“Do Not Fear, Beloved” Page 6Rev. Sara E. Baron…

January 14, 2019February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

The
words we heard from Isaiah today were spoken to a community abandoned
to despair. Isaiah chapters 40-55 is called “Second Isaiah” and
Second Isaiah was written to the exiles who had been force-ably
marched across the desert to Babylon after the defeat and destruction
of Jerusalem. The exiles in Babylon were despondent. They’d watched
their city, their temple, and their nation be destroyed. They’d seen
entirely too much death. Those who were left behind had all of their
possessions and food taken from them, and were left without city
walls to protect them. And the ones in exile were supposed to be the
leaders of the people who took care of them, but instead they were in
captivity in a foreign land.

In
the midst of all of this, they were likely struggling with their
faith. Not only do terrible events tend to make most people struggle
with their faith, the faith of the Israelites at that time centered
on two things: 1. The story of the God of Liberation who had freed
them from slavery in Egypt and 2. The gift of the Promised Land to
God’s beloved people as a sign of God’s intention to keep them from
other nations. You can probably see how a faith based on freedom and
land would be seriously shaken by being taken back into slavery after
losing the land.

To
those struggling former leaders, now slaves, Isaiah send a message of
hope. Isaiah was a prophet, so he spoke what he believed to be a
message from God for the people. The message is shocking. It may
help to know that “To be redeemed according to Israel’s law means
to be bought out of human bondage by one’s kin, a close member of the
extended family.”¹
More specifically, “The verb refers to a family intervention and
solidarity whereby a stronger member of the family intervenes to
assure the well being of a weaker member.”²
So with that, we can hear the first verse again.

This
is a message to you from YHWH, who created you, from God, who formed
you:

Do
not be afraid. You are in need of a family member to pay for your
freedom,

and
I have done so. You are my family. You bear my name.

The
people are ENSLAVED. In a foreign land. After a major defeat, that
most of them took to be a judgement by God. This cannot be what they
expect hear. Not even the beginning, the reminder that they were
formed by God’s own hand. And definitely not the next part that God
was going to pay for their freedom … since they thought God had
sent them into exile. After feeling abandoned by God they got this
message that God claimed them, loved them, acted on their behalf. I
imagine that it was confusing to try to parse out if this could be
true. As a scholar puts it, “Israel is now fully identified with,
belongs to, and is cherished by Yahweh.”³
But they’ve been interpreting their experience as the opposite.

This
experience, while very specific, seems to have some universal themes
underlying it. Life has its ups and its downs, some of the downs are
very far down, some of the downs are for a whole family or whole
community, and quite often the downs feel like God has forgotten us,
abandoned us, punished us, or… maybe like God ISn’t after all.
Today’s Isaiah scripture speaks into those times. “Do not be
afraid, I am with you. I have called you by name, and the name I
call you is ‘mine.’” We are not forgotten, abandoned, nor
punished. We are still connected, beloved, claimed… and when
things are at their worst, God is with us for it.

The
passage then turns to possible threats that could harm Israel, and
assures that YHWH is available to help them if that happens. Floods
and rivers, not too much for God. Fires and wildfires, not too much
for God. This, too, applies to us. Bad things may come, disasters
may come, raging loses may come, they aren’t too much for God and God
is still with us.

Second
Isaiah speaks words of comfort and hope. This is particularly
notable because First Isaiah (the first 40 chapters) come before the
exile and speak rather dire warnings of what might come to pass if
the leaders of the people don’t chance course. As most of the Hebrew
Bible was written down during and immediately after the Exile, I am
convinced that it has two primary questions it is asking is “why
did this happen to us?” and “how do we understand God in these
circumstances?” The Hebrew Bible answers those questions in a lot
of different ways, and Second Isaiah’s take is “it happened, that’s
not the right question. But as to how do we understand God, that’s
the important one – we know a God who comforts us, cares for us,
never abandons us, and claims us. Because of God, we have hope for
the present and the future.”

There
are so many themes that bounce back and forth between our two
scriptures today, it can seem that Luke 3 is using Isaiah 43 as a
source text. However, Isaiah is inherently talking to the COMMUNITY,
and in Luke 3, God is speaking to Jesus – just one guy. Or, at
least, I think that’s what is happening. The story says that it is
of God speaking to Jesus, but I also know the story is much larger
when we consider the baptism of Jesus as one of the primary reasons
we baptize people into membership in the Body of Christ, and that
this story then resonates within all baptized Christians. So maybe
both them are written to communities, but only one of them admits it?
I’m not sure.

Luke’s
telling about Jesus’ baptism is brief but powerful. Jesus was
baptized, he was praying, the Spirit came (like a dove) and then
voice (from heaven) said, “You are my Child, the Beloved; with
you I am well pleased.” Within the Gospel this serves as an
affirmation of Jesus’ identity as Messiah. However, have the words
have echoed through the ages, and been passed on to each Christian at
their baptism, they have come to mean even more. They have become
like the words in Second Isaiah, an affirmation that God knows us,
sees us, claims us, and is with us. These are words that tell us
that we are LOVED, and that God also LIKES us. They are words that
tell us of grace – that we are loved because God loves us and
that’s the final answer – that our FIRST identity is “loved by
God” -both as individuals and as a community.

Our
second identity, then, is to show God’s love. In the United
Methodist Communion liturgy, the second question that is asked fo
parents of babies being baptized or of adults answering for their own
baptism is, “Do
you accept the freedom and power God gives you to to resist evil,
injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?”
I have come to LOVE this question. In fact, it has been MY cover
photo on facebook for two years AND the church’s cover photo for a
year and a half.
I’ve considered changing both, but it is too on point.
In these times, when the powers of injustice and oppression feel
like they’re crushing in, both within the church and in the world, it
feels liberating to hear that question again. “The freedom and
power God gives you….” We do not have to be pulled into. We
don’t have to participate. We can choose another path. We are FREE,
because God frees us from the powers of evil, injustice and
oppression.

That’s some great stuff.
And Jesus is one of the examples of what a life can look like when it
is free from evil, injustice, and oppression.

“This is my child, the
beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” It is easy to look at the
babies we baptize and see how true those words are for them. It can
be very easy in adult baptism to hear the words echoing as well. One
of the challenges is remembering that it keeps on echoing for all of
us, all the time. In sacred moments, we see it, but it is
omnipresent. Each person we meet is beloved by God, a child of God,
one who God LIKES. Each of us are beloved by God, a child of God,
liked by God – even when we aren’t able to like ourselves.

And then there is the correlated
bigger picture. We, as a church, are a community of God’s, a Body of
Christ together (even as we are part of larger and larger versions of
the Body of Christ in the world.) We are not the entirety of God’s
beloved community, but we ARE a beloved community of God’s. Which
means that we are some of the recipients of the words in Luke as well
of the ones in Isaiah. We are children of God, beloved, and with us
God is well pleased. Also,

This
is a message to you from YHWH, who created you, from God, who formed
you:

Do
not be afraid. You are in need of a family member to pay for your
freedom,

and
I have done so. You are my family. You bear my name.

We
are God’s, together. In fact, as a community, we come together
knowing ourselves to be an expression of God’s love, together. We
are formed together by being people seeking God, seeking to
understand things of God, seeking to live out God’s ways in the
world. We are formed by the Divine stories, by Divine love, by
building the kindom of God together. We bear God’s name.

This
means that God is with us in the ups and downs. God was with us when
this community was large, when Sunday School was overflowing and this
sanctuary was full every week. God is with us now when we are fewer
people, with just as much commitment to God’s ways. God is with us
when new people are joining us, and God is with us when we gather in
gratitude for lives well lived. God is with us when we are
struggling to find our ways of being in this world and in this
community, and God is with us when we know we’re up to just the right
ways of being love in the world.

We
are God’s. Thanks be to God. Amen

1Kathleen
M. O’Connor, “Exegetical Perspective on Isaiah 43:1-7,” in
Feasting on the Word Year C Volume 1,
ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville, KT:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 221.

2Walter
Bruggemann, Isaiah 40-66
(Louisville, KT: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 53.

3Bruggemann,
53.

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

January 13, 2019

Sermons

“What IS this baptism thing?” based on Acts 19:1-7 and…

January 14, 2018February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

This week, statements were made that said that some people are more important than other people, and some places have people that matter while others don’t. The statements made this week were a moral atrocity. While this was exceptionally direct and overt, unfortunately, such statements are made on a regular basis, most often in budgets.

This past Tuesday I went to the NY statehouse to advocate for fair funding of New York State schools. New York state schools are THE most segregated in the United States (you heard me correctly). While New York spends rather a lot on its public school systems, it does not spend that money equitably. Because of the hard work of education advocates (and multiple lawsuits), in 2007 New York State created a “foundation aid formula”. The formula was meant to counter two pieces of inequality: the reality that school district’s primary funding comes from property taxes which can vary GREATLY between wealthy and impoverished communities; and that the needs of students can vary greatly between wealthy and impoverished communities.

The formula, carefully created, has never actually been funded. Instead, already wealthy (and usually white) school districts get a higher percentage of the money than average, while already impoverished (and particularly schools with many minority students) get a lower PERCENTAGE of the money than average. To get to particulars, the Schenectady City School District is underfunded by $44 MILLION according to the foundation aid formula, like many upstate cities’ schools are. That is, the New York government has an education budget that is as offensive as the language spoken in the Whitehouse this week.

Similarly, the United Methodist Church also FUNCTIONS as if some people matter more than others. I’m not just talking about the history of the Central Jurisdiction (if this is news to most of you, we’ll do a second hour on it later), or pay gaps for clergy on the basis of race and gender, or any of the other multitude of issues within the United States. I’m not even ONLY talking about the discrimination of LGBTQIA+ people in the church. There are ALSO issues with how the church functions as a global church. Namely, our constitution differentiates power between churches and conferences in the United States and those in the rest of the world, and the church as a whole functions as if the churches outside the United States are our colonies. While we do have some United Methodists in Europe, the vast majority of United Methodists outside of the United States are in Africa and the Philippines. This means that global colonization history AND racism continue to impact our church in every day of its life, and the colonization AND racism are WRITTEN INTO OUR CONSTITUTION.

To put it bluntly, we are not yet living the dream that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. offered us.

But, we are still dreaming it. Within the church, the dream is powerfully held and advocated for by the Love Your Neighbor Coalition, methodized as “LYNC.” LYNC consists of: all of the racial ethnic caucuses in the United Methodist Church, 4 groups organizing around LGBTQIA+ rights in the church, MFSA, Fossil Free UMC, and the UM association of ministers with disabilities. It is an amazing, profound, and inspiring group! LYNC looks and feels like the church as it should be – it is still messy with a lot of view points – but it is loving, respectful, and capable of growth. LYNC has JUST released a statement about the church it dreams of being a part of. LYNC’s current work is centered on the African concept of “ubuntu, and early in the statement, it explains “ubuntu” by quoting Achbishop Desmond Tutu:

The first law of our being is that we are in a delicate network of interdependence with our fellow human beings and with the rest of God’s creation… [Ubuntu] is the essence of being human. It speaks of the fact that my humanity is caught up and inextricably bound up in yours. I am human because I belong. It speaks about wholeness: it speaks about compassion. A person with ubuntu is welcoming, hospitable, warm and generous, willing to share. Such people are open and available to others, willing to be vulnerable, affirming of others, do not feel threatened that others are able and good, for they have a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that they belong in a greater whole. They know that they are diminished when others are humiliated, diminished when others are oppressed, diminished when others are treated as if they were less than who they are.¹

I want to read you the abstract of LYNC’s statement, because I think it is profound, because I think it dreams the church as God does, and because I think it contains truth beyond the bounds of the United Methodist Church. It isn’t short, exactly, but it is as concise as a dream can be:

The United Methodist Church is in the midst of a once-in-a-generation opportunity. A harm has been named within the body and brought to light. How we respond will define our future. There are responses that will promote healing, restore relationships, restore our ubuntu, and lead to this struggle being remembered as a restorative struggle. And there are other responses that will amplify the pain. It is time to banish this period of legislated discrimination to the dustbins of our history.

Therefore, the Love Your Neighbor Coalition calls upon the Commission on a Way Forward and the Council of Bishops to develop a plan that maintains the UM connection and removes all forms of language that discriminates against LGBTQ persons from the Book of Discipline.

We call upon the delegates to the 2019 special session of General Conference to act to maintain the UM connection and remove all forms of language that discriminates against LGBTQ persons from the Book of Discipline.

Furthermore, we call upon all United Methodists to join together in love, grace, and compassion, to recognize “us” reflected in each other, and to work to strengthen our relationships and our United Methodist connection and restore our ubuntu, regardless of where we stand on the theological or political spectrums.

Finally, as we look beyond the 2019 General Conference, we call upon those who become delegates to the 2020 General Conference and upon all United Methodists to careful examination of other ways in which we harm our ubuntu, other ways in which we perpetuate new and historic injustices against one another such as sexism, racism, misogyny and colonialism, and to join together to work toward our continuing restoration and sanctification in those regards as well.

(Amen) It is a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere, to dream and work with LYNC. In fact, I think it is a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere, to dream with God and work towards the kindom.

The good news is, our baptisms calls us to seek a just (and anti-racist) world. Baptism not only welcomes us into the church, with its radical love and inclusion, but it welcomes us into the work of creating the kindom and working with God to fulfill God’s dreams.

In our Acts passage, the newly baptized are said to prophesy. As Rev. Dr. Ruthanna B. Hooke, explains, “in Luke’s gospel and Acts, to prophesy is to speak about the present; it is to speak God’s name on behalf of God’s work in the world.”² She goes on to say, “The gift of prophesy calls us to proclaim what God is doing even now in our world, and to do so with boldness. This Spirit moves us to proclaim God’s good news to the poor and liberation to the captives. This gift empowers us to ‘speak truth to power,’ confronting the ‘rules and authorities’ of this world with the revolutionary message of the gospel, and trusting that when we are called up on to offer this witness the Holy Spirit will gives us the words to say.”³ From that definition, the baptized are CALLED to prophesy, even when the truth we speak is uncomfortable for others to hear. We are CALLED to seek justice, including with our words. Of course, the more difficult part is finding the words, and the time, and the way to speak. Those are the struggles of day to day life of faith. The blessing here is the promise that God is working with us and through us to help us find the ways to speak!

In Mark, we hear a story of Jesus’s baptism. The New Oxford Annotated Bible says of the passage, “Jesus himself is baptized into the renewal movement that began before him.”⁴ This is a very important statement! First of all, Jesus was a Jewish man baptized by a Jewish man, and the first meaning of the ritual was found in their shared Jewish routes. Secondly, John the Baptist was leading a renewal movement in hopes of helping the people be freed from oppression. By the best work of scholars, we think that Jesus was baptized by John as a ritual of becoming a disciple of John’s. It is so helpful to remember that he was learning from a person already in the movement, even as he eventually became the teacher. In that way, Jesus is like the rest of us: both a learner in and a teacher in the movement we’re a part of.

This baptism thing is an entrance into the work of the Body of Christ – the work of dreaming with God and building God’s kindom. It is work that decries racism, sexism, homophobia, and all other claims that one human is more important than another. The final statement of our Gospel passage is, “This is my child, the beloved, with whom I am well-pleased.” We, as disciples of Jesus, believe those to be INHERENT to God’s nature – a blessing God has spoken over each and every human being. It is our life-long goal to learn to treat each other as such – both individually as as parts of our society and church.

As LYNC says, may we remember that we are called to “careful examination of other ways in which we harm our ubuntu, other ways in which we perpetuate new and historic injustices against one another such as sexism, racism, misogyny and colonialism, and to join together to work toward our continuing restoration and sanctification in those regards as well.” May we use our voices to prophesy whenever a statement is made – directly or indirectly – that fasley claims that some people aren’t beloved by God. Because, dear ones, we are ALL God’s children, and as such, beloved. Thanks be to God. Amen

1Archbishop Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope For Our Time (Doubleday, 2005).

2Ruthanna B. Hooke, “Pastoral Perspective on Acts 19:1-7” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 1 edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008) 230.

3Hooke, 234.

4Richard A. Horsely, “Mark” in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Third Edition, edited by Michael D. Coogan (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 58 New Testament.

–

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

January 14. 2018