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March 31, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Resurrecting Joy” based on Isaiah 41:4b-10 and Luke 24:1-11

I have a question I’d like you to contemplate: Which do you like more – daffodils or tulips?

OK, assuming you are now ready – daffodil fans can you raise hands and cheer? Tulips fans?

Believe it or not, I’m going to take this a step further. (I know, I know, not the Easter sermon you were expecting.) Tulip fans – can you shout out things you love about them? Daffodil fans?

Thank you.

Amen

😉

Just kidding. This Lent we’ve done a Bible Study on the Resurrection Narratives. We read the stories of Easter from each of the Gospels, and asked a few questions about each one:

What does resurrection seem to mean here?
Why describe it this way?
How does it feel?
How does this connect today?

As we read and discussed, we started to notice something about the empty tomb stories: they feel incomplete. The empty tomb isn’t the POINT, instead it feels like the introduction to the point. The tomb is empty… ok. That could mean a lot of things, including grave robbers. But each of the gospels ends the story of the empty tomb with something to nudge us towards its meaning. Luke ends with the rest of the disciples believing the empty tomb to be an “idle tale” but Peter going to see for himself and being amazed. In Luke in particular, the empty tomb is the start of sharing stories of the post-resurrection Jesus experiences. Those experiences are the ways the followers of Jesus end up claiming that he is alive, and the work of God in him isn’t completed yet. It isn’t, actually, the women sharing the story (though maybe it should be) or the dazzling clothes of the angels (black? white?). It isn’t the early dawn on the first day of the week or the prepared spices. It isn’t even the angels saying “he is not here.”

The empty tomb points to the continued life of Jesus, but it is in fact JUST an empty tomb. The early followers of Jesus were transformed in those early days by whatever experiences they had that led them to call it resurrection, and eventually they came to understand THEMSELVES to be the shared Body of Christ, and understanding that has been passed down the ages, right to this moment, when we are together the Body of Christ alive and doing ministry in the world. The empty tomb points to LIFE.

I’m going to take this even a step further. When we say “Christ is alive” I believe that it implies “and calls us to life abundant.” Life itself, just life, isn’t the point. Especially today when medical science allows life to continue far after abundant life has ended, it is easy to see that this isn’t just about being alive, but about being ALIVE – about life abundant.

Christ is alive and calls us to abundant life.

Christ is alive and calls us to full, beautiful, connected, joyful LIFE.

But, it is possible that for some of us, that sounds… I don’t know, really hard?

Am I off? I don’t think I’m off. Our lives are fulled with innumerable stressors, real ones. We’ve learned that about half of our society doesn’t have enough money to “make it,” and another big chunk of society lives in fear of falling under that line. So monetary stress is real, regular, and abundant. Job stress. Health concerns. Traumatic experiences of the past. Worries about our loved ones. And then, heavens, all the things in the news. ALLLLLLLL THE THINGS. There is this constant stream of information about things we should worry about, or fix, or grief, or understand, or… care about.

And the stressors and the worries and the news add up, day after day, after day, after day and maybe full, beautiful, connected, joyful LIFE feels kinda unlikely? I read an article1 recently that discussed the ways life has improved over the past four years, and that somehow people don’t seem to have NOTICED. The authors, psychiatrists, suggested that the malaise of the American public today is due to unprocessed pandemic grief, “But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger—exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.” I know we all want to be over it, but between continued illnesses and deaths and long COVID, we aren’t. And, further, we haven’t processed it. So, there are good reasons aplenty that we aren’t all feeling like we’re all in on that full, beautiful, connected, joyful LIFE that we’re called to.

And yet, beloveds of God, we are called to full, beautiful, connected, joyful LIFE. Even now. So, how do we do it? I came across an idea that I believe MATTERS in reading I thought I was doing for the sake of becoming a better premarital counselor. I was sitting there reading Emily Nagoski’s book “Come Together: The Science (and Art) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections” (highly recommend) and in the final chapter her teaching about sexuality and sensuality became even more spiritual. At one point she says, “Our only certainty is that one day, we won’t get any more days.”2 Which is pretty much the whole point of Ash Wednesday and part of what we’re meant to hold as we travel through Lent AND Holy Week.

She explains in her book the phenomenon of “savoring” which she defines as people’s “capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance positive feelings in their lives.”3 She says that there is a Savoring Checklist, and it includes: sharing joy with others – talking about what is happening and why it is good; reminding ourselves that time is passing as a way to cherish a moment before it passes away, which could sound like saying to yourself, ‘”Time is short and I choose to do this with my time.”; expressing the joy in our bodies – laughing, and jumping, clapping and whooping; and finally slowing down to pay attention to the experience of joy or pleasure itself – in many of the ways we’ve been taught through mindfulness.4 She goes on to say that every time we chose pleasure and joy we enable ourselves to pick it again in the future and remember the pleasure and joy of the past. Then she says, “when we savor pleasure and thus highlight it in our memory, we can remember our lives as more worth living. We look back on our day, our year, even our entire lifetime, and we see less of the struggle and more of the countless moments of pleasure.”5 The memories “glitter across our memory, brighter and more numerous, when we take time to savor them.”6

OK, so the gist: to live life abundantly there is a trick: take the wonderful moments and savor them – share the joy by talking with others, notice the wonder while it happens, and let your body be full of joy. When you do that – when you savor this wonderful life that God gave you, it will bring your attention to the good, the wonderful, the pleasurable, the joy-filled parts of life, both now and over all.

It will, it turns out, move us to full, beautiful, connected, joyful LIFE. Just, enjoy the good stuff!! Savor it, let yourself be delighted when you are. And of course, this can be some of the big stuff of life. Every year I savor singing Easter hymns with brass accompaniment, and when I think back to my wedding I remember a moment in the midst of the worship service when I wished it could last forever because it was such a delight. But pleasure and joy are easily abundant everywhere too. Food tastes good (if you are lucky.) Stretching your body feels good. Laying down to rest is a wonder. Your favorite song is worthy of savoring.

And, to bring it full circle, there are pretty flowers in the world. Ones that you have now brought attention to, embodied the joy of, talked about the joy of, and … savored. Daffodils and tulips, they’re pretty amazing, huh? And they are just one of the many wonders around us, gifts given by God and others to calls us to full, beautiful, connected, joyful LIFE.

Thanks be to God!

Amen

1 https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/03/covid-grief-trauma-memory-biden-trump/677828/

2Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections (New York: Ballantine Books, 2024), 292.

3Nagoski, 270.

4Nagoski, 272.

5Nagoski 273.

6Nagoski, 273.

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

March 31, 2024

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January 15, 2023
by Sara Baron

“Foolish and Wise" based on Isaiah 52:1-10 and 1 Corinthians 1:26-31

Again and again I find myself at the website for the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and reading over the principles of Rev. Dr. King’s philosophy of nonviolence. Every time I read them, I learn. Every time I read them I notice again how deeply rooted Rev. Dr. King was in following Jesus, and in the wisdom of other traditions that also teach nonviolence.

This week, the principle that jumped out was number 2: Nonviolence Seeks to Win Friendship and Understanding.

The outcome of nonviolence is the creation of the Beloved Community.
The end result of nonviolence is redemption and reconciliation1

It is always worth reviewing the idea of the Beloved Community, central as it is to Rev. Dr. King’s thinking. The Commission on Religion and Race wrote about this for us, “Philosopher-theologian Josiah Royce first conceived the Beloved Community concept; later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr popularized it during the Civil Rights Movement. Rev. Dr. King envisioned that the Beloved Community to be a global movement where the agape love of God would be the driving force to redemption and reconciliation and a place where all people can share in the abundance of wealth in the world. In the Beloved Community, all forms of discrimination, bigotry, and dehumanization are eradicated and countered by a more inclusive, interdependent existence of people who live in non-violent harmony with one another.”2

That is, the Beloved Community is formed from the truths of our 1 Corinthians passage. The ways to move from systems of power-over, oppression, and hierarchy don’t tend to come from those who hold the power, engage in the oppression, and maintain the hierarchy. Rather, the wisdom to see how things work, why things don’t work, and what could be better tends to come from those disempowered, oppressed, and on the bottom of a hierarchy. The ones lowborn, “foolish” in the ways of the world, insignificant, weak. They’re the ones most likely to listen to God, to respond to God’s urgings, to find new ways.

The nonviolent social movement of Rev. Dr. King, Ghandi, and Jesus are most notable to me, in that they sought to eliminate oppression with LOVE. They did not seek to eliminate the oppressors, only the oppression. They wanted to CHANGE relationships, not stop them. They saw that there is real power in community, in connection, in solidarity, and in peace. World changing power, and they all used it. Not power over, but power with.

There is the vision of the kindom, or the Beloved Community. The way of God in the world is not in power over, but power with. It is in humanizing ALL. It is in sharing abundant resources. It is in togetherness.

This, I think, is also the real meaning of the salvation discussed in Isaiah. The historical idea was of return, hope, freedom, and connection. And, when it is looked at carefully, it is clear that God is at work to move towards peace – towards wholistic well-being of all and each, towards joy – for all, towards comfort, towards freedom from oppression.

God’s dreams get spoken a little differently in each time and place, but in Isaiah and Paul, Jesus and Ghandi, Rev. Dr. King hopefully in each of us, they resonate with the same underlying melodies, hopes, and passions. God’s passion is for ALL to be WELL, together.

As you may remember, Rev. Dr. King talked about the triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism as “forms of violence that exist in a vicious cycle.”3 About poverty, he said, “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we now have the resources to get rid of it. The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty … The well off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these.”4

Heavens. It is even less “new” now than when he said it. The existence of poverty within our nation is a choice our nation has made about it’s values, a choice that the Bible CLEARLY disagrees with. We could house everyone, and we could do it for LESS money than it costs us NOT to house everyone, but we choose not to. We could feed everyone, and the impact on our society as a whole would be profound, but we choose not to. We could provide affordable, excellent healthcare for everyone, once again at lower costs than our current system, but we choose not to.

As Ms. Bryce Covert summarized in an NYT opinion piece entitled “There is a Reason We Can’t Have Nice Things,” this summer,

“In a seminal 2001 paper, the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote tried to answer this very question: Why doesn’t this country have a welfare system that looks like the ones in European countries, progressively taxing those with the most wealth to redistribute resources to those with the least? Economic differences, they concluded, don’t explain it. But they did find that “racial fragmentation” has played a “major role” in keeping us from these policies in a way it hasn’t elsewhere. They also found that while Europeans see the poor as members of their own group who are merely unfortunate, Americans see them as lazy “others.” American voters are less likely to demand that their leaders pass policies that help the least well-off. “Racial animosity in the U.S. makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately Black, unappealing to many voters,” they concluded.5

That is, our choices to allow people to struggle in poverty are inter-related with racism. Like Rev. Dr. King said.

The way I see it, at the center of all the evils and violence is the dehumanization of others. Which means that every SINGLE movement toward compassion is a movement away from violence, away from evil, towards the beloved community. Compassion MATTERS, for each of us, for all of us, and for the world we want to make. For the world we are making with God.

I subscribe to a newsletter from Emily Nagoski, who with her sister wrote “Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle” which I would put on a required reading list for humans if I had the power to make such a thing. Last week she entitled her email newsletter, “Burnout: You don’t have to Wait for the Revolution to Feel Better.”6

Her words were profound to me, and so I’m going to share them with you. She says that there are solutions to burnout, and they are neither the revolution nor self care. BUT RATHER, compassion. Speaking of society as a body, she says:

We help the body learn not to treat parts of itself as the enemy.

Just because a cell in our social body is different from us doesn’t make it “foreign” or a threat; its difference means that it plays a role in our social body that we ourselves cannot play, and so we must protect it, because our own wellbeing within this social body depends on every different cell sustaining its wellbeing. We can’t soothe the inflammation of the social body by attacking any part of it.

No, the cure for burnout can’t be some fantasy of revolution, nor is it the finger-trap of self-care. It is simply care; it is all of us turning toward each other with kindness and compassion. When we see each other’s exhaustion and overwhelm, we offer support without judgment. When we notice our own sense of inadequacy, we allow others to witness it and love us anyway. The “cure” is each of us declining to let the forces of racist, sexist, capitalist oppression stop us from loving the hell out of one other, come what may.

…

And if you’re worried I’m saying, “Don’t try to change the system; let’s just be nice to each other while the world burns,” I invite you to think bigger. Think outside the boring dynamics of Force A acting against Force B and so Force B retaliates with overwhelming power. Imagine instead Force B transforms into a cloud, saturating Force A with peace until it deliquesces and releases us into the natural, soft flow of being human.

Audre Lorde says: community built on honoring our differences. She calls us to “recognize difference as a crucial strength.” She says,

“Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community does not mean shedding our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”

The cure is not “self-care.” The cure is simply care — all of us, caring for each other, by honoring our differences and loving one another because of them.

That’s it, dear ones. That’s how we do God’s work, how we build the kindom, how we live the Beloved Community, how we follow Jesus, how we continue the work of Rev. Dr. King. We love the hell out of each other, we simply care, we honor our differences and love one another. May God help us do it! Amen

1 https://thekingcenter.org/about-tkc/the-king-philosophy/

2General Commission on Religion and Race. https://www.r2hub.org/library/what-is-beloved-community

3 https://thekingcenter.org/about-tkc/the-king-philosophy/

4Ibid.

5 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/21/opinion/racism-paid-leave-child-care.html

6 https://emilynagoski.substack.com/p/burnout-you-dont-have-to-wait-for?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=287493&post_id=95085447&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email