Cords of Human Kindness

August 3, 2025March 17, 2026
by Sara Baron

“Cords of Human Kindness”based on Psalm 107:1-9, 43 and Hosea 11:1-11 August 3, 2025

Content note: this communion Sunday we also said goodbye to our former lay leader, youth group leader, Breakfast Coordinator, Social Worker, and sibling in Christ Sylvester as we send him off to retirement.

A lot of Bibles, and even the Lectionary page at Vanderbilt Divinity Library, label our Hosea passage “Like a mother, God loves Israel.” I can see why. The passage clearly talks about God as a nurturing and loving parent. The one who taught their son to walk, who picked him and snuggled him, who fed him and healed him.

But, when I read the passage I was struck by the fact that there isn’t anything actually maternal about those acts of care-giving. Unless, of course the Hebrew for feeding referenced nursing and I just missed it because I was reading in English. But, it doesn’t – I checked. According to the New Interpreter’s Bible, the passage refers to parental work, but doesn’t have any gendered nuances – other than the ones we project on to it.

Now, as you may know, I’m all for holistic conceptions of the Divine and push back on masculine language and imagery of God instinctively. The concept of God as a loving MOTHER can be a gift to heal wounds that some people hold, and certainly moves towards wholeness in conceiving of the Divine. But, also, the concerns I have about the ways human fathers can make the conception of a Divine father too violent can also apply to human mothers. Human parents come with a lot of failings.

In this this case though, I wonder if we want to stay with it, in part. I wonder if there is healing in thinking of The Divine as a Gentle and Compassionate FATHER and in sanctifying Gentle and Compassionate FATHERHOOD rather than in pigeonholing Gentle and Compassionate Parenting to Motherhood.

We are a church that see Gentle and Compassionate Parenting on the regular. And we are blessed to see it from people of all genders. We know, because we see it, that people of all genders love their children. We watch mothers, fathers, and parents teaching their children to walk. Well, let’s be honest, its bigger than that too. We watch parents and grandparents and friends in Gentle and Compassionate Nurturing Care. I noticed months ago that I found it hard to track where my infant son Michael was in after-worship events because he got passed around so much! Many humans have lifted him to their cheeks, and led him with cords of human kindness. This community offers this Gentle and Compassionate Nurturing Care that reflects the Divine. And it is BEAUTIFUL.

With Michael though, he would get passed around – back before he got mobile – UNTIL he got to Sly. When he got to Sly, he stayed. All of you, somehow, read the room and wouldn’t separate the two. Sly’s Gentle and Compassionate Nurturing Care and Michael’s love of it was attended to with grace.

When I was looking for Photo Show entries this Lent, and “relationship” came up, I tried to find a picture of Sly holding Michael where Sly’s face was visible and Michael’s wasn’t. I couldn’t, so I didn’t submit one. Another of you did the same. Two of you submitted stunning pictures of the two them, and got cautious emails from me letting you know that the pictures were great and we’d savor them but not put them on the internet.

As a community we have seen something sacred in the care of one man for one baby, and made space for it and celebrated it.

It makes sense to me. There are a lot of ways that Sly has acted as Gentle and Nurturing Father in this community. (He is NOT the only one, but he is the one leaving after today, so I’m naming it today.) Sly feeds us. He makes things more beautiful. He shows up, time and time again. He brings his best and uses it to care for others. He brings laughter along with him everywhere he goes. And, in his time with us, he has devoted much of his energy to the care a youth group (now grown into young adults) and showing young people how to share love in the world.

I’m not supposed to be embarrassing Sly today. (Shrug). But normally I have to worry about him getting me back, and this time he’s leaving so he can’t 😉

Friends, I think it can be healing for our souls to think about the Divine as a Gentle and Compassionate Nurturing Parent. Far too often the Divine Parent imagery is that of judger, or punisher, dominator, or some other form of “Daddy-knows-best” weirdness. In Hosea the Divine Parent gets MAD because the child is being super awful. God claimed Israel as child, and asked Israel to be a beacon and example of mutual care and compassion and Israel KEPT ON FAILING. But the key is in verse 8, “How can I give you up, Ephraim?… My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.” God is mad, but God’s love is the defining parental act. The passage says, “I loved my child to teach them love, but they failed. And I love them anyway and will take care of them anyway.” It tracks perfectly with the Psalm affirming that God’s Steadfast Love Endures Forever, and God helps people even in the most dire of situations.

Beloveds, there is sacredness in nurture, in compassion, in care, in care-giving. Our society tends to minimize the value of care-giving, but as people of faith we live by a different value system. We see the sacred work that is tender and loving care. It is work that reminds us of God, it is work that shows us God with us. When we see tender and loving care, we are reminded that God is like that. Not one who powers over us, but one who holds us with gentleness.

So, thanks be to God for all the people who show nurturing, compassion, gentleness, and care. And, while we’re at it, thanks be to God for the moment we – as individuals – pull that off! (Quite often only by the grace of God.)

And, thank you Holy One, for a community that sees the power of Love that is compassionate and nurturing rather than overpowering and dominating. We are so grateful to be able to see the sacredness of gentleness. We are so grateful to show the world the power of nurturing love! Amen

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

August 3, 2025

Uncategorized

Untitled

May 26, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Starting With Care” based on Genesis 2:1-3 and Matthew 6:26-34

We’re going to start with the bad news: you can’t control anything.

Or, at least you can’t control anything important.

You can’t control how long you’ll live, what the quality of that living will be, what illnesses or injuries you will endure, how long your loved ones will live, if or when traumatic events will occur, nor how they’ll be responded to.

I was recently a part of a conversation about suffering led by a medical professional who – rather appropriately I thought – was worried about the fact that patients sometimes assume their suffering is God’s punishment. I agreed with him that this is just not TRUE, and it is awful to think that you are both in pain and that you deserve it. But, I am also aware that if pain and suffering aren’t a punishment from God, another option is that life is a crapshoot and there isn’t any meaning to be found in it – and for a whole lot of people that’s MORE uncomfortable than thinking God wills it. Because if God’s punishing them, or teaching them a lesson, then the suffering AT LEAST means something and maybe even has redemptive value. But if it was just a random thing, and it could have happened to anyone and just happened to happen to them – well, for a lot of people that’s WORSE.

Because then it is entirely out of their control. If God is punishing them, then IF ONLY they’d acted differently, then they could have prevented this from happening.

Right? It is an awful theology, but the human desire to pretend we have control is really quite powerful.

And, let’s be honest, we can’t control things but we can …. impact probabilities, right? Cancer is MORE likely if you smoke, if you don’t exercise, if you don’t eat well. Even better, you aren’t likely to get hurt falling off a rock wall if you don’t attempt to climb a rock wall. Right?

That said, once I broke a toe because a container of chili fell out of my freezer and landed on it. No rockwalls involved. Another time I sprained an ankle horribly – at the ski mountain – on the INDOOR stairs when I was grabbing lunch. Probabilities aren’t guarantees.

I find some comfort in the Matthew passage that tells us that worrying and trying to control the uncontrollable is in human nature. This one isn’t a modern day problem and we don’t have to blame the 24 hour news cycle, smartphones, or social media. This is a human problem. We are aware enough of the uncertainties of life to worry about what may happen.

Jesus seems to recommend not worrying about the little things – about eating and drinking and finding clothes. Which, funnily enough, were exactly things that most of his audience was worried about most of the time because he was speaking to people who often didn’t enough enough food, or drink, or a change of clothes.

In the face of their daily struggle for survival, Jesus says,

“Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?”

And I get his point. Life is vivacious, nature takes care of itself, hoarding is unnecessary, and truly no one is as beautiful as a flower. But also, I don’t get his point. Because it sounds a whole lot like saying, “Sure, there is a system of oppression out there that took away your family’s land and livelihood, and now you are hoping every day to get hired back to work the land so that you can afford to eat tonight, and sure you are likely to die soon of malnutrition, but don’t worry about it, God will take care of you.” And, while I TRULY believe that God does want to take care of everyone… well, deaths from malnutrition HAPPEN so it seems like that “promise” isn’t one that often works out.

Compassionate people don’t say to starving people, “don’t worry about food.”

So, what the heck is Jesus doing?

I think I did a bad job in picking this passage, particularly that I didn’t look at the verses PRECEEDING these ones. Namely, “No one can serve two masters for a slave will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” These lines are a big deal in the Bible. For a world in which people thought being wealthy was a sign of God’s favor, it really turns the tables. This passage encourages the poor while challenging the wealthy. And it is placed before the bit about the lilies of the field.

And I wonder if Jesus is at this point talking to wealthy people. The ones who DO have enough to eat, but are worried about it anyway. The ones who do have clothes, but fret that they’re not enough.

And I wonder, too, if Jesus is doing one of those really deep teaching things where he is saying to the poor – if you work together you’ll have enough, but when you have enough don’t worry about getting more like the rich people do. Trust in each other and God, don’t horde.

Furthermore, I think maybe Jesus wants those who are oppressed to look up long enough to see they system that is oppressing them, and that it isn’t God’s will. God made a world of abundance, PEOPLE are keeping each other from accessing it. Part of the problem of trying to survive is that you can be so pre-occupied with it that you don’t notice you shouldn’t have to fight that hard.

God made enough. It was true then, and it is true now, just as it is true that people died of not having enough then and people die of not having enough now. God made enough, people have distribution problems. And I think it’s OK to worry about the distribution problems.

I really appreciated this week’s essay from We Cry Justice. I’d like to read a little more of it to you:

God creates human partnerships. In short, God created a system whereby all material and emotional life is tended to. So if we are to be fruitful and multiply – if we are to add to creation – the systems we create must extend the provision of care.

…

Within us lies the potential to create and re-create a system that revolves around and produces care, a system where needs are met. We will need each other to do so. We will need to be in partnership, working together to be fruitful and multiply.1

We can’t CONTROL anything, although we can do a lot of damage trying. We can, however, be in partnership with each other and God and seek to “extend the provision of care.” We can choose to notice that care is inherent in creation, and that God’s care hasn’t changed. We can remind ourselves that there is ENOUGH, and that’s good. We can remember the lilies of the field – when they’re useful – that creation is beautiful and awe-inspiring.

(Image of mutual care: Ellis Nurses with supporters picketing for better care for their patients, and for each other. Photo by Sara Baron)

We can remember that things aren’t now as they should be, but they CAN get better, that God is working with us to make them better, that we’re working together, that many people are in this together. That we want a world where no one has to worry about what they will eat or drink or wear, because the resources of the world are abundant there is enough for everyone – and in the kindom of God the resources are shared with the abundance of God.

It is a dream worth holding onto, and remembering, and seeking. We can start with care. And every little bit helps. We can’t control it, but we can shape it. Thanks be to God. Amen

1Solita Alexander Riley “In the Beginning, There Was Care” in We Cry Justice (Minneapolis, 2021), p. 145.

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

May 26, 2024