BlackLivesMatter – First United Methodist Church Schenectady

“What Angers God” based on Amos 8:1-12

July 17, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Most of the time, when people quote Amos, they quote the sweet part (Amos 5:24) which says, “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” What they miss is that the verse they know is in the midst of more pieces just like the one we just read. The paragraph that verse is in, is attributed to God, saying:

21 I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
22 Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
23 Take away from me the noise of your songs;

I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
24 But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

25 Did you bring to me sacrifices and offerings the forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? 26You shall take up Sakkuth your king, and Kaiwan your star-god, your images that you made for yourselves;27therefore I will take you into exile beyond Damascus, says the Lord, whose name is the God of hosts.

I say that mostly so that you don’t think our passage from Amos today is the weird part of the book. Amos loves justice and righteousness, and he speaks about a God who cares about how people are treated. But, even for prophets, Amos isn’t a cheerful one. He believes that the people of God have utterly failed to uphold their end of the covenant and that their utter destruction is imminent. He says so, and people hate it.

Looking at today’s text, this is one of the times that Biblical translation totally ruins the play on words. Amos sees a basket of summer fruit and the word for “summer fruit” sounds like the word for “end.” Therefore the first hearers would have noticed the play on words and been able to follow, but for us the textual connection is just obscure. We are left to trust the Hebrew scholars who tell us that it goes like. that This is a vision and a pronouncement about the end of life as Israel knew it.

Most scholars think that the book of Amos reflects prophetic oracles that derive from Amos himself, although they have been edited and a false ending added to soften the original end of the book! They think it came into its present form during the exile (587-539 BCE), so about 200 years after the prophet lived and spoke. As one scholar puts is, the oracles of Amos, “mainly condemned the ruling class in the north for their oppressive treatment of poor and needy members of society, and threatened that Israel would be punished by God, probably by military invasion and defeat. … Amos does not condemn Israel for faithless foreign policies; rather, he concentrates on the treatment of one section of society by another.”^¹ This oracle certainly fits that description.

There is a lot of destruction predicted, and that may reflect both the historical sayings of Amos and the historical remembering of both the Northern Exile (722 BCE) and the Southern one, since it got written down after both of them. I would like to focus, though, on the complaints that Amos names as the issues God is having with the people:

that they “trample on the needy”

and “bring to ruin the poor of the land”

they are impatient with religious observance, wanting to get back to making money

they cheat the people with improper weights and measures

they are “buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals”

instead of selling food to people, they sell them mostly inedible food leftovers

These are both individual and communal wrongdoings. While each individual seller is responsible for their own actions which are wrong, that’s not all that is happening. It is because EVERYONE is doing this trampling that the poor are trampled. If some of the merchants were fair, people would have good options. If there were regulations of weights and measures, the people couldn’t be cheated. Society has to look the other way, and the empowered have to choose to do nothing in order for the poor and powerless to be so completely decimated. The wrong that is done is done by each person doing it and by the whole for not stopping it.

The line “buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals” is one of the more provoking in the Bible. It exemplifies the reality of greed – that when one person is trying to get rich, the people they are getting rich off of are paying the price. In reality, this was likely happening. It was common in ancient days (and ones not so long ago) for people to get so deeply into debt that they would sell themselves or their children into slavery to pay off the debt. The vision of God in the Torah which forbids interest AND forbids the selling of ancestral land, seeks to create a society without people being sold to pay off debts, but the people weren’t living that vision. People were cheating each other to make greater profits off of sandals, and those who were poor and vulnerable were being bought and sold because of the injustices of those profit margins.

I can imagine the justification of the grain sellers in the markets in Bethel, their responses to hearing Amos’s claims. Can’t you? They would say, “I have to feed my family! And I can’t do that if I sell the wheat in pure form because the harvest wasn’t good enough.” They would say, “I know my scale isn’t balanced, but did you see the guy over there? His is way worse!” They would say, “Yes, I’m doing OK for myself, but I work hard and I’ve earned what I have!” They would say, “It is the people’s choice to buy where they want, it isn’t my responsibility to take care of their well-being.” They would say, “If you don’t have enough money, you don’t get to buy the good stuff.” They would self-justify to the end, and in doing so deny their shared humanity with the people who happened to be poor or needy.

This spring I went to a training put on by the United Methodist Women about Human Sexuality so that I qualified to teach “Human Sexuality” MissionU this summer. They’re coming quickly! During the exercises we did to experience the curriculum we heard from a survivor of child sex trafficking. In the video she mentioned how many children are trafficked and how many people they were expected to sleep with every night. I did the math my head. By low estimates, 2,000,000 times a night, a child is paid for sex in our country. Suddenly it occurred to me that this means that there are A LOT of people choosing to use the bodies of children in this way. My mind was blown. I had no idea that so many people were engaged in such behavior, and it made me rethink our society as a whole.

It also led me to continued research, and I found quotations from men who bought sex with sex workers which are entirely too disturbing to be read from this pulpit.^² Even more distressing was that according to the research that is out there (which is mostly LOUSY by the way) the people who are buying sex are pretty NORMAL. Talk about “buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandal” though! People who have enough to spend some as discretionary income are using it to buy access to the bodies of people who have no choice. (Although I acknowledge the reality that there are people who choose out of true free will and not just economic circumstances to sell their bodies, I believe that is rare enough and the harms done to those who do not truly have choice are severe enough that it is worth focusing on those who do not have control.) Most of sex that is bought and sold is done of desperation, addiction, and usually a lack of control over one’s life. Yet, people buy it.

People BUY access to another person’s body – quite often young girls who have been taken away from their families and friends. It is very clear to me that the harms that Amos spoke about, the “buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandal” are very much still alive and well here and today. In Schenectady we know that there is plenty of prostitution and sex trafficking, and we know that once the casino opens we will have a lot more.

We also know, at least if we are listening to Amos, that God cares about the people that society ignores. The poor, the needy, the disenfranchised, the “least, the last, the lost, and the lonely” to name a few. God gets upset over the treatment of people who society tries to pretend don’t exist.

This week I was given the honor of being invited to sit on a panel to talk about the #BlackLivesMatter movement in Schenectady, and in particular the relationship between minority communities and our police forces. There were many articulate comments made about the ways that people who live in dark skin are told that they don’t matter. Some of the worst of those are known to us in the homicides perpetrated by police, but there are a million tiny cuts that happen every day in our city and county and country to people in dark skin.

Our society defines some people as mattering and others as not. That’s why we have to say #BlackLivesMatter. That’s why we have to be informed about sex trafficking and think about the reality that people BUY one another – if even only for minutes at a time. God is angered by the ways we dehumanize each other. God is angered when we allow injustice to fester and the vulnerable to pay the price. I’ve said before, and I still believe that the root sin is dehumanizing other beloved children of God. Everything derives from that.

Amos threaten the people with being abandoned by God, defeated in war, and the destroyed by an earthquake. That is to say, he thought God was angry, and angry enough to act on behalf of the people that the king and his empowered court had abandoned. I agree that God is angry, although I disagree with Amos about God’s methods. Given the injustices of today, I simply hear God crying and begging us to pay attention all of God’s people.

In the #BlackLivesMatter conversation we were encouraged to participate in Study Circles (I believe they will be coming back and we will get information out), to talk to people are different than we are, and to continue the work of educating ourselves on racism and – where it applies – white privilege. There is also a plan for continued conversation in our city.

With regard to sex workers and human trafficking, there is a a local resource that is doing great work. (Please consider this your mission moment in the sermon.) “Patty’s Place is a drop-in support and referral center for women engaged in sex work. They provide basic services such as food, showers, hygiene items, clothing, HIV testing, and a secure resting place, which help these women be safer in their current lives. They also offer counseling and referrals for longer-term services that can help women improve their lives and leave the sex trade. Most of the women with whom they work have suffered from years of abuse and have a variety of overlapping problems and needs. Patty’s Place gives these women a network of supportive relationships and help navigating the diverse services they need.” If you want to help, their two biggest needs are volunteers and donations. Volunteers are needed to do outreach and to do administration work. Donations are useful both as money and as supplies. Today they are mostly needing new underwear in all sizes and deodorant. If you get donations to us, we will get them to Patty’s place.

As the casino gets closer to opening, we are needing to prepare for expansions of dehumanization in our city. Studies tell us that there will be more trafficking and more people looking to buy sex. They also tell us that there will be more corruption, which means more injustice. There will likely be more crime, and more of it violent. As incumbent as it already is on us to re-humanize other people, and to recognize all people as beloved by God, there are going to be new challenges to that work. The current projections are that the casino will open in the first quarter of 2017.

There is a lot of work to do. Some of it, however, is in getting quiet and listening. We are not going to be able to invert all of the damage to our communities created by the city. Singlehandedly, we cannot even solve the struggles our city already has. We will need to focus a bit, listen for how we are best able to rehumanize God’s people, and get ready to do it. That is, while I encourage us to continue the work of building the kin-dom, loving the people, transforming injustice, and acknowledging all of God’s children, I also encourage us ALL to take some deep breaths. Maybe even a few months of deep breaths. Things are going to get harder around here, and we are going to need to be calm, centered, steady, and supportive of each other to be useful in changing things.

We aren’t called to be like the merchants in Bethel that Amos spoke to. Instead, we are called to take responsibility for the ways that our society diminishes beloved children of God, and do our part to change it. Some of that involves being quiet and observant to notice what is going on. Thanks be to God that there are so many ways we can participate in acts of love and justice. Thanks be to God that we are called both to action AND to Sabbath. May we learn to do both well. Amen

1John Barton “Introduction to Amos” in The New Interpreter’s Study Bible edited by Walter J Harrelson (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 2003) 1279

2Two of them, “Prostitution is renting an organ for 10 minutes” and “Being with a prostitute is like having a cup of coffee, when you’re done, you throw it out” found at http://www.ksufreedomalliance.org/sex-trafficking.html

–

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

June 17. 2016

Sermons

“Infuriating Plumb-Lines” based on Amos 7:7-17

July 10, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

This poem is entitled “Allowables” and it is by Nikki Giovanni:

	I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn't
And she scared me
And I smashed her

I don't think
I'm allowed

To kill something

Because I am

Frightened¹

And yet, so many people are dead because others were afraid. We, as a country, are frightened.

The fear lives in us in many ways. We have anxiety for our own futures and for the futures of those we love, particularly of younger generations. We are afraid of the world that is becoming, particularly with regard to: Global Climate Change and the ways it is destabilizing the world; the global refugee crisis and the millions of humans left without a place to call home; and the global economy, still slumped in many ways and still biased to producing wealth for the rich by continuing to devalue the lives of the poor.

We are afraid, as well, of the prevalence of violence. Violence also comes in many different forms to keep us afraid. Around us there is domestic violence (emotional, physical, and sexual), violent crime, mass shootings, bombings, terrorism, and of course war – both declared and undeclared. Violence is terrifyingly common!

We a country that lives in fear of violence and death for ourselves and our loved ones. Most of us are afraid of not having enough to survive – no matter how much we have right now. We are afraid that we too could become refugees. We are afraid that our government and way of life could collapse under us (or is collapsing under us.) We are afraid of what another single person could do out of their fear or anger.

I watched the videos of the shootings that were perpetrated by police this week. I didn’t want to, but I did because it didn’t feel responsible to stick my head in the sand. It was clear that the officers were responding to their fear, and not to the actual events occurring around them. It is not yet clear what motived the police shootings in Dallas, and what we hear indicates that it was motivated by hatred. Yet, I suspect there is fear under that as well.

The fear itself is not the problem, although it is nearly epidemic. The problem is how the fear gets dealt with. It get denied, repressed, and projected – rather than admitted to and faced. That makes it stronger and less rational. Furthermore, the projection usually means that fear gets placed on people perceived to be “other”. That’s when fear gets dangerous. This, however, isn’t a new phenomenon.

In fact, I think what we see in our society today is also reflected in what Amos was calling out in his society in the 750’s BCE. Amos’s life as a prophet occurred during the reign of King Jeroboam II, who was the most “successful” king in the history of Israel. He was successful militarily, economically, and politically. He restored the kingdom to its largest known boundaries, brokered deals with other leaders, and the nation prospered. Well, like it goes, the wealthy prospered. Amos was from Judah, so the other country from whom Israel had succeeded in a civil war. Amos describes himself as a simple farmer, called by God to speak what others would not.

As Rev. Dr. Thomas Mann eloquently put it in my reading this week, “Prophesy is the gifted ability to see what other people cannot or will not see. Prophets focus primarily on the moral and spiritual conditions of a nation; they do not simply predict future events but warn of consequences to injustice.”² The nation of Israel was “successful” but as we’ll hear next week, Amos accuses the wealthy and the king of “buying the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals.” (Amos 8:6) The cost of “success” was oppression. Amos was calling out the upper class for what they did to the lower class – and if you are patient, I’ll get to how that has to do with fear.

When people are oppressing others there are two interconnecting ways that they have to dehumanize the people they are oppressing. First of all, to choose to oppress someone requires creating a narrative that says that the other person or people matter less than you do. That can be done lots of ways: via race or gender or age or economic status or SAT score or position or whatever. Secondly though, to choose to oppress another person or people is an inherently terrifying act. When you are an oppressor, you have to be aware (at least subconsciously) that YOU could be the oppressed instead of the oppressor. Given that reality, it becomes imperative to continue to dehumanize the other, to oppress them further, to keep as much separation as possible between your full humanity and their partial humanity. Also, you have to make sure that they will never rise up and oppress you.

This was a significant piece of our history as a nation that engaged in racially “justified” slavery. There was a narrative – the race theory- created to justify dehumanizing people. There was a constant fear of slave rebellion, and there was a terror of slaves wanting to do harm to their masters like the harm done to them. The cycles of violence against people of color were deep, as was the fear of white people of being treated the way they treated their slaves. Both the violence and the fear live on. At the Schenectady Black Lives Matter march on Thursday someone made a sign that said “This is the new genocide of Black People.”

Race, of course, is not the only marker used to justify oppression. Any “otherness” will do – real or imagined. Often the marker has been economic – although the definitions of who gets to be wealthy and who doesn’t has changed with place and time. In Amos’s time, some of the poor in that society were poor by position: widows because they had no male protection nor access to land, orphans because they had no male protection nor access to land, and foreigners because they no male protection that counted nor access to land. Some would have been poor by circumstance – because of bad harvests or because there were too many male children in a generation or because they were the youngest sons of youngest sons.

There were people living in poverty, and the policies of those in power was to add to their struggle with oppression, rather than to lighten their load with policies of support. The vision of the Torah is of a nation where the widows, orphans, and foreigners are provided for, and where it is not possible to slip into generational poverty. By this time though, the people who claimed the vision of the Torah were acting more “normally.” They were participating in systems that used the labor of the poor to enrich the wealthy and strengthen the power of the already empowered. As Mann says, “For Amos, the primary failure is injustice,”³ and injustice is prevalent.

Amos doesn’t think God likes the injustice of Israel, nor the way it found its “success,” one little bit. He expresses it by suggesting that justice is not found in the nation, and God is so upset as to abandon the people. That’s the role of a prophet. The role of “those in power” is played in this story by Amaziah, the priest of Bethel. According to Mann, “Bethel is something like northern Israel’s ‘national cathedral.’ The collusion of religious and political institutions is blatant when Amaziah says to Amos, ’[Bethel] is the king’s sanctuary.’ One would have thought it was God’s.”⁴ In particular, the name “Beth-el” means “house of God” so the suggestion here is not overly subtle.

Amaziah wants Amos to GO AWAY, because he is upsetting the kingdom by speaking the truth. Then Amos basically predicts the exile of the Israel, which will happen Assyria in a single generation. The important pieces of this passage for me today are: that the role of the prophet was to speak uncomfortable truths, that the man understood to be speaking for God was calling for justice for the least empowered, and that those in power desperately wanted the one calling for justice to HUSH.

Often prophets, however, have to point out not only what injustice looks like but what consequences it has. Amos pointed out that the “success” of Israel was unstable and could lead to its demise. As people of God, prophecy is some of our work. We end up having to say that unless this country turns itself around and faces its own racism as well as its ridiculous gun laws, the violence we experience now will only continue to escalate.

There is such fear in our society because there is such oppression, and those of us who benefit from it live in fear that it will turn around and oppress us. (Because life and society are complicated, almost of us benefit from it in some ways and are oppressed by it in others.) Injustice anywhere is not ONLY a threat to justice everywhere, is it a source of our anxiety and fear, and thus a piece of the violence of our society itself.

There are many intersecting issues in our country today, and I’m expecting that many of you who are listening have already done many of the things that can make a difference. I’m going to remind us all of them again though, because in the midst of fear it is a good reminder that we can do things that matter.

We take courage from each other and from the God we know so that we can acknowledge our fears without repressing them nor letting them rule our lives.

We continue to educate ourselves about our past and present as a nation with racial oppression, to destabilize the myths of racism and thereby change them.

We can speak up about gun access.

We name injustice and oppression wherever we see it, and we participate in actions to change them. We do this even when it infuriates others.

We love all of God’s people as much as we can as often as we can and as well as we can, and trust that God will use our love to build the world as God would have it be.

We trust that if we work together, and act out of faith, hope, and love, even the brokenness of our country can be fixed.

May it be so, and may the God of justice use us to help heal our country, even if it means infuriating others with our calls for justice. Amen

1“Allowables” a poem by Nicki Giovanni, in her book Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid, page 109.

2Thomas W. Mann in “Exegetical Perspective on Amos 7:7-17” found on page 221 of “Feasting on the Word Year C Volume 3” edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2010).

3Mann, 221.

4Mann, 225.

–

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

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

“John Wesley v. Race Relations: Grace” based on Galatians 3:27-29…

August 17, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

This
week Target announced its intentions to remove gendered labels from
its toy and children’s bedding sections. They also intend to remove
gender clues – like the blue or pink background of the shelves.
Foxnews.com started their article on this change in this way, “Target
stores are undergoing a sex change of sorts.”¹
Many people seemed to respond to the news as Fox covered it – as if
Target was attacking gender, and they attacked back.

They
told Target that they’d take their business elsewhere, because they
were traditional people who loved their children. That is, they
spoke as if their lives and values were under attack. I think, for
many people, they were. Now, I don’t think that the concept of
gender is particularly fragile, and I have no concerns that it is
about to break. So I don’t think it is in need of vigilantes
defending the importance of placing Barbies on shelves with a pink
background. At the same time, if gender roles are one of the primary
ways that people make sense of the world, then defending the roles,
and defending the ways the roles are formed, would be a way of
preserving the world as one knows it and in this mindset, as it
should be.

It
is easy enough to understand why people, who are aware of changes
happening all around them, might choose to cling to the social norms
that help them make sense of the world. The fear that could come
with sensing change and feeling out of control could easily arise
into a desire to maintain the norms you have always known. However,
it is dangerous.

People
experienced their values and ways of life under attack with this
news, and they attacked in kind. There are all kinds of ways that
behaviors like this happen in our society. Most often as a society
we encourage others to behave as we see fit through passive
aggressive comments, but more extreme measures, including violence,
are used as well. It amazes me, actually, how strongly people
associate their security and well-being with the maintenance of
social norms.

The
value placed on social norms relates to the high murder rate for
trans women of color. In the United States, the murder rate is 4.5
people out of 100,000 people every year².
Or, 1 in 22,222. The murder rate for trans women of color is 1
person out of 8.³
That makes it about 3000x higher than the US average. 3000. Times.
Higher. MURDER. Rates. The mere existence of trans women of color
threatens people so profoundly that they get killed. The combination
of racism, sexism, and gender normativity has proven deadly at
enormously high rates.

People
will go to extremes – including extremes of violence – to
maintain their world view and the social norms. This is also true of
the myths we live by. The reasons for slavery were profit, but
church leaders and theologians used their authority and the authority
of the Bible to justify it.⁴
They were part of the creation of the theory of race.

Yes,
the theory of race was created
to justify the money made for slave owners by the labor of slaves.
The myth called race theory has killed millions of people. I have
read about this before, but I reviewed my knowledge this week by
reading a paper by Audrey Smedley, Professor of Anthropology Emerita
Virginia Commonwealth University. She says,
“Race
originated as a folk idea and ideology about human differences; it
was a social invention, not a product of science. Historians have
documented when, and to a great extent, how race as an ideology came
into our culture and our consciousness.”⁵
“English laws had terminated all forms of slavery centuries before
their arrival in the Americas.”⁶

The
differentiation between poor workers in the colonies started because
of the fear created by the Bacon rebellion in 1676. It was a threat
to the social stability of the time. Smedley explains, “The
decisions that the rulers of the colony made during the last decades
of the 17th century and the first quarter of the 18th century
resulted in the establishment of racial slavery. They began to pass a
series of laws separating out Africans and their descendants,
restricting their rights and mobility, and imposing a condition of
permanent slavery on them. … Some colony leaders began to argue
that Africans had no rights under British laws and therefore could be
subject to forced labor with impunity.”⁷

She
continues, “Colonial leaders were … laying the basis for the
invention of race and racial identities. They began to homogenize all
Europeans, regardless of ethnicity, status, or social class, into a
new category. The first time the term “White,” rather than
“Christian” or their ethnic names (English, Irish, Scots,
Portuguese, German, Spanish, Swede) appeared in the public record was
seen in a law passed in 1691 that prohibited the marriage of
Europeans with Negroes, Indians, and mulattoes (Smedley 2007, 118). A
clearly separated category of Negroes as slaves allowed newly freed
European servants opportunities to realize their ambitions and to
identify common interests with the wealthy and powerful. Laws were
passed offering material advantages and social privileges to poor
whites. In this way, colony leaders consciously contrived a social
control mechanism to prevent the unification of the working poor
(Allen 1997).”⁸

From
this early history, we gained the conception of race. A final note
by Smedley, “In the 1860s, slavery ended, but “race” as social
status and the basis of our human identities remained. Race ideology
proclaimed the existence of separate, distinct, and exclusive groups
that were made unequal by God or nature.”⁹

The
intentional creation of race, for the purpose of legitimizing the
barbarous act of slavery – already known to be barbarous for
centuries in British law – but necessary to turn a profit has
dehumanized human beings and legitimized their murders for nearly 400
years.

We
see, almost every day now, the impact of this theory on the lives of
people in our country. The creation of race theory was not only the
creation of a theory about so-called “blacks” but also the
creation of the idea of so-called “whites.” Since then it has
expended to define and separate people into various “categories”
of humanity with associated stereotypes. The categories also have
associated murder rates. People of color, both men and women, young,
middle aged and old are being killed in our country, including by our
police forces at atrocious rates. The THEORY of RACE is still
perpetuating its evil. It
is time to throw the theory out and replace it with a better one.

A
better world view comes from a more ancient source. Paul says,
“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free,
there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ
Jesus.” As followers of Jesus, we are not to buy into social norms
about race, or gender, or any theory that some humans have value and
others don’t. There is no distinction. We are united. We are one.
A harm to any individual is a harm to us all.

The
gospel passage about the Syrophoenician woman comes to the same point
as Paul! Ched Myers, author of Binding
the Strong Man,
points out that the woman’s “solicitation is an affront to the
honor status of Jesus: no woman, and especially a gentile, unknown
and unrelated to this Jew, would have dared invade his privacy at
home to seek a favor. A rebuff by Jesus thus is not only
understandable but expected.”¹⁰
And the dog comment was REALLY insulting. But she doesn’t give up!
She argues back with him. Which was a further affront to his honor.
Yet, at that point he concedes the argument, acknowledges her point,
and
heals her daughter, thereby extending his ministry outside of Jewish
boundaries. And it is said that he heals her daughter because of her
ARGUMENT, not her faith!! To go back to the words of Myers, “Jesus
allows himself to be ‘shamed’ (becoming ‘least’) in order to include
this pagan woman in the new community of the kingdom; so too Judaism
will have to suffer the indignity of redefining its group boundaries
(collective honor) in order to realize that gentiles are now welcomed
as equals.”¹¹

I
love the words. “Judaism will have to suffer the indignity of
redefining its group boundaries in order to realize that gentiles are
now welcomed as
equals.”
Doesn’t it sound like the work of transforming race theory? It also
sounds like the work of grace, the unmerited favor and love of God
which we all experience whether we realize it or not.

Grace
is God’s love for us. We are not expected to be up to the standard
of offering pure unmerited favor and love to others AND YET it is the
goal of Methodists to put aside the things that keep us from being
able to do so until nothing but God’s love lives in us – that is –
until grace can shine through us. We’re at trying to attain life
lived as grace.

By
both of our texts today, we are challenged to extend the love of God
beyond any reasonable boundary – to all people. In Christ we are
called beyond the things that separate us, beyond the things that
define us, into wholeness with God and with each other. Social norms
don’t stand in the way of grace. We are to throw away anything that
gets in the way of living toward grace, including social norms.

Grace
is the most defining doctrine of United Methodists, likely based on
the theology of John Wesley which was entirely focused on it. It is
so our thing that Amazing Grace is our favorite song by a landslide.
Of all United Methodists, 39% claim it as their favorite song.¹²
And grace, it seems, is the essential way to transform the world.
It leads us to compassion. It leads us to humanizing other people.
It stretches us beyond our comfort zones and our safe places. It
takes our norms and chops them to pieces, and in doing so makes space
for joy and love and wonder to abound.

In
this sermon series, in addition to all the other things that have
been happening, I’ve been sharing some of the ways I’ve recently felt
free to name and understand the Divine. John Shelby Spong in A
New Christianity for a New World
discusses the idea of God as the ultimate source of love. He says,
“One worships this God by loving wastefully, by spreading love
frivolously, by giving love away without stopping to count the
cost.”¹³

Sisters
and brothers – that’s it. That’s God. That’s the gospel. That’s
the Epistle. That’s John Wesley’s point in new words. That’s the
solution to race theory. Love wastefully, and let others see it.
Wasteful, boundless, ridiculous, wonderful love – grace – changes
the world. Thanks be to God. Amen

1 Cody
Derespina, “Target
going gender neutral in some sections” on published on August 13,
2015 at
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/08/13/target-going-gender-neutral-in-some-sections/
Accessed August 15, 2015
2 https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/1tabledatadecoverviewpdf/table_1_crime_in_the_united_states_by_volume_and_rate_per_100000_inhabitants_1993-2012.xls
3 http://www.transstudent.org/transvisibility
4 Summary
of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States
chapter 2: “Drawing the Color Line” (Perennial Classics, USA,
1980)
5 Audrey
Smedley “THE HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF RACE… AND WHY IT MATTERS”
a paper presented at the conference “Race, Human Variation and
Disease: Consensus and Frontiers,” sponsored by the American
Anthropological Association (AAA) on March 14-17, 2007 in
Warrenton, Virginia. Found at
http://www.understandingrace.org/resources/pdf/disease/smedley.pdf
on August 15, 2015, page 2.
6 Smedley,
3.
7 Smedley,
4
8 Smedley,
6.
9Smedley,
7.
10Ched
Myers, Binding the Strong Man
(Orbis Books: Maryknoll, NY, 1988, 2008), page 203.
11 Myers,
204.
12 http://www.kintera.org/atf/cf/%7B3482e846-598f-460a-b9a7-386734470eda%7D/survey1.pdf
13 John
Shelby Spong A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional
Faith is Dying and How a New Faith is Being Born
(HarperSanFrancisco, 2001) page 72.

_____

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady
on August 16, 2015