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May 20, 2019February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

In
the Gospel of John, we hear, “I
give you a new commandment, that you love one another.” Of course,
it is not a new commandment. At all. Rather, this is as old of
commandments as commandments come. Love commandments are
fundamental. There are two parts, the love your neighbor part
(Leviticus 19:18) “You shall not take vengeance or
bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your
neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.” and the love God part. (Deut
6:4) “Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You
shall Love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul,
and with all your might.” Jesus’ commandment to love each other is
grounded in the already there tradition as an abiding commandment.
Further, that’s a tenet of every major religion in some form or
another.

It
isn’t new, but it is still challenging. You know that passage from 1
Corinthians 13 that people love to have in their wedding ceremonies?
The one that says
“Love
is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant
or
rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or
resentful; ⁶it
does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears
all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all
things. Love never ends.” The one that is actually Paul writing to
the church in Corinth who are fighting amongst themselves, and he is
telling them what Christian love toward one another looks like?
Well, if Paul had to write that letter to do that, then we can assume
the people weren’t following the commandment too well.

And,
of course, we have the history of Christianity showing us more
examples of how badly we follow this commandment. If our love for
one another is meant to be way we show that we are Christ’s, OYE.
There was the split between the Eastern and Western Church. The
Protestant Reformation was a wreck – I can’t even go into the
horrors it other than to say that at least 100,000 people were
killed. And then, in our tradition, our Methodist Church split all
over the place over the issue of slavery, and power, and money, and
we’re facing a new split now because the church doesn’t know how to
love. We have NOT loved each other well. We have not shown
ourselves to be disciples of Christ, at least not on the big scale,
not if it means showing the world how well we love.

Instead,
on the large scale, I think we look like most other human
institutions, obsessed with power, money, and control. It isn’t
pretty.

While
there are great things that do happen on the larger scale (UMCOR,
Africa University, supporting seminaries, Imagine No Malaria), I
don’t think the larger scale is the one that CAN be reflective of
love. The blessed ties that bind us together are just not big enough
for the size of organizations that exist.

Have
you heard of Dunbar’s number? The New Yorker explains it well:

The
Dunbar number is actually a series of them. The best known, a hundred
and fifty, is the number of people we call casual friends—the
people, say, you’d invite to a large party. (In reality, it’s a
range: a hundred at the low end and two hundred for the more social
of us.) From there, through qualitative interviews coupled with
analysis of experimental and survey data, Dunbar
discovered
that the number grows and decreases according to a precise
formula,
roughly a “rule of three.” The next step down, fifty, is the
number of people we call close friends—perhaps the people you’d
invite to a group dinner. You see them often, but not so much that
you consider them to be true intimates. Then there’s the circle of
fifteen: the friends that you can turn to for sympathy when you need
it, the ones you can confide in about most things. The most intimate
Dunbar number, five, is your close support group. These are your best
friends (and often family members). On the flipside, groups can
extend to five hundred, the acquaintance level, and to fifteen
hundred, the absolute limit—the people for whom you can put a name
to a face. While the group sizes are relatively stable, their
composition can be fluid. Your five today may not be your five next
week; people drift among layers and sometimes fall out of them
altogether.¹

Dunbar’s
numbers are about the limits of how many people you can feel
connected to at certain levels. They’re also about how many people
can feel connected to each other as a group, and how much structure
is required to connect people at different levels. The gist is, the
larger the group, the less people feel connected, the more work is
required to create a sense of community.

This
may explain a bit about church size and function, as well as a lot of
human behavior. It also explains why we’ve struggled so much as an
Annual Conference to feel bonded to each other – we get together
only once a year and we’re STILL bigger than the largest group that
can have actual cohesion. The disconnect between levels of the
church makes sense in this model, although so does the fact that our
church is built in layers, so that relationships can be built.

The
key seems to be, that human beings, human institutions, and human
societies run on relationships, and none of them can be successful if
they outgrow relationships. Institutions that are larger than
relationship capacity EITHER have to have ways to subdivide to allow
relationships to stabilize OR they will lose their focus and
identity, because they lose their basis in relationship.

I
don’t think Jesus was talking about institutions, I think he was
talking about PEOPLE, and the way they treat each other. The part of
the command that IS new is that is it no longer love “your
neighbor” but now “love one another.” It takes the community
from physical proximity to one that is defined by shared work.
(Which may be more similar than it sounds to begin with.)

Only
relatively small groups can have enough cohesion to be defined by how
well they love each other, it just can’t happen on a massive scale.
But let’s be really honest – it doesn’t always happen on a smaller
scale either. Humans can be REALLY hard to work with. #shock
Groups can really struggle.

I’ve
really been thinking a lot about group dynamics, OK, I ALWAYS think a
lot about group dynamics, it seems like they’re super duper important
to every part of following Jesus. One of the harder things about
functioning in a group is that the group is usually looking out for
the group’s best interest, and that doesn’t always line up with each
individuals best interest. This isn’t that fun if you are one of
the individuals whose needs aren’t aligned. You’d almost think
groups aren’t worth it, if it weren’t for the great benefits they do
offer: companionship, connection, shared reality, wisdom, growth,
hope, a place to make a contribution, support, acceptance, belonging,
being known, laughter, inspiration, purpose, stimulation,
interdependence – stuff like that. (I think groups are TOTALLY
worth it, can you tell?)

Perhaps
because of the constant need in a group to balance between the needs
of the whole and the needs of individuals, it is common in groups for
individuals to attempt to gain control over one another. Sometimes
one, or some, or all of the people, just WANT THINGS DONE THEIR WAY.
I expect that sounds obvious, and I expect that you have experienced
it. Vying for control is one of the basic dynamics of most groups,
and it can unravel them, and the degree to which people are vying for
control can relate tightly to how functional the group is.

Now,
thinking about a person trying to control groups, and trying to
control other people in groups is ALSO interesting, and it leads me
to some self-reflection. After all, sometimes I’m that person and
sometimes I’m not, and I’ve been wondering about what makes the
difference. Two pieces of it have occurred to me: I don’t tend to
seek control when I don’t really care what choices are made (so when
something doesn’t much matter to me), and I don’t tend to seek
control when I trust the group process to come up with a good answer.
That suggests that I’m more likely to seek control when I think
something really matters (duh), and when I’m scared. This has been a
bit of a relief for me as an insight, because I’m guessing I’m not
the only one who gets controlling when I get scared, and that means
that when I feel like people are trying to control me, it gives me an
option of being compassionate towards them because 1. they care a lot
and 2. they’re scared instead of … well all the other narratives
I’ve otherwise created in my head about other people trying to
control me. If people are feeling scared, that elicits compassion
from me, whereas if I just respond to my experience of someone trying
to control me, I’m far more likely respond with annoyance,
frustration, and … let’s be honest, defiance. Now, I dislike that
this has to be said, but it does: Having compassion for someone’s
fear does not require us to give them their way. This is inherently
true. Also, as people of God, we are seeking to be motivated by
love, not fear, so we don’t let fear rule.

Now,
let’s jump over to Peter in Acts. This is a hard story to preach
on, because I want to be very respectful of the Jewish tradition of
keeping kosher, which I find beautiful and meaningful. Keeping
kosher is a form of being faithful by paying attention to eating in
just ways, and it forms an identity of faithfulness, patterned into
one’s life. All that means that the formative story of why
Christians abandoned our Jewish roots, that were formed in keeping
kosher, is a tender sort of thing. Giving up keeping kosher was
giving up a primary Jewish identity, and Jesus’ early followers were
good Jews. Keeping kosher was good practice.

That
said, the history of Christianity is also found in this story. What
was once a sect of Judaism became a major world religion, in part
because of these decisions – the ones to include Gentiles as equal
partners in the Way of following Jesus, and not to require Gentiles
to become Jewish in order to become Christian. A GOOD THING had to
be let go in order to make it possible to do ANOTHER GOOD THING. To
welcome in new people required letting go of what had been very
important. To make space for what God was up to next in that
community required letting go of something that was already sacred.
Peter is horrified in this story about what is being asked of him.
But we wouldn’t be here if he hasn’t adapted.

That’s
a lesson that we all have to learn time and time again, particularly
if we want to live well in community. The “love one another” bit
requires adapting to each other, and it requires constant attention
to the living tradition, to see what needs to bend, or adapt, or be
let go. This loving each other thing – its really hard work.

But,
it is worth it. We know a God of love BECAUSE we know love through
each other. Thanks be to God, and may we continue to love one
another. Amen

1Maria
Konnikova ”The Limits of Friendship“ October 7, 2014
https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-media-affect-math-dunbar-number-friendships

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

 https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

May 19, 2019

“Giving Life” based on Acts 9:36-43 and John 10:22-30

May 13, 2019February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Let’s
talk about messianic expectations for a minute, as in, what were the
expectations of the messiah for the ancient Jewish people? Also,
where did the whole idea come from? (Believe it or not, I think this
is going to come around to something relevant.)

The
expectation that God was going to set things right by working
with/through a messiah was an idea that emerged during the Babylonian
exile, probably after the royal line was intentionally extinguished
by the Babylonians. Until that point, there was an expectation that
the monarchial line of David was always going to sit on the throne in
Jerusalem, and when the monarchial line was extinguished, things got
confusing. (To be fair, I think that David and his descendants were
a more significant part of propagating that story than God was, but
for the people it was discombobulating anyway.)

Things
were all up in the air. The Promised Land was intimately correlated
with God’s covenant with the people, and they’d lost it. The story
of God giving the people their freedom was their primary narrative,
and they’d lost that too. Losing the monarchy was just another loss
in the midst of blow after blow to the people’s lives and faith.

It
isn’t clear where the story started, but it did. The story came to
be that God was going to restore the fortunes of ancient Israel
through the messiah. The expectation itself, though, wasn’t
consistent. Sometimes there was going to be a new king, a just king,
a good king, and he was going to lead the country into a new freedom
and dominance. Sometimes there was going to be a new military
leader, a general, who lead the people to win all the battles, and
restore their land (and often other people’s too). Sometimes it was
a new high priest, one able to lead the people to connect again with
their God, and restore worship in a new temple. Sometimes the messiah
was going to be a new prophet, who spoke with the power and truth of
the prophets of old, a new Moses and a new Elijah rolled into one,
whose capacity to speak the truth would bring down the power
structures and allow God’s new power structure to emerge.

And
often, the messiah was a combination of several of those things. But
in each case, the messiah restored the nation of ancient Israel
through either political, economic, or military might, and the rest
came into being too. God was going to work through the messiah, and
God was going to restore the fortunes of Israel through the messiah,
and it would all be OK again.

Since
it make the most sense to connect the goodness of the future God was
going to create with the goodness of the past where God was known to
have worked, most people assumed that the messiah would be a
descendant of David, of which there were many even though the king
and his children had died. This expectation is why Matthew and Luke
go through such pains to tell us that Jesus, like David, was born in
Nazareth and review his lineage.

When
we remember what the expectations for the messiah were, we can see a
few things more clearly: first why potential messiah candidates were
cropping up under the oppression of the Roman Empire – when people
were looking for God to save them again, and secondly why some of the
Jews of the day did NOT think that Jesus fit the bill. After all,
the fortunes of Ancient Israel were NOT reversed by Jesus, not
politically, nor economically, nor in military might. Quite the
opposite even, by the time the Gospels were written the second temple
had been destroyed, Jerusalem had been ravaged, and the masses had
been killed AGAIN in 70CE.

All
of that is back story to pick up the meaning in the lesson today from
the Gospel of John, where Jesus is asked if he is the Messiah. In
the Gospel, the Jewish authorities really annoyed that he won’t tell
them, the literal translation of “how long are you going to make us
wait” is “how long are you going to take away our life?”¹
However, this is the Gospel of John we’re dealing with, and that
means we should be looking for metaphor rather than historical fact.
John is using this story to teach his readers that Jesus IS the
messiah, and that it is better to be one of his sheep than not to be.

I
think the Gospel of John leaves the door open for other shepherds who
take care of their sheep too, a many flocks each with their own
shepherd approach, and I like that. I also love the image of Jesus
as a shepherd who has taken care of his sheep long enough that we
know his voice and trust him to lead us well, to good food, safe
pastures, and still waters. And that Jesus takes care of his sheep,
even protecting us from those who would seek to do us harm.

But,
I wonder if we are like the members of the Jewish establishment in
this story, asking who the messiah is. I wonder if we are still in
the messianic mindset. That is, I wonder if we are waiting for God
to act, and for God to act through someone else, to make things
better. Or perhaps I should say, I wonder WHEN we are in that
mindset, since I know we aren’t always there.

It
is sort of funny, since we are the inheritors of the tradition that
claims the messiah has already come, that we seem to continue to seek
a messiah! As far as I can figure out the stories of Jesus and of
resurrection, the narrative is that God was working with and through
Jesus in his life and then after Jesus died, that capacity he had to
transform the world was gifted to his followers, so that now we can
work together to continue his work. We can now show the world what
love looks like. We can now empower God’s beloveds. We can now be
sources of healing. We can now teach of a God of
never-ending-all-inclusive grace! What was once the work of one is
now the shared work of many.

We
aren’t supposed to be waiting for God, because we believe that God is
working with US, and sometimes waiting on US. We aren’t supposed to
be waiting for someone else to fix things anymore, because we’ve
learned that WE are supposed to be working with God in fixing things
for everyone.

Yet,
sometimes we still expect other people to do it, or maybe God to do.
And sometimes that’s OK – not everything is ours to do and trusting
others to also do their part is not only OK, it is excellent. But
waiting on a messiah, waiting on God to work though ONE person to fix
things, THAT isn’t our job.

The
transformation from being a follower of Christ to doing Christ’s work
is evident in the disciples in the book of Acts. In our story today,
Peter raises a woman from the dead, just like Jesus raised a girl in
Mark. In the Mark version, Jesus is said to speak in Aramaic, saying
little girl, arise, which is recorded as “Talitha, cum.” In
Acts, the grown woman is named Tabitha, and Peter says, “Tabitha,
get up!” The parallelisms are clear enough, which means the
differences are what make things interesting.

In
Mark, Jesus is directive, and he has witnesses, and he simply takes
her hand, says the words, and it happens. In Acts, Peter is quieter,
he does not have witnesses, but he is said to pray and seek direction
before he speaks. In Mark the girl’s value is mostly established
from the love her powerful father has for her. In Acts, the woman is
a disciple, a person who has devoted her life to care of the poor, a
beloved member of the community, whose worth seems to come from the
ways she has lived her faith. I really love the little detail that
the widows all showed Peter the clothing she’d made for them. Widows
were among the poorest members of society, and she’d cared for them
so well that what she’d made was worth bragging about. Her life
mattered to theirs.

It
seems clear to me that Peter is being presented as LIKE Jesus, but
not AS a new Jesus. Peter now has the connection to God that allows
him to see what others cannot, but he has to nurture that connection,
which we see when he prays before he acts. Peter is PART of the
inheritance of Jesus’ power and work, but he isn’t the whole thing
(Tabitha is part of it too). Peter is, then, like all of us. Able
to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, and WITH the rest of the
community able to continue his work, but none of us are supposed to
replace Jesus. We’re not asked to do it on our own. Our tradition
says we’ve already had a messiah, and thus we don’t have to.

Jesus
says, “little girl arise” and Peter says “Tabitha, get up”,
and I find myself wondering about how often we hear God asking us to
do the same. “Get up.” “Get moving.” “Get to work!”
I’m not sure how much of what we hear is actually God and how much is
our own inner critic, combined with the unrelenting expectations of
the world. When I look at the Bible holistically, there is a balance
between the “get ups” and the “sit down and rest a whiles.”
God who freed the people from slavery in Egypt used that slavery to
explain the need for Sabbath, for a full day of rest EVERY WEEK, in
order to fully establish the humanity of all. God is as worried
about rest as God is worried about “get up and do!” We, however,
are often much more worried about “get up and do” so we tend to
listen better to that one.

Or
at least I do. Sorry for all the times I project myself onto all of
you.

God
is seeking for us BALANCE: the capacity to make a contribution to
the world, and the space to savor the goodness of life, the time for
intimate relationships, and the joy of getting things done. God
gives us the gift of LIFE, and then guides us to living it in the
fullest. We may hear a lot of “get ups” but only because we
aren’t as tuned into the “rest a whiles.”

So,
I ask of all of us: can we remember we aren’t called to be the
messiah, even if we’re lucky enough to get to be part of continuing
his work? And can we listen as well the urging of God to rest as we
do to act? Can we receive the gifts of life, and savor them, even as
we seek to make sure everyone gets the gifts? Can we receive the
gifts of rest and the gifts of calls to action, and listen to them
both? I suppose we can at least try. Amen

1Gail
O’Day, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX: John, Leander
E. Keck editorial board convener (Nashville: Abingdon Press,1995)
676.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Mary 12, 2019

“Odd Commandments” based on Acts 9:1-20 and John 21:1-19

May 6, 2019February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Today
we’re dealing with stories of 3 men who undergo changes. The change
in Ananias is probably the least significant, and may be the most
fun. Ananias is briefly described as “a disciple in Damascus,”
where disciple means student and implies student of Jesus or the
early church. Damascus was then, as it is today, a city in Syria
which is north east of Galilee, about as far northeast of Galilee as
Jerusalem is south of it.

Ananias
is my kind of disciple. He is in the midst of a visionary experience
with Jesus himself, and is told to go find Saul to fulfill a
concurrent vision that Saul is having. His response is EXCELLENT.
He says, “I’ve heard of that guy. He has done a lot of evil, and
he has the authority to do a lot more.” Which I take to mean, “Um,
Jesus, you sure you have the right guy? Cause what you are telling
me makes no sense. This is the guy killing us off, and thus not one
who is likely to be invested in helping you out. Also, I’d rather
not.” I appreciate anyone who talks back, asks for clarity, and
double checks instructions that sound wrong.

In
this case, as the story goes, Jesus was quite sure that Saul actually
was the right guy, and Ananias was open to doing as he was asked, and
it worked out. Thus, I don’t think that there was a huge change in
Ananias. He was already a student of Jesus, he was wise enough to
ask for clarity, and courageous enough to do what was asked. When he
was told to do something new, and convinced it was really on purpose,
he was game. However, he didn’t follow blindly. Phew.

Saul
and Peter experience bigger changes. I was reminded recently that
most people have a lot of things to do and learn in the world that
don’t have to do with the Bible and Christianity, and thus it is
particularly helpful to say directly: Saul is also Paul. Saul is a
Hebrew name, Paul is a Roman name, the same guy was called both,
depending on where he was. So Peter and Paul, two relatively huge
figures in early Christianity, undergo major changes in today’s
stories. I’m not sure which one is bigger – if you need extra
entertainment in this sermon, feel free to try to decide for
yourself.

That
story in Acts about Saul (Paul) and Ananias starts off saying,
“Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the
disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for
letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who
belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to
Jerusalem.” (Acts 9:-1-2) in the previous chapter of Acts, Saul
was introduced as standing in approval when Stephen was stoned, and
dragging disciples in Jerusalem to prison. (Ananias had not been
exaggerating.)

Saul
had gone to all the trouble of getting special permission to
persecute early Christians outside of Jerusalem. He was deeply and
profoundly committed to eliminating the scourge of Jesus-following
from faithful Judaism. Saul was from a committed Pharisee family,
Pharisees at the time of Jesus were a sect of Judaism who were
particularly careful in their observance of laws and traditions of
Judaism. They were often the experts in Jewish law, and many were
scribes and sages. At the time of Jesus, and of Saul, Pharisees were
not the most common sect of Judaism, rather they were the ….
populous nerds, if that makes any sense, and around here it SHOULD
;). After the destruction of the Temple, the Pharisees were the
strongest sect left, and modern Rabbinic Judaism is largely based on
the Pharisee perspective.

I’m
explaining all that because I’ve often wondered why Saul was SO angry
about the early Jesus-movement. He seems to have taken it
personally, in that he made it his personal mission to root it out
and kill it. The Pharisees, from my perspective, didn’t have a
particular reason to be threatened by the early Jesus-movement. The
ruling sect, the Saducees, did, because they were responsible for
keeping things quiet and under control and the Jesus followers didn’t
help with that. But the Pharisees existed quite peaceably with other
sects of Judaism, and I really think early Jesus-following could have
been understood as just another sect before Paul started his
missionary work.

It
could be that Saul/Paul was really upset about the ways that Jesus
threatened the value of the Law, particularly about strict Sabbath
observance, but I don’t quite believe that. There were far more
important violations of Jewish law happening, and Paul wasn’t stupid.
From all accounts he was incredibly faithful and very intelligent.
Perhaps one of Jesus disciples had really annoyed Paul. Perhaps one
of the stories or teachings he heard drove him particularly nuts.
Perhaps he noticed the power of the fearlessness of the early
followers, and noticed that the nascent movement was a bigger threat
than others noticed. Perhaps he was just doing his job, and his job
happened to be to root out THIS threat, and he thought it needed to
be done in Damascus too. Try as I might, I can’t quite get my head
into his thought pattern to figure out why he was rushing to arrest
people and approving even of murder.

But,
he was.

And
then this … something happened. He became blind. He heard a voice
he attributed to Jesus. He prayed and fasted for three days, then
Ananias came and healed him, he could see, and he became a part of
the very movement he’d been trying to kill.

That
Paul guy. He didn’t do things in half-measures. He was 100% against
you and then 100% for you, and he did both with complete devotion and
passion. It is a bit scary. I guess it also makes sense. A
capacity for passion can be harnessed in a lot of different ways.
Also, when someone who has stood VEHMENTLY in one position manages to
change their mind, they are sometimes just as VEHEMENT on the other
side afterwards.

I
wish I could see the bridge though. I suspect it would be very
interesting. Something about how Paul valued his faith and
understood God had led him to think that the Jesus-followers were a
threat to what mattered, and Paul was willing to do anything to
protect God and God’s people. After the change, Paul was still
willing to do anything to protect God and God’s people, it is just
that his conception of God’s people had expanded. I suspect the same
motivation was there all along, but his interpretation changed.

It
seems to me that this may be a helpful tool to remember when we are
face to face with people with whom we are on ENTIRELY OPPOSITE SIDES
of things. There are a few such examples in our society (and
denomination) today, and I know you are aware of some. The irony is
that there is often a shared value in our positions, but a difference
in interpretation. If you’ll allow me to admit it, I suspect that
the VAST majority of people in the United States care about our
country, care about the people in our country, want people to have a
chance to thrive, and want our country to be a leader and positive
example in the world. There are some incredible differences in how
we think those things can be accomplished, but if you look at it that
way, we’re seeking the same thing. One of the ways we can meet
people with whom we disagree, if they are willing and we want to keep
being in connection, is to keep digging deeper and deeper until we
find shared values underneath what appear to be radically different
positions. A game can be made of how deep two people have to dig to
find shared values.

Paul
is an example of an extremist, but one who shows with his life that
the same passion can be expressed in polar opposite ways, and that
gives us a chance to remember that those with whom we most
passionately disagree may be people with whom we … well, share
fundamental values. )

OK,
onto our final changer – Peter. I’ve always thought Peter was set
in up the Gospels to be a bit of an idiot so we’d feel better about
ourselves when we are being idiots, but John Dominic Crossan thinks
that the Gospels are rough on Peter because they reflect some
ambivalence about his role as church leader. In any case, Peter
usually looks like an idiot.

This
is no exception. After Easter, Peter is sitting around, aimless and
decides to go fishing. Now, fishing for Peter is not like fishing
for any of us. (I’m unaware of any commercial fisher-people in this
church. If I am misinformed, please let me know.) Peter, at least
according to the Synoptic Gospels, had been a fisherman before Jesus
called him. (John doesn’t share this information, in fact this story
sounds shockingly like the call of Peter in the Synoptics.) A
fisherman was a commercial position. Peter had likely fished the sea
of Galilee, as his means of making a living. Scholars seem to argue
a bit about fishing – they agree that a large profit was being made
at this time from fish, as demand for it was high in the Empire at
that time. Scholars don’t seem to have clarity about whether or not
the fisherman were able to actually keep any meaningful portion of
the wealth they produced. Based on how the world works, I’m leaning
towards, “nope.”

In
any case, if Peter had been a fisherman, and then left fishing to go
follow Jesus, then going back to fishing after Jesus’s death was
going backward. This was AFTER Easter, so after the disciples were
supposed to have GOTTEN IT, that they could keep on sharing Jesus’s
message, that they could empower others as he had empowered them,
that the work wasn’t done but it was now theirs to do.

But
in this passage, they DEFINITELY don’t get it, and so they go fishing.
They revert. They pretend away the past year, INCLUDING Easter, and
just go back to what they knew.

I’ve
gone fishing. I’ve found wonderful new ways of life, new
possibilities, transformations, and then let them slip away. I’ve
gone to anti-racism trainings, and committed to attending to my own
privilege, and then come home to be immediately distracted by all
that is normal in my life. I’ve gone away on retreat, found my
center, remembered how much I NEED to spend time in connection with
the Divine to be my whole-self, and then allowed myself to be
immediately pulled into things that aren’t whole-self inducing. Or,
on a SUPER practical level… on a regular enough basis that it is
embarrassing, I notice that I get a little bit overwhelmed, and am
not sure which way to turn in the midst of too many options, and I
turn to my phone to do something ENTIRELY meaningless rather than
exist in the uncomfortableness of not knowing.

I
go fishing.

I
go back to what I know, what I have been, what comforts me, EVEN when
I know better.

I
think, maybe, we all go fishing. But Jesus called the disciples away
from the fishing, in this story he does it AGAIN. He didn’t let them
revert, he kept on prodding them into the fuller life they needed and
the ways they could gift the world around them. He commands Peter to
feed and tend his sheep and lambs… which is NOT fishing. The story
says that when Peter first saw Jesus he leapt into the water to swim
to where Jesus was. That is, he KNEW that where he was supposed to
be wasn’t fishing, it was in the new life Jesus had called him to.

I
think that’s true for us too. Rather than breath threats and murder,
we’re called to work with those who God loves (ahem, all.) Rather
than be afraid, we’re called to speak love to those who scare us.
Rather than revert to what is comfortable, we’re called to new life
and new possibilities. They can feel like odd commandments, but
we’re called away from fishing and into taking care of vulnerable
sheep – including ourselves and each other. Thanks be to God that
God doesn’t make peace with the status quo, or leave us in our
comfortable places. Amen

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

May 5. 2019

“Refusing to be Silent” based on Acts 5:27-32, John…

April 30, 2019February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I’ll admit I have a strong
bias in this story. It feels like my
personal job to protect Thomas from the accusations made about him over the
years. I feel for him. He said something reasonable and rational and
has gained the title “Doubting Thomas” for 2 millennia. (My desire to protect Thomas would make a bit
more sense if the Jesus Seminar thought this story reflected historical memory,
which it does not, but that hasn’t had quite the impact you’d expect on my need
to protect Thomas.)

The problem, I think, is that
this story does what it supposed to do.
It was designed to include those Christians who did not experience the
resurrection first hand, and to affirm their faith. The line, “Have you believed because you
have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to
believe.”(20:29) The story seems to
say, because Thomas needed proof, but YOU managed to believe without it, you
are even better than one of the first disciples!

“Have faith, even in what you
can’t see” has been a perennial preaching favorite, and Thomas has been the
straw man set up to make it work. There
are a few issues with this though. Most
importantly, “believe what I tell you because I told you so, even if it doesn’t
make sense” is a terrible way to lead people.
Also, bodily resurrection is … a great metaphor, but not something to
get obsessed about as historical fact.

This year, I came across a new
great way to defend Thomas, namely that none of the disciples believed the
Easter story to begin with. Gail O’Day
in the New Interpreter’s Bible says, “John 20:19-23 is linked with the
preceding story in the garden by use the emphatic expression ‘that day’ (v.
19), although the disciples fearful conduct indicates that they have not
credited Mary’s report (cf. Luke 24:11).
The locked doors may be mentioned to heighten the drama and supernatural
effect of Jesus’ entrance into the room (v. 19b, fc. 25; Luke 24:37),
but their primary importance for the Fourth Evangelist is found in the phrase
‘for the fear of the Jews.’”[1]
Aka, all the disciples were scared, and hiding in that room, even though they’d
heard the Easter narrative from the women already. They hadn’t seen and they didn’t
believe. It wasn’t just Thomas.

Furthermore, as another
scholar says, ““The women’s report should have been credible because (1) they were
relating events of which they had firsthand experience (2) there were several
witnesses (3) their character has been established by the reports of their
selfless service to Jesus and his disciples.”[2]

Now, before I can go on in my
defense of Thomas, I need to take a break and talk about antisemitism in the
New Testament. It is morally
reprehensible not to, especially with texts like what we have today, and
shootings like we had yesterday – not to mention the past two millennia of
Western history. Now, I’m actually not
convinced about whether or not the New Testament is inherently antisemitic for
two historical reasons. The first is
that at the time the New Testament was written, Christians understood
themselves to be Jews who were following “the way” of Jesus…. not unlike the
various denominations in Christianity today where all of us would say we are
following the way of Jesus, but we might add that we’re doing so through some
of the teachings of John and Susanna Wesley.
Given that the earlier followers of “the way” were Jewish, the things
they’re saying against the Jews are INTERNAL squabbling, reflecting something
like the things I say about the WCA.

The problem is that while the
followers of “the way” were an oppressed group in the time of the writing in
the New Testament, they became the powerful group and the history of the
Western hemisphere since Constantine has involved Christians having power over
Jews and using the language of the New Testament to justify mistreatment of
others of God’s beloved people.

The second piece takes a
little bit more nuance. “The Jews” is
not really a reference to all Jews, or Jews in general. More often, it is being used to refer to the
people in roles of authority within Judaism.
This applies to the Gospel and to the story from Acts. The people who were in roles of Jewish authority
were the ones who had been placed there by the Roman Empire, with the intention
of controlling the Jewish colonies by controlling their leaders. Because the Empire appointed, and removed,
leaders at will; the Jewish leaders served the Empire rather than the people,
or God, or the faith tradition. So,
sometimes, “the Jew” doesn’t even mean people who are Jewish, it means Roman
Empire leadership appointed to Jewish roles.
In our Sunday Night Bible Study, where people are great at asking
questions and pondering, we have been wondering if “the Jews” was really coded
language for “the oppression of the Empire” while being a FAR safer way to say
it. Further, the Roman appointed leaders
REALLY wanted to keep the peace, and keep their jobs.

But, again, even though I’m
not sure the original language of John or Acts was anti-Jewish, because 1. it was written by people who were themselves
Jewish, about an internal fight within Judaism and 2. the references to “the
Jews” seems to refer to Roman appointed leaders, I KNOW that these texts
have been used SINCE Christianity became a dominate religion to do harm, and I
want us to be very very careful in how we hear, speak about, and reflect these
texts in our lives. NOTHING about
Jesus or the Jesus movement gives us permission to do harm (or allow harm to be
done) to God’s beloved people, and God’s beloved people come in ALL faith
traditions or lack there of. Some of our
job in refusing to be silent is refusing to be silent about the mistreatment of
our Jewish siblings in faith by Christians.

Now, all that said, in Acts,
we hear Peter telling the Jewish authorities that they have murdered
Jesus. (Do you see now why I spent all
that time fussing?) The authorities are
presented as being concerned about disrupting the peace, which probably
reflects the fact that Luke-Acts was written AFTER the Roman Empire came in and
destroyed the 2^nd Temple ALONG with killing a lot of people (the
Jewish historical Josephus says 1.1 million people died, that is likely an
exaggeration, but it reflects an enormous scale). I think the Jewish leaders probably WERE
trying to prevent something like that from happening.

Both Christianity and Judaism
were transformed, perhaps even formed by the experience of death and
destruction in 70 CE. Nothing is the
same as it was before then, and some of the separation of the traditions
happened as the Temple was destroyed. I
believe that the New Testament, which other than the authentic letters of Paul
was written in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple, seeks to make
sense of that destruction in many of the same ways that the Hebrew Bible tries
to make sense of the destruction of the first temple and Jerusalem in 586 BCE.

One of the ways we see God at
work in the world is that what should be an end point, a death, a destruction,
ends up being over the long run a source of great wisdom, creativity,
compassion, and growth. The faith
traditions we have today were developed in the midst of horror and destruction,
but they speak to growth, hope, faith, and love.

In Acts, we hear Peter say, “We
must obey God rather than human authority.”
How and when do we make that determination? When are we clear that God’s will is distinct
from the will of those in authority? Is
it simply the question of violence – that God is not for violence, passive or
active? Or is it about oppression – that
God is not on the side of oppression? Or
is it more positive? That God is on the
side of life! And love! And expansive possibility! This determination matters.

Now, the story in John is
happening on Easter evening. That’s why
it is so notable that none of those gathered seemed to have figured out that
hope and courage are the Resurrection narrative, not being afraid and locking
yourselves into a room by yourself. We
do know, because of the radical growth of Christianity in the early years, that
the disciples did leave the room, and did so with great courage. They continued sharing Jesus message of love,
of God, of hope and possibility, and were killed for it too – and they too died
with great courage and integrity. The
Resurrection narrative is the story of facing fears with courage and letting
God’s yes take precedence over the world’s no.

In the midst of this
narrative, in the midst of the fear of the disciples sitting in the locked
room, we hear a repetition of a blessing, “Peace be with you.” Peace is shalom here, it is a holistic desire
for well-being, not just the absence of violence. Shalom implies physical, mental, spiritual, emotional,
AND relational well-being. That’s the
best part of it – shalom can’t exist in just one person because it is
inherently relational. It also can’t
exist without each person finding it, so all gain from it. “Shalom, well-being, connection, love,
wholeness be with all of you!” And this gets repeated.

Then there is the weird thing
about sins. Did you hear it? “When he had said this,” (the peace bit) “he breathed on them and said
to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they
are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” What does that mean? Gail O’Day says, “Any discussion of this
verse, therefore, must be grounded in an understanding of the forgiveness of
sins as the work of the entire community. … The forgiveness of sins must be
understood as the Spirit-empowered mission of continuing Jesus’ work in the
world. … Because the community’s work
is an extension of Jesus’ work, v. 23 must be interpreted in terms of Jesus’s
teaching and actions about sin. … In
John, sin is a theological failing, not a moral or behavioral transgression (in
contrast to Matt 18:18). To have sin is
to be blind to the revelation of God in Jesus.”[3]

Does that mean, then, that
what Jesus is quoted as saying can be understood as “If you teach people of the
possibilities of life as I taught you, they will be free from fear; but if you
allow them to continue to live in fear, nothing will change?” It is amazing, but this all fits with the
Maundy Thursday narrative about “love each other as I have loved you.” O’Day says, “By loving one
another as Jesus loves, the faith community reveals God to the world.”[4] And THAT, amazingly enough, releases “sin”
in John’s perspective. 😉

Now all of this brings us back
around to my friend Thomas, the one who is as direct and honest as Peter when
he says, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger
in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not
believe.” I really love this
line. I love it especially because when
the story then provides him with proof he does a 180 and DOES affirm the truth,
more strongly than anyone has before him.
“My Lord and My God” was a very strong statement. I wonder how often, when we are presented
with proof we’ve asked for, we are able to notice that it is there and it is
time to change our minds?

Most of all though, do we have
the courage of Peter and of Thomas, to speak the truth? Are we willing to say what we don’t believe
when we don’t believe it AND what we do when we do? Are we willing to speak up and witness to the
power of love to transform lives? That
is, to release the power of sin in the world?
(Giggle, it is so weird to say that.)
May it be so. Amen

[1]Gail
O’Day, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX: John, Leander E. Keck
editorial board convener (Nashville: Abingdon Press,1995) 846.

[2] R.
Alan Culpepper, “Luke,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. 9
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994) 470.

[3]O’Day,
847.

[4]O’Day,
848.

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

“A New Thing” based on Isaiah 65:17-25 and Luke 24:1-12

April 21, 2019February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Years ago I asked my boss for a computer password. He responded, “You should know this. Its is the most obvious answer. We are a ____ people.” Now, I’ve had a lot of church related jobs, but I didn’t think this was obvious. I thought there were a lot of possible answers. We are a loving people. We are a Jesus-following people. We are a gracious people. We are a beloved people. After a while, I tried “We are a resurrection people” and that got me close enough that I was informed the password was “Easter.”

I’ve thought about that every since. For my boss, it was SO obvious that “Easter” was the sort of people we are. For me, there are a lot of questions about what that means, and how we live it out. I yearn for the sort of certainty he had in thinking I could guess the password.

Every month I ask a question of the Church Council as a start to our meeting. I’m known for asking difficult questions, and this church is full of thoughtful, intentional, … strong-willed…. opinionated people. (I wouldn’t have it any other way.) Thus, I ask a difficult question, people offer a variety of different answers, I have a better sense of what people are thinking and we move on.

For the first time, after nearly 6 years, this month the Church Council found an ANSWER to my question. It started like normal. I asked, “Where are you seeing resurrection?,” and people offered many and varied answers. But then a pattern emerged, and was named. The most profound way people are seeing resurrection is in the restoration of relationships, and as a corollary, in the miracle of life-giving relationships themselves.

I thought this was a profound answer, a good way of knowing what it is to be Easter people, so I ran it by the Confirmation class. You would be delighted to know that our Confirmation class is very reflective of this church. The students are thoughtful, intentional, strong-willed, …. opinionated people. They have no patience for irrationality, and even less for exclusion in any form. Last week I ran this idea by them. We talked about resurrection, what it does and does not mean, and how we make sense of the metaphor for our lives today. I wasn’t sure that “restored relationships” would be as meaningful for teens as for those who had experienced brokenness in relationships for decades. It turns out, I was wrong.

They thought that “restored relationships” and “hope where it seems there is no hope” sounded both meaningful and valid as ways of understanding Easter.

Thus, I’m trusting the Church Council and the Confirmation class to be good tests of the pulse of this community, and I’m going to keep on preaching about restored relationships AS resurrection.

For those who aren’t quite with me yet though, I want to play with that wonderful line from Luke’s first Easter Story, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” (v. 5) Within the story it functions to emphasize the empty grave, but it also seems well phrased for metaphorical contemplation. When else have we given up something “for dead” when there is still life in it? When have we discounted a possibility, including of a restored relationship, when God wasn’t done with it yet? What does it mean to be people looking for the living among the living, rather than among the dead?

Last week I quoted John Dominic Crossan’s assessment of Jesus’ teaching, namely that Jesus taught “that God has given all human beings the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God’s power, rule, and domination are evidently present to all observers.”^¹That left us questioning how to live our lives being guided by that wisdom. Parker Palmer is a wisdom teacher, who teaches people how to find the power of life within themselves. It seems to me that his book his book “A Hidden Wholeness: A Journey Toward an Undivided Life” takes off where John Dominic Crossan off.

Parker Palmer believes in the power and wisdom of the soul, and since the word soul isn’t one I find easy to explain either, I’ll let him say what he means by that:

“Philosophers haggle about what to call this core of our humanity, but I’m not stickler for precision. Thomas Merton called it the true self. Buddhists call it original nature or big self. Quakers call it the inner teacher or the inner light. Hasidic Jews call it a spark of the divine. Humanists call it identity and integrity. In popular parlance, people often call it soul. … it is the objective, ontological reality of selfhood that keeps us form reducing ourselves, or each other, to biological mechanisms, psychological projections, sociological constructs, or raw material to be manufactured into whatever society needs – diminishments of our humanity that constantly threaten the quality of our lives.”²

I’m going to take it a step further and say that the soul is the source of the wisdom that Dom was talking about, “the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God’s power, rule, and domination are evidently present to all observers.” Our souls KNOW, we know, but to know we have to listen to our souls.

Throughout Lent we’ve been talking about spiritual practices. One might also say we’ve been talking about practices of listening to the Divine, to our own souls, and to each other’s souls. None of this is particularly easy, but Parker Palmer is the teacher who is focused on exactly that. He thinks most of the time we’re led by ego and by fear, which leads us to be divided from the wisdom of our own souls, “Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the ‘integrity that comes from being who you are.’”³ He calls us to wholeness, but cautions us that, “Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.”⁴

Isn’t THAT an interesting idea to consider on Easter? On this day when we think about resurrection, about restoration, about new hope and the power of life; what does it mean to think about wholeness as requiring acceptance of brokenness? Do we tend to think of resurrection as … perfection? I suspect we do. But that misses the point. God’s work in the world towards restoration doesn’t require nor create perfection. Perfection isn’t a part of life, and resurrection is about restoring LIFE. HOWEVER, God’s work in the world is always towards wholeness, and wholeness requires seeing, accepting, and making peace with brokenness.

Parker goes on to explain how we TEND to deal with this, “A divided life is a wounded life, and the soul keeps calling us to heal the wound. Ignore that call, and we find ourselves trying to numb our pain with an anesthetic of choice, be it substance abuse, overwork, consumerism, or mindless media noise. Such anesthetics are easy to come by in a society that wants to keep us divided and unaware of our pain – for the divided life that is pathological for individuals can serve social systems well, especially when it comes to those functions that are morally dubious.”⁵ Then he explains how to get OUT of that cycle, and the answer is both individual and communal. Palmer is a Quaker, and he believes there is a lot of power in silence, in quiet, and in listening. He encourages people to make space for silence in their lives, but he also says, “But we cannot embrace that challenge all alone, at least not for long; if we are to sustain the journey toward an undivided life. The journey has solitary passages, to be sure, and yet it is simply too arduous to take without the assistance of others. And because we we have such a vast capacity for self-delusion, we will inevitably get lost en route without correctives from outside of ourselves.”⁶

A few years ago I did an intensive training in the teachings of Parker Palmer. Much of what Palmer offers is based in the Quaker tradition. In living out these ideals in community, I discovered there was A LOT of power in them. We were taught to ask open, honest questions of each other, and to sit in silence especially when it was uncomfortable. We were invited to play with poetry and art, journaling, and conversation. We were taught that the soul is wise as all get out, but also shy and needing time, space, and metaphor to share its wisdom. We were taught to hold space for each other’s souls, both because souls are inherently precious, but also because every time a glimpse of a soul is seen, we learn about our own soul too. It is an unspoken part of Palmer’s worldview that souls are unique reflections of the Divine.

I have one more of his insights I want to share today: “All of the great spiritual traditions want to awaken us to the fact that we cocreate the reality in which we live. And all of them ask two questions intended to keep us awake: What are we sending form within ourselves out into the world, and what impact is it having ‘out there’? What is the world sending back at us, and what impact is it having ‘in here’? We are continually engaged in the evolution of self and world – and we have the power to choose, moment by moment, between that which gives life and that which deals death.”⁷ Isn’t that the question of Easter? How do we choose life? How do we work with God who chooses life in choosing life?

How do we live lives that REALLY show “that God has given all human beings the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God’s power, rule, and domination are evidently present to all observers.”^⁸How do we participate in and build community that loves people, and their souls, into a fuller wholeness; under the premise that whole people are a gift to the world? How do we build communities that reflect God’s goodness, wholeness, hope, and the power of God’s commitment to LIFE rather than death?

How do we allow God’s love, life, and wholeness into our lives so that we, and our relationships, can be restored? John Dominic Crossan believes that Jesus taught us we already know what we need to know, we already have the wisdom. Parker Palmer says that wisdom is in our souls, and to access the wisdom we need some quiet, and we need others who also trust in the wisdom of our souls.

This is what we know: God is a God of LIVE, not death; the wisdom you need to lead a transformed life is already with you; there are people who trust in your wisdom and are willing to help you find it; silence is a valuable asset in listening to the soul; metaphor, art, and open-honest questions matter too; AND… this is a community that has been and will continue to love people AS THEY ARE. That love then means that people can safely let their souls out to play, and grow further and further into who God calls us to be. We are a safe place for souls, and that means we are a safe place for LIFE. Maybe, after all, we are an Easter people. May it ALWAYS be so. Amen

1 John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Stories of The Death of Jesus (USA: HarperSanFrancisco: 1995) 47.

2 Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward the Undivided Self(USA: Josey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint, 2004), 33.

3 Palmer, 4.

4 Palmer, 5.

5 Palmer, 20.

6 Palmer, 10.

7 Palmer, 48.

8 John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Stories of The Death of Jesus (USA: HarperSanFrancisco: 1995) 47.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

April 21, 2019

“Being Fed and Given Rest by God” based on…

April 15, 2019February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3Brueggemann,
160.

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

March 24, 2019

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

April 15, 2019February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I like that part 😉

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 10, 2019

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

April 15, 2019February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

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

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

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

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

3Brueggemann,
160.

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

March 24, 2019

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

April 15, 2019February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With
clear objective observation

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

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

In
making requests.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May
we practice it – regularly and well. Amen

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

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

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

April 7, 2019

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

April 15, 2019February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you feel the tension rising?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2Crossan,
42.

3Crossan,
44.

4Crossan,
44.

5Crossan,
47.

6Crossan,
47.

7Crossan
48.

8Crossan,
48.

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

April 14, 2019