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December 26, 2021
by Sara Baron

“The Narrow Way” based on Psalm 148 and Luke 2:41-52

Jesus was a pretty radical figure, maybe. I can’t always tell. On the one hand he messed with some really basic parts of religious norms of his day – like Sabbath keeping, and marriage laws, and the sanctity of the temple, and tithing. But on the other hand, all of what he taught can be found within the Jewish religious tradition of his day. He is a prophet calling people back to fidelity to God’s vision for a society who takes care of all people – just one doing it in the context of his own day.

As I try to figure out if Jesus was a radical or not, it becomes clear that the actual crux of it all is that following our God is a radical act, and that’s true throughout our tradition as well as in our lives. I read the Bible with a bias towards the narrative about Sabbath and distributive justice. (John Dominic Crossan suggests there are two major themes. That’s one, and a covenant / reward / punishment theme is the other. They’re interspersed in the Bible, but have very different worldviews.)

To seek to follow God’s ways, which are about distributive justice, adequate rest for all, and seeing the Divine Spark in every ONE and all of creation. And, it is a radical act to do so from within “domination systems” that prioritize some lives over the lives of others, and take the work of the many to enrich the few. I’m sometimes more than a little distressed to notice that the difference between Jesus’s time and ours is that he lived in a “pre-industrial agricultural domination system”1and we live in a post-industrial non-agricultural domination system. Both systems are maintained by violence and the threat of violence, exploit the poor for the sake of the very few on top, silence the many, and use religion to legitimize the exploitation.

So, in the face of the domination systems, God’s kindom of equitable distribution of rest, of labor, of food, of clothing, of shelter, of healthcare, and of education is RADICAL in the extreme. Anyway, I’m thinking about all of this because we have in our Gospel Lesson today a presentation of Jesus at age twelve being more than a little bit of a smarty-pants, but also showing that he UNDERSTOOD the point of following God. The story says he amazed the religious teachers of the day, and claimed the center of the faith tradition as his place in the world. This is, of course, a story told by later generations who were seeking to make sense of the wisdom of Jesus, but as a story overloaded with metaphor and meaning, it is definitely worth further examination.

The piece that often strikes me in this story is that it affirms once again how religiously faithful Jesus’s parents were. The travel to Jerusalem from Nazareth wasn’t minor, and doing it every year constituted a real burden. But those who were thinking about how Jesus came to be Jesus really believed that he had to emerge from a family deeply established in God-worship and God-living. Luke’s story does this in so many ways, and I tend to agree. The ways that Jesus spoke and reflected on the scripture of his own tradition, the faithfulness to the Holy One that he lived, and the teachings he offered could only come from someone who grew up steeped in faithful Judaism, AND in the difference between God’s vision and the world’s domination systems.

This year, perhaps because the First Sunday of Christmas is the day after Christmas, and the stories are all smooshed together in my head, I’m struck that this story about Jesus as a young wisdom teacher in the Jewish tradition comes very soon after Luke’s story of his mother at a similar age singing the Magnificat, and showing the depth of HER understanding of God’s radical ways. These 12 year olds are both said to know the faithful wisdom of the ages, and I think that’s intentional, because how could Jesus become Jesus unless his mother was as faithful and wise as she is presented as being.

We also have the repetition in this story that Mary, “treasured all these things in her heart.” (2:51a) which we also heard in verse 19, after the shepherds told their story, “But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” I’ve recently been reminded to look more holistically at Mary’s story. She agrees to bear the Messiah, even when it risks her life. Or, perhaps, she survives sexual violence, and gets pregnant, and then has to find a way forward with her son. And then, it seems, she has to figure out how to feed him, and how to keep him alive, and how to teach him about oppression while teaching him about nonviolence, and how to trust God. And, then in the end, she is said to watch him die. Mary’s life is incredibly faithful, but almost never easy, it seems. Her wisdom, her faith, her trust in God define her life, and become the background of the teachings of Jesus, but they don’t protect her from harm.

That’s true of Jesus too, but sometimes it seems like maybe he had more choice in the matter. He remained faithful to God and God’s teaching even when it was clear it would result in his death by the hands of the Empire. He could have stopped, right? I don’t know. But I think maybe his mother’s child couldn’t stop as long as anyone lived under oppression.

From where I sit, it isn’t always clear what decisions are following in the ways of God’s vision / Mary’s faith / Jesus’s life and what decisions are following in the ways of the domination system. It would be so nice if it were always clear, but life is muddy. Maybe that’s why the adult Jesus taught in parables. The answers aren’t in black and white, they’re in the struggle to find the meaning of the story in the context of the day and in the context of our day. The systems change, but God’s vision remains. And those who are faithful to it still seek wisdom to live the kindom and bring it further into being. The two systems are hard to disentangle rather on purpose – it benefits the domination system to look “righteous” and it tries hard to look like God’s way.

I think this is why following God’s way is sometimes called the “narrow way” – it is less traveled, and harder to find. Sometimes we get lost trying to find it. And yet, I deeply believe, worth seeking and walking or rolling on it. I think it is even worth the times we are lost.

In this Christmas season, may we commit again to following in God’s radical ways, to traveling the narrow path, and to seeking them with our lives. Amen

1 Marcus Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).

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

December 26, 2021

Uncategorized

“Consolation” based on Isaiah 61:10-62:3 and Luke 2:22-40

December 27, 2020
by Sara Baron

A
month ago, the words to the hymn “Come Ye Disconsolate” jumped
off the page at me. It isn’t a hymn well known to me, until that
point I’d picked it once in 14 years, but it fit the moment too well
to ignore:

Come, ye disconsolate, where’er
ye languish;
Come to the mercy seat, fervently kneel.
Here
bring your wounded hearts; here tell your anguish.
Earth has no
sorrow that heaven cannot heal.¹

Disconsolate
means “without consolation or comfort.”²
I checked to be sure I had that right.

Perhaps,
then, it is not surprising what I heard and noticed in today’s Gospel
lesson that had never pulled my attention before. Parker read verse
25, “ Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this
man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of
Israel,…” and I thought “consolation!? I never noticed that
before” Followed by, “what does that really mean?” I figured
it meant …. something to do with the Messiah.

The
New Interpreter’s Bible says, “The ‘consolation of Israel’ was a
term for the restoration of the people and the fulfillment of God’s
redemptive work. … The term comes from references in Isaiah:

Comfort, O comfort my people
says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem (Isaiah 40:1-2 NRVS
cf. 49:13)

For the Lord will comfort
Zion (Isaiah 51:3 NRSV)

Break forth together into
singing, you ruins of Jerusalem;

for the LORD has comforted
his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem (Isaiah 52:9 NRSV, cf
66:10-13)”³

Right.
So this was about the Messiah, who for the Jewish people was the one
would bring the fulfillment of God’s promises of restoration.

How
interesting it is that it is called the “consolation” and focuses
on comfort! Simeon is a man introduced as waiting for God to act to
bring comfort, and trusting that God would. Then, when he sees the
baby Jesus, he sees this as the fulfillment of the promise that he
would see God’s Messiah. The story also says that a holy prophet,
Anna, saw and understood who Jesus was.

Jesus
as comforter, Jesus as consolation. That is both a familiar and
unfamiliar idea to me. I grew up with it, but that version was
very… milquetoast. Jesus was presented as available to me to make
me feel better when I was sad, to listen to me, to be my friend.
And, I think all of that is true. But as I’ve grown, I’ve become
equally interested in the idea that God wants good things for
EVERYONE, and in order to make that possible, I need to participate
in building a just society. God doesn’t just LISTEN, God wants to
help, and we are God’s hands and feet in the world.

The
expectations for the Messiah at the time of Jesus were for a king /
prophet / general who would restore the nation of Israel to political
and military prominence. As you may have noticed, Jesus didn’t do
that, but as Christians we tend to claim that what he did do was
better!

I’ve
been told many times that my job is to comfort the afflicted and
afflict the comforted, which interestingly was originally said about
the role of journalists. This year, I think we’re all the
afflicted, so my attention has been largely on comfort.

This
week I read a wonderful article entitled, “Jesus wasn’t born in a
stable and that makes all the difference.”⁴
I bet you can deduce the point from the title 😉 The author makes a
substantive argument that the word “inn” is mistranslated in Luke
2:7(b) “She wrapped him in bands of cloth and laid him in the
manger because there was no room for them in the inn.” A better
word would be “spare room.” As in “she was out in the main
family room with the family and the livestock because the spare room
was already overflowing.” Jewish peasants at the time kept animals
with them in their homes. And throughout the Middle East it would be
UNTHINKABLE not to stay with family if you have family.

The
author’s primary point is that when we think of Jesus being born out
in a stable, his family rejected by everyone, alone and distanced
from everyone. That is, we tend to think of Jesus being born
APART. Luke’s actual story puts Jesus in the middle of a small
house filled with a lot of family, so stuffed that the only
reasonable place left to put the baby down was in the
dug-into-the-ground animal feeding troughs. (A place he wouldn’t
roll away.)

The
“spare room” translation makes it clear that Jesus was part of
the Jewish peasantry. So does the detail in today’s reading about
giving a sacrifice, and the fact that what was given was the poor
person’s gift, for those who couldn’t afford the more expensive “a
whole lamb” option.

Remembering
that Jesus was born into a devout, poor, Jewish family helps me
understand his role as comforter. There is an understanding of pain
and a yearning for justice that fits having grown up both poor and
devout.

I
do think that old quote is true, of journalists, of preachers, and
even of Jesus himself. Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the
comfortable. And, dear ones, most of us are both. And, more than at
most points in our lives, we’re the afflicted. So, may you make
space in your being to accept the comfort and love of God. “Earth
has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.” NOT EVEN 2020.

And
that’s some good Christmas news.

Amen

1United
Methodist Hymnal #510

2Summarized
from Apple Dictionary

3
R. Alan Culpepper, “Luke,” in The New Interpreter’s
Bible Vol. 9 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994): 70.

4 https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/jesus-wasnt-born-in-a-stable-and-that-makes-all-the-difference/