“Bread That Satisfies” based on Psalm 63:1-8 and Isaiah…

March 20, 2022
by Sara Baron

Isaiah 55 contrasts the ways of the Babylonian Empire
(read: all empires and all domination systems) with the ways of God.
One satisfies, one doesn’t. One has built in rest, one is a constant
system of labor. One is aimed at the fullness of humanity, one is
aimed at pleasing a King.

According to the Bible the glory days of ancient Israel
as a nation-state started in in 1000 BCE when David was King, and his
son Solomon after him. After that the Northern Kingdom left, and in
722 they lost a war with Assyria and were taken into Exile. In
587/586 BCE the Southern Kingdom lost a war with Babylon and their
leaders were taken into Exile.

The book of Isaiah centers around the second, southern
exile: first in warning that it might come unless things change
(chapters 1-39), then the exile “happens” and there are
conversations to the exiles about what return will look like
(chapters 40-55), and finally encouragement to those who have
returned and are struggling (chapters 56-66). Isaiah 55, our passage
for today, is the end of the encouragement to the exiles, and it is
written in “anticipation of a a joyous and secure homecoming.”¹

Walter Brueggemann in his commentary on Isaiah 40-66
(amazingly, one of my favorite Brueggemann commentaries) says, “The
initial verse…offers to passersbys free water, free wine, and
free milk. This of course is in contrast to the life
resources offered by the empire that are always expensive, grudging,
and unsatisfying. … The rhetorical questions ask,
incredulously, why Jews in exile would invest so much in forms of
life that cannot work – why work so hard and so long in ways that
give no satisfaction; why give life over to the demands and rewards
of the empire that yield nothing of value in return.” ”²

As the text refers to the “wicked”, Brueggemann has
a great explanation for who that refers to. “’The wicked,’ I
suggest, are not disobedient people in general. In context, they are
those who are so settled in Babylon and so accommodated to imperial
ways that they have no intention of making a positive response to
Yahweh’s invitation to homecoming.”³

There were, in fact, plenty of people who didn’t return
from exile. After 80 years, for many, Babylon had become home. The
scripture says that even those who have accommodated themselves to
the empire – to the systems of domination – can be freed and
pardoned, and come back to a full and abundant life within the
community.

And all of this makes me wonder about how it applies
today. When are we settled into domination systems, and in need of
being reminded that other options exist, and welcomed home to the
community of God, and forgiven and set free to live in equality and
equity with each other?

When are we the “wicked” who are too enmeshed with
the empire, and need forgiveness? This is a convicting question for
me. I continue to struggle to hold onto ONLY kindom values and let
go of the domination ones. I appreciate the reminder that it can be
changed and forgiven.

One of the tools of domination systems is fear. Fear
works to keep us from seeing things clearly, fear moves us into
right/wrong thinking, fear moves us into blame, fear moves us into
us/them thinking, and fear kills creative problem solving. Fear
makes people more interested in authority, which means more invested
in hierarchy, and more likely to accept the commandments of
authoritarians. Fear leads to snap decisions, instead of careful
consideration.

Fear is a really, really useful tool, if the desire
is to keep people separate, compliant, and disempowered.

And, it can get a hold on me rather too easily,
particularly when I’m not getting enough down time with God.

Another of the useful tools of domination systems is
getting control over meaning making, which usually means
appropriating religion for its own purposes. We can see this clearly
in looking at the Roman Empire in Jesus’ day, and the Roman appointed
High Priests running the Temple. That domination system thought
having the Temple’s support was imperative to keeping control, and so
they appropriated it. That is one example of a rather constant
reality.

Truth be told, when I read the Bible, I’m often struck
by the struggles back and forth between the stories of an all-loving
God encouraging the people to care for each other and the strangers
in their midst AND the stories of a God who controls, rewards,
punishes the people – including by trying to frighten them into
compliance. I tend to think of the first as the stories of God, and
the second as the constancy of humans trying to to claim the power of
Divine meaning making for their own ends. The fact that it is a
constant tension in the Bible itself clarifies how hard it is to
separate out the love of God from the desire of people for control.

At the recommendation of my colleague the Rev. Harold
Wheat, I recently read “One Nation Under God” by Kevin Kruse.
The book takes a long view of American religion, and the battles for
control of it. The history takes a sharp turn after the successful
passage of Roosevelt’s New Deal, which was generally lauded by the
nation’s clergy. In response, business and industry leaders started
multiple meaning making campaigns of their own, putting clergy on
their payrolls to deride “communal values.” They spent decades
accessing power at the highest levels, providing resources, and
finally in engaging in nation-wide PR campaigns to encourage people
to attend worship as part of their patriotic duty. Since these
campaigns were so successful, those pushing worship were confident
that most of those attending worship would be getting their
pro-business messages shared from the pulpit.

This church was one of the ones that did NOT comply with
the campaigns, thank God. But, being a part of US culture during
that time meant being a part of a society with the highest worship
participation rate in the country’s history, and this church did
benefit from that.

One of my big take aways from the book was that every
church and every church structure I know well has defined itself from
its heights in the 1950s or 1960s, and created its narratives and
identity in those “high times.” But that came without an
awareness of the forces that created that high, or the reality that
it was an ABERRATION, not a “new normal.” It is a bit like the
Jewish people in 506 BCE looking back to the glory days of King
David, and forgetting that in 1500 years of history, about 80 were
the time of nation-state empire. It was an aberration, not the norm.

The fact that the worship attendance of the 1950s was a
cultural swell of worship attendance nation wide suggests that the
narratives of “failure” for not maintaining the heights are…
well… wrong. After the nation wide ad campaigns stopped and the
nation stopped being pushed to define being a good American with
being a good worship attender, worship attendance started returning
to more historically normal levels.

However, I’ve been in A LOT of meetings over the years
where in direct or indirect ways people have tried to “problem
solve” church decline, and that has almost always sounded a whole
lot like blame. This is never the story I heard – that the
huge ballooning of membership was an oddity that was unsustainable,
and that it was to be expected that it would not be maintained.

Instead, there are seemingly infinite definitions of the
problem and possible solutions. “Better evangelism.” “More
prayer.” “Clear mission statements.” “Good websites.”
“More faithful leaders.” “More training in inviting people to
church.” “Better missions.” … Take this class, do this
study, engage in this survey, read this book, ….and some of it is
even useful, but the impact of the whole is the continuation of the
narrative that worship attendance in the 1950s was “right” and
that means that everything since then has been “wrong” and if
that’s true, then it implies we’re doing our FAITH wrong.

Learning that there is a bigger narrative at play has
helped me reframe those conversations about church growth and church
decline. It has also helped me see that even when there isn’t active
blame going on, church leaders (clergy and lay) are just
internalizing it. I’ve done it (I still do it.) The number of
people who choose to attend worship FEELS like a tangible expression
of how faithful I am to God. But it isn’t. Yet, I have to actively
remember that.

And, I worry about all the church leaders in all the
churches for the past 70 years who have asked “why are we getting
smaller” and ended up believing that it was because THEY were doing
their faith wrong, because they couldn’t see the larger dynamics at
play. They’ve taken in the wrong story. Our faith is not WRONG, nor
BROKEN.

Of course, it is hard to see the church in decline and
it is extra hard right now to see the church transforming and not
know if it is strong or weak or.. what it is right now. But, as I’m
committed to building the kindom of God, and I’m excited to have ANY
partners in that work who want to work with me. I’m willing to tell
people why that seems worthy of my life energy, and I am delighted
when I get to teach about what kindom/God values are and how they
differ from empire/domination values.

The thing is that strength, even strength in numbers,
looks a lot like a domination value. And inflated numbers in the
past were aimed at no good. God is willing and able to work with any
of us who want to work with God, and to make a big difference with
those who are committed to doing so. I’m interested in celebrating
those committed to following in the ways of Jesus, and the power that
love has in our midst. I’m ready to let go of an old, false, and
misleading narrative of who we are supposed to be, and let us be who
we are.

There is the labor that matters, the bread that
satisfies. And leaving behind the old myths that were created to
control the churches and their people– that’s the empire stuff we
don’t need anymore. May God help us sort through, and find the
kindom values in our hearts, to put them to further use in our lives.
Amen

1Brueggeman
158.

2Brueggemann,
159.

3Ibid
160

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 20, 2022

Sermons

“Perplexing” based on Acts 2:1-18 and John 20:19-23

June 4, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Drew,
today’s confirmand, planned this worship service. He had a lot of
leeway. I was surprised at how little of it he used, and how
intentional he was in the decisions he did make. Drew likes worship
the way we usually do it, but there were some tweaks. Please
pay attention to the labeling of the music at the beginning and end
of worship 😉

Some
of the leeway Drew had was in picking the scriptures for today. He
asked what was traditionally read on this day and we read together
the Pentecost texts from the Revised Common Lectionary, year A.
After questions about the texts themselves, he decided that we should
read the two different versions of the Pentecost story from Acts and
John. When we discussed the sermon he suggested that I compare and
contrast the stories, and then pull out the meaning that is in both
of them for all of us.

I
like this young man’s idea of a sermon 😉

The
Christian liturgical calendar follows the Luke-Acts narrative about
Pentecost, placing it 50 days after Easter. The Greek ordinal number
for 50? Pentecosto. Pentecost was a part of the Jewish Celebration
of Booths (sometimes called Tabernacle), celebrated 50 days after the
Passover, and was a harvest festival. Luke’s placement of the coming
of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost is saturated with meaning. The
harvest festival becomes a harvest of new Jesus followers. The
harvest festival was celebration of the bounty as a sign of of God’s
care for the people, and Luke reimagines it as a celebration of God’s
care for the people through the sending of the Holy Spirit.

It
is on this basis that Christianity celebrates the Season of Easter
for 50 days, starting on Easter Sunday and culminating in Pentecost.
We do it because Luke and Acts tell us that the gift of the Spirit
came 50 days later.

John,
however, disagrees. Neither Matthew nor Mark present any version of
this story, so the debate is simply between Luke-Acts and John. (Ah,
I should explain my language. Luke and Acts are written by the same
person and meant to be parts 1 &2 of the same book, however the
order of the New Testament messes this up.) John’s gospel places the
gift of the Holy Spirit on Easter evening. We may sometimes gloss
over this story, because it gets used as an opening to the story
about Thomas, who wasn’t there when the Spirit was given. The story
is less often heard standing alone, and it didn’t get prime attention
in the creation of the Christian calendar, which prefers Luke’s
version.

The
stories are VERY different. Luke-Acts takes place in the morning, a
fact we are reminded of because Jesus’ followers are again being
accused of being drunk. John’s version takes place at night.
Luke-Acts’s version happens in public, others see the impact of the
Spirit, and they hear the preaching, and many are converted. John’s
version involves a large group of disciples as well, but without an
audience. There is more FUSS in Luke-Act’s version, more description
of the event, more of a miraculous feel. John’s version is
relatively quiet. It mostly focuses on Jesus speaking.

In
Luke-Acts, the crowd responds to the disciples speak. It says they
were amazed, bewildered, and perplexed. The movement of the Spirit
and its impact seemed startling, and not in particularly comfortable
ways. The Spirit is known to blow as she will, and that often makes
people uncomfortable.

(An
aside: the last time I read about the Spirit, the Bible translation
I read from referred to the Spirit with feminine pronouns. Afterward
I was asked about it, and had the chance to share the fact that the
Spirit’s pronouns in Hebrew are feminine, and some translators follow
the Hebrew, despite the fact that in Greek the Spirit is gender
neutral and in Latin the Spirit is masculine. Since the Creator most
often gets male pronouns in the Bible, I also tend to want to follow
the Hebrew pronouns for the sake of balance within our conceptions of
God.)

In
both texts the Spirit comes to the Body as a WHOLE. The Spirit is
NOT received by one person, but instead by many. In Luke-Acts, given
that the occurrence is during a Jewish pilgrimage festival, faithful
Jews had filled the city to be witnesses, but the people in the house
together all receive the gift together.

The
writer in the New Interpreter’s Bible, has a fantastic comment on the
fact that the faithful Jews from around the diaspora took note that
the Galilean men were speaking to them in their languages. They
could still tell that the men were Galilean, including by their
speech. Robert Wall says, “The language of the Spirit is not
communicated with perfect or heavenly diction, free from the marks of
human identity; it is the language of particular human groups, spoken
in their idiom. God works in collaboration with real people –
people who are filled with the Spirit to work on God’s behalf in
their own world.”¹
I rather love that idea. The Spirit moved, and certainly in
unexpected ways, but still worked within the people as they were,
including with their existent accents!

Now,
likely because of the tradition doing so, I associate the story in
Acts as the normative Pentecost story, which means that I’m intrigued
by the version in John. As previously mentioned, it also involves
the Spirit coming to a group of Jesus followers, it was likely NOT
just the 12 because John doesn’t tend to think in terms of just the
12 and he didn’t designate them as such. A group of followers were
simply gathered, and they had an experience of the Risen Christ,
which IMMEDIATELY involved receiving the gift of the Spirit.

Jesus
speaks in five sentences, and two of them are saying “Peace be with
you.” This is a particularly apt greeting for the frightened
followers who had fearfully locked themselves into an upstairs room –
after hearing the women’s Easter story! The double naming of peace
both sounds like a traditional greeting imbued with God AND serves as
a reminder that fear need not define their lives. Those faithful
disciples were going to face significant persecution in coming days
and years, but Jesus, God, AND the Spirit were calling them to do so
in a different way, with the Peace of God within them.

In
this version the gift of the Spirit is the gift given so that the
followers of Jesus can continue his work, they become HIM and are
empowered to do as he had done. He was sent, so they are sent. He
breaths on them as God has breathed on the first humans in Genesis.
A new life is beginning, one that is defined by peace.

Now,
I have never much liked the LAST line of this passage, John 20:23,
which has Jesus saying, “If
you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain
the sins of any, they are retained.“ My objections aren’t
particularly deep. I j shy away from sin language, as I’ve too often
seen it lead to guilt and shame rather than to a free and abundant
life of peace and joy with God.

However,
Gail O’Day’s commentary on John (also in the New Interpreter’s Bible)
fixed a lot of problems for me, and made me rather glad that line was
included. She says that, “In John, sin
is a theological failing,
not a moral or behavioral transgression (in contrast to Matt. 18:18).
To have sin is to be blind to the revelation of God in Jesus.”²
Furthermore, given this understanding, “The forgiveness of sins
must be understood as a Spirit-empowered mission of continuing Jesus’
work in the world.”³
And, finally, this work is the work of the community, and never one
person alone.

So,
let me see if I can remake those words so they fit with O’Day’s
insights. But maybe first, you should
know that Gail O’Day is Dean
and Professor of New Testament and Preaching at Wake Forest
School of Divinity, and was previously professor of homeletics at
Candler school of Theology at Emory. She’s an amazing scholar, and
especially well respected as a scholar of the Gospel of John.
Following her insights, it would be as if Jesus said, “If you work
together to help people see God at work in the world, they will be
free from their fears and able to live in peace with you. If you
leave people in the fear they already know, there they will stay,
without the blessings that you now live with.”

In
O’Day’s reflections on this text, she continually turns back to John
14-17, which is called the Farewell Discourse. Within it are the
defining words, in John 15:12, “ ‘This
is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
O’Day reflects on the continuity between the passages, “By loving
one another as Jesus loves, the faith community reveals God to the
world”⁴
Thus, the seemingly problematic line that the institutional church
has often used to claim authority over people’s lives and access to
forgiveness is really
about
inviting the followers of Christ to share God’s love, and in doing so
to show other people the possibility of living life in peace, love,
joy, and freedom from fear.

Perhaps
it isn’t so perplexing after all. Perhaps the story of Pentecost is
the story we already know: God calls us to love one another and be
examples of the gracious and abundant love of God in the world. And
that can change everything, because it is the completion of the
Easter narrative – no matter when it happened ;). Thanks be to God
for the opportunity we have to extend love into the world. Amen

1Robert
W. Wall, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume X: Acts Leander E. Keck editorial board convener (Nashville: Abingdon Press,
2002) 58.

2Gail
O’Day, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX: John, Leander
E. Keck editorial board convener (Nashville: Abingdon Press,1995)
847.

3O’Day,
847

4New
Interpreter’s Bible, John, 848.

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

“Rainbow Connection” based on Revelation 21:1-6 and John 13:33-35

April 24, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

“Why are there so many songs about rainbows, and what’s on the other side?” “What’s so amazing that keeps us star-gazing, and what do you think we might see?”¹ Or, in another voice (one that is not Kermit the Frog), “Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too. Imagine all the people, living life in peace…” “Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people, sharing all the world…”² Or, in another voice (one that isn’t John Lennon), “We will work with each other, we will work side by side, and we’ll guard each one’s dignity and save each one’s pride.”³

Or, in yet another voice, one attributed to God and one that likely formed the basis for the reading from Revelation today, from Isaiah 65:17-19

For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice for ever in what I am creating;
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.
I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people;
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress.

The strange text of Revelation is generally obscure. It was written in code so that if it was found by the wrong people, it wouldn’t be understood. In this case the “wrong people” were those who wanted to destroy the early Christian community. The issue is that we don’t really have the code. However, the last two chapters break out of the clouds a little bit, and it becomes clear that the author is yet another dreamer. Granted, he hasn’t been writing about rainbows, nor star gazing, but by the end he writing about hope, faith, and love as convincingly as third Isaiah. (Which, in case you didn’t know, is as high of a compliment as I can give.)

Our brief passage today is jam packed with imagery. There is a new city, a new Jerusalem. Heaven and earth as we know them have “passed away” and this is the new creation. The sea is no more. That’s significant in two ways. First, in Hebrew lore, the sea was the epitome of chaos, and the fear that comes from it. Secondly, in the ancient world, the sea was what separated people from another. It is as if all the continents came back together again. So the lack of sea means there is nothing to fear and nothing that separates people from each other!

God chooses to live WITH the people. “The home of God is among mortals.”(21:3). That is, there is no separation between God and people either. And, within the vastness of the created universe, this dreamer proposes that there is no where God would rather be than among the people! With God’s presence, there is no death, there is no sadness, there is no pain. And when there is thirst, God’s one self quenches it.

This is really interesting imagery. It isn’t a image of heaven. It could be an image of heaven come to earth, that makes some sense, or they may be combined into one thing. It proposes a sanctity of life itself, of humanity, of earthiness and fleshiness and of cities! (As commentators point out, the Bibles starts in a garden but ends in a city – a really big city, as it turns out.) Much of Christianity has been other-worldly focused, but both the hope-texts in Isaiah and this hope-text part of Revelation suggest that God is at work creating the WORLD as God wants it to be, not just waiting around for us to die in order to give us abundant life.

That’s something that REALLY matters to me. I believe that God is at work in the world, still creating, still moving the world into what it can be, and is now working WITH us on that. I believe that the life of Jesus was part of that creative energy, and the work of his followers is to be attentive to co-creating the world as it can be with God. His message was that this work is POSSIBLE, and that it is NEAR, that we can reach it. I deeply believe that the purpose of life as a follower of Jesus is to help form the world into what it can be. This is one of the most important pieces of my faith.

Another of the most important pieces of my faith is that God loves each and every person AS WE ARE. We are already enough for God. I don’t deny human brokenness, nor the need for healing and change. I simply believe that it is not a barrier to God’s love, and that even in brokenness and sickness God still sees us as enough. Because I believe God loves ALL of us, I believe how we treat each other matters in the deepest parts of the universe. When we hurt each other, we hurt God. When we exclude each other, we exclude God. When we fail to love each other – or ourselves – we limit our capacity to love God.

My biggest question coming into this sermon was “Why is this commandment to love each other called ‘new’?” You might even have noticed that I put this in the bulletin as my sermon title, but I’ve since gotten over that. My issue is that the commandant is very old. It is in the Torah. It is one of the foundations of the entire YHWH tradition. Every Jewish person ever has known it. Worse yet, this version is a bit tame! While the rest of the Gospels give some version of “love your neighbor as yourself” which reflect the original law, this text says simply to love each other. It is an insider commandment, which is (still difficult but…) way easier!!

I finally found an article by a Jesuit named Jack Mahoney on a website called “Thinking Faith” that did some justice to the question. Father Mahoney points out that, “One of the purposes for which the Gospel of John seems to have been was written was to attempt to resolve painful divisions which existed within the Johannine community (as we see in the First Letter of John). The evangelist therefore may have Jesus here exhorting all his future disciples to mediate his continuing love to one another after he has gone, and so maintain the unity he will pray for earnestly.” That is, this is a pretty practical suggestion! The love ONE ANOTHER bit is being said because they weren’t succeeding at it. It also suggests that the love we show is a partial expression of the holy love that exists for each person. That is, ‘John in his gospel and his letters (as their author or their source) writes so repeatedly of the need for mutual love and unity among the disciples of Jesus, that it seems likely that these virtues were notably lacking in John’s Church”.⁴So, it wasn’t “new” but it needed attention.

If we are meant to love each other – and our neighbors in all places – and if we are meant to co-create the world as it can be with God, that leads us to significant questions about HOW that work is best done. Within communities of faith, there are vast and abundant differences about what that means.

In particular, The United Methodist Church is a broad umbrella, and we have some striking differences of opinion about how God would like the world to look and what love looks like in the world. On May 10^th our every-four-years international gathering, General Conference, starts. It is the only body that can speak for The United Methodist Church and make adaptations to our rules.

There is a fantastic Coalition called the Love Your Neighbor Coalition which is the combined effort of the Methodist Federation for Social Action, 4 groups working on LGBT inclusion, the 5 racial ethnic caucus groups in the United Methodist Church, a new environmental group called “Fossil Free UMC”, UM Association of Ministers with Disabilities, and the Western Methodist Justice Movement. (If you want to know more, grab a copy of my sermon, they’re all listed in the footnotes.)⁵ Although I love the name “Love Your Neighbor” it has also occurred to me that it could be called “The Rainbow Connection.” The views and perspectives are different, but the Coalition works towards inclusion, celebration of diversity, and recognition of the wholeness of humanity of people across many different rainbow spectrums. That’s what they believe love looks like. That’s what they think God’s world is meant to look like.

There is another Coalition. It is the Renewal and Reform Coalition, and it is comprised of Good News, The Confessing Movement, UMAction, and Lifewatch. (Transforming Congregations and the Renew Network are now part of Good News.) If you know what the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) is you might want to take note that UMAction is the UM wing of IRD. If you don’t know, ignorance is bliss. The Renewal and Reform Coalition released their General Conference Agenda last week. As they put it, “The Renewal and Reform Coalition has three major priorities in Portland: 1) uphold biblical teaching on life, marriage, and human sexuality, 2) restore and strengthen the integrity and accountability of our covenant connection as United Methodists, and 3) promote the fair representation and empowerment of our United Methodist brothers and sisters outside the U.S.”⁶

To be more specific, their legislative goals include: to remove The United Methodist Church from the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice; to make sure that the church does not “agree to disagree” about the full humanity of LGBT people; to significantly tighten restrictions on clergy preforming same sex marriages (including a mandatory minimum penalty of a one year suspension); “broadening the definition of ‘self-avowed practicing homosexual,’ so that those who are married to a same-sex person or who have publicly acknowledged being a practicing homosexual would no longer be able to serve as clergy”; “adding as a chargeable offense ‘interfering with the General Conference or another United Methodist body or agency’s ability to conduct business,’ in order to counteract the disruption of General Conference and other agencies by activists.”; and much more!

The church that the Love Your Neighbor Coalition dreams of (and believes God to want) and the church that the Renewal and Reform Coalition dreams of (and believes God to want) do not look the same. Unfortunately, the Renewal and Reform Coalition has the voting majority on most (if not all) issues.

There are plenty of reasons to maintain hope. First of all, the existence of this church is proof that God’s love matters in the world, and no legislation from General Conference will ever change that. Secondly, the Love Your Neighbor Coalition (Rainbow Connection) may be prepared to LOSE, but they aren’t going to sit down and take it! There is a significant non-violent resistance strategy. I’m going to a training on it this Saturday. A Bishop and a pastor did a wedding yesterday in NC and got news of it onto CBS! More is coming. The commitment to sharing God’s love in the world is deep and wide. (Fair warning, this resistance may lead to my arrest. I’m not concerned about this, and I hope you won’t worry either. Portland, OR is friendly to protestors.)

God’s dreamers put God’s love into action to create the world as God would have it be. Sometimes it is easy, sometimes it is hard. It doesn’t really matter though, because God’s love is worth it! May the dreamers who seek to welcome all of God’s people into God’s holy church continue to do their work and find their way, so that the rainbows of peoples in the world might know they are worthy of God’s love and they are enough. Kermit sang, “Someday we’ll find it, the Rainbow Connection, the lovers, the dreamers, and me.”⁷ I think we found it – now we get to use it. Thanks be to God. Amen

1“Rainbow Connection” in The Muppet Movie Original Soundtrack Recording, Kermit, 1979.

2“Imagine” John Lennon, 1971.

3“They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love” Peter Scholtes, 1966.

4 Jack Mahoney SJ, “Why a ‘New’ Commandment?” http: //www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/20120713_1.htm Posted on: 13th July 2012, accessed on April 23, 2016.

5 Affirmation, Black Methodists for Church Renewal. Fossil Free UMC. Love Prevails.MARCHA: Metodistas Asociados Representando la Causa Hispano-Americanos,Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA), Methodists in New Directions (MIND),National Federation of Asian American United Methodists (NFAAUM), Native American International Caucus (NAIC), Pacific Islanders Caucus of United Methodists (PINCUM),Reconciling Ministries Network, United Methodist Association of Ministers with Disabilities, Western Methodist Justice Movement (WMJM)

6Steve Beard “Renewal Agenda for General Conference”http://goodnewsmag.org/2016/04/renewal-agenda-for-general-conference/ Published April 13, 2016, accessed April 21, 2016.

7“Rainbow Connection” in The Muppet Movie Original Soundtrack Recording, Kermit, 1979.

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