“Strive for Gratitude” based on Matthew 6:25-33

November 22, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Jesus was a Middle Eastern refugee, according to the Gospel of Matthew. Abraham was a Middle Eastern refugee – specifically a Syrian one- according to the Torah. The entire Exodus narrative is the story of the people who would become ancient Israel as refugees wandering in the desert. And the entirety of the Bible obsesses over welcoming foreigners and offering hospitality to strangers.

According to the UN Refugee Agency, “Globally, one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. If this were the population of a country, it would be the world’s 24th biggest. ‘We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before,’ said UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres.”¹ And, sadly, it appears that many US politicians are responding to terrorist attacks around the world with fear of refugees themselves – instead of with a desire to adapt to the needs of the displaced and to change the realities of our broken world.

It is hard, initially, to talk about “don’t worry about what you’ll eat or drink or wear” when the world has never seen so many displaced people who don’t have access to food or water or clothing. It is ALSO hard to talk about it after having been at our Community Breakfast, and seen the beautiful faces of our guests, who don’t have adequate access to food or water or clothing either.

This is a hard text to preach while acknowledging the realities of the world, but I think it started out that way. The Jesus Seminar, who are pretty picky about what they think Jesus did and didn’t say, wrote this about the passage, “Among the more important things Jesus said are a series of pronouncements on anxieties and fretting. It is possible that we have before us the longest connected discourse that can be directly attributed to Jesus, with the exception of some of the longer narrative parables.”²They also aknowledge the assumed audience, “The string of sayings is addressed to those who are preoccupied with day-to-day existence rather than with political or apocalyptic crises.”³

That is, Jesus was talking to people who were struggling to have enough to eat and telling them not to worry about food. (But he wasn’t talking to refugees.) The aspects of this passage that make it difficult to preach are inherent to it, not a modern challenge of it. Furthermore, it is consistent with how Jesus spoke and what he taught. To go back to the Jesus seminar, and their reasoning for believing in the authenticity of this passage, “these formulations betray the stamp of Jesus’ speech and connect with other sayings stemming from him: congratulations to the hungry (Luke 6:21), petitions for the day’s bread (Matt 6:11), and the certainty that those who ask will receive (Luke 11:10), to cite but a few examples.”⁴ This SOUNDS LIKE Jesus.

Jesus tells hungry people not to worry about bread.

What the heck, Jesus?

I figure there are a few ways to understand this:

We could assume that Jesus doesn’t care about human life and thinks the whole purpose of everything is the spiritual realm and/or access to heaven.
We could assume that God does take care of God’s people, that Jesus’ teaching is true, and that if people are dying of starvation it indicates that God actually doesn’t like them. (Or that they sinned or some other justification for God’s lack of affection.)
We could explain it all away with a conversation about the lack of human capacity to understand Divine Will.

(Please note that I don’t find these options valid enough to bother refuting them. If you need help with that though, let me know, and we can go through them.)

Personally, I’m going to go with the fourth option.

4. Maybe Jesus means it. Maybe paying attention to what you don’t have and worrying over how you’ll get it is a waste of life. Maybe worrying is more of a problem than even hunger and maybe this applies to a lot of aspects of life. Maybe, even, focusing on what you do have and being grateful for it will make more of a difference than having more. (Not to say I’m not still at “What the heck Jesus?” but MAYBE…)

Studies say that we gain more from giving than we do from keeping. In one of my favorites, researchers gave college students $5 and either instructed them to spend it on themselves or on others. They nearly universally went to Starbucks, which would make an interesting study in itself. In any case, in spending the money on themselves, there was a burst of happiness that lasted for a few minutes. The burst of joy that came from spending a gift on others lasted several days.

In concentration camps the power of that phenomenon showed up more powerfully. The people in concentration camps were given starvation level meals. They didn’t have enough to live, and yet the people who choose to share their INSUFFICIENT food with others (usually ones who needed it more) ended up living LONGER. Food, it turns out, is not the most important thing. It may be that hope is. It may be that connection is. It may be that making a contribution to someone else’s well being is. It may be that caring enough to try is. I don’t know. I don’t know how it works, but it does.

And I’m pretty sure that Jesus’ ministry, which happened among people who didn’t have enough to eat anyway, was mostly about freeing people from fear so that they could share and work together and although it doesn’t really make sense if you look at it economically: when a whole group of people who don’t have enough combine their resources, there is MORE than enough. That seems to prove economics wrong.

But I think that may have been the truth that Jesus was getting at. There really is more to life than food and clothing. And, obviously, worrying doesn’t help ONE LITTLE BIT. And, clearly, God wishes for us all to have enough. Yet we know that not everyone does – not every close. And yet, there are also many people in the world who have enough food, water, and clothing and live entirely meaningless lives. I think building a just society and a just world is the responsibility of us as the followers of Jesus (and as people of faith more broadly.) I think we have failed in many ways, just as we have succeeded in many ways. I don’t think everyone is going to have enough to eat – this year. But maybe the year will come when we all will.

In the any case, life IS more than food, and the body IS more than clothing. And there are many, many things to be grateful for. This week I read a book by Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams entitled Uncommon Gratitude: Alleluia For All That Is. One of the chapters is on gratitude and singing alleluia for poverty, which is not something I’d spend a lot of time thinking about. Apparently, Socrates said that the richest person is the one who is content with the least and Epicurus said “Wealth consists in not having great possessions but in having few wants.”⁵ Joan Chittester says:

Poverty brings with it a spiritual vision the lack of which may in the end underlie the final corrosion of this wealthy society in which we live. Poverty stretches us to a vision of life that extends beyond the countinghouse, beyond the glutting of our lives with things. Poverty enables a person to see life in all its dimensions, to taste it in all its sweetness, and to recognize its vacuousness. It enables a person to choose between what is real and what is not about a life lived in midst of plastic and sparkles, of the lasting and the ephemeral, of the dehumanizing and the excessive. It reminds us of what is necessary and what is nothing but fluff, nothing but indulgence, nothing but consumption for the sake of show. Poverty keeps us real.

I do not applaud poverty or recommend it or justify it or minimize its struggles and its cruelty. I do not glorify the “happy poor.” But I do see that a bit less engorgement and a bit more sufficiency in a society long ago surfeited and satiated by the unnecessary could, would, make the whole world richer. ⁶

It isn’t all about feeding physical hunger, because physical satiation isn’t enough for us as humans. We are more. A lack of food is a problem – a justice issue – a thing to try to change. But food isn’t enough. Food, water, and clothes aren’t enough. Maybe Jesus was just telling the truth.

So even now, when the world sometimes feels like it is falling apart at the seams, when so many are hungry, when so little justice is to be found, we still hear Jesus saying, “don’t worry about it!”. What do we do?

We can notice what we have – whatever it is and be grateful. It will multiply the effect of whatever we have – both in our lives and in the lives around us. Gratitude is an antithesis of fear and worry, it is a sister of hospitality and care, it is a way of following Jesus’ commands:

Strive to respond with gratitude; pay attention to the goodness. It all matters. It changes you! Thanks be to God. Amen

___

1“Worldwide displacement hits all-time high as war and persecution increase”http://www.unhcr.org/558193896.html accessed on November 21, 2015.

2Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Autthentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), page 152.

3Funk et al, page 153.

4Funk et al, page 153.

5For the first, I got rid of male language, it is thus not a true quote.

6 Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams entitled Uncommon Gratitude: Alleluia For All That Is(Liturgical Press: Collegeveille, MN, 2010.) page 28.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 22, 2015

Sermons

“NOT Worthless”based on 1 Samuel 1:4-20 and 1 Samuel 2:1-10

November 15, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I spent a lot of time thinking about what to say about the terrorist attacks in Paris, before I realized that there were also terrorist attacks made by the same group in Baghdad and Beirut which the news cycle had not taken quite so seriously. Then I realized that there were also deadly natural disasters in Japan and Mexico on Friday. Then I worried that there were likely other tragedies that I didn’t know about. Then I thought of the 200,000 deaths in Syria that have motivated 4 million refugees to leave their homes. Then I remembered that there are lots of refugees NOT from Syria. On Facebook I kept seeing these words, written by a poet named Warsan Shire from Nairobi, Kenya:

“later that night

i held an atlas in my lap

ran my fingers across the whole world

and whispered

where does it hurt?

it answered

everywhere

everywhere.”1

I asked Drew Vickery, who was here this weekend for the CCCYM (Conference Council on Youth Ministries) event what he thought I should say about the attacks on Paris, and after a few hours he got back to be and said, “Nothing. I think you should focus on hope.” #fromthemouthsofteens. I don’t have words to take away the pain of the world, I don’t have words that will stop or transform extremist militants, and I surely don’t have words that will bring any of the lives tragically lost.

The hours I spent reading up on the terrorist group last night brought one imperative sentence to light, “For certain true believers—the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil battles—visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a deep psychological need.”2 This clarified my role for today: to offer a form of faith that is not about defining “good” or “evil” but rather about seeking wholeness for ourselves that can encourage others into wholeness. So, here we go…

Hannah is surprisingly resilient. It isn’t that painful things don’t seem to hurt her – they do – a lot! They don’t overcome her. We see it twice in her story. The first thing that we know about her is that she’s barren. Now, people in the ancient world did not think that barrenness COULD be a male problem, but even if they had, Hannah’s husband’s OTHER wife was distinctly not barren. A woman’s value came in her childbearing capacity, and to be barren was to be worthless. To be barren was to be ashamed. Hannah was barren.

And yet…her husband loved her. This is not particularly normal, nor expected for marital relationships at the time. In fact, it looks like it was true in only one of Elkanah’s marriages. He loved Hannah, and he gave her preferential treatment because of it. His words indicate that he doesn’t even care that she’s barren, which I think supports the case that he really loves her and not just her “value” in his life.

This was not sufficient for Hannah. She wanted to have a child. We are completely incapable of determining if this is about her maternal instincts or if it is about a desire not to be in shame, but let’s assume it is some of both. Her husband’s love did not take away her shame, although it may have helped her have resilience to it.

Every year when she had the chance, she went to the house of God and prayed there. We’re told that she asked God to open her womb, and even tried to strike a deal with God about it. This is imperative to her story, she eventually gave birth to the prophet who would anoint the first kings, and it better be clear how faithful his mother was in order to establish his faith.

This is the first place that I see Hannah’s unusual resilience. By most accounting, if a woman’s womb was barren, it was barren because of divine punishment. Yet, as one scholar put it,

“Hannah at once embodies both the patriarchal constructions of her worth and a deep assumption that God is concerned about her. … When Hannah seeks out God’s presence in this state of anguish, her prayer signals that she is aware of a divine concern for those who are questionable worth. She does not come to God with formal petition. She does not come with traditional sacrifice. She comes in loneliness, isolation, and despair. She lays bare all the emotion and pain.”3

She believes that God cares about her, despite her barrenness, despite her shame. She is resilient to her own shame. It doesn’t stop her from seeking the Holy One AND making requests of God and EVEN bargaining with God (which is a dangerous idea). She doesn’t let it stop her, and that indicates that she thinks God might listen to her.

That’s some GOOD theology for a mostly powerless, shamed woman 3000 years ago.

There is a repetition of her resiliency as well. Eli, the priest, is often presented as not knowing a whole lot about God. He isn’t a bad guy, he just hasn’t had much contact with the Divine. So, when Hannah was praying with all her heart, Eli confused this with a drunken stupor, and decided to come up and shame her about that.

She might have slinked away.

But not Hannah. She, a lowly, barren woman corrected him. She is such a delight! She wasn’t mean about it, she correct his assumption. She has NOT been drinking. She explains that she was PRAYING (we don’t know if she gets this out with or without sarcasm in her voice), and she makes a request of him, “Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time.” She not only asks favors of God, she asks one of the high priest.

And we should know something is going on by now, because Eli receives her correction and grants her request. Then God does too, and she gives birth to a child and names him Sam-u-el, “God has heard.”

I wish more people were like Hannah, refusing to be put in their place, denying the capacity of anyone else to define their value to the divine. I wish more people took the mantle of shame that other people tried to put on them and simply refused to wear it because they KNOW that they are worthwhile to God.

The Magnificat of Mary which celebrates God’s mighty acts is song that fell from Mary’s lips when she was pregnant with Jesus. It is based strongly on Hannah’s song that she sang to celebrate God’s mighty acts when Hannah was pregnant with Samuel. Hannah’s song, just like Mary’s, focuses on God’s power to care for the poor, the broken, and the vulnerable. It also emphasizes God’s capacity and willingness to bring down the high, the mighty, and the rich. They are songs of celebration of God’s work for the disenfranchised. They are RADICAL claims about God that anyone with a vested interest in the status quo should worry about.

Hannah is the Biblical predecessor to Mary. She’s a big deal, in large part because she knows that God cares about the people that the people don’t care about – including her.

Hannah is a model of shame resilience on the basis of God’s grace, a model we desperately need in modern day Christianity. This week I read Karen McClintock’s book Shame-Less Lives, Grace-Full Congregations, and she had a lot of wisdom to share about shame and grace. Early on in the book she points out that, “We are encouraged by the dominant culture to self-improve rather than self-affirm and to strive for more rather than to be content with what is and satisfied with ourselves. The pervasive and soul-defeating presence of cultural shame leads to perfectionism, addition, and self-hatred.”4 Later, she clarifies that, “Shame is not a course-correcting emotion. While guilt says, “I made a mistake,” shame says, “I am a mistake.‘”5

At two point she offers the words that make SO MUCH sense of the world, “Shame is often the first tool grabbed off the workbench by those entrusted to maintain the status quo,”6 and, “Because shame feels so terrible, we avoid it through the use of blame.”7 But it wasn’t until she said, “You can never be satisfied with yourself if you are constantly striving to be as wise, good, kind, or as generous as God,”8 that I knew she was preaching to me. She continued that point with a quote from Barbara Brown Taylor who said, “I thought that being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was, and it was not until this project failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.”9

Finally, since this is a quick run through of an excellent book, I want to offer one of her stories:

“I had the opportunity to mentor a clergyperson I’ll call Sam during his first few years as a parish pastor. … To help him integrate his adult self and his ashamed little boy, I had him spend a few weeks between our conversations thinking of himself as ordinary. I encouraged him to ask himself, ‘What would an ordinary person feel right now? What would an ordinary person want, do, say? The exercise provided him with a reflective distance between his idealized self and his ordinary self. Once he accepted his ordinariness, he could balance service with replenishment and encouragement with separation."10

I think Hannah knew how to do that. She was just an ordinary woman, so was Mary, and they knew God to care for ordinary people.

With the possible exception of Jesus, every character in the Bible is visibly and deeply flawed. This clarifies that God works with and through real people, not perfect ones. They called on their actions sometimes, but God doesn’t ask them to “shape up or ship out” when it comes to their flaws. They’re just accepted as they are.

Dear ones, God created you as you are and loves you are as you are. You need not be perfect, you need not be particularly GOOD, you need not be extraordinary. You are enough.

May that knowledge fill the world.

I suspect it will help. Thanks be to God and may God help us ALL. Amen

____

1 Accessed at http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/812310-later-that-night-i-held-an-atlas-in-my-lapon 11-14-15.

2 Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants” in The Atlantic March 2015 Issue. Accessed athttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/ on Nov. 14, 2015.

3 Marcia Mount Shoop “Theological Perspective of 1 Samuel 1:4-20” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009) page 292.

4 Karen A. McClintock, Shame-Less Lives, Grace-Full Congregations (Herndon, VA: The Alban Intitute, 2012) p. 4.

5 McClintock, 22.

6 McClintock, 52.

7 McClintock, 67.

8 McClintock, 95.

9 McClintock, 101, quoting Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), 218-219.

10 McClintock, 107-109.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

November 15, 2015

Sermons

“Visibly Invisible”based on Mark 10:42

November 11, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I’m going to mention two important dates in my life. The first is Tuesday, January 28, 1986. That is the date of my first class in a course I took during my first year in seminary called “Religion and the Social Process.” It is the ONLY course I ever took where I still remember the introductory comments of one of the three professors who were team teaching the course. Professor Joanna Gillespie looked at us and said, very emphatically, “In this course we are going to give you a lens which will enable you to see structures of oppression.”

That stuck with me. It kind of hit. I had never heard that kind of talk before. Structures of oppression. I had not really thought much about oppression up to that point in my life and I kind of had the vague impression that oppression was what bad people did to the helpless. Oppressors were villains. And of course, I wasn’t an oppressor. I wasn’t racist. I wasn’t sexist. Let me tell you, was I ever in for a wild ride that semester.

In reflecting on this I went back to my notebook from that course. Still have all my notebooks. I was reminded of the phrases and concepts that, as I look back, shaped my thinking and the way I look at the world. Simple things such as an operative definition of oppression:

The use of coercion, force or violence by any holder of power – individual or institution -to constrain others or deny their rights.
Or the idea that social relationships can not be seen except as they are given meaning by the culture.
That there are ways that structure mediates meaning
And that institutions create their own value system

Here is one that I found very powerful.

Social structure operates in three realms; discrimination, segregation and stereotype.

Discrimination – denial of the right to have.

Segregation – denial of the right to belong

Stereotype – denial of the right to be

And all of this organized around a system of in groups and out groups.

Now as the course unfolded through the lectures, readings, group and written assignments it became very clear, to me at least, that my own personal beliefs, attitudes and view of the world came out of this whole structural social-political realm. My belief system was

formed in the context of being a white, middle class, protestant heterosexual.

Fast forward thirteen years. Thursday, May 20, 1999.

That is the day I walked into the administration building of Bare Hill Correctional Facility in Malone, New York, to begin my new job as that prison’s Protestant Chaplain. As I walked into that august institution I very quickly discovered that I might as well have landed on

another planet. It was a different world. And yet it is a world that, in many respects, is a microcosm of the outside world. It is a world where everything is intensified and where the lines of demarcation a brutally sharp.

Talk about a structure that has in groups and out groups! I mean, you can see it as soon as you walk in. Officers in blue, inmates in green, civilians in civilian attire. It’s right there before you. The lines of demarcation were so sharp that as a civilian staff member I was not permitted to wear green or red. Only inmates. The security staff, the guards, in fact all staff, had to be able to visually discriminate population – that is, the incarcerated ones – from non-population. There are many things a prisoner is not permitted to have. And there are groups to which a prisoner is not permitted to belong, namely gangs. And it is the Department that determines what a gang is.

It is a world of organized discrimination, segregation and stereotyping.

Now to be sure, there are sound security reasons for this in most, but by no means all, cases. It wouldn’t be good for prisoners to have guns, knives, drugs, certain metal objects or escape paraphernalia, of course. And gang activities in prison are never good. But the point is all these restrictions are imposed from above.

However, all too often a line gets crossed. And it gets crossed because staff in that setting are cloaked with power. While at Bare Hill I had two clerks who were inmates. One day I called out for one to come into my office for a moment and in about one second he was in front of my desk with a ‘yes sir?’ Boom! There!

Now, in eleven years of teaching prior to that I NEVER had any student respond that way. In 23 years of parenting up to that point I NEVER had a response like that. In 25 years of marriage….well, never mind.

But I call out the clerk’s name and in one second he’s there.

Now this had absolutely nothing to do with me. It is no reflection on how my clerks viewed me. You see, there was something else controlling the situation. It was in the form of something called rule 106.10. Rule 106.10 is in a little booklet that is issued to anyone entering a New York State prison to serve a sentence. It is called Standards of Inmate Behavior. Rule 106.10 is the only rule printed in bold faced upper case letters. Rule 106.10 states AN INMATE SHALL OBEY ALL ORDERS OF DEPARTMENT PERSONNEL PROMPTLY AND WITHOUT ARGUMENT.

It doesn’t say ‘follow,’ doesn’t say ‘comply,’ it says OBEY. Absolutely no wiggle room is given in that rule. And WE, staff, were expected to follow a principle that has a name I’ve always hated, called ‘zero tolerance.’

That simple phrase is a manifestation of immense power. So much so that it gets invoked almost as a religious talisman. I would see signs posted that said such things as “Inmates can not enter without permission of staff.” and the numbers 106.10 would be printed underneath.

Power.

We see the manifestation of it. But there is an invisible component to it. It is visibly invisible.

“You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them.” So Jesus told the disciples in our Gospel reading. I’m only going to deal with that statement.

The phrases ‘lord it over’ and ‘exercise authority over’ are each rendered as a single word in the Greek. ‘Lord it over’ has as its root ‘kyrie’ meaning lord and the ‘exercise authority over’ has the word exousia, meaning authority. And the word ‘archein’ or ruler is in that sentence.

Ruler. Lord. Authority.

I’m going to use those three words as a jumping off point into the work of a remarkable scholar who has given me deeper insight into what I began learning thirty years ago in that wonderful course, my experience as a prison chaplain of fifteen years, and an awful lot of what has been going on in our country, world and yes, in our denomination.

Walter Wink, a New Testament scholar and teacher at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York and who died in 2012, produced a five volume work known collectively as “The Powers” in which he explores the language of power as used in New Testament writings; how the language is used, how the biblical writers conceived of power and the powers and the very real implications that has for us now. Like all good scholars he was not without his critics but I have found his work remarkable.

Those three words, ruler, lord, authority, are power words, part of a language of power that, according to Wink, pervades the New Testament. Other words are kings, rulers, principalities, power, name, wisdom, commission, throne, dominion, lordship. He also observes that the language of power is imprecise, liquid, changeable, and unsystematic. His words. But in spite of this there are clear patterns of usage that can be seen. He also finds that, because they are interchangeable, one word can be used to represent them all.

Now here is one of several kickers. And I’ll quote him directly: “These Powers are both heavenly and earthly, divine and human, spiritual and political, invisible and structured.” That is, invisibly visible.

Now here’s the other kicker; the Powers are both good AND evil.

The processes, definitions and categories that were identified in that course all those years ago could easily be dismissed as mere sociological and psychological reductionism. Explained, or explained away by our modern mindset and world view.

What I have always found remarkable and invigorating is that this work that Wink had done gives us a way to see all of this theologically and biblically. He shows us a way to have a theological and biblical understanding of these processes and categories.

Yes, on one level we can think of kings, rulers, principalities, power, name, wisdom, commission, throne, dominion, lordship, as political structures, social systems and institutions. But he found that there was always something that could not entirely be reduced to those

categories, something immaterial, invisible, spiritual and real.

He argues that the principalities and powers are the inner and outer aspects of any manifestation of power.

The inner aspects are the spirituality of institutions, the inner essence of outer organizations. The outer aspect is seen as political systems, appointed officials, the chair of an organization, laws, all the tangible manifestations which power takes.

Police and law enforcement. Prison guards and prison systems. Chaplains and Administrators in those systems. Governors and governments. Churches and pastors. Bishops. Annual Conferences. Boards of Ordained Ministry.

There is a visible pole, an outer form – be it church, nation, economy – and an invisible pole, the inner spirit, the driving force that animates, legitimates, regulates its physical manifestation in the world. Neither pole is the cause of the other. Both come into existence together and cease to exist together. And the way the inner and outer aspects of a power work, the relationship they have to each other can be complex and is largely unseen. Unless we look for it. I feel it is legitimate for us to think of the spirit of an institution as having a mind of its own that, collectively, may be fundamentally different from the minds of the individuals within that institution, and that the spiritual aspect can influence in unseen ways those who are a part of that institution.

When a particular Power becomes idolatrous, placing itself above God’s purposes for the good of the whole, then that Power becomes demonic.

The church’s task is to unmask this idolatry.

One example that comes to mind is the long, complex and convoluted legal history of corporate personhood. The Citizens United Supreme Court case was but the latest occurrence in a history that goes back centuries. The whole question of what rights are to be afforded a corporate entity has a long, long history. Of course corporations have long had the right to enter into contractual agreements and individuals have long had the right to file suit against corporations, both of which are aspects of personhood. The longstanding question, though, seems to have been just what rights are to be afforded a corporation. ALL the rights of an individual or just some of the rights? To my mind the simple fact that this question has been seriously considered for so many years is an indication that there is an immense and largely unseen power at work here.

When a corporate entity gets to the point that IT’s existence and life is it’s only reason for being and is to be considered of more importance than actual individuals and if it’s life is to be fostered at the expense of individuals – THEN THAT POWER HAS BECOME DEMONIC.

And this is true whether that inner spiritual dimension is that of a corporation, or a law enforcement agency, prison system…

even ideas and ideologies…

And yes, even a religion and it’s concomitant organizations, such denominations.

As I’ve already stated, the church’s task is to unmask this idolatry. Bring it into the light of day. Make it visible. Allow people to see it for what it is.

A warning. You know how you can tell if a person or group is successfully doing this? The more successful anyone is in unmasking a power and shining a light on it, the more angrily and even violently that power will respond.

We’ve seen it in the Occupy Wall Street movement in which the violent response was, at least to me, horrifying. We’ve seen it in Ferguson when the racist basis of law enforcement was called into question.

And yes, we see it in our own denomination – now I’m goin’ from preachin’ to meddlin’ here – we’ve seen it in our own denomination in the recent spate of church trials over the issue of marriage equality. Violence doesn’t have to be physical.

So, that’s it. Our task as part of the Body of Christ is to unmask that which is hidden. To see the invisible in that which is visible. To shine a light and be a light. And to do so without fear. And to do it with love not anger. And yes, to bear the response when it comes.

For are we not the Body of Christ, and do we not have a task to do?

Amen.

Appendix and notes

The references to the course Religion and the Social Process, a course that was taught during the spring semester of my first year at Drew Theological School in Madison, New Jersey, are based on my own recollections and the notes I took during that course.

Our required texts were

The Predicament of the Prosperous, Bruce C. Birch and Larry L. Rasmussen

Beyond Liberation, Carl Ellis

Sexual Violence, Marie Fortune

Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?, Letha Scanzoni and Virginia R. Mollenkott

Hunger for Justice, Jack A. Nelson

Habits of the Heart, Robert N. Bellah, et al.

My very brief discussion of the work of Walter Wink is taken from his three volume work collectively entitled “The Powers.”

Naming the Powers: the Language of Power in the New Testament Fortress Press, 1984

Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence Fortress Press, 1986

Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination Fortress Press, 1992

My comments are primarily from the first volume. For those who are interested, but are hesitant about tackling a fairly monumental three volume work I recommend his 1998 book The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium, originally published by Augsburg and now available in paperback. It is a digest of the third volume with elements of the previous two and at 200 pages considerably shorter than the 784 page total of the three volume work. He also omits almost all the secondary literature references from the larger work.

One important element in Wink’s work, which I did not address, is his coining the term ‘the myth of redemptive violence.’ It is a powerful concept very pertinent to our own time.

This sermon was primarily descriptive as opposed to prescriptive. In addressing any kind of prescriptive approach to the issue we need to be aware of some issues regarding the nature of the Powers, for the Powers are ignorant of God’s plan. I conclude these notes with a fairly extensive quote from Naming the Powers. All emphases are mine.

“The Powers did not know”: seen from the perspective provided by our hypothesis,evangelism and social action are the inner and outer approaches to the same phenomenon of power. I have already described the subversive character of the early church’s refusal to worship the imperial genius and its recourse instead to prayer. Many modern Christians have unfortunately understood injustice in simply materialistic terms and have not recognized the need to “convert” people from the spirituality that binds them to a particular material expression of power. It is not enough merely to change social structures. People are not simply determined by the material forces that impinge on them. They are also the victims of the very spirituality that the material means of production and socialization have fostered, even as these material means are themselves the spin-off of a particular spirituality. In a new structure people will continue to behave on the basis of the old spirituality, as they have to varying degrees in every communist regime, unless not only the structure but also their own psyches are reorganized.

Evangelism is always (Wink’s emphasis) a form of social action. It is an indispensable component of any new “world” Unfortunately, Christian evangelism has all too often been wedded to a politics of the status quo and merely serves to relieve distress by displacing hope to an afterlife and ignoring the causes of oppression. The repugnance with which most liberal Christians regard evangelism betrays their own failure to discern that all liberation involves conversion. Whenever evangelism is carried out in full awareness of the Powers, whether in confronting those in power or liberating those crushed by it, proclaiming the sovereignty of Christ is by that very act a critique of injustice and idolatry. And as the churches of South Korea and Brazil and Chile and around the world have learned, such evangelism will inevitably spark persecution. In sum structural change is not enough; the heart and soul must also be freed, forgiven, energized, given focus, reunited with their Source.

Walter Wink

Naming the Powers

Pages 116-117

___

–

Rev. James Sprenger

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

October 18, 2015

Sermons

“Generous Gifts of Poor Women” based on Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17…

November 8, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Usually, the educated elite of a society receive more praise an attention than society’s impoverished widows, but usually doesn’t apply to the Bible. The scribes were religious scholars, but they were also more. By Jesus’ day, the Temple high priest was appointed by Rome and the priests and scribes were benefiting from the Empire’s system of taking the wealth of the poor and giving it to the already wealthy. Many of them, I suspect, meant well. They thought they were keeping the peace. They were doing the best they could with what they had. But they were participating in a system of oppression.

Rodger Nishioka is a contributor to Feasting on the Word, and a professor of Christian Education at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA. He writes regarding the gospel:

Together, these two sections read as a lament for and an indictment upon any religious system that results in a poor widow giving all she has so the system’s leaders may continue to live lives of wealth and comfort. The attack is not on Jewish religious practice. The attack is on any religious practice that masks egotism and greed. The scribes are like leeches on the faithful, benefiting from a religious system that allows poor widows to sacrifice what little they have.¹

The little narrative is ripe for interpretation, despite its brevity. As a child I always imagined this widow to be an old woman, a connotation associated with widowhood that often makes life very hard for young women who are widows. But many artists have portrayed this scene, and more often then not they show her as young, sometimes even holding a baby. Then, instead of an older woman sacrificing her own food, that suggests a young mother sacrificing her family’s food.

We don’t know her age, we do know that the “collection plates” of the temple were metal. Since all money was coins, and the bigger coins were worth more, this particular set up insured that people could HEAR how large the donations were. This meant that the big givers got big praise, and the small givers – got shamed.

Jesus upset that system. He didn’t sit there praising the big givers for their big gifts. He noticed the woman giving small gift, a shameful gift, a gift so small it would be tempting not to show up and give it, and he noticed. He noticed that her gift was big IN COMPARISON to what she had, and that the other gifts had been small IN COMPARISION. He took the person most likely to be ignored, disregarded, unimportant, and shamed (because, after all, the MAN of the family should have been giving the gift), and he praised HER. He saw.

Poverty can make people feel invisible. Being a woman in a patriarchy can feel invisible. Being a widow without support can easily feel invisible. But Jesus saw her in the midst of all that was going on in the temple. And he used her as an example of abundant giving.

The Torah sets up a system that is meant to care for widows, orphans and foreigners AND for the Levites who cared for the religious well being of the community. The Levites didn’t get a portion of the land allotted to them. Instead, one of the purposes of tithes was to feed them. They took care of the cultic rituals, and the rest of the tribes took care of them. They didn’t get all of the tithes though, because some of them went back to people’s hometowns to throw feasts for EVERYONE, which was one of the ways of feeding widows, orphans, and foreigners. Widows, orphans, and foreigners were cared for in other ways as well: there were laws about leaving the edges of fields and the second pickings for those who had no land, there was an expectation of levirate marriage which tried to keep family lines alive and widows cared for, and there were laws against the sale of family property and against interest which meant that poverty could exist but didn’t become an inherently downward spiral.

The Torah set up a system to care for the vulnerable AND to allow a set aside group of people to be able to devote themselves to religious practice by being given gifts by the rest. The issue in this passage is that those devoted to religious practice are not simply surviving, they’re thriving, and they’re doing it by taking away the livelihoods of the vulnerable. And Jesus was NOT happy.

The widow may have been paying her expected tithe to the Temple, or she may have been giving of her own expectations of herself. We aren’t told that, but we are told that she has given all that she has to the Temple. What sort of religious organization takes the last money of a poor widow?

Is this story told to praise the widow or to condemn the Temple? The widow’s generous gift is an indictment of the Temple system, and an even bigger one in the context of the scribe’s greed and egotism. Perhaps it is OK to take a poor widow’s last coins, because there is a human need to GIVE, and because contributing to something larger than ourselves matters, and because a person has a right to give whether they have a lot or a little. But it isn’t OK to take a poor widow’s last coins if the system in place isn’t going to take care of the widow. The system is making the clergy wealthy at the expense of the already poor. Or, to make it more simple, the Temple was functioning to take the meager wealth of the poor and redistribute it to the rich. No wonder Jesus was angry.

The widow gives an extraordinary gift that the Temple is not worthy to receive. A friend of mine asked a great question this week: what would it take to make the Temple worthy of such a gift, and what would it take to make our churches worthy of such gifts? That is worth pondering.

The poor widow, however, is not the only generous widow in our scriptures today. We also have Ruth and Naomi. This is a story worth knowing, here is a brief summary of the first two chapters:

Naomi and her husband and two sons left the holy land of Israel to live in in the hated neighboring country of Moab because of a famine. The famine lasted a long time, and both sons grew up and married Moabite women. Then both sons and Naomi’s husband died. She decided it was time to go back to Israel, to live as poor widow on other people’s generosity. As was expected at the time, her daughters in law went with her, but before they had gone far she turned to them and freed them from their bond to her. Custom said they were to stay with the family they married into. She urged them back to their own mothers to start their lives anew. One went, the other was Ruth, who pledged her life in a vow of commitment to Naomi’s. When they get back to Naomi’s village Ruth goes to glean the leftovers of the harvest and the owner of the fields instructs her to be treated with kindness.

That brings us up to the part of the story we read today, which is HIGHLY suggestive in a sexual way. As one scholar put it, “The word for ‘lie down’ in Hebrew often implies sexual intercourse. Moreover, feet are used as euphemism for genitalia in the Bible. Though the word translated as ‘feet’ in this passage is not the usual term, Naomi’s instruction to ‘uncover’ the lower extremities of Boaz is provocative. That this encounter happens at night makes the meeting even more suggestive.”² I generally enjoy it when I’m in on the joke, and I know it when the Bible is making sexual innuendos.

This, however, is not one of those times. The story is thought to end well. Ruth and Naomi are cared for by Boaz, Naomi’s line continues, and eventually King David well be born. Theologically it is magnificent, since the Israelites and Moabites were historic enemies and the Israelites were often vehemently anti-marriage with foreigners. The mere existence of this story is pretty remarkable. You’d think they wouldn’t want to say that their most beloved (no, I don’t know why) king was the great-grandson of Moabite woman, but they DO. And it seems to suggest that God’s ways are bigger than human ways, and God’s inclusion extends to even one’s enemies.

AND YET, I’m a really enormously big fan of the concept of sexual consent, and I’m not sure that Ruth had any of that in this story. I grant that she is said to have gone willingly to Boaz, but her economic circumstances called for desperate measures and she was willing to take them in order to ensure that both she and Naomi would survive. Is it consent when you and your loved one(s) would die if you didn’t? Was Naomi appropriate and wise in finding a way forward, or did she use Ruth’s young and sensually pleasing body for their gain? Who actually had power in this situation and why?

In some ways, and I don’t like of the the ways, holding the Bible up to the standard of sexual consent is unreasonable. Women didn’t often have the power to say “no,” and if you can’t say “no,” then your “yes” doesn’t count. But when a whole society fails to give women the right to say “no” then it becomes odd to call out the lack of consent in any particular story. But I’m doing it anyway, because I think it is wrong every single time.

At best, in this story, Ruth and Naomi choose to use Ruth’s sexual capacity to gain the means of survival. It is a gift much like the widow’s mite – one that is generous in the extreme and an indictment when it is necessary that it be given. Ruth is not alone, by any means, in the history of women, in becoming so poor that they only thing they have left to use towards survival is their own bodies. This is a story with nearly universal undertones, at least in market economies. It is proof yet again that the Bible is not naive about humanity, including the struggles of very poor women. At the same time, every retelling of this story should be a condemnation the society in which it happens.

The story provides evidence that Boaz was a very honorable man, likely even a good man. I like to think that despite all that happened out of necessity that Ruth may even have been quite happy with him, but that’s likely just wishful thinking. Ruth gave what she had, both for herself and for the woman dependent on her and unable to provide anything for herself.

Some generosity is too much.

One poor widow gave her last coins to the Temple.

Another poor widow gave her sexual capacity for the sake of male protection and therefore survival.

May these stop being common stories.

May we build a religious system that is worthy of the widow’s mite.

May we build a world where sex is ONLY mutual, consensual, and NEVER necessary for survival.

May we hear the stories of women and men who have given such gifts, and honor them.

And when we receive gifts of excessive generosity (of any size or type) may our receiving honor the givers. May God help us. Amen

____

1 Rodger Y Nishioka “Pastoral Perspective on Mark 12:38-44” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009), page 286.

2 Frank M. Yamada “Exegetical Perspective on Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009), page 269.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 8, 2015

Sermons

“Jesus Wept” based on Revelation 21:1-6a and John 11:32-44

November 1, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

It has been a while since I’ve stood in the pulpit to preach. Over the past three weeks, this space has been filled by profound and interesting men, whose willingness to share of themselves gave me space to focus myself elsewhere. I went on vacation. I soaked up the goodness of people I love, who make me whole, and it was grand.

Over the course of my adulthood I’ve used my vacation time to do two things: to see people I love, and to ski. The skiing has always happened with people I love, which makes winter vacation trips all the sweeter. I’m told that there are people who go vacations to do other things – like sit on a beach, or meet a new city, or hike an amazing part of the world that they’ve never hiked before. Those options have always seemed wonderful to me, but they have never become a priority because I have too many people I love and want to see, and they are always a bigger draw than anything else could be. There are a lot of people I love that I wish I had more time with – and they’re all over!

This week I came across an article that substantiated my vacationing choices. It is entitled, “How Our Housing Choices Make Adult Friendships More Difficult”¹ and it was a response piece to an article in the Atlantic entitled, “How Friendships Change in Adulthood.”² Both pieces were both interesting, discussing the importance of friendship to happiness and the challenges of making and maintaining friendships during adulthood. The Atlantic article discussed the challenges related to work and family – the demands of life that take away the time for friendship.

The housing article added some important perspective on American society, and what we think is normal. It points out that making close friends comes down to “ proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other.”³ Or to put it more succinctly, “The key ingredient for the formation of friendships is repeated spontaneous contact.”⁴ For many of us, the way we life doesn’t make a lot of space for that. Cars don’t help. Walkable neighborhoods do help, but not everyone lives in them. Houses don’t necessarily help! People are more likely to run into each other in apartments or in intentional co-housing. (The articles points out that this explains why so many people make such important friendships in college.) That is, we don’t just run into all that many people!

Interestingly, whenever I am walking around in Schenectady, I do run into people I know. Because of poverty levels in Schenectady, many people are not isolated by cars (they don’t have them) or housing (it is intermingled). It strikes me as strange that as people move up the socio-economic ladder in our society, they end up being more isolated from others. This seems to support the article’s argument that what we think of as normal in the USA isn’t normal and likely isn’t good! Why can’t we build a society where people interact AND have food security? The truth is we can, but we have to dream it.

The article, which was really advocating for thinking about housing life differently, much like my college friends and I always dreamed, with extended community in co-housing, running into each other in shared spaces, had one passing line that I couldn’t let go of. It was arguing about how isolated people are and said, “Say you’re a family with children and you don’t regularly attend church (as is increasingly common). There are basically two ways to have regular, spontaneous encounters with people. Both are rare in America.” (The two ways are “walkshed” neighborhoods and intentional co-housing.)

But did you hear it? If you don’t regularly attend church, then you don’t have the opportunity to meet people, run into them spontaneously, get to to know them slowly over time, and become friends. But, if you do attend church, that’s one of the benefits. I sort of love it when the value of church IS seen in society, and that is in fact one of the greatest values.

Today is All Saints Day. While we use it as a ritual of remembrance for all of our loved ones, and that is beautiful and important, there is a nuance to it that we often ignore. All Saints started as a way to remember the martyrs of church, and is formally a way to remember all Christians both past and present. Most specifically, today is the day to remember the members of our church family who have passed away in the past year and add them to the collective cloud of witnesses who came before us. The great cloud of witnesses dreamed and shaped our community and entrusted it to us, hoping that we will one day pass it on again. In a celebration of life, we thank God for the life of an individual person. On All Saints day we thank God for all the saints, and the collective gifts they’ve given us.

And THAT is why I’m waxing poetic about friendship today. We are formed by each other, in community, and sometimes the lines of connection and intersection are invisible to us. In my time here I’ve heard stories of people I’ve never met, and yet their lives have shaped mine. Friendships are most important to our happiness and our wholeness, they shape our lives. Most church relationships are friendships.

The honored dead whose names we will read today are people who shaped our lives, whether they were part of this church or not. And by shaping us, they’ve guided us not only into who we are but also in how we understand God and Love. In the Gospel lesson today, Jesus weeps. Trivia fans be aware, in the KJV, this was the shortest verse in the Bible. Theologians have argued since this story stated getting told about why he wept, but I think most of them have been wrong. They have messed up theories about him weeping is just a ploy, or annoyance at the crowd.

I think Jesus wept because his friend was dead.

This is not a particularly difficult interpretation for me to come to. Jesus cared about Lazarus. He was sad that he was dead, and he was also sad that Mary and Martha were hurting, and being present to his own grief and theirs led to tears. Over the centuries this interpretation has been avoided like the plague because it implies that Jesus may not have been: all-knowing, stoic, or immune to emotion. I’m cool with all those issues. I’d rather understand Jesus to be a man who cried when terribly sad things happened.

In our Revelation passage, the acts of creation which start the Bible and continue thematically through it, come to their narrative conclusion. God acts in creation again, this time a creation that exists without chaos, without death, without grief, and WITH the fullness of the Divine presence in all places and at all times. It is a vision of comfort and consolation that has held up to the passing of the ages. As one scholar put it, “It is a vision of the church at the end of time, and, because it partakes of the eternal, it is present and available to us now.”⁵

That is, in our relationships of love – in our families, in our friendships, in our church family- we get a glimpse of what it is to have the fullness of God among us. The vision of Revelation is one where we’d not only be intimately connected to God, but we also wouldn’t lose each other anymore.

Somehow, and we all understand the how differently, God keeps us connected to each other, even beyond the seemingly firm lines of death. God is the connector, we are connected, and connection is what makes life so wonderful. So thanks be to God – for those we love and have lost, for those we love and have not lost, and for God’s own self. Thanks be to God for friendships – past, present and future. May we continue to learn to give them energy so they can give us life. Amen

____

1 http://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friendship
2 http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/how-friendships-change-over-time-in-adulthood/411466/
3 David Roberts “How Housing Choices Make Adult Friendships More Difficult” published in Vox Policy and Politics accessed athttp://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/how-friendships-change-over-time-in-adulthood/411466/ on Oct. 31, 2015.
4 Ibid.
5 Ginger Grab, “Homiletical Perspective of Revelation 22:1-6a” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009) page 233.
–

Rev. Sara E. BaronFirst United Methodist Church of Schenectady603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 1, 2015 – All Saints

Events and Celebrations

“First, Last, and In-Between” based on Mark 10:17-31

October 13, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

“First,
Last, and In-Between”

Mark
10:17-31

First
United Methodist Church, Schenectady, NY

Chett
Pritchett, Executive Director, Methodist Federation for Social Action

Good
morning,

I
bring greetings today from the board of directors of the Methodist
Federation for Social Action and from our staff and interns in our
Washington, DC office. I’m so thankful for the witness of this
congregation, for those who have been part of the Troy, and now Upper
New York Chapter, and for giving us your former pastor to lead our
coalitional work toward General Conference.

I
also bring greetings from my home congregation, Dumbarton United
Methodist Church in Washington, DC. For 27 years, Dumbarton has been
a reconciling congregation, welcoming persons of all sexual
orientations and gender identities into the life and leadership of
the church.

I
am blessed to be in this sanctuary today. In a lot of way, I think of
First Church and Dumbarton as kindred spirits. Over the past three
years as the executive director of the Methodist Federation for
Social Action, I have come to know many such congregations. Although
it may seem like it, I am here to say, “You are not alone!”

“You
are not alone” seems to be a good place to start from today’s
Gospel lesson. As found in the Gospel attributed to Mark, this
passage of Scripture is part of a larger story. Jesus and Peter and
James and John had left the glory of the transfiguration on the top
of the mountain and found their way, with the other disciples, in the
valley, with their faces turned toward Jerusalem.

Here
is where Jesus began his teaching ministry. Those who had heard of
Jesus’ ability to perform miracles gathered around him and asked
him questions. Some asked him trick questions and Jesus replied with
trick answers…I mean parables. And so today, we find Jesus asked
by a rich young man, “What Must I Do To Inherit Eternal Life?”

Jesus
replied, telling the man, “you know the commandments,” and then,
as a good rabbi would do, added instruction: “you lack one thing:
go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will
have treasure in heaven, then come and follow me.”

Wow.

Jesus
must not have had his coffee that morning.

“It
is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for
someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

This
Jesus guy pulls no punches.

Then
the disciples got scared: “Then who can be saved?” they asked.

The
disciples and the rich man were asking the same question. They were
concerned with what they needed to do – how must we behave, what
can we do. Peter even says it with a little snippiness: “Look, we
have left everything and followed you.”

We’re
the good guys. We’re the ones who left our families and belongings.
We’re the ones facing ridicule for your sake. Surely, we’re going
to be blessed! We have to be blessed! We’re going to be blessed,
right?

Jesus
assured them that now and it the age to come their goodness would be
noted. But then he threw in a zinger:

“The
first will be last…and the last will be first.”

I
mean, come on – is it any wonder Judas betrayed him and Peter
denied him?

Before
coming to the Methodist Federation for Social Action, I spent more
than 7 years as a manager for Cokesbury, the United Methodist
bookstore. While there, I got to meet seminarians and clergy and lay
people who were hungry to share their faith with others. One of the
most curious books I came across during those years was a children’s
book with plastic relief faces on the cover. The title was “Jesus
and the 12 Dudes Who Did.” I can’t remember what the book
actually said, but I remember the cover and the title with great
clarity. “Jesus and the 12 Dudes Who Did.” Placed alongside
today’s Gospel reading, I think the author got the title exactly
right. The Disciples saw themselves as do-ers, part of the in-crowd,
doing stuff, doing things, because they were going to be front and
center on the right side of history.

But
when Jesus says “the first will be last…and the last will be
first” – he’s making a bold theological statement.

When
Jesus says “the first will be last…and the last will be first”
he’s saying that good works are fine, but they aren’t the be-all
and end-all of God’s message.

When
Jesus says “the first will be last and the last will be first,”
he’s stating that it’s not about the ACT of selling your
possessions and leaving all you have that will help you gain eternal
life. It’s about the transformation, the re-orientation, the
newness that comes when your life is turned toward God more fully.
It’s about loving God with all your heart and mind and soul.

When
Jesus says “the first will be last and the last will be first,”
he’s making the most basic theological statement: “God’s grace
is available to all.”

This
is an interesting conundrum for those of us progressive,
socially-aware, engaged United Methodists.

The
Protestant work ethic did a number on most of us. We work hard to
make the world a better place and provide for those who go without
and challenge the powers that be. We put in hundreds of volunteer
hours, we give money to organizations working to change the world
(thank you). And if Jesus came back, he’d say, that’s all well
and good – BUT…

*You
are already good enough.

That’s
all well and good – BUT…

*God
already loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

And
here’s the scandalous part of Jesus’ parable. God loves everyone
else, too.

*Your
annoying colleague at work. God loves them.

*Your
oblivious, unaware neighbor who always parks too close to your
driveway. God loves them.

*Your
racist, homophobic cousin. God loves them.

And
there’s nothing you can do about it, except welcome them as they
are. And show a little love.

Because
the reality, friends, is that we are, as Martin Luther once wrote,
simul Justus
et Peccator.

Always,
at all times, we are somewhere in-between saints and sinners– in
the same body, at the same time. We never fully embody godliness,
and sometimes – OK, a lot of times – we are as oblivious as those
twelve disciples.

You
see, the human condition, is not, as pure Calvinists would say, one
of total depravity.

Instead
it is one of always being in-between.

Scripture
reminds us of this again and again.

We’re
in-between birth and death.

We’re
in-between fear and safety.

We’re
in-between chaos and community.

We’re
in-between joy and sorrow.

We’re
in-between what has been and what could be.

For
many of us, we know that it means to live in-between.

Some
of us live in-between as exiles – either forced upon or chosen.

Some
of us live in-between because the culture that formed us is different
from the culture in which we reside.

Some
of us live in-between because it’s how we must balance our
overlapping and multiple identities.

I
grew up along the Ohio River in a town that was in-between
Pittsburgh, PA and Columbus,OH and Charleston, WV. In Appalachia, we
always seemed to be in-between one place or another.

In-between
a mountain and valley.

In-between
jobs.

In-between
a pay day.

In-between
illness, or a mining accident, or a chemical spill.

When
I came out of the closet as a gay man in 1995, no one would have
expected a United Methodist-related college in the middle of small
town West Virginia to be a place of acceptance and welcome. For many
of my friends who grew up as good Methodists, my coming out forced
them to think about sexual orientation in a new way. And for my
friends who are LGBTQ, my faith has forced them to think about
religion in a new way. Being queer and Christian is an in-between
place I have learned to inhabit – and could only do so, not by any
acts of good works, but by God’s grace. Grace, which on this
National Coming Out Day, allows me to say boldly to those struggling
to reconcile their faith with their sexual orientation or gender
identity, “You are not alone!”

And
that’s what I do every day at the Methodist Federation for Social
Action. But not just for the LGBTQ communities, but for United
Methodists across our connection who are seeking ways to live into
their baptismal vows “to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in
whatever forms they present themselves.”

One
way we do this is through our involvement with the Love Your Neighbor
Coalition, the work of 12 United Methodist caucuses spanning
racial/ethnic, progressive, and LGBTQ caucuses within The United
Methodist Church. I’ll be talking a little bit more about our work
after this service, but I want to encourage everyone here to go to
www.lyncoalition.org –
I’ll give you time to write it down and repeat slowly. Check out
our vision for The United Methodist Church and add your name as a
supporter.

Because
this work isn’t done for extra jewels in our crown, it’s not done
to show Jesus how much we love him. We do this work because we know
the importance of lifting up the voices of those who find themselves
in-between: in-between the powers that be and loving our neighbors;
in-between justice and injustice; in-between hope (and fear) for the
future.

The
work of the Church must be to continue sharing the message of God’s
love and grace for all people.

It’s
that simple. And yet, you and I know, it’s that difficult, too. I
call it “Living in the Land of Maybe.”

Because,
just like the rich young man, and just like the disciples, and just
like the faithful saints and sinners who have composed the Church for
almost two thousand years. Sometimes we get it wrong. And sometimes,
just sometimes, we get it right and we get a glimpse of the world as
it is and can be. A world that is chaotic, and messy, and downright
beautiful, and loved by God, not because of what you or I have done,
but because we have decided to participate in God’s world.

Brazillian
feminist theologian, Ivona Gebara, imagines God’s hope for the
world in this way:

“Men
and women will dwell in their houses; men and women will eat the same
bread, drink the same wine, and dance together in the brightly lit
square, celebrating the bonds uniting all humanity.”¹

This
is no works righteousness folks, but this is to say that we can
partake in the presence of grace and love in the world.

And
every now and then, we get to join in the dance where we can proclaim
together “you are not alone,” to a world in-between injustice and
righteousness, in-between fear and hope, in-between saints and
sinners.

Won’t
you join me in the dance?

1
Gebara, Ivone. “Women Doing Theology in Latin America,” in
Feminist Theology from the Third World, Ursula King, editor,
Orbis Books: Maryknoll, NY, 1994, 59.

Sermons

“Let the Children In” based on Psalm 8 and Mark…

October 4, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Artistically, in Europe, babies and small children were painted as small grown ups for many centuries. Their faces don’t look like baby faces or children’s faces. The proportions of their bodies don’t like right either. It was apparently quite a revolution when someone ACTUALLY looked at a child and painted the child to look like they do. While some of this was about artistic development, a lot of it was about how children were seen. The most relevant thing about kids was that they might grow up to be adults, so that’s how people saw them.

The artistic transition happened around 1500 (give or take.) The concept of childhood itself is newer than that historically. The concept of children as valuable is even newer. Child labor laws weren’t consistent in this country until the Great Depression.

Not all children today are treated as if they are precious, but children as a whole are seen as having great value. Some of this is related to the availability of effective birth control. As much as I believe that parents of very large families are able to love all their children because they just DO, human beings are finite. The amount of attention and expressions of affection that can be given to a small number of children is more per child than the amount that can be shared among many. As people were able to control the number of children they had, many people decided to use their resources to give their children the best chance the could at life – and had less children so they had more to give each child.

As children have become less prevalent, they have become more precious. But that was NOT the case in Jesus’ time. Life expectancy was low, very low among the 97% of people who comprised the lower class. Survival to age 10 was about 50%, which led to a lack of investment in a person until it was proven they’d live for a while.¹ As an agricultural society, children were of use as workers in the field, and as a society that also valued bodily pleasure between spouses, there were plenty of reasons to have children. There were many children in Jesus’ day, but they were not understood to be fully human. They were JUST children. As it is put in the Jewish Annotated New Testament, in the time of Jesus, “The child did not represent innocence but a secondary status, a lesser human.”²

The pope stopped his caravan to receive a child during his visit to the US, in a nearly perfect living example of Jesus’ words in this passage. It was different primarily in how children are seen. Pope Francis’ actions were consistent with his universal value on human life, and society’s understanding of children as people. Jesus’ words were an expansion of his value on human life. As the Jesus Seminar said in their conversation about this text, some think it is authentic because of“Jesus’ dramatic reversal of the child’s traditional status in ancient societies as a silent non-participant.”³ This fits with his “sympathy for those who were marginal to society or outcasts.”⁴

People knew Jesus was important, important enough to keep him from being bothered with “pesky” kids. Yet Jesus says, “let the children come to me.” And then he keeps going. He tells them that the kindom of God belongs to the children. Then he says something rather obscure, and it appears to be just as obscure in Greek as it is English: “Whoever does not welcome the kindom of God as a little child will never enter it.” So, what does that mean? Does it mean that you have to welcome the kindom of God as a child would welcome the kindom of God? Or does it mean that you have to welcome the kindom of God the way you would welcome a child?

We don’t know.

I always thought it was the first (the question frankly didn’t occur to me until a colleague pointed it out this week), but I never could quite figure out how a child would receive the kin-dom. Most commentators suggest that a child would welcome the kin-dom without reserve or judgment, but I’m pretty sure they’ve just never met kids. Others say that this reflects the lack of hierarchy among kids, I still think that perspective comes from an innocence about children. More likely, from having known a few children, I’m going to guess that they’d receive the kin-dom with a boatload of curiosity, exploration, and questions. Which, as far as I can tell, is a great way to do it.

On the other hand, if the goal is to welcome the kin-dom like one welcomes a child, it implies that we’re supposed to welcome children. It even implies that this is a moral imperative for following Jesus and seeking God. (Not at all subtle hint at the US government as well as all countries in the world who are limiting the number of Syrian refugees they’ll receive.) It implies that the people seen as irrelevant and replaceable in Jesus’ time are still of value to him, to God, and therefore to us.

This extends to imply that there is a moral imperative to welcoming all people whose humanity is in question. To take it a step further, this implies that we should extend protection and life-saving measures to all of God’s people. That is, we might want to take steps to prevent the ~30,000 gun related deaths in our country every year, about 60% of of which are suicide. This is a significant issue because suicides are often decisions made impulsively, and the presence of a gun makes it easier and A LOT more effective. (Threat of death from suicide goes up by 4.8 times when a gun is in a home.⁵)

We have a lot of guns in the United States, although the percentage of gun owners has been in decline the number of guns owned per gun owner has been on the rise. According to the Washington Post, gun sales in the United States are $11.7 billion, with $993 million in profits.⁶ I think it is interesting to note that gun companies make about as much money on ammunition over as they do on guns. More significantly than having a lot of guns, we have a lot of gun related deaths. These are correlated of course, but not perfectly, and it is worth looking at the impact of gun violence directly. According to the New York Times, “Since 1970, more Americans have died from guns than died in all U.S. wars going back to the American Revolution.”⁷ To be direct about children, “In America, more preschoolers are shot dead each year (82 in 2013) than police officers are in the line of duty (27 in 2013).”⁸ The majority of these are accidental, related to having firearms within the reach of children.

Yet if we look at our society, there is not political will to change our access to guns. In fact, over the past decade, the most significant increases in gun sales have happened around the election of President Obama and each mass shooting. The mass shootings seem to bifurcate us as a country, with some people thinking more guns would help and others thinking the opposite. Furthermore, many people believe they are safer with a gun than without one. (If you have a gun in your house, you are 2.7 times more likely to be murdered than if you don’t have one, after controlling for potentially confounding variables.⁹) Given all of these factors, it seems like it is time, as a country, to try a third way. Making guns safer is certainly better than just letting them run rampant, and I am grateful for those engaging the conversation by trying to find a way forward.

Since it doesn’t seem possible to decrease gun access in the United States, as determined by how votes in Congress have been going, other choices are necessary. An op-ed piece in the New York Times made some great suggestions, ones that could actually happen in our politically divisive political system:

Public health experts cite many ways we could live more safely with guns, and many of them have broad popular support.

A poll this year found that majorities even of gun-owners favor universal background checks; tighter regulation of gun dealers; safe storage requirements in homes; and a 10-year prohibition on possessing guns for anyone convicted of domestic violence, assault or similar offenses.

We should also be investing in “smart gun” technology, such as weapons that fire only with a PIN or fingerprint. We should adopt microstamping that allows a bullet casing to be traced back to a particular gun. We can require liability insurance for guns, as we do for cars.

It’s not clear that these steps would have prevented the Oregon shooting. But Professor Webster argues that smarter gun policies could reduce murder rates by up to 50 percent — and that’s thousands of lives a year. Right now, the passivity of politicians is simply enabling shooters.¹⁰

I don’t say this all that often, to my own detriment, but if the only way forward is compromise, then lets do it. If we can decrease gun violence by 50%, that’s a lot.

The text of the Psalm offers a perspective that seems to be almost 180 degrees removed from that of the news. It celebrates God, and God’s goodness. It suggests that safety itself comes from the “mouths of babes” and reminds us of the majesty and wonder of creation. Looking up at the night sky, filled with moon and starts, the Psalmist is amazed that God bothers to care for humans. (I had some of those thoughts as I watched the lunar eclipse.) Yet, the Psalms goes on to point out that God not only cares for us, God trusts us and asks us to be representatives of holiness itself in the world.

What a different view than the one we have when we look at violent deaths and the horrid debates that emerge from them. To be reminded of wonder in the midst of horror can put us in tension, but it is a healthy tension. The world is often a violent and unjust. The world is also a place of unparalleled beauty and wonder. As far as I know, it has been this complicated for quite some time. It never really stops being awful, and it never really stops being wonderful. Paying attention to the world can feel like a roller coaster ride.

And this world is what we are passing on to our children. Jesus said, “Let the children come to me” and he gathered them around him, pulled them into his arms, and blessed them. Dr. Seuss said, “Unless someone like you cares an awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”¹¹ It isn’t always just about trying, it is about trying together. I hope and pray that we, as a society, care enough to work together to create change, so that world our children grow into has less fear and violence. May we be at work creating a world with more wonder than horror. May God help us. Amen

– – – –

1 Warren Carter, The Roman Empire and the New Testament: An Essential Guide (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 2006) page 10.

2 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), 79-80.

3 Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), page 89.

4 Funk et al, 89.

5 Linda L. Dahlberg, Robin M. Ikeda and Marcie-jo Kresnow “Guns in the Home and Risk of a Violent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study” published in the American Journal of Epidemeology (2004) 160(10): 929-936. http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.full#ref-2 Accessed October 3, 2015.

6 Brad Plumer “How the U.S. gun industry became so lucrative” in the Washington Post December 19, 2012 http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/19/seven-facts-about-the-u-s-gun-industry/ Accessed Oct. 3, 2015

7 Nicholas Kristof “A New Way to Tackle Gun Deaths” in the New York TimesOctober 3, 2015. Found at: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-a-new-way-to-tackle-gun-deaths.html?referer= on October 3, 2015.

8 Kristof

9 Dahlberg et al

10Kristof

11Theodore Geisel writing as Dr. Seuss in The Lorax (Random House: New York, 1971).

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

October 4, 2015

Sermons

“Gold and Honey, Meat and Bread” based on Numbers 11:4-6,…

September 27, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

We have completed two weeks of the Young Adult study on Genesis, which by our process means we’ve gotten through 4 chapters, and I have learned a lot. We have Study Bibles and we have commentaries, and there is a lot to be gleaned from all of them. Rather excitingly, they rarely agree.

Last week, the Jewish Study Bible made a fantastic contribution to our study. It pointed out that in Jewish culture, salvation is understood to come from the study of the Torah. The Torah is the first five books of the Bible, shared in both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. They are the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The study of the Torah is the goodness of life in Judaism. Historically this was what adult men did, if they could, every day. In Judaism the study of the Torah is much more about the questions than the answers, and all the cumulative study has lead to truly great questions.

The Jewish Study Bible suggested that the Jews aren’t looking for a Messiah to save them because they have the study of the Torah to making meaning in life, and they didn’t need saving. I have some reasons to argue with that premise historically, but I’m going to refrain from it because I think it has value and deserves to be heard. Furthermore, if their claim had been “some Jews” or “most Jews” I wouldn’t even have an argument, so let’s go with that. Most Jews are not and have not been looking for Messiah to save them, because they have the study of the Torah and that’s enough!!

It certainly makes sense out of the Psalm, which is praising the Torah. It may be helpful to remember that what is called in Judaism the Torah has usually been called in Christianity “the law.” Hear again the beginning of our reading from Psalm 19:

The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; the decrees of the LORD are sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the LORD is clear, enlightening the eyes; the fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever; the ordinances of the LORD are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb. (Psalm 19:7-10)

That text is SERIOUSLY in favor of the Torah, isn’t it? It even sounds like an understanding of the Torah as a source of salvation, if you think of salvation as being about life, wisdom, joy, enlightenment, truth, righteousness and goodness. That would fit most people’s idea of salvation.

I once taught a Bible Study on Deuteronomy, mostly because no one I knew had studied it before. With the guidance of Walter Brueggemann’s commentary, we discovered that we loved the book! It set out a vision for humanity that was attainable and yet remarkable. The vision wanted to keep everyone out of poverty, and did so by preventing the acquisition of wealth. The vision wanted to eliminate harm done to widows, orphans, and foreigners, (cumulatively “the vulnerable”) and set up systems to care for them. The vision wanted to ensure that people were attending to good living, and set up a way to support a priesthood so some people’s job could be working out how life could be lived well. It is an enthralling vision. Fair warning though, if you go to read it, don’t try that without Brueggemann’s commentary, and preferably a group. The Bible can be convoluted at times and horrifying at others, without the right resources to guide the conversation.

Deuteronomy is a part of the Torah, and in some ways it is a summary of the other 4 books. I’m with the Psalmist about the wonder of the Torah, and I love the Jewish idea of salvation via engagement with these profound texts, but there are some rather surprising things that would happen if one took that idea seriously. For instance, you’d be taking stories like the one we read from Numbers as salvific. And the Numbers reading isn’t exactly about perfect human living.

In fact, the Numbers reading is an example of how awful people can be. The people have been brought out of slavery into freedom and they are being cared for by God’s own self. (Sometimes you have to just go with the story to hear what it has to say on its own terms, before you fight with it.) They’re whining. They’re whining about how great they had it back in the day when they were slaves. They’re whining about how great the food was. “We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.” For nothing!?!?! They were slaves. While they likely didn’t pay for food, they also didn’t get paid for their labor, and they were given food in order to keep them alive so they’d keep working.

So, the people who have been brought out of slavery and are being given manna to eat in the desert are whining about the lack of diversity of food. Moses and God find this annoying, which seems rather reasonable. But before God can get too upset it, Moses takes his anger out to God in prayer, and starts whining about what a heavy burden it is to deal with this annoying people. This puts God in the place of having to be the fixer, instead of getting upset. In this narrative, whining, complaining, and nagging work on God. Just saying. It hasn’t ever worked for me, but it works in this narrative.

Some of the text gets skipped in our reading, but it basically says that God responds “You want meat? I’ll give you meat until it comes out of your noses.” God is very personified, huh? In the meantime the authority of Moses got shared with 70 others (which was really significant as a leadership number in the ancient priesthood), who have a funny one-time prophesy experience. And the prophesying includes the 2 guys who were picked to be part of the 70 but played hooky. Then Joshua gets upset with them because they’re stepping on Moses’ toes by doing his thing among the people. But Moses assures him that he’s happy to share.

If you were going to pick a piece of scripture for the purpose of guiding people toward life, wisdom, joy, enlightenment, truth, righteousness and goodness, would this be it?

I’ve been pondering that all week, and I can’t decide. On the one hand, this text is incredibly honest about humans beings and how we operate. It points out how easy it can be to idealize the past. It gives Biblical precedence for the 21^st centuary word “hangry” which is about being cranky/angry when we’re hungry. It examines the challenges of leadership, and it even does a great job with presenting the value of shared leadership and joint responsibility. And it is interesting. There is a lot that can be gleamed from this passage. There are a lot of truths in it. Whether or not it happened, it is really real.

Yet, on the other hand, this is a weird text. God and Moses are in a fight over who has it worse, nagging works on God, the people are simply awful, and the man who is about to take over from Moses is an idiot. There are not suggestions about how to live a good and meaningful life, and the lessons that could be derived from the text would be equally likely to be problematic as to be helpful.

And that, as far as I’ve experienced it, IS the beauty of the Torah. While there are parts of it that are long lists of laws and rules, most of the Torah is made up of stories that tell deep and profound truths about humanity (and our relationship to God) but require a lot of work and mining to get there. The Torah isn’t linear. Even the rules and laws require digging, mining, and contemplation in order to bring meaning out of them. Often there are conflicting versions of the same story, or of the same event, or of the same law! And the conflicts get to just sit there next to each other begging for some examination. Collectively, over millennia, conversations about the stories and nuances have enlightened the generations. They have provided life, wisdom, joy, enlightenment, truth, righteousness and goodness. They have made meaning out of life and therefore made life worth living.

The idea that the study of the Torah might be salvific excites me in two ways. The first is obvious. I’ve spent a lot of my life doing that sort of examination in Bible Study and it has consistently enlightened me and improved my life. The second is a bit more exciting though. It opens up the door to consider other possibilities for salvation.

A few weeks ago I preached about salvation, and I made a very strong claim about how wonderful communal salvation is and how dumb I think the mainstream Christian view of personal salvation is. I ended up, presenting alternative routes to full and abundant living. I was not explicit about these being means to God, and therefore means of individual salvation.

Two of you took the time to present alternative viewpoints to me, which – in the vein of great Bible Study – were great guidance to me. I had claimed that I didn’t know where the idea of personal salvation came from anyway, and one of you said “Um, Jesus?” He was right. The gospels do present the idea of individual salvation.

Secondly, someone offered me another alternative way to think about individual salvation. She said that for her, individual salvation is knowing that God loves her, as she is, and she’s not alone. That was super helpful to me, because I think that’s the starting point for everything in faith. I just forgot that it wasn’t obvious, and I loved using that idea as the concept of what salvation means for individuals. That’s the starting point for both healing and for abundant living within this Jesus-following way of life.

Then, if individual salvation is about knowing God loves you, what gets you there? For some people, it comes rather directly through Jesus, and for many through his willingness to face death in order to share God’s love. For some people, it comes from the utter miracle of a sunset. For some people it comes through the wonder of worship and the beauty of music. For some people it comes from the study of Torah (or the Gospels.) For some people it comes from the wonder of being able to contribute to the lives of others. For some people, it comes from having loved ones gathered in one’s home. Likely, for must of us, it comes through many factors that intersect and interplay during our lifetimes.

So, what helps you know that God loves you? That is, what fills you up so that you are able to share love in the world? Do you need more filling up? How can you receive it? Do you have enough love to share? How else can you give it away? The door is open for consideration, examination, and further questions. Have fun!

For wonderful questions, we give you thanks O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

September 27, 2015

Sermons

Untitled

September 20, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

At Game Night, there was a description of our Hebrew Bible lesson this morning. Namely, “A virtuous woman as defined by old Jewish men.”¹This description is funny because it is true.² As a woman working on gay rights issues in Myanmar put it this week, “The perspectival bias in biblical hermeneutics is unquestionably patriarchal, and gender discrimination has been traditionally derived from the Bible — written by men, for men, with little consideration given to the lives of women. Likewise, same-sex behavior receives marginal attention in the Bible; when mentioned, the primary concern is to protect the prerogatives of males, for whom any experience of “effeminization” undermines their status.³ Therefore, a description of a “capable wife” found in the Bible is likely to have a gender bias. The woman is a paragon of perfection, and she’s successfully made the rest of us feel guilty ever since they dreamed her up.

Luckily, there is a lot more going on in this text than initially meets the eye. Scholars don’t think that “capable” is a great translation in the opening line “A capable wife who can find?” (Proverbs 31:10a) According to Dr. Kathleen O’Connor, professor emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, the description of the woman “is more literally a ‘strong woman,’ a ‘woman of worth,’ a ‘warriorlike woman.’”⁴ And there are some strange things going on with the poem, ones that might lead to some big questions. O’Connor says, “Proverbs 31:10-31 is an acrostic poem, arranged in alphabetical order, each line beginning with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The presence of the acrostic, combined with language repeated from earlier poems about personified wisdom, suggests that this woman is more than the average mortal.”⁵To be more direct, the poem is at least about a woman who is living out Wisdom. It is more likely about Wisdom as personified as a woman. At most Wisdom is, like Logos, an aspect of the Divine personified. The so-called ‘capable wife,” O’Connor says, “may not be God in this poem – a much debated point – but she works for her followers as if she were.”⁶

OHHHHH. This much quoted text about the perfect woman might be about the PERFECT woman, the embodiment of God as a woman. I feel less guilty already, and I’m not even a wife. There are some little clues that may support this theory. O’Connor says, “Rather than the woman praising her family, her family praises her, thus reversing gender expectations of the ancient world.”⁷ Praise is most frequently due to God in Biblical literature. The praise itself also sounds extraordinary, “Many woman have done excellently, but you surpass them all.” (Proverbs 31:29). Not just anyone can be the very best. There is the obvious factor that no human being could do and be all that is suggested, and the fact that the woman described is quite unusually wealthy and powerful, and her care for the poor and vulnerable, and her wisdom. She is described as “more precious than jewels” (Proverbs 31:10b) which is interesting when the Bible tends to think God is the being of highest value – as in God’s decrees are more precious than gold in Psalm 19:10. And, quite curiously, her physicality is given no description. All of those lean us toward one of the interpretations that suggest that this woman is “more than just a woman.”

As she is either Wisdom as woman or God’s Wisdom as woman, she is NOT the standard against which other women are to be judged. Another scholar suggested, “it is not likely that all of these admirable traits, characteristics, and accomplishments will be found in one person…[what] looks like the portrayal of a single wonder woman is actually a composite of some of the ways that women make a difference.”⁸ I slightly disagree with him though. If we want to take this Wisdom-God-Woman as a composite, then wouldn’t it be of all people? Wouldn’t this be a Hebrew Bible version of what becomes for Christians the Body of Christ? It is a description of what all of us are capable of being when we work together for God and therefore also a description of what God is up to in the world.

How does sound then? God at work in the word is: trustworthy, hardworking, focused on feeding her people, thoughtful, strong, prepared, generous, well-dressed, empowering of others, able to create beautiful things of great value, dignified, full of laughter, kind, joyful, and worthy of praise! Yep. That sounds like God, and what we are able to do together at our best! That suggests that each of us is meant to provide one or a few of the aspects of this Wisdom-God-Woman as our gift to the world, but NONE of us are meant to provide all of them.

If this interpretation is true, however Wisdom and God and the “capable wife” are interrelated, the text is unexpectedly female-positive. There are other places in the Bible where God is compared to a woman, but I don’t know of any texts that are such an extended metaphor of God conceived in the feminine. It is a rather profound upheaval of expectations about how God is understood. Women were not of high value or power in those ancient times, and comparing God to a woman either weakens God or strengthens women. I’d hope it is the latter!

When I bought my house last year I made a joke that as a white, adult, landowner there was only one thing that would have kept me from being able to vote when we became a country (my gender). I’m glad to live today. My humanity is recognized and accepted and I have powers in the world that my sisters from previous generations would not have deemed possible. The idea that only wealthy white men could vote in our country (for a LONG TIME) sometimes hurts my head, but it also makes sense out of the battles we’re still struggling with. When we became a country full humanity was only granted to wealthy white men. Thanks be to God that the definitions have changed, and culture is going to catch up eventually!

Biblically, this went a step further than it did in early US history. A man’s household was his property: his wife, his children, his servants. In the Gospel, Jesus starts playing with the ideas and roles of servants and children. Rev. Dr. Sharon Ringe is a professor of New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary, and a contributor to Feasting on the Word. She says succinctly, ”Competition for power, wealth, and prestige infected all cultures included in the Roman Empire.”⁹ (Which makes it part of the world as I’ve known it.) According to our text, the disciples were people who existed in a pretty normal culture and all wanted to be the best! After all, following an religious/moral teacher can become a source of pride. It could lead to one thinking one is better than others who don’t follow one’s teacher. And if one’s teacher is Jesus directly, it seems reasonable one might want to feel good about it, and then even feel most justified than then next disciple.

There is a lot to be said for being the best in most cultures! Yet the entire Gospel lesson today suggests that following Jesus is NOT about being the best. This is why it is particularly helpful that we’ve eliminated the need to be the “best” woman/wife with our work with Proverbs. In the text Jesus stakes a claim of having a unique role with God when he says he is the “Son of Man” but he then explains that his unique role is going to get him killed. It may be a good time to remember that the Jews had been awaiting a Messiah for 5 centuries or so, and they expected him to bring them political, social, military, and financial status. He wasn’t supposed to go and get killed. That in and of itself is reversal of the type that might be understood as the first being last.

Jesus’s responses to the disciples fighting of their greatness continues the same theme. Ringe writes, “The words translated in the NRSV of verse 35 as ‘servant’ is diakonas. While that word came to refer to a person in ministry, in the Greek of Jesus’ and Mark’s day it meant someone who served meals. The person who was ‘servant of all’ was the lowest in rank of all the servants – the one who would be allowed to eat only what was left after everyone else had eaten their fill.”¹⁰ Isn’t that an interesting take on ministry itself? Soon there after there is a strange transition from the disciples being expected to be servants to them being expected to be like children. This is another case where translation fails us. The word for servant and the one for child are very similar. Ringe continues, “Mark’s audience would have heard the word ‘child’ as referring to someone like the servant who served meals to everyone else in the household, in that both were seen as without ‘honor’ or high social standing.”¹¹Then, “Not only is Jesus himself said to honor and welcome a mere child (v. 36), but the saying in verse 37 equates one’s welcome of such a child with welcoming Jesus himself.”¹²

That is, according to Dr. Martha L. Moore-Keith of Columbia Theological Seminary, “Jesus first calls the disciples to emulate the child, thus renouncing social status; he then calls them to welcome the child, to make space for those with no social status, since to do so is to welcome Jesus himself- and the One who sent him.”¹³ It works quite well as a continuation of the idea that they are to be like servants, doesn’t it? The entire Gospel lesson is a set of inversions about what it means to be great. The first shall be last and the last shall be first, indeed. Children, and servants come first. Jesus and the disciples are last.

When we add in Proverbs, we see that the standard of perfection isn’t intended to be met by human beings. The best and perfect wife is an expression of Wisdom and/or God. She isn’t the best, she’s out of the competition. She’s isn’t the goal. She’s the expression of what we can all do together.

God doesn’t seem too interested in our definitions of who or what matters. Isn’t it great? It gives us a lot of freedom: to care about what really matters and not what is “supposed to matter”, to let go of the quest for perfection and leave that for God, to get on with the work of living and helping others live, to do our own parts of the work of the Body of Christ and trust that others will do the same and God will build it up toward good – that is, to let go of trying to be first and just be! With God, we aren’t in a competition. Thanks be to God! Amen

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1 “A Game for Good Christians.” Expansion Deck: Wisdom Literature.
2 All humor is funnier when it has to be explained, right?
3 Molly T. Marshall “Religios Freedom and Human Rights” published September 25, 2015 by Baptist Global News. Accessed athttps://baptistnews.com/opinion/columns/item/30483-religious-freedom-and-human-rights on September 19, 2015.
4 Kathleen M. O’Connor, “Exegetical Perspective on Proverbs 31:10-31” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009). page 75.
5 O’Connor, page 75.
6 O’Connor, page 79.
7 O’Connor, page 79.
8 H. James Hopkins, “Homiletical Perspective on Proverbs 31:10-31” inFeasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009)., page 77.
9 Sharon H. Ringe, “Exegetical Perspective on Mark 9:30-37”, in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009), page 95.
10 Ringe, page 95
11 Ringe, page 97.
12 Ringe, page 97.
13 Martha L. Moor-Keish, Theological Perspective on Mark 9:30-37, in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009), page 96.
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Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

“Powerful, Tempting Words” based on James 3:1-12 and Mark…

September 13, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I used to have a game called “True Colors.” It consists of a set of questions, and voting boxes. Questions were something like, “Who is most likely to talk their way out of a speeding ticket?” or “Who makes their bed every day?” Each player is assigned a color, and then the players vote on who among them best fits the description. The scoring of the game required players to assess each question and determine if they would get “all”, “some,” or “none” of the votes on that question. Thus, the game existed to answer the advertised question, “Do you see yourself as others see you?”

Jesus’ questions in the gospel lesson today made me think of that game. He asks two questions: Who do THEY say that that I am and Who do YOU say that I am, but the gospel writer seems to use them to introduce the questions “Who did Jesus think that he was?” and “Who did God think that Jesus was?”

The game True Colors, doesn’t really do what it says. It CLAIMS to ask “Do you see yourself as others see you?” But it really asks, “Do you know how others see you?” or “Do your self-judgments fit other people’s judgments of you?” The answer is often, “no.”

I once heard a story of a woman who saw herself very differently than others saw her:

“An Asian traveller to Iceland joined a night-long search operation for herself after she failed to recognize her own description in details of a “missing woman”.

The woman was declared missing from a party touring the Eldgja volcanic region in south Iceland after getting off the party’s bus to freshen up, the Daily Mail reported.

She hopped off the bus briefly, but had also changed her clothes — and her fellow travellers did not recognise her when she climbed back on again to continue the party’s journey. Soon the search began for a woman described as Asian, around 160 cm, in dark clothing and speaking English well. When the details of the missing person were issued, the woman reportedly didn’t recognise her own description and unwittingly joined the search party for herself.

After a night-long operation involving around 50 people, the “missing woman” eventually realised she was the source of the search and informed the police. The search began on Saturday, but was called off at around 3 am (local time) on Sunday morning when the woman realised she was the subject of the frantic efforts.”

This woman did not know how the others on her tour bus saw her. Quite possibly, the others the on the tour bus didn’t really see her, if a change of clothing was that confusing for them.

For some of us, it is easy to be pulled into spending all our time worrying about how others see us and it is easy connect our self-worth with how others judge us. If we were to ask the questions that Jesus asked, “Who do they say that I am?” and “Who do YOU say that I am?,” life could get really difficult. It happens naturally enough. Positive judgments from others feel good – at least at first. Negative judgments from others feel bad – at least at first. Most human language is laced with judgment, and it has powerful effects on our understandings of ourselves. To make things even more challenging, not all judgments come from the outside. Many of the most powerful ones are self-judgments, and they are often HARSH.

Judgments are so pervasive that they’re sometimes hard to identify. Studies of people texting while driving have established that there is a reason people do it! Namely, there is little, tiny rush of endorphins that comes every time we get a text message or a response on social media, and the rush of endorphins can become addicting. The endorphins (good feeling hormones) indicate, to me, that most of us interpret texts or social media responses as a sort of praise – someone cares enough to respond to us! And we’re so hungry for praise, which is positive judgment, that we seek it out – as a whole culture.

James seems to obsess over judgments. He says he is talking about the power of words, and he is, but it seems a little bit bigger than that. Our tongues are as powerful as the rudder of a ship, or the campfire that starts a forest fire, he claims. But then he gets all flustered that blessings and curses can come out of the same please. He says, “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so.” (James 3:10) but the even better part is when he objects to the whole idea of cursing, saying that with our tongues “we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God.” (James 3:9) First of all, he has a great point. Much 1 John says, “Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” (1 John 4:20) Since all of creation is created by God, or at perhaps all of creation is IN God, to curse anyone or anything is to curse God.

Now, I proposed a few weeks ago a new definition of blessing, a blessing is anything that is being used for building up the kin-dom. I wonder what that does in this passage, when James talk about speaking a blessing! Would that mean that he’s talking about words that are useful for building up the kin-dom? I suspect so. And then curses word be words that keep the kin-dom from being build up! The reason I suggested that James is more upset about judgments than just about words, is that I think the thoughts we have and the judgments contained in them can do as much damage within us as the words spoken out-loud can do damage to others.

Blessings and curses may not even sound much like we’d expect them to. Some curses may be couched in flowery praise language, but be used to manipulate someone to do something not good for them! Blessings may come out in hesitant, halting language, seeking to name a truth a person has to share without even a mention of good things to come!

In any case, James is on target with the power of language, and how it impacts both the speakers and the hearers. The ways we use language, and the goals we use it for, form us and our communities.

Given all that, the questions Jesus asked strike me as dangerous! He was ASKING for judgment. Different people judged him differently. The answers the disciples gave were very different. He was told that some people thought he was john the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets, and yet another group said he was the Messiah – the one they’d all been waiting for. That seems to be the answer he was looking for, or at least the answer the Gospel writer wanted placed in people’s minds. We aren’t told how Jesus understood himself, nor why he wanted to know what people were saying. The text seems to suggest that while the Messiah that the people expected was to be the new King of Israel, the Messiah they got was one who would be killed for that very claim.

Rev. Monty Brown, a United Methodist from West Virginia has answered the most important of the questions for all of us, Jesus included I’d say. Who does God think that I am? God thinks that I am a “beloved child of God, precious and beautiful to behold.” Who does God think that you are? God thinks that you are “beloved child of God, precious and beautiful to behold.”²

Unlike the roller coaster of other people’s judgment, this God based identity is steady, sturdy, and consistent. What does it mean to be beloved of God? A friend of mine says that to love someone is to acknowledge that your well-being is intertwined with theirs. To love someone is to acknowledge that your well-being is intertwined with theirs. That is to say that their happiness brings you joy and your sadness brings them sorrow…. that it is hard for you to be fully happy if they are sad. It seems like a very good description of what love looks like.

And not just on the human level. What does it mean to be beloved of God? It means that God’s well-being is intertwined with ours…. when we hurt God hurts with us and when we celebrate, God is filled with joy.

Now, if we ponder that for a moment, and we consider what it means to love God… God intertwines us with everyone else, at least a little bit. When we say we love God, it means that our well-being is intertwined with God’s well being – which is intertwined with everyone else’s well being! God does best when things happen that are a net good for all people, and God is most hurt when deep harm is done. Maybe that’s why it actually feels bad to get revenge, or to hurt another person – because if we listen well, we hear the ways it hurts us too. And maybe that’s why the best feelings in life tend to come when we’re able to help another person – because we get a bit of the joy back.

Now, being a beloved child of God, precious and beautiful to behold is our fundamental identity – all of us. But if you notice, that doesn’t mean everything will go well. Right after the conversation about who Jesus was, he talked with his followers about what kind of trouble that was going to cause in his life. That’s another place that the power of language is visible. Peter offers him advice: be smart, save yourself! And Jesus must be tempted, because he responds, “Get behind me, temptation.” Putting to words something Jesus wanted anyway made it harder for him to turn it down. The words Peter spoke were powerful and tempting. Many words are. There is a lot be said for taking words (even words that aren’t spoken, words that stay thoughts) very seriously. When we are at our best, we can take the judgments of our thoughts, our words, and our world, and examine them for the nuggets of wisdom within.

That’s one of the coolest things I’ve learned this summer studying non-violent communication. Judgments have nuggets of goodness in them, showing us what we need and what we want and thereby helping us get there. Peter’s judgmental rebuke of Jesus contained within it the nugget of joy in his connection to Jesus and wonder at his teaching a desire to have his meaningful life continue. Jesus’ responsive rebuke of Peter revealed his shared desire to continue his life and ministry, and his commitment to being authentic. He knew others were out to get him, but he refused to change the way he acted out love in the world. Listening to the values people have in stories makes the stories much richer.

Listening the needs and values we have in judgments can take the sting out, and leave life enriched. May our powerful words be used to tempt ourselves, each other, and those we meet into enriched lives. Amen

1 http://www.deccanherald.com/content/275838/tourist-joins-search-self-missing.html Accessed September 12, 2015.

2 Monty Brown, Free Us For Joyful Obedience: A Primer on Pastoral Caregiving from a Pastor’s Heart (AuthorHouse, Bloomington IN: 2006) Location 680 in Kindle edition.

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Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

September 6, 2015