“Breathe” based on Exodus 32:12-23 and Matthew 22:15-22

October 18, 2020
by Sara Baron

Today’s
gospel is one of those really deceptive ones. You think you know
what it means, and then you go to explain it, and it splits out of
your fingers.

The
Jesus seminar puts Jesus’s words, “Give therefore to the emperor
the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are
God’s” in red, indicating that they think this reflects an
authentic teaching of Jesus. In fact, it is one of the statement they
are most sure of, it ranks 7^th.¹

The
challenge for me is that I read the Social Science Commentary on the
Synoptic Gospels this week (which I usually do), and it took issue
with how this text is usually understood.

“In
the twenty-first century, Europeans and Americans generally believe
there are four basic social institutions: kinship, economics,
politics, and religion. These are conceived as separate social
institutions, and people make arguments about keeping them separate.
However, in the world of the New Testament, people attended to only
two institutions as distinctive: kinship and politics. …

In
trying to understand the meaning of Jesus’ statement about rendering
to Cesar and God what belongs to each, therefore it would be
anachronistic to read back into the statement either the modern idea
of separation of church and state or the modern notion that economics
(including the tax system) somehow has a separate institutional
existence in a realm of its own. To assert here the frequent notion
that “two kingdoms” one political/economic and the other
religious, one belonging to Cesar and the other to God, are each
being given their due in the reply of Jesus is to confuse ancient
social patterns with our own.”²

Sooooo….
what does it mean?

I’m
not sure, but my best guess is that the clue comes in Jesus’s
question, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” The answer when
it comes to the coin is “Caesars” What equivalently bears God’s
image?

Well,
our faith tradition says… we do. We are made in God’s image, the
latin is “imago dei” – image of God. The equivalent of the coin
is…. people.

This
is a fantastic answer. It is faith-filled, deep, and sidestepped the
trap they were trying to put Jesus into. Even better, it took a
while to sink in. You hear, “Give to God what is God’s, and you
have to think, ‘well, what is God’s?’” And that is a very useful
question. The coin suddenly seems a lot less important, when both
people and creation are God’s!

For
me, this is a primary identity. Who am I? I am a beloved child of
God, made in God’s image.

It
is also expansive. Who are you? You are a beloved child of God,
made in God’s image.

In
a symposium I did this week, Adam Foss shared about being a District
Attorney, and slowly awakening to the depths of injustice in the
justice system. As he woke up, he realized he needed to ask the
community he worked for what they needed, and he was surprised by
their answers. They told him that what they needed most from him was
“to be seen as humans” and “to be treated with dignity.”

This
has me thinking about how and when society dehumanizes people. There
are, unfortunately, A LOT of answers, but I’ve been wondering mostly
when society has convinced ME to dehumanize people. And, the answer
is sort of difficult to sit with.

Rather
than share my own list, I’m going to give you a moment to consider
yours.

Foss
also talked about the culture in the DA’s office, where if anyone
expressed discomfort (or any other emotion), they were told they were
“getting too close to the case.”

Maybe
that’s what really hit me. Because, if I’m honest, there is so much
pain visible to me, that I have to look away from some or numb myself
from some in order to function. But to do that FEELS like
dehumanizing the ones I look away from (perhaps it is.)

This
week I also came across a suggestion from Nanea Hoffman which said,
“Note to self: you don’t have to continuously monitor all the
disaster and heartbreak in the world. You are not in charge of
outrage and grief. Witness it. Feel the feelings. But remember,
love is where you live.”

And
with that, a deep breath came out.

It
is important to know where injustice is happening, where people are
being dehumanized, and in particular where people are struggling
close to home. BUT, not to know for knowledge sake. To know for
action’s sake – and studies say that the more we know the less
likely we are to act, likely because we get overwhelmed.

One
of the INTENTIONAL strategies of the past few years has been to
overwhelm us with despair. (It has worked far too well.)

But
we are not made in the image of Caesar We are made in the image of
God. We cannot solve all the problems in the world – at once. But
we CAN make significant differences in the world, and in the world
around us. The small actions we take every day matter, because we
are MADE IN THE IMAGE OF GOD. We are God’s hands and feet and LOVE
in the world.

So,
what can you do to live in love this week? How can you let go of
despair? (Feel it but then let it go) How can you, like Moses, savor
the closeness of God? How can you connect with the humanity of
others?

A
suggestion, or two.

Take
deep breaths, stomach expanding breaths, often. Let them out with a
sigh.

It
helps. It may help even more if you remember that you are breathing
and breathing out the Divine.

And,
feel your feelings. Be with the despair, or the grief, or the joy,
or the anger, or the exhaustion. Even better, if you can trust
someone with them, name them. The more you accept your own humanity,
the better you will be able to accept the humanity of others.
Emotions are a reflection of souls.

And
that’s it, my friends. We are ALL made in the image of God. Thanks
be to God. Amen

1Robert
W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels:
The Search for the Autthentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA,
1993).

2Bruce
J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh Social-Science Commentary on the
Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) p. 397-8.

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

Sermons

“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

“All Messed Up” based on Acts 16:16-39

May 8, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

This story is all messed up. To begin with, Paul is a very questionable hero. He doesn’t seem to act in order to benefit the slave girl. In fact, the text says explicitly that he was “very much ANNOYED” by her and that’s why he healed her. Annoyance – not compassion, love, or concern for her well-being, annoyance.

Truth be told, the story doesn’t really seem to care about the slave girl either. The slave girl is not named, the text does not indicate that Paul ever spoke to HER directly, and it does not tell us what happens to her after she was “healed.” She’s a narrative means to an end.

The spirit in her is used to tell us that the followers of Jesus’s way were in fact slaves of the Most High God. Her status as a slave may exist primarily as a narrative device, whereby the enslaved is able to name the slave-to-God status of others. While it is suggested that her owner’s were angered by losing the money she had been making them, the accusations they made against Paul and Silas don’t even have anything to do with that.

Of the girl herself we know very little. She was a slave. She had a spirit of divination. It made her owners a lot of money. She followed around Paul and his company, and her truth-telling about them got annoying after a few days, so Paul ordered the spirt of out of and it came out. Then she wasn’t worth as much money.

Those aren’t terribly human facts to know about someone. We know nothing of her motivation, although her motivation could reasonably be assumed within the confines of the story, to be the spirit and not her! We don’t know what happens next for her. Is she beaten because she is now worthless? What back-breaking labor does she land in? How old is she anyway? What other work may she be used for now? What she grateful? Was the spirit something that benefitted her life or harmed it (go with the story on this one, we can’t change the story, so we might as well accept its premises for a moment).

Not only do we know nothing about her, we also don’t know why Paul failed to SEE her or have any mercy on her. If he had the power to take away the spirit, then maybe he could have done so earlier. On the other hand, having the spirit made her more valuable, which may have improved her life. But he doesn’t seem to CARE and neither does the story.

At best, this part of the passage might just be a retelling of the parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge.

[Jesus said,] ‘In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, “Grant me justice against my opponent.” For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” (Luke 18:2-5)

Paul gets worn down by a spirit, and orders the spirit out of slave girl. Like the judge, he doesn’t act out of justice or obligation, he uses his power because he is ANNOYED.

Later, when he gets out of jail because of his inborn status as a Roman Citizen, he demands HIS rights as a Roman Citizen, and is upset that he was mistreated because HE deserves better because of his power in the world. Paul demands a public apology, but only for how he was treated. He doesn’t ask about her status, or indicate that she mattered.

In Acts, Peter is presented as “the new Jesus.” Paul isn’t. Thanks be to God. I don’t know what Peter would have done in this case, nor can I really speak to what Jesus would have done. Yet, I’d like to believe they would have SEEN the girl, and not just been annoyed by the spirit. I want to think they’d worry about her life too. Stories of Jesus seem to imply that lives matter, even the lives of people who have been beaten down by life.

In this story, Paul fails to do so.

And yet, he doesn’t. The second half of the story is different from the first half. The interaction with the jailer is amazing, beautiful, miraculous, and shows an INCREDIBLE amount of empathy for the very person who was oppressing them. Paul and Silas cared about the jailer, and the ways that they responded to the jailer saved his life and showed him a new way of being. The way that Paul responds to the jailer is exemplary. He SEES him and cares about him, without even knowing him. That feels like how Jesus would have handled it.

The story of the earthquake in jail, and the prisoners staying put is pretty darn weird. I suppose Paul knew that the authorities would figure things out sooner rather than later, so he wasn’t particularly concerned. Yet in most cases in human history, the cycle of oppression wins out. One person or group oppresses another, and if the oppressed ever get a chance to lead, they respond with oppression as well. Prisoners taking gentle care of their jailers breaks the cycle of oppression. That being said, as a GENERAL rule, I don’t think this is a model we have to follow. It is a good thing to keep in mind when you already know you are SAFE, but not necessarily a good choice every time.

Paul’s actions in prison were very effective in proclaiming that the way of Jesus was different than the ways of the world. The jailer converted. Paul didn’t, however, call out the economic injustice, the inherent human dignity of the slave girl, or even the position of jailer in a system of oppression. Paul’s actions mostly left things the same, and didn’t lead people to fuss over them, other than worrying about if they’d get in trouble for misidentifying a Roman Citizen.

I think he could have done better. I think these stories are all messed up. That’s a relief! It indicates that sometimes the people of God mess up, and although we are doing our best, we fail to see the most loving way forward. Sometimes we don’t notice the calls for justice around us. Sometimes we’re just plain wrong! Often we don’t SEE.

Yet, God continues to work through Paul through the rest of Paul’s life. The writer of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles has told some pretty important stories for the history of human kind. That is, the failure of Paul and the story to get it right isn’t the final answer. (Not that this helps the slave girl one little bit. Nothing does.)

Yet, it doesn’t stop here. Paul kept developing, and learning more deeply how to love. He would eventually write the famous words to the Galatians, “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. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” (Galatians 3:28-29) Paul would come to know that slaves have value and that women have value. Perhaps if he looked back on his life, he would have regretted how he acted on that one day, but it didn’t define his life.

We can make mistakes, and learn to do better later. It’s normal. It’s human. In fact, we can’t do otherwise! God is certainly capable of forgiving us, and that should lead us to believe that we can be capable of forgiving ourselves.

want to share God’s love and God’s light at General Conference, even with those with whom I disagree. I don’t want to compromise, and I WILL NOT compromise on the inherent dignity and worthiness of all of God’s people regardless of sexual preference or gender identity. (Obviously.) And yet, the people who stand in opposition to inclusion are not the enemy. They simply don’t know better – yet. Many of us in this room have struggled along the journey to get to inclusion. (Some of us who are younger, had open-minded parents, and attended great churches in our youth didn’t have to struggle, but that makes us much more lucky than wise.) If those of us in this room, who now so consistently act out of regard for the wholeness of your sisters and brothers who are LGBTQI, were once not so sure, then it is clear that God’s grace can win in the hearts of others as well.

No one’s mind will be changed by yelling though, nor by nastiness. As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” Love is the only way forward, especially in the face of hatred and fear. As I get ready to leave, I’m pondering how to make space for God’s love to flow through me to drive out hate. I wonder how I can serve as a light.

Now, as previously discussed, I am convinced that the time has come for acts of disobedience and non-violent direct action that will disrupt the normal system. I believe that The United Methodist Church acts as an oppressor doing harm to beloved children of God, and I believe (as I have believed throughout my life) that I am to be part of changing that. The question is how to keep my heart and mind peaceful, steady, and focused on love while I do so. People are going to say terrible things, and things are at times going to go terribly wrong.

But the people who say terrible things are misguided, not evil. The things that will go terribly wrong are not permanent. God is love, God is creator, God is powerful beyond measure. God’s will win out in the end – either through The United Methodist Church or The United Methodist Church will die so that God’s love can live. Nothing else is the final answer. Nothing else can be. God’s love always wins. That is, the Love of God will win out in the end, no matter how much human beings at the church at large mess it up right now.

Two of my favorite prayer practices interrelate. I’ve mentioned them before, but it is worth a reminder today. One prayer practice is to breath in love and breath out stress, fear, and anything that holds you back from love/God. That one is wonderfully de-stressing. The other is to breath in the pain of the world, and allow God to transform it within you, so that you can breath out love.

It is my intention to pray that prayer over and over again. It is my intention to try to live that prayer through the next two weeks. When you are able, I invite you to join me. When the pain becomes too much to bear it may help. (If it doesn’t, return immediately to the other one and soak up love until you can go forward again!) We are, all of us, called to be God’s love and God’s light in the world. We are to participate in co-creating the world with God. We are to use our power to bring in the kin-dom. We are able to participate in changing hate into love.

Let us breathe. Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

May 8, 2016