“Rejoice!?”based on Luke 3:7-18

December 13, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

In
the book Debt:
The First 5,000 Years,
David Graeber writes,

“If
one is on sociable terms with someone, it’s hard to completely ignore
their situation. Merchants often reduce prices for the needy. This
is one of the main reasons why shopkeepers in poor neighborhoods are
almost never of the same ethnic group as their customers; it would be
almost impossible for a merchant who grew up in the neighborhood to
make money, as they would be under constant pressure to give
financial breaks, or at least easy credit terms, to their
impoverished relatives and school chums.”¹

What
intrigues me about the “good news” of the John the Baptist is
that he completely ignores this universal reality. He speaks with
the same expectations and demand to everyone, regardless of their
relationships to each other. He is calling people back into
community, and they aren’t even community!

He
starts out being sort of nasty, I tried to wiggle out of preaching
this text because I rather dislike the brood of vipers language, but
upon examination he is saying radically loving things. (I have come,
rather despite myself, to really like John the Baptism. It turns out
most of my assumptions about him have proven entirely untrue.) John
calls on all the people to change their lives, he doesn’t just ask it
of the leaders or of the wealthy. He makes the same demands on
everyone who comes.

To
the crowds who have gathered, he demands a morality of sharing. No
one should have two coats while anyone has none. This is a standard
that makes a lot of sense, right? It isn’t trivial though. The
person who has two coats may feel as if they’ve²
earned them, or they really like them, or they are aware of the
differing fashion needs they respond to!! They may feel that they
aren’t their brother’s keeper, or that there are too many people
without coats to have the coatless be their responsibility.

That
is, they may not experience the other person as an extension of
themselves. In functional families, it would not go that way. If
there were 4 people and 4 coats, the distribution would not be such
that 2 people and 2 coats and 2 people had no coats. In a functional
family, 4 coats for 4 people would be distributed 1 coat per person.
Calling on people to give away extra coats, and extra food, is
calling on them to take each other’s well-being as extensions of
their own. That is something we naturally do for people we love and
are in relationship to. John calls for the extension of that
community. (This is the problem I have with trying to dislike John.
He sounds like Jesus.) He calls for it to extend without limit.

To
the tax collectors, John also extended a challenge. His words are
deceptively simple.

“Collect
no more than the amount prescribed for you.” That would, again,
be something we might expect to happen in a family. If the tax
collector came to the house of their cousin, they wouldn’t ask for
more than they were required to ask! This is an extension of
fairness to the whole community. It is treating each person as
someone you’d care about.³

The
final group that John is said to speak to is the soldiers. They are
probably the most interesting group. This is not because of what
John tells them, it is an extension of what he suggest to the tax
collectors: don’t take money you aren’t entitled to. What is
interesting is that they were there at all. The soldiers were Roman
soldiers. Why were they coming out to a radical Jewish prophet in
the wilderness? What was it about being part of the power structure
of the empire, or maybe even more simply about being human, that led
them to banks of the Jordan River and the preachings of the Wild One
seeking a better life? What were they expecting? Did they find it?
Did any of them follow it? Did they have a better life afterward?

The
challenge to the soldiers, while equivalent, may be even harder than
the rest of what John said because he calls on them to treat people
like family and they aren’t from the same group AT ALL. They are
different ethnically, and linguistically, and religiously. The
soldiers were the threat of force maintaining the empire and its
power to take wealth from the poor and transfer it to the wealthy.
John doesn’t call on them to stop being soldiers, he just calls on
them to be GOOD soldiers, and to let go of their greed, and to see
the humanity of the people they were (theoretically not) occupying.

Then
John goes back into a statement that I find cringe worthy. He speaks
of Jesus and says, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his
threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the
chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.“ This is called good
news! And it is. Christianity has done some terrible things. One
of them is assuming that there are good people and bad people and God
loves and forgives the good people while sending the bad people to
hell. Unfortunately, that’s the first thing I hear in this passage.
But I don’t think it is an appropriate reading of the passage.
Instead, I think it is consistent with the rest of the passage. As
Rev. Dr. Barbara Thorington Green says, the line between the wheat
and the chaff is not between people, it is within each of us.

This
is a passage of hope. God’s work includes taking away the greedy,
lifeless, selfish parts of ourselves so that we can be freed for
connection, love, and wholeness. The burning of the chaff is the
permanent removal of the things that hold us back from love, and the
making of space for love. This is a process of sanctification.

The
paradigm of the wheat and chaff is easily translatable into an
extension of Isaiah’s beautiful vision. In that vision, God offers
well-springs of joy for us to draw from; strength and might of the
Divine to trust in; and freedom from fear. It is a vision of joy and
beauty.

All
week I’ve been thinking about what it means to rejoice in the midst
of the quiet waiting of Advent. I’ve also been thinking about what
it means to call for joy when there is so much pain around us. I’m
not just talking about mass shootings and Islamophobia in our
society. I’m also profoundly aware of the many in our midst who are
grieving. For some among us the wounds are fresh or unhealed. For
others the holiday season itself is a source of pain. And we live in
a broken world. Many of us, me included, have too many coats. And
far too many people have none. The relationships that lead us to
sharing and wholeness are often not present in our lives.

To
go back to David Gaeber, he proposes that
“sharing is not simply about morality, but also about pleasure.
Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the
most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something:
music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds. There is a certain
amount of communism of the senses at the root of most things we
consider fun.”⁴
He says that we tend to share best with those we consider equals.
I’m not sure that John was proposing charity at all – in the sense
that charity is a gift of undeserved love to a stranger. Instead, I
think John was proposing making people family. When that happens,
the sharing follows naturally. (This is why anyone who has ever
researched it has said that socio-economically diverse neighborhoods
are best for everyone in a society.)

Joy
comes, at least in large part, by sharing the goodness of life with
each other. Isn’t that interesting? So much of what society tells
us is simply wrong. It isn’t about acquisition or outdoing each
other. It is about the wonder of experience together. There is
plenty of sorrow and sadness to go around these days, but there are
ways to pick ourselves up to. Thanks be to God! Amen

1David
Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years
(Brooklyn and London: Melville House, 2011), p. 102.

2As
of this week the Washington Post style guide has approved of using
“they/them” in the singular. This is helpful both for the
transgender community and for speaking without having to name a
gender for a person. On that basis, despite some old teaching that
rankles, I’m going to follow their lead.

3
I will note, however, that this is historically complicated. The
system in Rome as I understand it did not involve having a pay scale
for tax collectors. Instead, they were permitted to acquire both
the taxes they’d pass on and their own income as they determined
necessary. Therefore I’m not quite sure how this would work in
practice, but let’s leave it be and hope I’m just missing something.

4Graeber,
99.

December 13, 2015

Sermons

“Smooth Ride” based on Luke 1:68-79, Baruch 5:1-9, Luke 3:1-6

December 6, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Whenever possible, I pick a window seat when I fly. I am endlessly mesmerized by the alternative view of the world it provides. There is the strange perspective shifting of take off and landing, when people, cars, houses, and roads either shrink or grow as the plane changes altitude. There is powerful metaphor that it is ALWAYS a sunny day – above the clouds – its just that sometimes we can’t see it. Once, I watched a multi-hour sunset as the plane and the rotation of the earth kept time with each other. Most frequently though, my attention is drawn by the patterns of nature and of human impact on nature.

Somehow, it doesn’t get old to fly by mountains and notice that the snow is deeper on the north side than on the south, or to look at streams running into rivers and see fractals emerge. Nor have I yet ceased to be interested in how fields and roads are formed around the natural elements of plains, mountains and water. I’m amazed at how strong humankind is in changing the nature of the world, and in how strong the elements of the world are in impacting human behavior.

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a window seat on the way home from Wisconsin, and I watched the rolling mountain/hills of the Appalachians, the roads running in the valleys, the valleys visibly distanced from one another. I looked for the roads between the valleys, and found one. It mostly went over the mountains, but in a few cases, it was visible from the plane, that the mountains had been cut in two so the road could pass on level ground. The valleys were connected, presumably the use of a whole lot of dynamite.

That’s crazy. We live in a world where mountains are cut in half for our roads. Or, at times tunnels are cut through them. Similarly, we have tunnels under rivers and bridges over them. Very little stops us from building roads and traversing the world.

It has not always been so. The prophesy we heard in Baruch which was also in Isaiah and was quoted in Luke was an impossible vision when it was written. Roads weren’t flat, nor straight, nor particularly easy to travel in ancient times. Mountains had to be gone over, or around. Valleys had to be gone down into, or around. Rivers had to be crossed without bridges, and perhaps worse than all of that for Biblical literature, deserts had to be crossed without access to potable water.

That’s why it was such a great vision. Only God could raise up valleys and drop down mountains and shade the way home through the desert. It was impossible for humans. But God could, and the vision says that God WOULD. It was a vision of hope, one that encouraged resiliency. The end had not come, there was more that God would be up to and it would be so good that the people wouldn’t even be able to believe it possible.

They did go home, but the path wasn’t smooth. The vision remained, even after its initial use had been fulfilled. I think that’s a sign of good literature – it has even layers of meaning that when the most obvious one is no longer relevant the text is still relevant. The vision gets quoted here in Luke again, because the power of the empire of Rome felt a little bit like the exiles’ experience in Babylon, and there was a need to connect again to this impossible hope. We noticed something in my lectionary group this week. By the time of Jesus, this impossible vision wasn’t so impossible anymore. Rome built roads, and they built GOOD roads. They made it possible to travel where it had not been possible, and made it a whole lot smoother of a ride. I wonder if Luke wrote this with the nostalgia of yearning for roads and with the awareness that the capacity of humans had changed, or if he just hadn’t NOTICED. (Sometimes things change and we don’t notice.)

Granted, Roman roads didn’t quite qualify as the wholeness of the vision. Frankly, our roads don’t either. We can split a rolling hill in the Appalachian range in two, but we aren’t there yet with the Rockies, and while we’ve done amazing work with bridges and tunnels, anyone who has fought traffic going into or out of NYC knows that physical barriers are still a reality. And, anyone who has driven… say… in the city of Schenectady knows that the ride is not generally smooth. (Seriously, how on earth are we going to get through winter and the road damage it brings when things are already this bad??)

Regardless, the Isaiah passage quoted in Luke is intriguing because it is set into it’s Lukan context. It is, to some degree, still about roads, but it is also about leveling the playing field, as is much of the Bible’s poetry. The interplay of the today’s passages intrigue me. I don’t usually include apocryphal texts in worship, but I loved this one too much to ignore it. It is the epitome of hopeful restoration language, and it fits SO WELL into this this second Sunday of Advent when we focus on our yearning for peace. It not only talks about mountains dropping and valleys lifting and shade trees protecting the travelers, it talks about the people as God’s Glory, and as Righteous Peace and as mercy and light.

And it sounds enough like Mary’s Magnificant to take the parallels seriously.

[God] has shown strength with [God’s ]arm;
[and] has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
[God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
[God] has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.

Both the road home and societies tend to be in need of leveling, and some respite of shade. In the joint meaning of the songs of Luke chapter one, we are reminded about God who doesn’t care about our status quo. God isn’t interested in who is higher up a hierarchy, God is interested in taking care of all the people, and that usually means lifting up the bottom, and filling it in with the extra from the top. A level playing field takes better care of all of God’s people. Please note that this doesn’t inverse reality: it isn’t that the poor become rich and the rich become poor. It is that everyone moves toward the middle ground. It is like the opposite of our world today: instead of growing income inequality, Luke 1 envisions growing income equality.

I think the most interesting character in today’s reading is Zechariah. Zechariah is identified multiple times as John the Baptist’s father and was an old priest. That meant that he was in the upper class and a descendent of Aaron. The story goes that he and his wife were barren. Those who have been in the Young Adult Study on Genesis know where this is going. Elizabeth was past child bearing years, and then got pregnant with John. Zechariah (whose name means, “God remembered”) is struck mute for the length of the pregnancy for his disbelief that this would come to pass. When the child is born, his mother wishes to name him John (which means “God’s gift”), but the people are horrified that she isn’t’ naming him for his father. He writes (further proof that he is upper class) “his name is John” and his mouth is opened again.

When it is open he speaks the first of the Luke passages we heard today, which is spectacular. It is also sort of weird for an upper class, entitled priest to say! It is all about God’s inversions in the world, and usually the people who are empowered by a system aren’t the ones who yearn to change it.

Zechariah also shows up, in name at least, in the second Luke passage about John’s ministry in the desert. This is quite curious. If Zechariah was an upper class man, a priest in the hereditary order of Aaron, then his son would have been too. Instead we meet John on the outskirts of society, teaching, preaching, and baptizing in the Jordan River. John forwent the privilege he was born into, and the gospel tells us that instead he spent his life “preparing the way of the Lord.”

That is, his work was to make the paths straight and smooth. Its funny though, the way of the Lord that John prepares seems ALSO to be the way of the Lord that Jesus worked on. I always thought, as a child at least, that John was preparing the way for Jesus. But this passage suggests that both John and Jesus are preparing the way for the people to connect with God and come home to the ways of God. The leveled road makes the journey easier, it also creates a more just society.

The level road is the way of peace, and it is hard to build, but worth working on anyway. If any people at any time in human history have known that, we are among them. We are people living in a society where mass murder has become normal, where special interest groups and the desires of profit-industry prevent change to our laws, and where we see with increasing clarity the disparity of violence in our world. As if the regular gun violence wasn’t enough, the response of our society is to demonize Muslims and dark-skinned people in response, making the actual shootings only the beginning of the problems we face. We take our pre-existence prejudices and add them into the pain and suffering in our society.

Over the past few years I’ve tried not to demonize gun rights supporters. As weak as it sounds, I have friends who own guns, and they aren’t bad people. I grew up in an area that prized deer hunting, and I see the value of hunting rifles (although, SERIOUSLY, if you are going to kill animals for sport, I think you should make it a little bit more of an actual challenge and go bow hunting). I can’t figure out the value of pistols, but at the moment I’m willing to let that go. The biggest problem we have is that military style assault rifles are legal to buy and use in our country. Without wanting to demonize anyone, and while wanting to participate in a genuine conversation with those with whom I disagree, I find that it is time to make an unambiguous statement: The only purpose of assault rifles is to kill a lot of people at once, and to protect the right of people to have assault rifles IS to protect the “right” to engage in mass murder.

Our country’s ride isn’t going to get any smoother until we change our gun laws. (We aren’t going to magically find the ability find perfect mental health care for all of our citizens, we aren’t able to stop propaganda from all extremist groups, we can’t prevent everyone from wanting to do harm. We can only change the access they have to the tools that make it EASY.)

I’m tired of preaching about violence and guns, but not tired enough to stick my head in the sand and pretend that the 350+ mass shootings in the USA this year didn’t happen. This is the season where we participate with our ancestors in faith in YEARNING for the world to be as God would have it be. Today we are YEARNING for peace, and while peace means a whole lot more than a lack of violence, it has to start there. One commentator on Zechariah’s song of praise (the Benedictus) wrote, “Advent continues, our ruminations go deeper. We wait, watch, wonder if we will ever know peace. Will we find peace in our own souls? Will there be peace on earth?”¹

Friends we live in an age and a country that can cut mountains in two to make the road smooth. We live in an age and a world that has eliminated polio and is about to eliminate malaria. We live in a world where extreme poverty has been cut in HALF over the past 25 years. We live in an age and and a country where an African American man is finishing his second term in office. We live in an age and a county where ROADS cut through MOUNTAINS. Roads can be made smooth. Gun control is not beyond our grasp ( PLEASE call/email/and write to your legislators).Peace is possible.

The road isn’t current easy. It turns out that driving along a smooth road is A LOT easier than building a road and making it safe and easy. I suspect we are called to be the road builders, and God is the one who gives us the strength and vision. Let’s get back to work. Amen

1Randall R. Mixon “Homiletical Perspective on Luke 1:68-79” in Feasting on the Word Year C Volume 1 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009) page 33.

–

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

December 6, 2015