“Life, Death, and Resurrection“ based on Isaiah 25:6-9 and Mark…

April 1, 2018February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

When I was a little girl, 8 years old I think, my family adopted a calico cat we named Marble Cake. We adopted her from the Humane Society, and she was beautiful. She was a little bit wild! The first time I held her, she extended her claws and exited by walking down my back. My parents thought she’d been mistreated earlier in her life, and assured us that if we were kind to her she would settle down.

The thing is, they were right. She changed in the matter of months. She was sweet and cuddly, a wonderful lap cat, and a fantastic companion for 18 years! Looking back on that moment when she settled into our lives, I’m especially grateful for my parents’ wisdom. Marble Cake needed to be able to establish her boundaries and have them be respected, so that the love we wanted to give her could break through. If we had ignored her, she wouldn’t have experienced love. If we had violated her boundaries, she never would have come to trust us. Worst of all, if we had fought back when – acting in fear- she hurt us, there would have been escalating violence.

I suspect that the story I just shared is particularly obvious to most of you. Hurting mammals respond with fear and fear often comes out as aggression. And any mammal who has been hurt needs consistent, gentle, loving care; and when it comes, miraculous changes occur. The irony is that human beings forget that we too are mammals, and we too need consistent, gentle, loving care. This forgetting causes problems on both the personal and the societal scale.

I want to look at the ways this plays out on the societal level. Let’s think for a moment about a group who is seen as a threat. This happens often enough! In fact, in the time of Jesus, the Jesus movement itself was seen as a threat. Conversely, from the perspective of the Jesus movement, the domination system of the Roman Empire was a threat!

Each of them responded VERY differently to the perceived threat though. The Roman Empire and its Roman appointed Jerusalem leaders worked the way most societies do throughout time. They decided to eliminate the threat, silence it, stop it. More concretely, they decided to kill Jesus to prevent the movement from continuing. Even though the Jesus movement was a nonviolent one, they stopped it violently. This is the most common way that the world works 🙁

Within the Jesus movement, those in power and authority were also a threat! The Jesus movement compromised primarily Galilean peasants whose lives were already threatened by the ways money flowed to the top in the domination system with didn’t leave enough for everyone to survive. They were further threatened when the Jerusalem leaders got scared of them. Jesus wasn’t trying to eliminate anyone though, he wasn’t even thinking of them as threats or as enemies. This is the man who taught love of enemies. Jesus was trying to change the system so that everyone benefitted, INCLUDING those who were currently oppressors. His nonviolent movement was aimed at the commonwealth of God where everyone can thrive. Now, of course, the oppressed are the most harmed in any system of oppression, BUT the oppressors are always also dehumanized by their participation in the system. Jesus was trying to bring a fuller life and a deeper humanity to all people, he was trying to bless the oppressors.

Reflecting back on Marble Cake, the Empire hit back when the cats claws came out, and Jesus loved the cat. Sometimes this is easier to see closer to our lives today. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote,

To our most bitter opponents we say: “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.¹

Rev. Dr. King and his followers acted like Jesus and his followers. They followed the path of nonviolence that transforms violence itself with the power of love. It is not an easy path, but it is a transformative one.

The world in the time of Jesus, as it was before him and as it has been after him, tended towards the ways of violence, oppression, and domination. There is a contrast between the ways the world most often has worked and the ways God would have the world work. And the primary difference is that the world uses violence to uphold inequity while God calls us to nonviolence and profound equity. (As people normalized to a capitalistic system, this should be squirmy.)

Jesus threatened the domination system of his day, in many ways. He offered free healing, which upset the economic systems dependent on gaining wealth from people’s illness. He taught everyone who came to him, which flagrantly defied the rules of social order (most particularly that only men were worthy of studying God). His teachings illuminated the injustices of the world around him. He spoke in ways that called out those who benefited from oppressing others, including in his own faith tradition. Additionally, he engaged in nonviolent direct action against the injustices of the Roman-Appointed Temple and the Roman-Controlled Passover celebrations. Worse yet, he was profoundly popular with the masses who were rekindling the power of their own faith tradition to find hope, connection, and reasons to challenge the way things were.

So, the Roman appointed Jerusalem leaders killed him. Yet, he maintained his commitment to nonviolence. He didn’t fight back, he didn’t flee, nor did he accept that what was being done was acceptable. He was killed, but he remained nonviolent and committed to God and God’s vision. He didn’t let the threat of violence, and the fear it induces, change his path.

This becomes particularly significant today. Marcus Borg said, “Easter is God’s YES to the World’s NO.” The World, with its preference for systems of domination and oppression, killed Jesus. The threat of violence became the punishment of death, and the world’s strongest commendation. But it failed.

Violence couldn’t force Jesus to comply, or conform, or even fight back and become a part of itself. Violence was powerless against Jesus! Death was powerless against Jesus, because they couldn’t change him or stop him! Because Jesus was able to face violence with nonviolence and disrupt its power, we know that we can too.²

Furthermore, the reason the Empire used violence against Jesus was to stop the Jesus movement. In that, it radically failed. Initially, their tactics worked. Peter was too afraid to claim Jesus, even after he’d followed him to find out what was happening. The disciples stayed away while he was crucified. (Exception being the female disciples who seem to have been there the whole time, although to be fair to the males, I don’t think they were seen as a threat and therefore weren’t threatened in the same ways. Likely they were mostly invisible to those who killed Jesus.)

So, the tactics of violence to induce fear worked BUT only temporarily. Then SOMETHING happened and changed things. Those same disciples who had denied Jesus and disappeared into the night became the leaders of the continuing Jesus movement and were unstoppable by the threat of violence from that point onward. All of the (remaining, male) disciples remained nonviolent while they were killed by the violence of the Empire. Whatever it was that changed the disciples from fear to fearlessness, from allowing violence to impact their actions to being impervious to violence, that’s what we call resurrection.

And it is our inheritance today. Jesus had a commitment to nonviolence, one that refused to be changed by the threat of violence. His disciples learned it. Today we celebrate it, and in our lives we are able to claim it! We are, today, the Body of Christ continuing his work and his legacy, and that requires that we use his means to seek his ends. To be followers in the way of Jesus “requires the unconditional and unilateral renunciation of violence.”³ Without that, we would easily fall into the other methods of fear, retribution, and fighting violence with violence. And Rev. Dr. King so clearly told us, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”⁴

The system of domination, oppression, and violence killed Jesus, but failed to stop his movement. God and Jesus can’t be stopped even by death! The Jesus movement got stronger. God’s work in the world built strength!

Mark tells us all this with only an empty tomb. In this earliest of gospels, all we get is the already fearless women, the suggestion of resurrection through a messenger, the hope for the disciples, and the fear that ends it all. This is the original ending of the Gospel of Mark and it is strikingly abrupt. “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” The end 😉 Scholars think the ending is intended to motivate action, that the listener would think “well, if the women didn’t tell, I have to” and/or “if they were afraid, I can overcome my fear and participate in the resurrection that they’re missing!”

To live out God’s nonviolence, is to live out God’s love, and is to live the kindom of God in the now. Some of this living is in celebrating, and that’s our particular work today! We are to see, name, and celebrate. We see, name, and celebrate nonviolence, the kindom, and resurrection. It is all around us, when we are looking. It is in the decrease in worldwide poverty and hunger, but also in the loving way our breakfast volunteers greet our breakfast guests. It is in the work of UMCOR, but also in the loving greetings shared as people enter the church. It is in the long, hard, work to change the norms and laws of society for the better but also in laughter between strangers.

Nonviolence, its expansive love, and its incredible power have changed the world and will change the world. Their power is seen in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus AND in his followers throughout time. May it be seen in us, in the strength of our love, and in the clarity of our commitment to follow his ways of nonviolence. May it be seen as we celebrate the resurrection and the reminder that violence cannot stop the love of our God. Amen

1Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “On Loving Your Enemies” found athttps://www.onfaith.co/onfaith/2015/01/19/martin-luther-king-jr-on-loving-your-enemies/35907 on March 29, 2018.

2Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Fortress Press: 1993 it seems), 141.

3Walter Wink, 149.

4King (same sermon on “Loving Your Enemies”)

–

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

“Why Galilee?” based on Acts 10:34-43 and Matthew 28:1-10

April 16, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I tried to start writing this
sermon on Thursday (my normal sermon writing day). This is one of
the challenges of Holy Week: in order to prepare worship services and
sermons you have to be out of sync with experiencing it. On Thursday
we remember Jesus’ last night with his disciples. In Matthew, Mark,
and Luke (the “synoptic gospels”), Jesus adds symbolism to the
Passover meal during in the Last Supper, which is the model for our
communion. In John, Jesus instead washes the feet of the disciples,
modeling for them the behavior he hoped would define their
relationships after his death: that they would be known by how
lovingly they treated each other.

Truly, I love remembering those
stories in Holy Thursday worship. There is a stillness to our
celebrations, a knowing of what will come next, that I suspect
pervaded the actual night Jesus sat with his disciples, but primarily
there are blessings.

On this Holy Thursday, as I sat
to write an Easter sermon, the news was shouting about the “Mother
of All Bombs” being dropped for the first time in history. It was
a shocking amount of violence. I was still recovering from the shock
of not quite a week before when 59 bombs had been dropped, and from
the chemical weapons that had been used days before that on
civilians.

It wasn’t just the direct
violence though. As I sat to write on Thursday, I was thinking about
the vulnerable people in the world and their struggles. Many in this
church have been actively advocating for the care of our immigrant
sisters and brothers, and yet I keep hearing of young families torn
apart. As many in this church have helped the clean up in Middleburgh
after horrible floods, I was part of the clean up in the Southern
Tier in 2011. The increase in extreme weather has already impacted
so many lives, and yet in the midst of this crisis for human life on
earth, our country is doing less and less to prevent it. Lives
continued to be lost and impacted by floods and droughts, mudslides
and major storms.

There was more, all piling on
top of each other on Holy Thursday. I love our breakfast program and
SUSTAIN ministry (I think they embodies the command to be known by
how well we love), but I hate that they are necessary! I’m so
grateful to serve a church willing to discuss white privilege and
racism, but I’m sick and tired of white privilege and racism. I’m
tired of fighting for fair and equal funding for Schenectady city
schools, which like most schools with mostly brown and black students
in New York gets the short end of the stick. I’m exhausted fighting
for LGBTQIA lives in The United Methodist Church, and just annoyed
that homophobia still defines our church at large. I am grateful for
my co-teachers in confirmation teaching about sexual harassment this
week, but as we’d reiterated how common it is, I was horrified but it
all, all over again. That is to say, the pile of problems I was
attending to, while trying to write an Easter sermon, was pretty
large.

That may explain why on Holy
Thursday, when I sat to write and I asked myself the question “what
does Easter mean today?” in the depth of my mind I heard a small
and terrified voice ask “is even Easter enough given the
brokenness of the world?”

It is very hard to write an
Easter sermon on Holy Thursday. Luckily I had to put it down to go
the Maundy Thursday service we shared with Emmanuel Friedans. My
roles included reading the story of foot washing from John 13 and to
inviting those present to allow me to wash their feet. The foot
washing story is the narrative example of the command to the
disciples at the end of chapter: that they would be known by how
lovingly they treated each other.
It is a defining moment differentiating the ways of the
world from the ways of Jesus.
While “important” people in the world are served by those said
to be “less important” than they are, in the Jesus movement all
of us are asked to love and serve each other. Instead of dominating
others, Jesus used his life to support them, and he asked us to
follow in his ways.

Having heard the foot washing
story explained when I was 13, I desperately wanted to be a part of
it! It started my call to ministry, this desire to be a part of
turning upside down the values of the world and what it looks like to
live a life that matters. I wanted to be part of a movement that was
known by how lovingly it treated its own members (and beyond). I was
drawn in. Foot washing is one of the stories that grounds me in my
faith. So, while in the most hidden parts of my brain I was
wondering if Easter was enough, I stood at microphone and the story
out loud, and everything clicked back into place.

Sure, things aren’t great right
now, and many of God’s beloved people are hurting. Then again,
that’s how it was during Jesus’ time too. The vast majority of the
Jewish people living in Judea and Galilee were struggling to survive.
The peasant class was about 95% of the population, and they tended
to die young, after a life of hunger and hard labor. Families were
torn apart by poverty and debt, because family members were sold into
slavery so that the remaining members could eat. Things REALLY
weren’t going well for the people, back in Jesus’ day. The system
existed to make the rich and powerful more and more wealthy, on the
backs and the lives of the peasants. The narrative of the Empire was
that they were the peace bearers, and yet the reality was that they
were the oppressors who kept fighting at a minimum because of the
power of their military might, and kept their military mighty by
paying them from the profits they reaped from the peasants.

Jesus’ life and ministry was
with the peasants in Galilee (although he did take some side trips to
Judea and Samaria). He saw the humanity of the peasants, listened to
them and ate with them. His healings were for them, and his
teachings designed to teach them. He was known as a great teacher
and healer, but the stories in the gospels also indicate that his was
a ministry of presence among the people. He loved the people with
God’s love for them. He showed them they mattered to him by being
present with them.

The peasants were seen by the
Empire as a means of wealth production, and at the same time as a
potential threat to the famous peace. They were seen by Jesus as
beloved children of God worth his time, energy, and passion. As
his fame grew and his ministry became well known, he continued to
spend his time with the people living in poverty. His life showed
that the people the Empire found expendable, God finds worthwhile.
It may be that the most powerful piece of the story isn’t in any one
of the parables, healings, or teachings, but rather that they
happened primarily among the peasants, reiterating God’s care for
all people. One of the most significant pieces of Jesus’ ministry
was his presence.

Each Gospel tells a unique
Easter story, and Matthew is no exception. The piece of Matthew’s
story that strikes me this year is that he suggests that the women
continued Jesus’ ministry of presence for Jesus at the end of
his life. They were at his crucifixion (27:55), they were at his
burial (27:61), and they were there on Easter morning. They held
vigil. They stayed, even when it was too late. They weren’t there to
change things. They were just with him. Based on how clear the
Gospels are about the women being present, I suspect that in
retrospect the disciples were grateful to the women for staying and
being present when they had run away. Jesus wasn’t alone in his death
and his body was cared for afterward, because the women continued
his ministry of presence,
a form of loving Jesus as Jesus had loved them.

And then, in the midst of their
ministry of presence, they are greeted by the angel. As if that
wasn’t awesome enough, immediately afterward they experience the
presence of Jesus again! The NRSV says that Jesus “met them.” It
means both that he “joined” them and “accompanied” them.¹
His presence was returned to them, and the Christian story ever
since is that the presence of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, has remained
with us.

Both the angel at the tomb and
Jesus ask the women to convey to the male disciples that he’ll meet
them again in Galilee. This is especially significant. First, it
reiterates that the presence of Jesus has returned. Secondly, when
Jesus says it he calls the disciples “his brothers.” They had
denied and abandoned him, and nothing that they had yet done had
changed that reality. They hadn’t repented, or apologized, or shown
back up. Yet Jesus calls them his brothers, which was an upgrade
from their previous titles. As it often is in the Bible, grace and
forgiveness come from God’s nature alone. As Eugene Boring says in
the commentary in the New Interpreter’s Bible,
“The women become not only missionaries of the resurrection
message, but also agents of reconciliation.”²
It would be the words of the women that would call them back together
and start the process of the disciples living the ministry of Jesus
in the world.

Finally though, there is the
duplicated message to the disciples about going to GALILEE. Why
Galilee? Jesus was killed in Jerusalem, in Judea, where the final
phase of his ministry had occurred. He was killed in the place he’d
rode into on a donkey, by the authority of those who saw his
indictment of the Temple. His body was placed in a tomb in Judea,
near Jerusalem. Why were the disciple to meet him back in Galilee?

It
seems like there are three possible answers. First, they were to go
back to the people Jesus had been in ministry with and continue the
ministry of presence among the most vulnerable people. (Those in
Galilee were even more vulnerable than those in Judea.) Secondly,
Galilee was more DIVERSE than Judea, and in Matthew Galilee is
referred to as Galilee of the Gentiles (4:15). It was home to Jews,
and to the Gentiles. This is one of Matthew’s references to the
universality of Jesus’ message, and that Galilee was the place to
expand God’s love beyond its traditional boundaries with the Jews
into all the world. Third, and finally, to go back to Galilee was to
go back to the beginning. It was home, for Jesus as well as for the
disciples, and it was where his ministry started and grew.
Easter marks the transition point, what had once been the ministry of
Jesus supported by the disciples becomes, on Easter, the ministry of
the disciples supported by Jesus.
They go back to Galilee to go back to the beginning and start the
story again, to be God’s presence to the people once again. They
went back to continue the ministry of Jesus, the ministry of
presence, that the women had held up in the meantime.

The ah-ha moment I had in Maundy
Thursday worship was really pretty simple. It is one I’ve had
before, even, I just had to remember. The brokenness of the world is
very real indeed, and unconscionable things are happening. But
instead of negating Easter, the brokenness of the world reminds us
of how much we need Easter! Easter is, as Marcus Borg puts it,
“God’s yes to the world’s no.” Easter affirms the life of
Jesus, who loved the people and was present to them, and Easter
affirms the commandment that the disciples continue his ministry and
be known by how lovingly they treated each other.
Easter is the explosion of the ministry of Jesus from one life
to many, the expansion of love from one human to many.

The world, like the Empire of
old, teaches us things that do harm. It teaches us that there isn’t
enough for everyone, so we have to compete and we have to hoard. The
world teaches us that some lives matter more than other lives, and
that since their isn’t enough we should take care of the lives that
matter first. The world teaches us about borders that aren’t allowed
to be crossed and separations that aren’t allowed to become
connections. The world teaches us to be afraid, and to be careful,
and to distrust those around us. The world teaches us that the
economy matters most, and keeps us alive. The world teaches us to
take care of ourselves and “ours” first.

Easter is God’s yes to the
world’s no as well as God’s NO to the world’s YES.. Easter denies
the world’s fallacies and offers us alternatives. Easter is a
resounding YES to the life and teachings of Jesus. In the Gospel of
John, Jesus teaches us to be known by how lovingly we treat each
other. In Easter, the
message of Jesus is passed on and expanded, given to us to live and
teach.

It doesn’t mean that we can make
everything OK, at least not over the short run. It doesn’t stop
weapons in in midair, reunite families, or reverse climate change.
But it does mean that we have received the command to be known by
lovingly we act, and that being present to God’s beloved people is
now our work (supported by Jesus). Doing that will be plenty to
change the world. Easter, it turns out, is more than enough. Thanks
be to God. Amen

1M.
Eugene Boring, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VII: Matthew
Leander E. Keck editorial board convener (Nashville: Abingdon Press,
1995) 500.

2 Ibid.

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

April 16, 2017