to be devoted to Jesus.  The text sets us up
to think this way by saying that not even Judas meant the money for
the poor.  However, I think it is a valid question!  

I
think it is a REALLY valid question.  After all, how do we decide
what to do with our resources?  Most of us, most of the time, aren’t
in possession of perfume worth’s a year salary that was hand carried
from India to Bethany, but we do have our own resources to care
about.  How do we decide what to give away, and what to use?  How do
we decide what portions of our time to give away?  When are are ready
to give something away – time, or money, resources or energy- how
do we know where to best put it?

I’m
not a great decider when it comes to such questions (or most others.)
I tend to think like a Tupper, “I need more data!”  The answer
between “show devotion” and “care for the vulnerable” is
fuzzy for me plenty of the time.  

And
I worry that when I don’t decide, when I just go about my day to day
life without thinking too hard, I’m even more likely to err than if I
consider a decision carefully and then choose “wrong.”  Yet the
fear of being wrong often leads me to the status quo, and the status
quo isn’t particularly intentional.

Luckily
there is something called discernment.  Apple dictionary does a great
job with the word “discernment.”  The first definition is “the
ability to judge well” the second is “(in Christian contexts)
perception in the absence of judgement with a view to obtaining
spiritual direction and understanding.”2
So, in a very practical way discernment is deciding, but it has more
nuance: it is about making decisions spiritually.  I suspect that
sounds fine and good to most of you – but also a bit meaningless.

I
have two practical offerings for you – two means of getting into
discernment.  The first is a spiritual practice called “Daily
Examen.”  I’ve mentioned it before, because I really like it.
Daily Examen is a simple practice, it is flexible, it is meaningful,
and it is HANDS DOWN the best way I know of for discernment of BIG
LIFE THINGS.

It
can be done individually, with a friend or partner, or in a group.
It goes like this.  You do what you need to do to center yourself, be
that lighting a candle, turning on music, sitting comfortably, taking
deep breathes, or all of the above.  Then, in language that works for
you, you ask the Divine to work with you in reviewing the past 24
hours.  As you review the day, you seek out what the best part was
and what the worst part was.  You may want to ask this differently:
when was I most connected to Love, when I was I least connected to
Love, when did I feel most whole, when did I feel least whole, etc.
The goal is to find a “high” and a “low” and THEN to thank
God for both, and for everything in-between.  

Then,
if you are working with others, you share that information.  In any
case, you write them down: the date, the best, and the worst.  After
a while…. weeks, or months… you review what you’ve written and
you pay attention to patterns.  Was the worst part of you day more
often than not related to your job?  Then it is definitely time to
consider if that aspect of your job can change, OR if your job can
change, or if your attitude about your job needs to change.  Was the
best part fo your day often the time you spent with your pet?  Then
likely it would be great to find ways to maximize that.  Or, perhaps,
was the best part of your day some ministry or group you only get to
do very once in a while – but every time it happens it was the
best?  Then, perhaps that is something you want to give more
attention to.

See?
Pay attention to patterns, and USE them to discern ways to live a
life with even more good, more love, more wholeness.  I want to note
that the staff I and I do this at staff meeting, although then we
review the whole week.  I’m often SHOCKED that the answers I find
aren’t the ones I expect, and I think we all know each other a whole
lot more because we’ve heard where both joy and frustration live in
each other’s lives.

If
you want a resource to help you with this process, the book “Sleeping
with Bread” is particularly excellent.

The
second practical offering I have for you is from Nonviolent
Communication (insert gasps of shock here).  As a whole, nonviolent
communication teaches us to listen and to speak in four parts:  

With
clear objective observation

In
naming and claiming emotions.  (ie. “I feel …”and never “You
make me feel…”

In
identifying and noticing the needs that are connected to the
feelings

In
making requests.

The
absolute key, as I see it, of Nonviolent Communication is in the link
between steps 2 and 3.  That’s the part where we take feelings we are
feeling and examine them to figure out what needs are under them.
This process has proven to me that it can unravel even the most
complex experiences and responses for me.  For example, I can think
of a time when I have felt annoyed.  This is definitely something
worth considering, because it is MUCH more likely to give me
information about myself and what I’m needing than it is about what
I’d otherwise call the “source of my annoyance.”  If I am
annoyed, it is because some need or needs of MINE aren’t being met.
Sometimes this is because my need for rest isn’t being met.  Other
times it is my need for harmony, other times for order!  In fact,
feeling annoyed has sometimes reflected a need for some
consideration.  In this way of looking at things, feelings are gifts
given to us to help us navigate and understand the needs that
motivate them.  They’re like flags marking something that needs our
attention.  (Note: anger is super extra this, it marks a violation of
something we really value!)

Once
we are able to notice a feeling, it gives us a chance to consider
what needs are underneath it.  Then, once we know the need, we have a
LOT of information about what is going on with us.  Further, since
needs can be met in infinite ways, we have a lot of choices about how
to proceed.  If what I’m needing is rest, I can go home and take a
nap… or I can go to the bathroom and take an extra long time
washing my hands…. or maybe just take a moment and say a few breath
prayers.  If what I’m needing is consideration, then I have the
chance to consider what that can look like and if I’m willing to make
a request related to it.

All
of this means that feelings, which we have all the time, can be great
sources of wisdom about who we are, what we need, and that opens up
the door for some great discernment.

It
seems like a good moment to point out that in Nonviolent
Communication, needs are considered universal, and they’re not a bad
thing.  They just ARE.  The goal is to become aware of them when
they’re flaring up and then become aware of the MANY ways they can be
fulfilled, so that we start getting creative rather than trying to
force the same solutions over and over that don’t work.

Discernment
is very different from decision making.  It is deeper.  It is about
the why even more than the what.  It can be reached through Daily
Examen, or Nonviolent communication considerations, or even just
through the quiet of contemplative prayer.  I appreciate a difference
between petitionary prayer – asking God for stuff- and
contemplative prayer – being present with God.  Personally, I enjoy
and find much more value in the latter.  It also helps with
discernment.  

I’ve
been told that when Quakers have an extra long agenda for a meeting,
they spend twice as long in silent prayer before it begins.  There is
wisdom in that.  Rushing to decisions can be as bad as avoiding them
all together.  But discernment, deep consideration, gives us all a
way to make good, spiritual decisions.  

It
turns out, of course, that pouring expensive perfume on Jesus’s feet
was a perfectly acceptable option.  I maintain that selling it and
giving the money away would have been too.  The key is probably in
the reasons underneath and around each decision, and figuring those
out takes discernment.

May
we practice it – regularly and well.  Amen

1Gail
R. O’Day, “John” New Interpreter’s Bible page 702.

2Apple
Dictionary, “discernment” accessed 4/4/2019.

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

April 7, 2019

Sermons

“Crying Out” based on Psalm 118: 1-2, 19-29 &…

  • April 15, 2019February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

I
long thought that Palm Sunday was a big Yay-Jesus parade, where
people shouted Hosanna to say “YAY God!” and it was clear that
everyone got how great God really is and how God was working through
Jesus.  I thought that the enthusiasm for God and Jesus was just so
big that the stones themselves were on the brink of crying out.  Then
I read John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg’s book “The
Last Week”
and learned that wasn’t it.

The story of Palm Sunday is so
much bigger, so much deeper, and so much BETTER than what I
originally understood.  It was, indeed, a Yay-Jesus parade, and it
did, indeed, reflect people celebrating their excitement over God’s
acts in the world.  But a WHOLE lot was happening underneath and
around it, and to understand that, we need to look at the Jesus
movement itself, the thing that was being celebrated.

I’m
working today largely from John Dominic Crossan’s book “Who
Killed Jesus: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel
Stories of The Death of Jesus.”  When
he was here last fall for a Carl lecture we learned that he goes by
“Dom.”  As he often does, Dom manages to get into the heart of
things by explaining the context.  Context is what makes his
scholarship so awesome.

Jesus was a Galilean, whose
ministry was centered in Galilee, right?  What was Galilee?  Galilee
was a colony of the Roman Empire, and it was a part of what had been
the Northern Kingdom of Israel.  We talk about the Northern Kingdom
of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judea because under King David
and his son King Solomon there had been a single united Jewish
country, Ancient Israel, for about 80 years after 1000 BCE.  It then
had a civil war and split into two – north and south.  The Northern
Kingdom of Israel lost a war to the Assyrians in 722 BCE and its
leadership was taken into exile.  The Assyrian empire took over the
land and imposed their customs.  The Southern Kingdom did better, it
didn’t lose and go into exile for another 150 years, AND the Southern
Kingdom also got the chance to  return from exile and rebuild.
Afterward, it became extra judgmental of its secessionist northern
neighbors, both for the differences that had been present in the
civil war AND for the fact that they were no longer a pure Jewish
state, in faith or custom.

We know some of this history
because of the stories of the Samaritan woman at the well and the
Good Samaritan.  Samaria is, after all, directly north of Judea, the
Southern kingdom.  What we sometimes forget is that Galilee is the
region NORTH of Samaria.  It was ALSO a part of the old Northern
Kingdom. The difference is that in the time of the Maccabees, about
150 years before the birth of Jesus, faithful Jews from Judea moved
up to Galilee to try to resettle faithful Judaism up north.  The
Galilee of Jesus day was multicultural and multilingual,  rural, and
full of faithful Jews as well as lots of people who weren’t Jewish at
all.  It was also a colony of the Roman Empire.

Now,
as Dom says, “The Jewish peasantry was prone … to refuse quiet
compliance with heavy taxation, subsistence farming, debt
impoverishment, and land expropriation.  Their traditional ideology
of land
was enshrined in the ancient scriptural laws.”1
Galilee itself was a fruitful place, and the land was useful to the
empire.  Dom explains, “Lower Galilee’s 470 square miles are
divided by four alternating hills and valleys running in a generally
west-east direction.  It is rich in cereals on the valley floors and
olives on the hillside slopes.”2
It was also pretty rich in radicalism, perhaps BECAUSE of the
percentage of very faithful Jewish people who believed land to be a
gift from God for the people of God.

Now,
John the Baptist did NOT do his ministry in Galilee.  (I JUST figured
this out.)  His ministry across the river in Perea, in the DESERT.  I
hadn’t realized that Galilee didn’t have deserts until Dom pointed it
out.  The other side of the Jordan is the side people had waited on,
it is the side they entered the Promised Land from.  Galilee, like
Samaria and Judea, had been part of the Promised Land.   According to
Dom, John the Baptist “is drawing people into the desert east of
the Jordan, but instead of gathering a large crowd there and bringing
them into the Promised Land in one great march, he sends them through
the Jordan individually, baptizing away their sins in its purifying
waters and telling them to await in holiness the advent of the
avenging God.”3
He was re-enacting the entrance into the Promised Land, that gift of
LAND for the people.  Thus he was challenging the religious,
political, social, and economic bases of Roman control.4
 This got him killed.  

Being a colony isn’t a great
thing for people.  That’s obvious, right?  Colonies exist to bring
wealth to the country that controls them, and that means that the
people in the colony are means of wealth production.  Dom explains a
bit more:

“When
a people is exploited by colonial occupation, one obvious response is
armed revolt or military rebellion.  But sometimes that situation of
oppression is experienced as so fundamentally evil and so humanly
hopeless that only transcendental intervention is deemed of any use.
God,
and God alone, must act to restore a ruined world to justice and
holiness.
This demands a vision and a program that is radical, countercultural,
utopian, world-negating, or, as scholars say eschatological.
That terms comes form the Greek word for ‘the last things’ and means
that God’s solution will be so profound as to constitute an ending of
things, a radical new world-negation.”

The best known example of this
in the Bible is when God acted to free the people from slavery in
Egypt.  The people were oppressed, they cried out, God heard them,
and sent Moses and set the people free.

That particular story is
celebrated and remembered at the Passover.  The Passover is holy
celebration of God’s action to set the people free when they had no
power to free themselves.    The Palm Sunday parade was a formalized
entrance to the Jewish celebration of Passover in Jerusalem, at the
time when Jerusalem was ALSO under Roman Imperial control.  It was,
thus, a very dynamic situation.   The potential for Jewish upraising
at Passover is the reason that the Roman Governor showed up then,
with a lot of military might and show..  In fact, the Roman Governor
came into the West Gate with a LARGE military parade, at about the
same time that the Gospels say that the Jesus movement came in the
East gate with a populist God parade.  

Can you feel the tension rising?

Dom
goes further into explaining how religious ideas of eschatology, of
last things, work.  He says that there are two models, and John the
Baptist used one while Jesus used the other.  The John the Baptist
way was passive for humans and active for God.  It was the idea that
God is going to come save “us,” where us indicates a single group
defined by those who know that God is about to act.  This sort of
eschatology is based on a future
promise that God will
act to save us.  Dom says, “This future but imminent apocalyptic
radicalism is dependent on the overpowering action of God moving to
restore justice and peace to an earth ravished by injustice and
oppression.”5
That might sound pretty good, until you hear the one Jesus used.  

As
a reminder, Jesus was baptized by John.  That means he was a DISCIPLE
of John (a student of John’s), but one way or another he branched off
of John’s teachings and went his own way.   The second way that Jesus
ended up going is called sapiential
eschatology.  Dom
says, “The word saptientia
is
Latin for ‘wisdom’ and sapiential eschatology announces that God has
given all
human beings
the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so
live that God’s power, rule, and domination are evidently present to
all observers.  It involves a way of life for now rather than a hope
for life for the future.  … In apocalyptical eschatology, we are
waiting for God to act.  In sapiential eschatology, God is waiting
for us to act.”6

As
far as I can understand it, this is the crux of it all.  We follow
Jesus, who taught us about God who is already present to us, who
works with us to change things for the better.  We aren’t waiting on
God.  We’re working with God.  Jesus’s ministry was one of
proclaiming the Kingdom of God.  Dom explains this well too, “the
sayings and parables of the historical Jesus often describe a world
of radical
egalitarianism
in which discrimination and hierarchy, exploitation and oppression
should no longer exist.”7
 The Jesus kingdom movement, “is not a matter of Jesus’ power but
of their empowerment.  He himself has no monopoly on the kingdom; it
is there for anyone with the courage to embrace it.”8
All of this may explain why they could kill Jesus, but not his
movement.  

It
also explains why the crowds were so excited on Palm Sunday and
throughout Jesus’ ministry.  Jesus was speaking to their problems,
oppression, debt, loss of land, loss of subsistence, loss of dignity
AND he was offering them the reality that God
was already with them and they could change it themselves!
No wonder they were having a Yay-Jesus parade.

I
think the big questions this leaves US with today are about how we
best live the Kingdom.  If it is already here, if God is already with
us, if we can partake in the radical egalitarianism, if  God has
given all
human beings
the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so
live that God’s power, rule, and domination are evidently present to
all observers… then what is it that we need make space for so that
we can LIVE it!???  How do we access that wisdom we already have, how
do we live that life that God has made  possible?

Or, to put it another way, how
do we step out of the world’s obsessions with consumption,
acquisition, fear, existential anxiety, competition, hierarchy, and
distractions SO THAT we can live the GOOD life God already made
possible?  Since the goal is to live in love and allow lovingness to
expand in us, and I wonder if it is a matter of balance.  There is a
need for rest, to savor the goodness; AND there is a need for
activity, to respond to the goodness.  There is a need for more
learning to know how to best respond, AND there is a need to teach
others what we know.  There is a need to attend to the goodness of
life AND there is a need to attend to the brokenness and see it
clearly.  There is definitely a need to play – to live into joy,
laughter and delight AND a need to be courageous and loving in
seeking justice for all.  Because part of the call of Jesus is to
live a good life, and the other part is to make it possible to for
others to live a good life – but not JUST a good life!  The call is
to a life that is a transformed, courageous, God-soaked with love.

In
the end of our story we hear, “Some of the Pharisees in the crowd
said to him, ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’  He answered,
‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.’”
This is the part I had entirely wrong.  It isn’t that the stones are
bursting with joy.  It is that the people cannot be silenced because
they’ve been empowered.
God’s empowering love is with them, and they’ve learned that they
already have what they need to change their lives and change the
world.  And once people know that, they can’t be silenced.  Thanks be
to God!  Amen

1John
Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus: Exposing the Roots of
Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Stories of The Death of Jesus (USA:
HarperSanFrancisco: 1995) 40.

2Crossan,
42.

3Crossan,
44.

4Crossan,
44.

5Crossan,
47.

6Crossan,
47.

7Crossan
48.

8Crossan,
48.

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

April 14, 2019

Uncategorized

Pastoral Response to #GC2019

  • March 2, 2019March 3, 2019
  • by Sara Baron

Dear Siblings in Christ,

The past few days have not gone as hoped. To be very succinct: in seeking for justice and inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people in The United Methodist Church, we failed.

That said, no legislative body has the power to limit God’s grace. God is God and the church is not. God is love, and the church can’t stop God’s love.

In this case, the church does not speak for God. Not only that, but the church is standing in God’s way.

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady will continue to welcome, include, celebrate, love, and empower people who are LGBTQIA+ as God’s beloved people, because it is true. We have noticed that God loves diversity, and that’s why people and creation are so diverse. We stand on the side of love, and we will ALWAYS stand on the side of love.

You are a beloved child of God, beautiful and precious in God’s sight.

This church will keep workings towards justice for all of God’s people, including LGBTQIA+ people, and we will not stop until justice is found. We are coming home with some new ideas about that… but planning is for another day. Today is a day to grieve for the blindness and harm done by the denomination, and to care for each other in our pain.

May God be with us, and may the Spirit guide us.

In God’s Love,
Sara

Sermons

“Words to a Warring Church’

  • February 4, 2019February 4, 2019
  • by Sara Baron

based on 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 and Luke 4:16-30

Don’t get distracted by the pretty love poetry, First Corinthians was written to a church that was fighting within itself, and this passage is about that. The Jewish Annotated Bible points out, “This letter, written in the mid-50s, reveals the divisions facing the Pauline churches over such central concepts as the Holy Spirit (ch 2), marital and sexual norms (ch 5-7; 11), relation with the Gentile world (chs 6; 8), worship practices (ch 12), women’s roles (ch 14) and resurrection (ch 15).”1 Paul clarifies right from the get-go why he is writing, “Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you should be in agreement and that there should be no divisions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same purpose. For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters.” (1 Cor 1:10-11, NRSV)

The whole letter is written to deal with the disagreements – to offer advice on them and to remind the church HOW to disagree. 1 Corinthians 13 fits into the latter category, it is meant to instruct the church on what it means to follow Jesus in the midst of disagreement. It reflects the opposite of the described behavior of the members of the Corinthian church in the rest of the letter. They are said to be impatient, unkind, boastful and arrogant, boastful in wrongdoing, etc. All the things that love is NOT. “Love is patient, love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful…” After all, love is a reflection of God’s nature. The word for love being used here is “agape” or unconditional love. The church often talks about this as the love that is God’s love for humans, and when we seek to live out our faith, we seek to bear God’s agape love into the world for all people.

Earlier in the letter, Paul worked with a common Corinthian saying, “All things are lawful”. He reflects, “‘All things are lawful’, but not all things are beneficial. ‘All things are lawful’, but not all things build up. Do not seek your own advantage, but that of others.” (10:23-24) Over and over again, Paul seeks to encourage the Corinthians to take care of each other, and use their power for the communal well-being.

Luke 4 contains another example of a faith community misbehaving. In this case it is said to be the synagogue in Nazareth, although historically speaking there are some reasons to be doubtful of the factuality of this story. Some of them are: we aren’t sure there was a synagogue in Nazareth; if there was, we don’t know that they would have been prosperous enough to have a scroll of Isaiah; and perhaps just as importantly, Nazareth isn’t built on a cliff.

This passage is almost certainly a creation of Luke, based off of a much shorter narrative in Mark that centers around the line, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their home town, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” Its OK that it is a creation of Luke, it lets him show of his themes, which I tend to greatly support. Luke emphasizes God’s love for the foreigners and Gentiles, and Luke quotes Isaiah who reminds us that the Spirit is working to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. For Luke, this is Jesus’s mission statement. For us, this is a part of our Communion Liturgy. For those who aren’t remembering it, the “year of the Lord’s favor” refers to the practice of Jubilee, in which every 50 years all debts are forgiven AND all land reverts back to the family who owned it. This system was meant to prevent intergenerational poverty, and to ensure that people’s subsistence remained possible. It was, by the time of Jesus, common for people to be imprisoned because of debt (a way to blackmail family members into paying up), or for family members to be sold to pay off debts. To the people of Jesus time (and Luke’s), who hadn’t seen a Jubilee in perhaps a millennia (we aren’t entirely sure if it ever happened, but we think it may have happened in the time of the Judges), this was probably a bit incredible.

Believable or not for those who heard it, the Isaiah passage emphasizes God being on the side of the poor, vulnerable, and oppressed, and working towards their good, and Luke believes this work is embodied in Jesus.

Now, within the context of this story, it is entirely too easy to assume that the Jews in Nazareth were upset about the inclusion of the outsiders, and feeling like their “special” status was threatened, but in the Jewish Annotated New Testament I have been assured by Amy Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler that this is not at all the case. After all, those were Jewish stories, and the Jews had very good relationships with Gentiles. Instead, the presenting issue in this narrative is that Jesus refuses to do messianic stuff. Mark explains this as Jesus being UNABLE, but in Luke it sounds more like Jesus refuses. Initially the crowd is quite pleased with what he is saying, but if he is doing God’s work (as described in Isaiah), but not for them. This is what enrages them. They want the good work of God too! They want freedom, healing, liberation, and debt recovery. Why wouldn’t they! Jesus choice not to help them when he helps others is what Luke reports as enraging them.

Having done adequate work understanding the texts on their own merit, I believe we are now free to excavate them for meaning for us today. I believe most of you have heard that The United Methodist Church is a bit, shall we say, Corinthian? For the uninitiated into the infighting in The United Methodist Church, let me offer a few disclaimers: 1. The fights in the church at large are NOT reflected in this congregation. After two years of careful study and conversation, in 1996, this congregation voted to be affirming and celebration of God’s LGBTQIA+ children, and we hold FIRM in that position today. 2. The General Church has pretty much always been a big fight for power, money, and influence. This is a discouraging fact (I’d love it if the General Church were a spiritually centered experience in collaboration and sharing agape around the world). However, it is a fact. In part this is true because we have a democratic process – we neither have a leader at the top telling us what to do NOR have complete freedom for our own churches. Furthermore, we are super diverse, and that means we often have very different values, and ideas of where power, money, and influence should be used. It isn’t ALL bad.

Now that I’ve offered the disclaimers, this month the Global United Methodist Church is getting together in Saint Louis to have a big old fight. (February 23-26). Officially, the church will be discussing, “human sexuality.” Really, the church will be fighting over whether or not people who are LGBTQIA+ are beloved by God. (Yes.) More deeply, I believe the church is still fighting over who has control of money, power, and influence, and the fight has been put on the backs of LGBTQIA+ people when really it is about whether or not the old-school power brokers (most commonly older, whiter, richer, Southern US, conservative, men) can make other people do their bidding anymore. (Thanks be to God, no.)

In First Corinthians, Paul is VERY concerned about the WAYS the church treated each other in their disagreements. He seems more concerned about this than about the answers that they come to. They were told to build each other up. This is a super duper hard thing to remember coming into General Conference. I believe we are all called to see each other’s humanity, and to see each other as beloved by God, even our disagreement. I do NOT believe it is acceptable to see another member of the church as the ENEMY. I believe that the way we disagree is important, and Paul’s teaching is very important.

And I really, really wish that the other side would stop doing stuff to make that more difficult. 😉

However, I’m going to play fair right now. I’m going to start by telling you what our side (the side for inclusion of all of God’s people) does that infuriates the other side (the side that likely thinks of itself as for “purity”). First of all, we disobey. The conservatives have had the majority power in the church since 1972, and have used it to say that “homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching” and thus “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” cannot be ordained or appointed and UM clergy can’t preside at same sex weddings. Because we don’t believe that these rules have authority in the eyes of God, we’ve disobeyed them.

Furthermore, we’ve protested them. We’ve gone to General Conferences, and other meetings, and protested, and people have been uncomfortable with that. In 2000, we (I wasn’t there, this is the “we” of the inclusivity movement) even shut down General Conference. Our Bishop at the time – yours and mine – chose to be arrested with the protesters in solidarity, which was one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever seen.

Our refusal to obey oppressive authority, and our refusal to be quiet about it has been a problem for the other side, and is taken as unfair tactics. Now, clearly, I disagree, but I thought it would be nice to share their viewpoint first for once.

On our side, the complaints are a bit different. First of all, our primary issue, is with the church claiming that some of God’s beloveds aren’t God’s beloveds. That said, James Baldwin once said (and Jan Huston was nice enough to post on my FB this week to remind me) “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” Thus, I do not believe that both sides are equally valid when it comes to discussing the humanity and right to exist of LGBTQIA+ people in the church.

Then there are the current tactics on the side of exclusion. These include: wanting minimum penalties for doing same sex weddings, kicking out Annual Conferences that ordain self-avowed practicing homosexuals2, minimizing the pension payments for clergy who are part of Annual Conferences that ordain self-avowed practicing homosexuals3, AND deciding to leave and form a new denomination (the Wesleyan Covenant Association) WHILE intentionally bankrupting The United Methodist Church4

That is, they want to kick LGBTQIA+ people and their allies out of the church, impoverish retired clergy, and bankrupt the denomination.

And Paul says I’m supposed to be loving.

And I think he’s right.

I sort of wish I knew how to be like Jesus in the end of the gospel, just walking away while fists are pounding and violence is imminent, like in a cartoon.

However, I’m willing to settle for a bit less. I’d like to be blessed with the ability to keep on loving, and keep on seeing God’s light in those with whom I disagree NO MATTER HOW BADLY THEY BEHAVE. I keep on praying, and practicing love, in hopes that I will be able to do so.

This feels like a lesson far larger than General Conference or The United Methodist Church. But it also takes a second step. I want to know people are beloved by God, no matter how badly they behave, but I do NOT think that means I have to let them walk all over me, nor over God’s other beloveds. Walter Wink teaches that when Jesus says “turn the other cheek” he means “use subversive methods to require your opponent to respect you.”

I want to learn to turn the other cheek in love. I hope you want to too! May God help us all open our hearts and minds to the agape love and wisdom necessary to do so, now and always. Amen

 

1 The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 287.

2 See, the Traditional Plan and the Modified Traditional Plan in the ACDA: http://www.umc.org/who-we-are/gc2019-advance-edition-daily-christian-advocate

3 http://hackingchristianity.net/2019/01/confirmed-pensions-board-issues-traditionalist-plan-concerns-wespath-updates-faq.html 
4https://snarkypastorrants.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-devil-in-details.html
Image is of the Love Your Neighbor Coalition logo.
Sermons

“Words to a Warring Church’ based on 1 Corinthians…

  • February 3, 2019February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Don’t get distracted by the pretty love poetry, First Corinthians was written to a church that was fighting within itself, and this passage is about that. The Jewish Annotated Bible points out, “This letter, written in the mid-50s, reveals the divisions facing the Pauline churches over such central concepts as the Holy Spirit (ch 2), marital and sexual norms (ch 5-7; 11), relation with the Gentile world (chs 6; 8), worship practices (ch 12), women’s roles (ch 14) and resurrection (ch 15).”1 Paul clarifies right from the get-go why he is writing, “Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you should be in agreement and that there should be no divisions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same purpose. For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters.” (1 Cor 1:10-11, NRSV)

The whole letter is written to deal with the disagreements – to offer advice on them and to remind the church HOW to disagree. 1 Corinthians 13 fits into the latter category, it is meant to instruct the church on what it means to follow Jesus in the midst of disagreement. It reflects the opposite of the described behavior of the members of the Corinthian church in the rest of the letter. They are said to be impatient, unkind, boastful and arrogant, boastful in wrongdoing, etc. All the things that love is NOT. “Love is patient, love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful…” After all, love is a reflection of God’s nature. The word for love being used here is “agape” or unconditional love. The church often talks about this as the love that is God’s love for humans, and when we seek to live out our faith, we seek to bear God’s agape love into the world for all people.

Earlier in the letter, Paul worked with a common Corinthian saying, “All things are lawful”. He reflects, “‘All things are lawful’, but not all things are beneficial. ‘All things are lawful’, but not all things build up. Do not seek your own advantage, but that of others.” (10:23-24) Over and over again, Paul seeks to encourage the Corinthians to take care of each other, and use their power for the communal well-being.

Luke 4 contains another example of a faith community misbehaving. In this case it is said to be the synagogue in Nazareth, although historically speaking there are some reasons to be doubtful of the factuality of this story. Some of them are: we aren’t sure there was a synagogue in Nazareth; if there was, we don’t know that they would have been prosperous enough to have a scroll of Isaiah; and perhaps just as importantly, Nazareth isn’t built on a cliff.

This passage is almost certainly a creation of Luke (who was not from Galilee), based off of a much shorter narrative in Mark that centers around the line, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their home town, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” Its OK that it is a creation of Luke, it lets him show of his themes, which I tend to greatly support. Luke emphasizes God’s love for the foreigners and Gentiles, and Luke quotes Isaiah who reminds us that the Spirit is working to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. For Luke, this is Jesus’s mission statement. For us, this is a part of our Communion Liturgy. For those who aren’t remembering it, the “year of the Lord’s favor” refers to the practice of Jubilee, in which every 50 years all debts are forgiven AND all land reverts back to the family who owned it. This system was meant to prevent intergenerational poverty, and to ensure that people’s subsistence remained possible. It was, by the time of Jesus, common for people to be imprisoned because of debt (a way to blackmail family members into paying up), or for family members to be sold to pay off debts. To the people of Jesus time (and Luke’s), who hadn’t seen a Jubilee in perhaps a millennia (we aren’t entirely sure if it ever happened, but we think it may have happened in the time of the Judges), this was probably a bit incredible.

Believable or not for those who heard it, the Isaiah passage emphasizes God being on the side of the poor, vulnerable, and oppressed, and working towards their good, and Luke believes this work is embodied in Jesus.

Now, within the context of this story, it is entirely too easy to assume that the Jews in Nazareth were upset about the inclusion of the outsiders, and feeling like their “special” status was threatened, but in the Jewish Annotated New Testament I have been assured by Amy Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler that this is not at all the case. After all, those were Jewish stories, and the Jews had very good relationships with Gentiles. Instead, the presenting issue in this narrative is that Jesus refuses to do messianic stuff. Mark explains this as Jesus being UNABLE, but in Luke it sounds more like Jesus refuses. Initially the crowd is quite pleased with what he is saying, but if he is doing God’s work (as described in Isaiah), but not for them. This is what enrages them. They want the good work of God too! They want freedom, healing, liberation, and debt recovery. Why wouldn’t they! Jesus choice not to help them when he helps others is what Luke reports as enraging them.

Having done adequate work understanding the texts on their own merit, I believe we are now free to excavate them for meaning for us today. I believe most of you have heard that The United Methodist Church is a bit, shall we say, Corinthian? For the uninitiated into the infighting in The United Methodist Church, let me offer a few disclaimers: 1. The fights in the church at large are NOT reflected in this congregation. After two years of careful study and conversation, in 1996, this congregation voted to be affirming and celebration of God’s LGBTQIA+ children, and we hold FIRM in that position today. 2. The General Church has pretty much always been a big fight for power, money, and influence. This is a discouraging fact (I’d love it if the General Church were a spiritually centered experience in collaboration and sharing agape around the world). However, it is a fact. In part this is true because we have a democratic process – we neither have a leader at the top telling us what to do NOR have complete freedom for our own churches. Furthermore, we are super diverse, and that means we often have very different values, and ideas of where power, money, and influence should be used. It isn’t ALL bad.

Now that I’ve offered the disclaimers, this month the Global United Methodist Church is getting together in Saint Louis to have a big old fight. (February 23-26). Officially, the church will be discussing, “human sexuality.” Really, the church will be fighting over whether or not people who are LGBTQIA+ are beloved by God. (Yes.) More deeply, I believe the church is still fighting over who has control of money, power, and influence, and the fight has been put on the backs of LGBTQIA+ people when really it is about whether or not the old-school power brokers (most commonly older, whiter, richer, Southern US, conservative, men) can make other people do their bidding anymore. (Thanks be to God, no.)

In First Corinthians, Paul is VERY concerned about the WAYS the church treated each other in their disagreements. He seems more concerned about this than about the answers that they come to. They were told to build each other up. This is a super duper hard thing to remember coming into General Conference. I believe we are all called to see each other’s humanity, and to see each other as beloved by God, even our disagreement. I do NOT believe it is acceptable to see another member of the church as the ENEMY. I believe that the way we disagree is important, and Paul’s teaching is very important.

And I really, really wish that the other side would stop doing stuff to make that more difficult. 😉

However, I’m going to play fair right now. I’m going to start by telling you what our side (the side for inclusion of all of God’s people) does that infuriates the other side (the side that likely thinks of itself as for “purity”). First of all, we disobey. The conservatives have had the majority power in the church since 1972, and have used it to say that “homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching” and thus “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” cannot be ordained or appointed and UM clergy can’t preside at same sex weddings. Because we don’t believe that these rules have authority in the eyes of God, we’ve disobeyed them.

Furthermore, we’ve protested them. We’ve gone to General Conferences, and other meetings, and protested, and people have been uncomfortable with that. In 2000, we (I wasn’t there, this is the “we” of the inclusivity movement) even shut down General Conference. Our Bishop at the time – yours and mine – chose to be arrested with the protesters in solidarity, which was one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever seen.

Our refusal to obey oppressive authority, and our refusal to be quiet about it has been a problem for the other side, and is taken as unfair tactics. Now, clearly, I disagree, but I thought it would be nice to share their viewpoint first for once.

On our side, the complaints are a bit different. First of all, our primary issue, is with the church claiming that some of God’s beloveds aren’t God’s beloveds. That said, James Baldwin once said (and Jan Huston was nice enough to post on my FB this week to remind me) “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” Thus, I do not believe that both sides are equally valid when it comes to discussing the humanity and right to exist of LGBTQIA+ people in the church.

Then there are the current tactics on the side of exclusion. These include: wanting minimum penalties for doing same sex weddings, kicking out Annual Conferences that ordain self-avowed practicing homosexuals2, minimizing the pension payments for clergy who are part of Annual Conferences that ordain self-avowed practicing homosexuals3, AND deciding to leave and form a new denomination (the Wesleyan Covenant Association) WHILE intentionally bankrupting The United Methodist Church4.

That is, they want to kick LGBTQIA+ people and their allies out of the church, impoverish retired clergy, and bankrupt the denomination.

And Paul says I’m supposed to be loving.

And I think he’s right.

I sort of wish I knew how to be like Jesus in the end of the gospel, just walking away while fists are pounding and violence is imminent, like in a cartoon.

However, I’m willing to settle for a bit less. I’d like to be blessed with the ability to keep on loving, and keep on seeing God’s light in those with whom I disagree NO MATTER HOW BADLY THEY BEHAVE. I keep on praying, and practicing love, in hopes that I will be able to do so.

This feels like a lesson far larger than General Conference or The United Methodist Church. But it also takes a second step. I want to know people are beloved by God, no matter how badly they behave, but I do NOT think that means I have to let them walk all over me, nor over God’s other beloveds. Walter Wink teaches that when Jesus says “turn the other cheek” he means “use subversive methods to require your opponent to respect you.”

I want to learn to turn the other cheek in love. I hope you want to too! May God help us all open our hearts and minds to the agape love and wisdom necessary to do so, now and always. Amen

1The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 287.

2See, the Traditional Plan and the Modified Traditional Plan in the ACDA: http://www.umc.org/who-we-are/gc2019-advance-edition-daily-christian-advocate

3http://hackingchristianity.net/2019/01/confirmed-pensions-board-issues-traditionalist-plan-concerns-wespath-updates-faq.html

4https://snarkypastorrants.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-devil-in-details.html

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron 

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady 

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

February 3, 2019

Sermons

“One and Many, Many and One”

  • January 28, 2019
  • by Sara Baron

based on 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 and John 2:1-11

If you talk to people about their faith, there are a lot of stories about personal experiences of the Divine that come up in the answers. The stories themselves vary widely – God seems to be infinitely creative – but the power of experiences themselves and the impact they have on people afterward are more consistent. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, said that the way you can tell if someone has had a authentic experience of the Divine is if they are more loving afterward – to God, to others, and to themselves. I haven’t heard a better way to tell. Those experiences can really matter.

Given how many people have had personal experiences of the Divine, it is a little bit surprising how few of the Biblical accounts of God’s miracles are said to impact only one or a few people. The healing stories could count in this way, but the healing of any individual inherently heals their community as well. Similarly, you might think that the stories of women’s wombs being opened by God are individual, but as they usually occur when the baby is either one of the new patriarchs or one of the new prophets, it isn’t really. Most of the miracles are communal. I’m told that within the Hebrew Bible, the major exception to this happens in the Elijah/Elisha cycle, where some miracles are more individual, and as such, this wedding in Cana story fits most with those stories.

Sure, all the wedding guests benefited from being able to drink good wine, but the recipient of the miracle was the host, who avoided shame because of it. Shame, and its inverse honor, were the MOST important facet of life in the Ancient Near East, and they were assumed to be a zero sum game. One could not gain honor without someone else losing it. They were also assumed to be a family matter, if any family member lost honor, so did the rest.

It is worth considering that Jesus and Mary may have been related to the host of the wedding. It is, after all, one of the common reasons that a person gets invited to a wedding, and since Cana was likely about 9 miles away from Nazareth, this was less likely to be an immediate neighbor. Furthermore, if the host of the wedding was family, then the lack of wine DID have something to do with Mary and Jesus, because it had to do with their honor and shame as much well as the host’s.

Also, it seems that it was common in those days for wedding guests to bring wine to the wedding. The story tells us that Jesus showed up at the wedding with disciples in tow, so this was likely a rather large entourage. It was also a poor one, so they probably didn’t bring enough wine to counterbalance their presence, so it may have sort of been Jesus’ fault that there wasn’t enough wine.

In any case, the story says that Jesus produced WAAAAAAY too much wine- about 454 bottles of it, by today’s measure. This probably relates to the gospel writer’s tendency towards exaggeration, so we don’t have to fuss over it much. There is probably also intended significance in the fact that the wine was made into the jars used for ritual purification. By the time the Gospel of John was written, the early Christian community was seeking to distance itself from their Jewish roots, including by foregoing purification rituals. So, basically, this story was a diss on the Jewish ritual of purification – and we should notice whenever our texts have an anti-Jewish bias. (Because we should.)

Now, you may think I’m babbling on about this story in too much detail and for too long (and you may be right), but this is a curious little story. This is the ONLY miracle in the Gospel of John that is unique – it has no parallel nor corollary in the other gospels. John says that the “signs” of Jesus reveal his “glory” – which is actually another way of saying his honor (and thus the same as saying his lack of shame). Because of showing his glory/honor, it said that Jesus’ disciples believed in him. I’m not sure that this is exactly how most of us today think about miracles, but it is interesting to think about how the Gospel writer thought of them! The gospel writer tells this story to say that Jesus was honorable, and so that we know why people believed in him, and presumably so we will too. That’s, as far as we’re told, the point. The Gospel wants to help people follow Jesus, and to do so means convincing them that Jesus is an honorable man worthy of being followed.

Thus, I think I know what I’m supposed to get out of this story: motivation to follow Jesus. I’m not entirely sure that is what I get out of this story though. The most interesting part for me is the reminder that Jesus was likely POOR. He and his disciples may have accidentally shown up at a party without an appropriate gift and nearly shamed their host.

While my study of the Bible has brought me to this conclusion many times (that Jesus was likely poor), it remains an insight to me. It wasn’t something I was aware of growing up, and I don’t think it is a shared assumption when we come to the text. In the US today, where we live in a meritocracy of sorts, our cultural assumptions tend towards thinking rich people are better and more worthy than poor people. This was likely even more true in prior eras of Western Civilization when it was further assumed that rich people were chosen by God to be rich because God liked them better. (I’m not entirely convinced that this idea has been eradicated from our collective consciousness.) It can be a little bit shocking to consider Jesus, who most of us think of as the most important human to ever live, as … poor.

It certainly messes with a lot of our assumptions.

When I was in seminary and being trained in various schools of theological thinking, I was really shocked to learn that Liberation Theology claims that God has a “preferential option for the poor.” The concept, however, is well established in the Bible. Much later on, when I read Debt, A History of the First 5000 Years, I was better prepared to learn that the author, David Graeber, believes that the world’s major religions emerged as counter movements to the world’s developing market economies and their inherent devaluing of human life..1 As a person of faith, I’d take this a step further and suggest that as systems developed to devalue human life, God worked in the world to counter that and value God’s beloved humans, and God’s counter work became the world’s faith traditions.

When we think about Jesus as poor, and God working for the benefit of the poor and vulnerable, we can see more clearly what God is up to today. Jesus, like many others in his day, and many others in our day, lacked food security. He often did not know where his next meal would come from or if it would be enough, like the 1 out of every 8 Americans who is food insecure..2 God worked through Jesus, who was poor. God worked through Jesus, who was poor, to take care of others who are poor. I believe God is still up to the same work – taking care of those who are poor, and vulnerable, and most often being very successful doing this work through others who are poor and vulnerable.

If this feels uncomfortable because you don’t identify as poor, I’ll remind you that according to the theory in Bridges out of Poverty, there are many facets to poverty including financial, emotional, mental, spiritual, in support systems, in role models, and in knowledge of hidden rules. When we look at it this way, we are all impoverished in some ways, and those areas of our life may be exactly where God is at work. The other option, however, in discomfort is to just sit with it – often God is up to something in our discomfort as well.

In any case,, there is inherent value in remembering that Jesus was poor, and that people who are poor are like Jesus in being poor. This is an inversion of the ways of the world, one we desperately need so that we can acknowledge the full humanity, and sacred worth of people who are poor.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, . “I have the audacity to believe,” he exclaimed, “that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education, and culture for their minds and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.”.3

“Why should there be hunger and deprivation in any land, in any city, at any table when man has the resources and the scientific know-how to provide all [hu]mankind with the basic necessities of life? Even deserts can be irrigated and top soil can be replaced. We cannot complain of a lack of land, for there are twenty-five million square miles of tillable land, of which we are using less than seven million. We have amazing knowledge of vitamins, nutrition, the chemistry of food, and the versatility of atoms. There is no deficit in human resources; the deficit is in human will. The well-off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst.”.4

He makes an excellent point, one that is equally real now. Our responsibility as people of faith is to counter the narratives that only some people matter, and advocate for those who are poor and/or vulnerable. We are to dream with God, and with MLK, of a world that uses its resources to take care of ALL of God’s children (which means all people).

1 Corinthians talks about the gifts of the spirit – that we don’t all get the same gifts, but that together we have all the gifts we need to do God’s work. I have learned that this is one of my core believes. I LOVE that God gives us such different gifts and abilities – that we don’t all want the same jobs, responsibilities, or committees. And I love that because of our diversity of gifts we’re able to be a healthy whole. It always strikes me as amazing when we get to the end of a nominations season to see how many people we have willing to share their gifts with the rest of us, and that together we have more than enough.

I believe this is how the world works. We have enough food, we have enough wisdom to know how to distribute it, we even have enough people to have a will get everyone fed. We just have to get past some barriers to make it happen. It is possible, and as it is God’s will, we can be a part of making it happen. Some of that work is already being done, and the work that remains – will get done. We are each only one, but we are many. God works with individuals and communities. Feeding the people is part of the building the kindom, God is a kindom builder and so are we. And, as the gospel writer of John says, when God is at work, there is MORE than enough. Thanks be to God. Amen

1 I cannot recommend this book enough.
2 https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics.aspx
3 https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-blog/food-insecurity-social-justive
4 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/vicki-b-escarra/martin-luther-king-hunger-in-america_b_809275.html”>https://www.huffingtonpost.com/vicki-b-escarra/martin-luther-king-hunger-in-america_b_809275.html . MLK, The Quest for Peace and Justice, Nobel Lecture

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
January 27, 2019
Sermons

“Opening Our Hearts to Gratitude”

  • January 23, 2019
  • by Sara Baron

Based on 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13

Our theme this Advent is “openness.” We are exploring it in worship, and it is the theme of our Advent Devotions – now available in the Narthex!! Today we’re starting with “Opening Our Hearts to Gratitude.” This may feel redundant to start with gratitude right after November and Thanksgiving, but I think there may always be more to say about gratitude. Or, at the very least, there is always more to be grateful for.

While I adore the season of Advent, I often struggle with the Advent texts the lectionary provides. The texts as a whole are cold, dark, scary, and apocalyptic. In them, one can hear Christian thinking about the SECOND coming of Christ because in the texts, one is reminded that officially Advent is at once a season of waiting for the coming Christ Child at Christmas and a season of waiting for the second coming of Christ.

The issue for me is that I have yet to be convinced about this whole “second coming” thing. It doesn’t fit how I understand Jesus, his message, his work, or the continued work of God with the Body of Christ. I’m perfectly fine with any or all of you being deeply committed to the second coming, because as always, I could be wrong!

Yet, my understanding of the second coming is this: the early Christians claimed Jesus as the Messiah. The faithful Jews who did not become Jesus followers responded by pointing out that Jesus did not do the things that they’d expected a Messiah to do, in particular to establish a kingdom on earth with political, military, and economic might. The Christians had trouble refuting this argument (because it was true), but they worked on it together and decided that Jesus was going to come back and do those things. This idea has taken a stronghold in the Christian tradition.

It doesn’t fit with the way Jesus lived, which had NOTHING to do with wanting to establish a powerful kingship. Nor does it have to do with how Jesus acted, which was all about empowering people without power to work together for the common good. It also misses the resurrection narrative itself, in which the followers of Christ are enabled and empowered to continue his work to transform the world.

I don’t think Jesus is coming back, at least not as a single, human, physical figure to establish a kingdom on earth. RATHER, I believe the shared work of the Body of Christ is to be the continuation of the work of Jesus to build the kindom of God. I believe that we are the continual way that Jesus is “back” although I more commonly think of it as the way that Christ continues to live.

So, I tend to get frustrated with the Advent texts. However, I still think my take could be wrong, and I don’t think I have more wisdom or knowledge than thousand of years of shared tradition, so I try every year to find my peace with the Advent texts. This year I’ve made my peace by picking two Pauline epistle texts (this week AND next week) and attending to them. These are lectionary texts, but not the apocalyptic ones. It is a balance. I think it is going to work out, they’re really excellent.

I wish we started Advent with Creation – as a way of remembering the start of our faith story with the start of the new year. So, I want to try it. My favorite “story” of creation in the Bible is Psalm 104. Read it here: Psalm 104, NRSV.

As it turns out, creation is a great starting point for gratitude. For many of us, being in the wonder of Creation is the easiest way for us to connect with the Divine, and I think that is in part because we are so overwhelmed with gratitude for the wonder and mystery of it all. The Psalm meditations on how each creature is cared for within creation, by God’s good gifts. The gifts for humans are like a communion set PLUS –“wine to gladden the human heart, oil to make the face shine, and bread to strengthen the human heart.” The Psalmist is not only practiced at noticing the wonders of creation, the Psalmist is also masterful at naming them with gratitude.

Another of the major access points to gratitude meets us in the opening verse of our reading from 1 Thessalonians. Paul asks, “How can we thank God enough for you, for all the joy we feel before God on your account?” I have been meditating on this verse all week, thinking of individual people I know and love; considering how incredibly grateful I am for their lives, their wisdom, their actions, their prayers, their BEING; and then trying to consider what it would take to adequately put together words to express my wonder.

How can we thank God enough for you? It actually feels impossible – even if I just pick one person, and even the one I pick isn’t someone I see all the time or know exceptionally well. How could I adequately thank God for the support of my high school chemistry teacher, or my junior high Sunday School teachers, for a college friend I’ve lost touch with but once had thought provoking conversations with? I’m SO grateful. But the words don’t feel like enough. And then there are ones I know better, and the ones I see more: how I could I ever thank God enough for my beloved partner, for my parents, for my dear friends, for the leaders, and members and participants of this church, for the staff I work with who make so many things possible?

The possibilities of things to be grateful for is (or approaches) infinite. I see where Paul gets his exuberance. There is so much joy to be found on account of God’s beloved people. There is so much to be grateful for. If you are needing the gift of opennness in your life, if you are willing to play with letting gratitude soak into your heart, I encourage meditating on this exuberant verse. “How can we thank God enough or you, for all the joy we feel before God on your account?” There is plenty to be found in that one little verse.

Paul’s exuberant gratitude for the people was writing to is, of course, not the final point. He also offers blessings to them, and one of them is particularly striking, “May Christ increase to overflowing your love for one another and for all people, even as our love does for you.” Scholars believe that this is the first letter of Paul, making this the first book written in the New Testament. Thus it reflects the earliest recording we have of the faith of the early Christians. I was stuck by this passage because it is more outward looking that much of the New Testament is. I suspect that as Christianity developed, and did so in a world that was hostile to it, it became more concerns with internal survival. Here though, early on, there is a balance between the relationships of the people of faith and those beyond the faith.

Love is presented as expansive. God’s love flows to all people, God’s love flows to and through Paul, God’s love flows to and through the early church in Thessalonia – as does Paul’s love, and Paul prays that it will increase to overflowing with them – allowing the love to be shared within the church and beyond to ALL people.

The joy isn’t the final point – love spreading to all people is the final point. But that end point goes through abundant gratitude. Love itself is a reason to be grateful. So is the expansiveness of love, the healing nature of love, the fact that God’s nature is one of love, the reality that we can share love, the reality for any of us that we have ever felt love, that it comes in so many forms.

How can we ever thank God enough?

Now, having focused on the wonders of creation and the incredible power of love, I want to take a step back. Gratitude is very important, it feeds our hearts, changes our perspectives, and allows a deepening of our spiritual lives.

That said, not everything is wonderful, or even good. There is deep pain the world including grief in its many forms, depression and anxiety, illness and injury, abuse and neglect. There are things we are not grateful for, and there are time when we are not filled with gratitude.

What then?

I think honesty and integrity are in order. When we are not grateful, it is worth paying attention to what emotions we are feeling. Whether it be anger, sadness, despair, frustration, exhaustion, confusion, or something else entirely, our emotions deserve some space to BE in the world without judgment. They’re even worth exploring. WHY are we angry, or sad? What ELSE do we feel? How strong are those feelings? Have they had a chance they need to be expressed?

THEN, and only then, it is worth considering IF there is space for gratitude too. Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn’t, there is no right answer. If so, there may be a silver lining that can be a source of gratitude. Perhaps you can’t be grateful for a terrible experience you had – but you can be grateful that it is over. Perhaps you are homeless and can’t be grateful for homelessness – but you can be grateful for those who see your humanity and support you. Perhaps you can’t be grateful for the death of a loved one – but you can be grateful for the time you had with them.

You don’t have to force gratitude on yourself if this isn’t the right time for you. It will come again when it is ready.

However, if you in a place and time in your life when it is possible to feel gratitude, I encourage you to take the time to notice the multitude of possibilities for gratitude around you – from creation to people and beyond – and to express it as well as you can. I suspect it will open your heart – to God, to others, and to even more gratitude as well.   Amen

 

Preached by Rev. Sara E. Baron on December 2, 2018

Sermons

“Opening Our Souls to Joy”

  • January 23, 2019January 23, 2019
  • by Sara Baron

Based on Philippians 1:3-11

Paul says that every one of his prayers is filled with gratitude to God for the joy he has in the people in the church in Philippi. This feels like a very big claim, I’ve always been tempted to use logic against it – I really think he prayed prayers that didn’t include the church in Philippi. However, as I can also be prone to exaggeration, I have to let it go. Most scholars believe that Paul was particularly fond of the church in Philippi, that it was his favorite. That may be so, and help make sense of it all. In any case, he is expressing a large amount of joy.

Last week we talked about some similar words to the church in Thessalonia, and we focused on the life-giving nature of the gratitude. This week we’re playing with the joy. Paul’s joy in the people in the church in Philippi provides us a space to consider joy in our own lives.

I recently watched a TED talk about joy, “Where Joy Hides and Where to Find It.” The speaker, Ingrid Fetell Lee, talks about asking people about what brought them joy. She says,

“I noticed that there were certain things that started to come up again and again and again. They were things like cherry blossoms and bubbles … swimming pools and tree houses … hot air balloons and googly eyes —and ice cream cones, especially the ones with the sprinkles. These things seemed to cut across lines of age and gender and ethnicity. I mean, if you think about it, we all stop and turn our heads to the sky when the multicolored arc of a rainbow streaks across it. And fireworks — we don’t even need to know what they’re for, and we feel like we’re celebrating, too. These things aren’t joyful for just a few people; they’re joyful for nearly everyone. They’re universally joyful. And seeing them all together, it gave me this indescribably hopeful feeling. The sharply divided, politically polarized world we live in sometimes has the effect of making our differences feel so vast as to be insurmountable. And yet underneath it all, there’s a part of each of us that finds joy in the same things. And though we’re often told that these are just passing pleasures, in fact, they’re really important, because they remind us of the shared humanity we find in our common experience of the physical world.”1

She goes on to say that she struggled to identify the patterns in those things for a long time, and then she noticed that things that bring joy are: “round things … pops of bright color … symmetrical shapes … a sense of abundance and multiplicity … a feeling of lightness or elevation.2 Ingrid Fetell Lee works in design and aesthetics, and that helps her see things others might have missed. Her next question is about why the world of humans is so dull, rectangular, and drab if that is the opposite of what brings us joy. She posits, “We all start out joyful, but as we get older, being colorful or exuberant opens us up to judgment. Adults who exhibit genuine joy are often dismissed as childish or too feminine or unserious or self-indulgent, and so we hold ourselves back from joy, and we end up in a world that looks like this.”3

Is that it? Is it so simple as we don’t want to be seen as childish or feminine or unserious? If so, that’s really sad. Jesus once said, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” (Luke 18:17, also found in Matthew and Mark.) Now, I’m not claiming to know what he meant by that, but I’m going to suggest that it is POSSIBLE he meant we should allow ourselves space for joy. To be a follower of Jesus doesn’t have to be boring, drab, colorless, nor rectangular experience. It can be fun, and full of laughter and joy. In fact, I think joy is a sign of spiritual maturity!

That said, I’ve struggled with it too. Especially in the years that I was seen as a “young woman pastor” more easily than as a “pastor” I pushed to be taken seriously in entirely too many ways! A few years ago, when I attended the Courage to Lead program, we were asked to bring an object with special meaning to us to symbolize our intention for the retreats. Rather to my own shock, I picked a stick that I’ve been carrying around the world for 20+ years.

I’d first encountered that stick when I was a junior high camper at Sky Lake, participating in a camp where we slept in tents, cooked our meals over fires, and generally savored being in the woods. Someone had identified a small black birch tree, and pointed it out. A conversation ensued about birch beer, which is a soda of my childhood in Pennsylvania that I’ve realized not everyone has has experienced.4 Think rootbeer, but … better. We wondered if the tree would taste like birch beer, so we… tried it. We tried sucking on this little tree, and it turned out it DID taste like birch beer! I’ve recently looked it up, and it turns out birch beer is flavored from the bark of black birch trees, so this is fairly reasonable.

Anyway, my young self thought it was AWESOME that a tree tasted like birch beer. So I broke off a stick and sucked on it, and then I kept the stick as a reminder of that awesomeness. It lived in a drawer in my parent’s house until I moved into my first parsonage, and then it has moved with me since. I can still look at this ridiculous stick and remember the JOY of that day. When I was asked to bring an object to a retreat in Wisconsin I looked around the house for something light and easy to pack. I brought the stick. Then I remembered I had to connect it to an intention, and that meant I had to figure out how on earth to connect a 20+ year old birch stick to my intentionality around my leadership capacity as a pastor.

As I shared about the stick at that retreat, I found myself saying that I’m naturally a person who experiences wonder and delight in the world. Yet, I was aware I’d leaned into critical thinking and cynicism in order to soothe hurts related to realizing how broken the world, its institutions, and its people are. I hoped in the course of the Courage to Lead program I might find my way back to being a person who finds it easy to see wonder and delight in the world.

That retreat was in 2015. The intention I brought to it has seemed to … work. I see differently than I once did, and there is more wonder in what I see than ever. In the November newsletter I talked about stages of faith development: pre-critical naivete, critical thinking, and post-critical naivete. It still takes a little bit of effort for me to be in post-critical naivete, but it is easier than it used to be. I know how broken things are, and now, even knowing that, I can see how wonderful and miraculous it is when things are a little less broken, or healing happens, or delight breaks in. It has become a little bit easier for me to see complexity and wonder at the same time.

And all of that lets the joy in better – EVEN these days!

I am also wondering what else holds us back from joy? One proposal, that I think holds water, is that we get held back from joy by trying to be taken seriously. Of course, sometimes we don’t feel joy because we are too busy feeling other things, and that’s healthy and appropriate. Yet, if we are looking for joy, how can we find it? I wonder if sometimes our lives end up being too stuffed full to make space for joy – because joy likes spontaneity and a little bit of time to savor. (It is not overly methodical!!!) Apparently color, roundness, lightness, and symmetry can help – as can ice cream and balloons. I suspect that more than anything we may need to just open ourselves up to it – allow little things that bring us joy to matter and savor their goodness.

Paul talks about a very deep joy, and I think his joy intersects with his faith. He goes on to say, “ I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.” (v. 6) That’s a pretty joy-filled statement too. That confidence is outstanding. What if it is true? What if the things that matter most WILL be brought to completion? Its a wondrous idea. Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope.”5 If the work that God has begun in us is the work of many generations, then it is only by faith and hope that we can trust it will get done.

And there are many things that I think God is up to that are going to take generations: racial equity, gender equity, full inclusion and celebration of LGBTQIA people, eliminating world hunger, creating world peace, adequate housing for all, excellent health care for all, curing cancer, making space for people with disabilities to be seen as equally vital to our shared humanity, universal access to education, helping us adapt to climate change, guiding us to minimize climate change, curing HIV/AIDS, creating a world where all people know and live compassion and empathy, making space for beauty in many forms to fill up human souls, long term sustainability, and access for all to sources of deep joy – to name a few. I hope and pray that Paul is right and the work that God has begun, God will bring to completion.

In the meantime, we can notice the instances – large or small – where progress is being made. I believe that in noticing such things, and celebrating them, creates more of them! I think part of our work as co-creators with God is to attend to the goodness (as well as to try to create it.) I think noticing joyful things and savoring them matters. I think joy is one of the many gifts God gifts us, and paying attention to it gives us clues as to who God is and what God is up to in the world. Paul goes on, in our passage today to say, “And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight.” I’d add joy. This is MY prayer: that your joy and love may overflow more and more – and that they’ll guide you into fuller knowledge and insight. May God help make it so. Amen

1Ingrid Fetell Lee “”Where joy hids and how to find it” a TED Talk from April 2018, found at https://www.ted.com/talks/ingrid_fetell_lee_where_joy_hides_and_how_to_find_it/transcript Accessed on 11/29/18
2Lee
3Lee
4If you want to know more about birch beer, I thought this was interesting: https://modernfarmer.com/2014/12/birch-beer-best-soda-youve-never-tried/ I, however, grew up with the clear kind.
5Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Sciber’s Son’s, 1962), 63. (but found in Feasting on the Word Year C Volume 1 page 43.)

Preached by Rev. Sara E. Baron on December 9, 2018

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