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February 4, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Yet Always Rejoicing” based on Deuteronomy 15:1-11 and 2 Corinthians 6:1-10

This church has been described a church who loves to learn. Its true. We love knowledge around here. We love learning things. We especially love learning things that help us know how to build the kindom of God, but I think it is fair to say that most of us also believe knowing more will help in the long run, so we’ll take learning for its own sake too.

We like knowing how things are. We like knowing how things could be. We like knowing how to get from here to there.

I am not an exception to this, I fit right in. Maybe I’m a little MORESO than average. And the desire to learn, and to know, and to consider are things I love about this church.

It also relates to some of our shared frustrations. Because we also want the world to value learning and knowledge, and to use knowledge for good, and generally to make things better, but we look around and that doesn’t seem to happen. (Or at least not fast enough.) Worse, we look around and the values we share: love, justice, compassion, inclusion, and humility are also not shared in the world.

We look around and things are a mess and we lose hope. And I’m going to play with hope and faith for Lent, so hold on to that for a few weeks. But for now, I think maybe we need a reminder that we may love to learn, and we may be invested in building the kindom of God, but at exactly the same time, we are not God. And God is going to work for good no matter what – with us, through us, despite us, no matter what. If we know something useful, great! If we don’t, God will find a way. If we find great partners, awesome. If not, God will find a way.

We end up being taught by the world that there isn’t enough. Right? There aren’t enough good jobs, so some people some people get ones that don’t pay enough. There isn’t enough good housing, so some people don’t get it. There isn’t enough… you name it and some people get the thing and some people don’t.

But that’s the way our society works, not the way God works. With God there is enough. There is enough love, everyone is loved. There is enough food, enough for everyone to be fed well. There is enough hope, enough to get us through. And, funny enough, there is enough MONEY for everyone to actually do OK. But the ways the world deals with debt and interest gets in the way.

Shifting from the world’s scarcity model to God’s abundance model is a hard thing to do! It takes constant awareness. It takes leaps of faith. It takes a community holding the truth of abundance together. And it takes God’s willingness to give us strength and knowledge to keep moving towards the narrative of abundance.

One important piece of the narrative of abundance for me these days is the reminder that there are enough people working for the kindom, that I can trust God working through all of us and only be responsible for my little contributions. I’ve been thinking about Jesus saying “my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” It sounds a bit like “We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything. “ from our Pauline reading today.

God’s abundance is there – including the abundance of rest and joy!!

So, I’m all for us continuing to be people who love to learn. We’re good at it, it is needed, and it helps us work with God. And I’m for us continuing to listen to God’s dreams, because they are amazing and because they inoculate us against the myths of scarcity. I’m for our work of justice and advocacy and our actions of compassion because they all build the kindom of God.

Part of our job, too, is to trust that if we do our part, God works with others to do theirs, and change happens. God plants seeds that can take years, decades, centuries to grow, but boy oh boy when they do! So let’s make sure we are nurturing God’s seeds in us and in our community, and hold on to the knowledge that with the God of abundance, all things are possible. Amen

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May 30, 2021
by Sara Baron

“Come, Holy Spirit”

In Easter evening the disciples were locked up together in a house, afraid of what would happen to them. It was into that enclave that stories of resurrection started to be told. And, it was in that enclave that some experiences of resurrection happened. According to Acts, the disciples were mostly together in that room for a rather extended period of time, praying, and …. just a little bit… starting to organize. As time went on, there were more people gathering together, functioning together as an extended family, but still they were gathered together in a tight circle, in Jerusalem.

And then came Pentecost.

Pentecost was and is a Jewish festival celebrating the first fruits of the wheat harvest. Faithful Jews had gathered in Jerusalem for the festival, just as faithful Jews had gathered for Passover, 50 days earlier. It was another of the 3 festivals that was a traditional pilgrimage feast.

A colleague of mine suggested that the first Christian Pentecost story, the one we read in Acts, required those days apart from the world.

Of course, at this point, we may scoff at 50 days. 😉 To the scoffers, I’ll offer a reminder of the 40 years of wandering in the desert, which the Bible also said was necessary to “get the people ready.”

As you may know, I do not believe in a God who punishes. I do, however, believe in a God who is willing to use any situation as a jumping off point for good. ANY situation. Those ideas can get confusing sometimes for people, because talking about what God does with a situation can SOUND like “God created this situation for good” but I don’t mean that! I just really believe that God is willing and able to enter any situation and seek the best possible outcome from that point, and often God is far more creative than we’d be able to imagine!

In Acts, 50 days after Easter, The Holy Spirit showed up, with gusto. God’s Spirit is a part of the understanding of the Divine in the Hebrew Bible as well, but the way the Spirit shows up is new. To be fair, the symbol of fire as representing God’s presence isn’t new, the burning bush helps us out there. And “tongues of fire” is a phrase that comes from Isaiah 5. The wind a symbol of the Spirit isn’t new either. But added up, it IS new.

God’s Spirit shows up, sounding like a rushing wind, looking like divided tongues of fire, and imparting the gift of being understandable to people of many nations, languages, and cultures. Robert Wall in the New Interpreter’s Bible says, “God’s spirit is poured out upon a community of believers. The Holy Spirit is not a ‘personal’ gift from God that each believer privatizes – ‘you can have your Spirit if I can have mine.’ This same Spirit of one God ‘appeared among them – on each of them’ as the distinguishing mark of a people belonging to God. The restoration of Israel is the work of this Spirit sent by God as promised (see 1:6) which is why the first auditors of the miracle of tongues were ‘devout Jews from every nation’ (2:5).”1

I must admit that this year I was particularly astonished by the list of the places the devout Jews were from. It served as a profound reminder of the history of the diaspora, of the people of Jewish faith being displaced, which is especially notable when Judaism has an especially strong theology as being people of the (promised) land.

This fits the history of the Jewish people, of course. They settled on land that was a crossroads between civilizations, and as Empires expanded they expanded to include the crossroads. As Empires contracted, other Empires expanded, and a long, difficult history of independence, tributes, colonization, and external control ALREADY characterized their history by the time of Jesus. Wars had come and gone. Empires had come and gone. And each time, people had come and gone, dispersing the “people of the land” to many lands.

It fits, as well, that dispersed people of the land would have a tradition of pilgrimage to come back home to the land.

These themes of place feel so strong in this story this year. The followers of Jesus being so afraid that their world contracted to a single room, or perhaps a home. The devout Jews being so broadly scattered and making such profound efforts to come “home” to worship. The ways that distance separated them even when they were in Jerusalem, by dress, and culture, and LANGUAGE.

The idea of a miracle of understanding. Of course, it makes sense to think about Christian Pentecost as being the antithesis of the Story of the Tower of Babel. In the Tower of Babel story, God was afraid the people had too much power together and seprated them with language. In the Pentecost Story, God’s Spirit blesses the people with connection and the capacity to speak and be understood. It could be said that God has gained trust in the people (and then it becomes a question of if we’ve earned it or God just gave it because God’s like that.)

Sometimes I yearn for the miracles of Pentecost, most often when I am speaking with someone whose language I share, but with whom I’m clearly not managing to communicate. The barriers of assumptions, connotations, life experience, expectations, values, and fears can make “shared language” distinctly insufficient for shared communication.

Yet, we are the inheritors of the Pentecost story. As one person put it, in Christmas we get the story of “God with us.” At Easter we learn that “God is for us.” At Pentecost we tell the story that God is IN us. The Spirit residing in and among us makes it possible for us to do God’s work in the world, to share love, to build the kindom – and sometimes even to understand and be understood.

While the pandemic continues around the world, and right here at home, in the United States many people are seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. Vaccines are making it possible to for life to change again. It may make sense to think of us as emerging from an overly small room. (Acknowledging, of course, the many who cared for us so well that they never were able to protect themselves. I hope for front line workers there is an emerging from fear.)

I believe that God is up to good among us, now, as God was up to good among the disciples then. I’m not arrogant enough to claim I know what God is up to, but I can sense…. something. This sermon is the last one I’ll preach exclusively online, at least for a while and perhaps for always. While we will keep online worship, we will also offer an informal outdoor worship service starting next week. Like the disciples, we’ll be in the city, able to be heard by those walking by. Maybe, God’s Spirit will make us audible in a new way as we emerge. But whatever God is up to, I know it is good. Amen

1Robert W. Wall “Refections on Acts 2:1-13” in New Interpreter’s Bible Vol X, ed. Leader E. Keck et al (Nashville: Abingdon, 2002), p. 57.