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Uncategorized

“A Vision, for Us Together” based on Isaiah 61:1-4…

  • January 30, 2022
  • by Sara Baron
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Do you have a Bible verse you claim as your own, one that reminds you of who you are, who God is, and how you want to live. (Possibly three versions of the same question). I’m going to try to guess:

Maybe Micah 6:8:

[God] has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.

Maybe Amos 5:24,

“But let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.”

The Golden Rule from Matthew 7:12?

“In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.”

The Shema from Deuteronomy 6:4-5?

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

The great theology of 1 John 4:7-8?

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.

Maybe the simple repeated theme from Genesis 1:

“And God said it was good”

Or the Hebrew Bible theme of who God is

“God’s steadfast love endures forever"

Or the great equalizing in Christ from Galatians 3:28?

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Or maybe a more particular call from Isaiah 40:1?

“Comfort, O Comfort my people, says your God.”

Or the wise challenge given Esther (4:14) that helps with courage?

“For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?”

Or, perhaps, the deceptively simple instructions from Paul in Romans 12:7-8 (The Message)?

Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle.

Or, just maybe, the Jesus theme from Mark (1:5)?

The time is fulfilled, and the kindom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’

Did I get it? Let me know in comments or an email! If you didn’t have one before, there are some good options, and if you wanted to know more about how I see the Bible, you just learned a lot. I don’t have ONE passage, but all of the above are incorporated into how I try to live, how I understand God, how I understand the vision of the Divine and the work of being a follower of Jesus.

Given the depth and breadth of the Hebrew Bible, there are a LOT of options to choose from to pick a passage to define one’s life and/or ministry. And that’s why I think it is so interesting and notable to hear the one Luke uses to define Jesus. It is a Jubilee passage from third Isaiah, and – perhaps I don’t have quite enough hope, it wasn’t on the list I just shared. This one is BIGGER, broader, more radical, more extreme than any I’d claim for myself. For Jesus, though, it fits.

61The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;
2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
3 to provide for those who mourn in Zion—
to give them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.
4 They shall build up the ancient ruins,
they shall raise up the former devastations;
they shall repair the ruined cities,
the devastations of many generations.

Walter Brueggemann makes a number of great points that help me make sense of this passage, and I’m going to share them with you, largely in my own words.1 It helps to remember that Isaiah 56-66 is considered “Third Isaiah”, distinct from what came before it in both themes and in timing. Isaiah 60 predicts a change for ancient Israel, a reversal of fortunes. It speaks to a people RETURNED from Exile, but struggling in the rebuilding stage. Brueggemann says these chapters are “primally concerned with the future of Jerusalem. It is urgent to determine if the new Jerusalem, which epitomizes new heaven and new earth, will or will not be a place of inclusion, will or will not be a place of neighbor ethic, will or will not manifest a passion for justice.”2

Isaiah 60 predicts that things are going to get better in Jerusalem, that God is going to make things better, and glory and prosperity are on the horizon. Isaiah 61 has a pretty big switch in that there is a HUMAN speaking, as God’s agent, one who is anointed with God’s spirit to MAKE IT HAPPEN.

This human is “authorized and energized to do Yahweh’s deeply transformative work in the community of Yahweh’s people.”3 And what the human-actor is going to do is create a NEW thing.

And the “new thing” is a creating justice for those who are weakened, disempowered, and marginalized. The verbs of what will happen to them speak volumes. The human acting on behalf of God will bring, bind up, proclaim, release, comfort, provide,

give. That is, a whole lot of action aimed at restoring “them to full function in a community of well-being and joy.”4

I know I’m going pretty deep into this passage, but when Luke claims this as Jesus’s vision for his ministry, and when it gives me the shivers like this to see how claiming this historical vision for Jesus fits both in his time and in ours, I think it is worth digging pretty deep.

Because, there are A LOT OF PEOPLE who are weakened, disempowered, and marginalized. And there is a lot of need for restoration, particularly restoring people to a good relationship within a healthy community of mutuality and JOY. Right? This speaks to the return of the exiles, and it speaks to the largely disempowered masses of Jesus’s day, and it speaks right into our day too. Our day, where corporate greed and epic income inequality along with racism and other forms of de-humanizing others prevent the fullness of God’s vision from being lived in people’s lives. A restoration to full function in a community of well-being and joy is another way of talking about God’s kindom, the one we’ve committed our lives to building, and it requires a lot of CHANGES.

Another important theme in this Isaiah passage is the concept of Jubilee. Jubilee is a Torah vision and commandment aimed at preventing generational poverty, and creating an equitable society. I’m currently reading David Graeber’s new book (with David Wendrow) “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” in which the professors examine many ways that human societies have organized themselves in order to consider why some societies carefully maintain equality and care for all, and why some create and maintain inequality and hierarchies of privilege.

It helped me see that the careful Torah provisions aimed at creating a just and equitable society were one of many ways of doing so, many of which have been successful for centuries. (Some archeologists see evidence that the lands of ancient Israel maintained a lack of hierarchy and care for all during the period of the Judges, some 300-400 years- which I think is a notable period of time!)

Pragmatically, practicing Jubilee is laid out in Leviticus 25 and relates to regular forgiveness of debts and restoration of land to original owners. Brueggemann says, “There is no doubt that a vision of jubilee -that is, a profound hope for the disadvantaged – is shockingly devastating to those who value and benefit from the status quo.”5 So, add in another element to what it means to have Jesus claiming this passage in his ministry. It names that he is upending the status quo for the sake of the disadvantaged. AND, it puts the advantaged on notice. There is a VERY good reason the Poor People’s Campaign is also claiming Jubilee as a platform, this Biblical concept still has power today.6 It is still NEEDED today.

I cannot resist the recommendation to reflect on Brueggemann’s quote “is shockingly devastating to those who value and benefit from the status quo.” We are, all of us, a complicated mix of powerful and powerless, we are those who benefit from the status quo and those who are held back by it. And it is of great value to our capacity to build the kindom if we are able to become clearer on where we benefit from the status quo, so we can change how we respond to those who are harmed by it. I suspect that this reflection is easiest accessed by attending to when our bodies “tighten up” at some suggestion for justice or another. What do we instinctually respond to as “that’s too far” OR “but, that would be scary (for me!)”? The work of building God’s kindom often requires us to pay attention to the clues from our bodies of what scares us, and then use that as a source of wisdom to listen to and empathize with people who lack whatever power we’re afraid of losing.

OK, a final point on Isaiah 61 (for now), The passage moves the community from sorrow and grief to gladness and praise. As the disempowered and marginalized are restored to full community, the community itself is healed.

So, when Luke tells us about Jesus reading a passage from Isaiah and claiming it as his own, there is A LOT going on there, a lot about God, a lot about the history of a people devoted to God, a lot about who Jesus is, and a lot about what God is asking of us.

Because, the gospels make it clear, the work that Jesus did during his life time is the work that the followers are Jesus are asked to continue in ours.

Which, rather uncomfortably suggests that I should have put Isaiah 61:1-4 on my list of verses to live by. Isn’t THAT a challenge?

Thank goodness we have each other and God: none of us are asked to be the single-human-actor. Instead, we TOGETHER have gifts sufficient for the tasks, and we TOGETHER have vision of justice, and we TOGETHER have power to build the kindom. We, TOGETHER, along with many other workers in the kindom, are given this time of upheaval in the world as a time to re-vision and to seek justice anew. May God help and encourage us along the way – there is a pretty long journey from where we are to where God dreams we will be. Amen

1 Walter Brueggeman, Isaiah 40-66 (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998) 212-215.

2 Ibid, 167.

3 Ibid, 213.

4 Ibid 213.

5 Ibid, 214.

6 https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/about/jubilee-platform/

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

January 30, 2022

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Untitled

  • January 23, 2022
  • by Sara Baron

“To a People Called Hope” based on Isaiah 62:1-5 and John 2:1-11

To a generation that calls themselves Forsaken, to those who have lived years they call Desolate, to those who would name themselves Abandoned, to those living in a place they call Forlorn, to those who think of themselves as Discarded… (to a people in a pandemic?)…

It is to you that God speaks.

It is to you that God has been speaking.

You are not how you have known yourself. Your past is going to be behind you, and no one will call you by those names again (least of all yourself.)

You will be known for your inner radiance, for your joy and laughter, for the inspiration of your loving relationships, for the delight you bring, and the fullness of your lives.

God is taking care of you, and there is joy to come.

Take heart.

Take hope.

(Thus ends my interpretation of the Isaiah reading for us today.)

In the Hebrew Bible, one of the signs of the Messiah who was to come was an abundance of food and drink. That is, if the scriptures tell us there was A WHOLE LOT OF WINE, we would be wise to be thinking, “that’s a sign of God’s work among us.”

A CAVEAT: In The United Methodist Church, we use grape juice at communion as a means of care for those who live with an addiction to alcohol. This “first sign” of John’s seems to be a similar possible trigger. For those who are especially tender, let this serve as a content warning, and invite you to find another sermon to hear. For those who are feeling OK, but might need some space, I’d invite you to translate “wine” to “bread” as needed. GOOOOOD bread is a wonderful thing and the same connotations can be attached as to “good wine.”

Back to the main story: the Gospel of John, which tends to super-infuse meaning into the stories it tells, suggests that Jesus creates about 120 GALLONS of GOOD wine. That’s a lot of wine. It seems that this is being used as a fulfillment of those prophecies that with the messiah comes an abundance of good food and drink, and this abundance is being used to draw people in to notice who Jesus is.

I keep thinking that making wine was a good way to care for people’s practical needs (I’m told water usually wasn’t safe to drink), but making GOOD wine was a way to share in the joy and hope of God. The things that bring pleasure matter. Jesus wasn’t against enjoying life, and part of the Gospel narrative is telling us that we too, are allowed to enjoy our lives. This, too, I think is part of the messianic promise. What is the point of a messiah if the people don’t get to live GOOD lives?

On that basis, the good wine is a sign of God’s work among us, a sign of God’s care for the people, a sign that God is WITH the people, and they have reasons to have hope. Of course, the Jewish people in Galilee at the time of Jesus had been through about 8 centuries of difficult times and were pretty used to both hopelessness of circumstances and hope in God anyway.

Where do we put our hope, is, I think, a theological question. It tells us what we think is holy. We often put hope in institutions, which will dismay us because they care about themselves, not people. Other times we put our hope in each other, which can be quite lovely, as long as we keep people off pedestals, and allow each other the space to be human. But, of course, sometimes we put all of our hope in ONE person and that tends to be unstable. We’re encouraged to put our hope in the economy, or in the next great thing we will purchase, but those are clearly unstable. Often we’re taught to put our hope in education (I’ve been tempted to do this many times), and maybe there is SOME truth to that, but I think the student loan crisis provides enough reasons to have concerns there.

My hope is in God. Really and truly. I believe that God is with us, on our side, patient, able, and going to stick with us no matter what. I believe God is working towards the kindom in many people and in many places, and that God’s vision for the world is the most likely outcome over the long run.

And, I am aware that hope feels like a limited resource right now.

But, I think God plays a long game, so I’ll keep my hope there.

Where is hope right now? It isn’t in “going back” because that era has ended. But it also isn’t in staying the course, because this isn’t sustainable. (Note: the great resignation). But, perhaps there is hope in the fact that having been shaken up and taken off course, we have a chance to decide what course we want to take next.

The Isaiah passage uses the metaphor of marriage to indicate how significant the change of fate for the ancient Israelites will be. God is claiming the people, and their lives won’t be the same afterwards.

That, too, I think is true of our lives since the pandemic began. While there has been an obscene amount of death and destruction, and I don’t mean to minimize that, the upheaval has also made space for some hope. We have a chance to let go of the things that were holding us back from a fuller life. We have a chance to grab on to the things that move us towards a fuller life.

Or to say it another way, the wedding ran out of wine (boo) but somehow there is an abundance of Good Wine anyway, because God is with us. What do we want to do now?

I don’t have many answers, but I do have some medium term dreams for this church community. I hope that we will be able to gather, eventually without distance or masks, and we will be healed by being in each other’s presences. This week I was reminded of the power of “co-regulation” – when the physical and emotional processes of mammals join together to ease the struggles of both. Co-regulation means we can breath easier, keep our temperatures in the right range, AND let go of panic when we are near someone else we trust, who responds to us with warmth. Being a community that is trustworthy and warm, and that in doing so is able to help people in their human journeys sounds VERY hopeful to me. So, I hope we able to be together and co-regulate again, and I hope when do it is SLOW and SWEET and we notice how good it is.

I have a hope that someday we are going to have coffee hour again, with real coffee, and maybe some snacks, and mostly with people milling about chatting with each other and crying in relief to be together.

I have a hope that we might eventually create a regular practice of “listening groups” to do the holy work of hearing each other, and allow God’s healing to enter each other’s lives by being known and loved.

I have a hope that we might look for signs that we are growing as a faith community by seeing how compassion and empathy are growing within us.

I have a hope that we might judge ourselves, in part, by how much FUN we are having together, by how much delight is in our midst, by our contagious our joy is – that we may be signs of the goodness of God.

AND I have hope that some of things we’ve developed over the past almost two years will form us in the future: that we might keep intergenerational faith formation because it is GOOD, that we will always have an online presence because it connects us whenever we are apart, that we may always take seriously the needs of those who can’t be physically present.

So, dear ones, in your lives, in your work, in your play, and in your church I invite you to consider: what is the mediocre wine? What isn’t worth drinking, or doing, or fighting for? And, what’s the GOOD stuff? What makes life worth living, what brings wholeness and healing, what brings compassion or joy? Feel free to answer in the comments, or bring some answers to the Sunday Check in ;).

God is a God who can be trusted, and there is hope through God, and we might as well take stock of where hope is flowing through us. Amen

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

January 23, 2022

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Untitled

  • January 16, 2022
  • by Sara Baron

“Two Big Questions” based on Isaiah 43:1-7 and Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

I’ve been told that human beings have two big questions in life, ones that are in tension with each other, ones that motivate much of what we do. They are: “Do I fit in?” “Am I special?” I think that together they add up to “Do I matter?” because both fitting in and being special are about mattering. We matter when we have a group who claims us, a place we can be real, an identity formed with others. We ALSO matter when we know we are making a contribution, that we are doing what WE in particular can do, when we are seen for being ourselves and not just another face in the crowd.

Or maybe when I was told this it was just about kids, as it came from a theory in my Children’s Literature class 😉 So, it seems, I’m the one who has expanded this to all humans. Mostly because it seems true to me.

We are always looking for clues about if we fit in, and adapting our behaviors to what we see around us. Think about masking at different kinds of gatherings and how uncomfortable it is to be in the minority in whatever decision you make.

We are also always looking for clues that we are special, and often we seek to show it by what we do, or say, or wear. This is part of why it can feel good to be thanked for sharing a musical gift, or visual display, or sharing a helpful thought. We want to stand out, in some ways, even as we want to fit in, in others.

So, they’re in tension, they motivate A LOT of what we do, and they add up to “do I matter?” Or maybe, “do I matter RIGHT?” Sometimes we even get stuck in old ways of fitting in or old ways of being special and struggle to adapt to new places or expectations. This stuff is deeply and profoundly correlated with IDENTITY, and for human-being-meaning-makers, our identity MATTERS.

I have been told that “Your community is the place that accepts your gifts.” Talk about intersecting the two questions! The place you fit in is the place that accepts you in your specialness. Hmmm.

Similarly, there are studies that say that we get a little burst of happiness hormones when we get a text message or a response on social media. These are ALSO related to our core questions: they tell us “I’m special enough someone is wanting to connect with me” AND “I fit in.” I find it interesting to pay attention to when I am doing things to get those little floods of positive hormones, and when I’m able to let go of them and be more present where I am.

For me, the story of Jesus’s baptism, and the ways it resonates in our lives today, correlate with all of this: being accepted and fitting in, being special and unique, and being affirmed as mattering. God saying, “You are my child, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased,” is the crux of what most of us need to hear most of the time, and a statement we struggle to believe and thus push back against.

We worry we aren’t worthy. That something we said, or did, or didn’t say, or didn’t do makes us unlovable. We worry that we aren’t sufficiently pleasing God, that we aren’t good enough, or we aren’t doing enough. This may be why we constantly seek affirmation that we are special and we do fit in. We need it, but we don’t trust it from the Source.

In the United Methodist Church we rather firmly hold that baptism is a one-time deal. Our reasons are sound: because baptism is a gift from God, humans can’t mess it up, so it doesn’t ever NEED to be redone. That “can’t be messed up” applies both to the person who does the baptizing – it doesn’t matter if they’re imperfect because God is the actor, not the pastor AND it applies to the baptized – it doesn’t matter what you’ve done, you can’t shake off God’s love. (It seems worth admitting that I believe in ONE exception to the “baptized once” rule, which is that if someone is baptized with a name and gender that do not match who the person has come to know themselves to be, then I am willing to make sure that they receive the blessing of inclusion with their actual name and actual gender. God still hasn’t messed up, but any ritual of inclusion should include the ACTUAL person.)

Of the many explanations for what baptism is, the one I most resonate with is that it is a ritual of inclusion. When someone is baptized we welcome them into the Family of Faith. Now, OF COURSE, we believe that God’s love is for all people and God works for the good of all people. So, the difference is that we, as the Family of Faith, acknowledge that love and spend our lives seeking to expand its impact in the world. We commit to work together to expand that love, to be loving to each other, to encourage each other in the work, and to recognize the sacredness of each person both within the Family of Faith and beyond it. To be baptized as a baby is to have promises made to teach you these things, to be confirmed or to be baptized as an adult is to claim this God of Love for yourself and the aim of expanding love in the world as your shared goal. (We often call this “the kindom”, MLK talked of the Family of Faith as being the “beloved community.”)

When Jesus was baptized by John, he was committing himself to John as his teacher, and becoming a “disciple” of John’s. He, too, was joining a movement committed to a Godly way of life and a vision for how the future should be. Later on, after John died, he claimed his own vision (similar to but similar to John’s) and started doing his own baptisms, claiming his own disciples. As disciples are learners, one of the phrases still used for people of faith in the Christian (Jesus following) tradition is “disciples.” In this church we seek to learn so we can understand both the world as it is and God’s vision for a just future for all of creation.

Baptism incorporated Jesus into his chosen community, and then incorporated his disciples into theirs, and incorporates us into ours. We are, at least we seek to be, that place that receives the gifts that people are willing and able to offer. This is a place where we “fit in” and try our hardest to make it possible for others to do so well. AND, that means it is also a place where we get to be special – to offer particular skills and gifts for the wellbeing of the whole.

There are so many loud and constant narratives in the world at large telling us that we aren’t enough, that some people matter more than others, that injustice is unavoidable, that fear should motivate us (to buy things), and that we should work harder to protect ourselves – no matter the cost to others.

And then there are the narratives of God. God says to the people (Isaiah 43):

Dear Ones, I created you, I formed you, and I like you.

You can let go of fear, you are already enough,

You can let go of worry, you are mine and that is identity enough.

You are beloved children of God. And it is good.

When you face floods, I am with you.

When you face droughts, I am with you.

You are precious to me.

I love you.

Do not be afraid, I am with you.

Come home to me.

I created you for goodness,

and I call you by your name.

NOW, integrity requires me to point out that this song of Isaiah is COMMUNAL, it was written to the nation of ancient Israel, promising that the Exile wouldn’t have the last word. The you is the whole, not the individual. And, I would say, that sometimes we need to hear it as it was written and be reminded of the power and sacredness of the whole. AND sometime we need to hear it as individuals and be reminded that we too are special to God.

The Spirit guides our reading and hearing of holy texts.

Dear ones, in God’s house, you fit in. AND, in God’s eyes you are special. When humans create God-centered spaces, they’re able to offer a genuine welcome God’s uniquely wonderful beings. And we try to do that, together.

May you rest assured, beloved child of God, you are already enough, and you need not struggle to matter. You already do – you are God’s beloved, and that IS enough. Amen

–

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

January 16, 2022

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Untitled

  • January 9, 2022
  • by Sara Baron

“Another Road Home” based on Isaiah 60:1-6 and Matthew 2:1-12

I really like the idea that the Christmas stories in the gospels are “Gospels in Miniature” that highlight the major points of each gospel writer, foreshadow what is to come, and even tell the whole story in a nutshell.1

Given the Gospel in Miniature idea, it is really easy to see why Luke tells us about shepherds in the field at night watching their sheep: he wanted us to know that the birth of Jesus was good news for the least, the last, the lost, and the lonely and he made his point early and often. Luke is spiffy though, and you should never underestimate him. With the shepherds he ALSO manages to tied Jesus to David one more time, in case we’d missed the point previously.

But, why does Matthew tell us about Magi from the East, with the power to access King Herod, impractical baby gifts, and only a fleeting encounter with Jesus?

Ironically, I believe that this was because Matthew was writing for a Jewish audience, and he was making the point he’d make again at the end of the gospel, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” namely that the good news of Jesus expanded past even the community of the faithful Jews.

The Magi from the east are outsiders, others, non-Jews. They have access to other wisdom, other traditions, other power. By having them perceive the spiritual earthquake of Jesus’s birth tells Matthew’s audience just how BIG this story is, and how profound it’s impact will be.

I think “the east” is particularly significant as well. To the east is the land Abraham left when God called him. Also, to the east is Babylonia, where the exiles had once been taken, and lived in captivity. That means to the east is where their release came, and like Abraham, the exiles returned home “from the east.”

By the time Jesus was born “to the west” was the power center of Rome, and the local power center of the Judea was also to the west. The powers to the west are the ones that Jesus will be organizing against in his life, and they are the ones with the power to end his life. So, it is from the east that Jesus is recognized for who he is, and that makes sense. This feels like a foreshadowing of Palm Sunday and Jesus’s entrance into Jerusalem from the EASTERN gate too.

So these EASTERN foreigners discern that there is something new and amazing happening and they come to see it for themselves. When they stop to ask for directions at the palace, the paranoid and power-hungry King Herod (who historically really was known for being incredibly bloodthirsty and insecure) decides to use them for his own purposes, to take out any threat to his kingship with haste.

The Magi are being used as the King’s spies.

But when they arrive and discover the humanity and vulnerability of Jesus, and of Mary, and (maybe) of Joseph, something shifts in them.

That may sound minor, “something shifts in them” but it is the best explanation I have for Easter too. Somehow, the very frightened disciples who were hidden away trying to save their lives had “something shift in them” and they weren’t afraid anymore, and they lived as Jesus lived, and were even willing to die as Jesus died.

A little shift inside can have HUGE consequences.

Something shifts in the Magi, maybe at meeting Jesus, maybe in a dream, maybe both, “and they left for their own country by another road.” This suggests that even meeting Jesus as a baby/toddler was significant enough to help people refuse the power of the Empire 😉

They refuse the power of King Herod, and they change their plans and find another way.

That does sound like an epiphany. Epiphany means a manifestation of a divine or supernatural being OR a moment of sudden revelation or insight.2 This sounds like both. They saw the divine in Jesus, or they experienced the Divine in a dream (or both) AND it was for them a moment of sudden insight leading to a shift within.

They went to their own country by another road. They went home, but they went home changed.

One of the fun parts of the Christian tradition is that we assume that the Magi showed up more than a year after Jesus’s birth. That is, this Epiphany celebrates the Magi showing up for last year’s Christmas. (Hmmm, given pandemic time warps, that sounds right, doesn’t it?) Given that, it is always a little bit the Christmas season, because the Magi are always journeying to Jesus – AND I think always journeying home by another route. The travel, and the change, are constant.

It could be tempting, right about now, to give up hope. It is 2022, and COVID 19, named for 2019 is STILL sending shock-waves through our lives, despite vaccines, despite prior infections, despite all we’ve given up for nearly two years. We’re back at trying to protect the capacity to keep schools open and trying to keep hospitals from being overrun (and neither are going terribly well.) In my house this week, we heard about more people testing positive for COVID than any other week of this pandemic.

It is scary.

AND we have to make decisions all over again about what is safe and what isn’t and where to spend our risk tolerance and what impact it will have if we get it wrong.

And it exhausting.

And people are SICK, some of them really sick, some of them dying.

And it is horrible.

And I wonder where God is inviting us to take another road home. I wonder about epiphany, and God showing up and surprising us, and shifting things within us, and making new things possible. Because I believe that God is with us, and God shows us a new way when it seems there is no way, and God is able to bring life even out of death, and God is with those who are alone, and God is ultimately creative.

There are “other roads home.”

They’re new to us, we haven’t chosen them before (maybe for good reason), they come without good maps, and there are unknown dangers along the way. That said, the roads we came by are now impassable to us, and the way home is by another way. (Fair warning, home will be changed when we get there too, but you already knew that.)

May God help us to travel the roads we are now on, no matter how we got here, and may we find enough promise them to make it through another day, and another day, and another day. Amen

1Borg and Crossan “The First Christmas”, major theme.

2Apple Dictionary 1/6/2022.

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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

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  • December 5, 2021
  • by Sara Baron

“The Road Home is Under Construction” based on Malachi 3:1-4 and Luke 3:1-6

When preaching is done well the past helps make sense of the present to prepare the people for the future. Preaching isn’t ever supposed to be just retelling the stories of the past, they’re told to make meaning, to help make sense, to get perspective, to gain insight. In oral tradition, the stories themselves change as they’re retold, responding to the needs of the people who are hearing the story as well as the perspective of the story teller. In our tradition, the stories eventually were written down into our scriptures, into one or a few versions, but preachers PLAY with the stories until they build a bridge from the past to the present that can support the future.

In this sense, I note that the scripture writers themselves are doing some “preaching” with the stories of their own tradition in our texts today. In Luke we hear quoted Isaiah, and it is with Isaiah we’re going to start.

Isaiah is speaking to the Exiles, displaced in Babylon, trying to make sense of the traumas they’ve experienced, the losses they’ve lived, the discombobulation of being displaced, and the sense that God let them down. I think more of us fit in here than we tend to admit. I hear my colleagues talk about the pandemic as collective trauma, and I believe they are right. When we add together the childhood traumas that most people have experienced, to traumas in adulthood, to collective trauma – it becomes clear that we have similarities with the exiles. And, trauma isn’t just a word for “ a bad thing.” Shelly Rambo in her book Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining talks about trauma as “an encounter with death.”1 She, like other writers on trauma, clarifies that it isn’t just suffering, “Suffering is what, in time, can be integrated into one’s understanding of the world. Trauma is what is not integrated in time; it is the difference between a closed and an open wound. Trauma is an open wound.”

Into this brokenness, into this trauma, Isaiah speaks a vision. He says that God will level out the way home, create an easy pathway back to Israel with the mountains brought low and the valleys made high, and the curves straightened out. There are some important aspects to this story: God does it! The people don’t have to. God smoothing the way home tells them that God still cares about them, a response to their biggest fear. The trauma doesn’t go away, it isn’t solved by this vision of homecoming, or even the homecoming itself. However, the trauma ALSO doesn’t get to have the last word.

Isaiah is preaching “don’t give up” to a people who thinking about giving up. Isaiah is sharing that God still cares to a people who aren’t sure if God still cares. Isaiah is offering a vision of hope to a moment of hopelessness. And he does it with an imagery of justice, of bringing down the mighty and bringing up the weak. You see it? The past trauma, the present struggles, the bridge to the future?

I wonder how Isaiah would say it to us today. How would Isaiah speak into the loneliness of the past and present, the constancy of ambiguity, the displacement in place that we know today? I wonder what our path home would look like, how we might construe the road construction on that path in meaningful ways. What are the mountains we struggle to climb? What are the valleys light doesn’t reach? What curves keep us from seeing the way forward? What rough spots slow us down?

I’m struck that in all the layers of stories today, which are all themed on preparation, the preparation is always of “the people” and never of a person. I wonder if Isaiah’s metaphor for us today would be of God building the bullet train tracks home – so that we can journey together instead of apart, and take care of creation while we’re at it.

Now, Luke as a preacher, is using the story Isaiah told to make sense of HIS present. Luke’s present is situated in the powers and principalities of Rome, the passage starts by naming the era via the names of the men who were profiting from the control of the Jewish people. (And then the names of the high priests they’d appointed, which lacks subtlety.) And then, Luke switches, he says that into this powerful mess of oppression came John the Baptist, preaching and asking people to change their minds, turn around, get reoriented (#repentance). Luke uses the story of the past, the imagery of a safe road home, to make sense of John’s ministry. What had been a vision for exiled people to have hope that trauma didn’t have the last word became for Luke a vision of a prophet preparing the people to hear the words of the the Messiah, so that everyone might have healing (#salvation).

Luke is preparing the people to stand up to Rome, by telling them a story of John preparing the way for Jesus by preaching repentance.

How would we name our present day? Would we say, “During the presidency of…” or “When …. was governor of NY” or “in the time when trust was at an all time low” or “when income inequality had reached new highs?” It seems that how we name the present impacts how we contrast it with what God is up to. Funny that. Its true of how we name the past too, right? What stories do we tell, and which ones do we leave out? How do our memories adapt over time?

You may notice that different parts of Christianity understand Jesus pretty differently. It is likely fair to say in ways that are polar opposites. In the United Methodist Church, there is a similar phenomenon with John Wesley – the ways he is interpreted say more about the theology of the interpreters than of John Wesley. To be honest, I think Luke is pushing Isaiah’s vision pretty far here, to make it fit John the Baptist, but it does tell us how Luke understood John and Jesus which is exactly what it was intending to do.

How we tell the stories of the past (and which stories we tell), relates to what we perceive and we need in the present and what we dream for the future. This applies to our individual lives as well as our communal lives.

The past isn’t quite as… fixed as we might imagine it to be. It is complicated, and it can only be seen through the lenses brought to it. In this season of preparation, it seems fair to be asking ourselves: what are we preparing FOR, and how does that relate to our past and our present?

The rest of our lives are going to be “after the start of the pandemic.” Which means that the time before the pandemic is now our past. How do we tell its stories, and how do we tell them to make sense of the present and the future? More broadly, I suspect the days of Christianity being the de facto religion of the United States and mainline denominations dominating the religious landscape are also in the past. How do we tell those stories, and the stories of our own church with awareness that the present is different from the past and the future from both?

In between Isaiah and Luke, speaks Malachi. Malachi speaks to the POST-exilic people, who were a combination of the exiles who had come home, the people who had been left behind, and those who had moved into ancient Israel in the meantime. For the returned exiles, the return wasn’t as idealized they might have hoped. They got home, but it wasn’t what they expected. There were conflicts between groups, misunderstandings, and DIFFERENT traumas that led to DIFFERENT triggers, all mixed up together.

In the midst of this, Malachi tells of a messenger who is preparing the way by purifying the people into righteousness. Malachi is preparing the people for the work they have to do by re-imagining the stories of the past. He reuses the idea of God sending a messenger, but changes what the messenger would do. Malachi looks to the past to purify the present to make space for the future, but to do so requires reworking the past.

All this preparing the prophets and writers were doing, all this worrying about the people and their connection to God, all of this awareness of the flow of time and its intersections, all of these criss crosses of timelines and imagery:

What do they say to us today? How do they help us be in our uncomfortable present? Well, all of the “presents” of the texts were uncomfortable. They were all times where people were just waiting it out, hoping for it to end – the exile, the discomfort after the exile, Roman rule. For what has felt to us like a very long time, we’ve been trying to wait out this pandemic.

But, the prophets and writers of God spoke into those uncomfortable presents to make meaning and do the work that needed to be done. This pandemic has lasted too long to just wait for it to go away. This IS our present, this one, not the one we expected, and God is with us in it, and God is working with us to build a bridge that can support the future.

I wonder what it will take to sort through the stories of the past, to tell them and hear them, and pick from them what stories we need to take with us into the future. I wonder how we get better at being in this uncomfortable and ambiguous now. I suspect a lot of it has to do with telling stories, and with taking the time to listen to God and ourselves. It has to do with not rushing away, but being present. And so once again, I invite you into the uncomfortable, into the present, into the NOW, with trust that God meets us here. Amen

Time with Young People

What is it like to be YOUR AGE years old today? What do I need to know, since I haven’t ever been YOUR AGE OLD in today?

Things are different than they have been, and it is hard to make sense of, but I’d love to know what you know, as I try to tell you what I know.

I”m 40 years old right now, and … I still have dreams that I am in public and forgot my mask…. and I also left the house this weke and got 5 steps away before I realized I really had forgotten my mask. My brain still forgets even big changes!!!

God is with us, God will always be with us, and God helps us adapt. Thanks be to God!

1 12.

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 5, 2021

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  • November 28, 2021
  • by Sara Baron

“The Future. The Past. Grief.” based on Jeremiah 33:14-16 and Luke 21:25-36

“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”

I can just HEAR the me from two years ago whining about the weird Advent passages, and how dark and gloomy they are, and can’t we have a more thematic set of readings. I can hear her, but I’m NOT her anymore.

The 2021 version of me reads these passages with relief, glad that the dystopian realities of the past two years have expression in our Holy Scriptures. Because, truly, people have fainted from fear – and with good cause. The powers of heaven and earth have been shaken. Foreboding has become normal, and all the nations of the earth are distressed.

YES, thank you Luke for putting it words.

I almost wish he hadn’t switched topics quite so quickly. I find I’m not quite ready to believe that all of this is going to be fixed by Jesus returning on a cloud, and there have been far too many metaphorical green leaves sprouting without metaphorical figs arriving for me to read the signs quite like that anymore.

However, when the passages ends with Luke suggesting, “Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place,” I do find that wish I’d heeded that advice, because strength has sure been needed, and I wish I’d prayed more to find it before everything came to pass.

Now, of course, unlike the first generation of Christians, I’m not expecting the end of the world imminently, nor expecting that the signs I see today suggest that’s coming. However, I believe we have all lived an end of the world as we knew it, and that requires some time to process and accept it.

Advent is a time of longing, and waiting, and hoping. It is a time when we acknowledge how broken things are, and how desperately we need God’s help to make them better. It is a time when we join in the yearning of people of faith throughout the ages, waiting for righteousness and justice and the kindom of God, and noticing that IT IS NOT HERE YET.

Friends, it is not here yet.

It doesn’t feel very close.

It feels further away than ever.

And I don’t even want to tell you all the reasons why, because I know your hearts are already broken, and I don’t think they need any additional burdens.

So I’m not going to. I’m going to trust that you’ve noticed that things are NOT RIGHT, and VERY BROKEN, and it is NOT OK.

And now I’m going to ask you to do something that you may not want to do.

I’m going to ask you to stay with the brokenness, and how much it hurts, and how awful it is, and all the emotions that come with it. I’m going to ask you not to think of ways to fix it, or what books or articles to read about it, or what music or game could help you forget about it, or what little unrelated thing you could try fix just to feel like you still have some power in the world. I’m going to ask that you just let it hurt.

I’m going to ask that you let yourself hurt, let yourself grieve, let your spirit wander around lost – and sad – and angry – and confused – and … most of all that you let it be without trying to fix it or ignore it.

This, dear ones, is the Advent I think we need.

Because we lost the world as we knew it, and it has been so scary and awful and disconnected that we’ve just tried to keep on keeping on, and so we didn’t ever deal with it. And so it has been dealing with us.

When I sit with people who have lost dear ones, I advise them that their job is to sit on the couch and cry. I worry that if people don’t sit on the couch, stare at nothing, and cry intermittently, that the grief will just ache harder and longer.

I want us to do that. To be with the pain, like God is with us. Emmanuel is one of the words we come back to every Advent – “God with us.” God is with us, and we need to be with ourselves as God is with us.

Over the course of my leave, I found myself coming to the song “Come and Find the Quiet Center” again and again, and its wisdom deepened in me as the weeks past. This week it is the second verse that is speaking most strongly to me:

Silence is a friend who claims us, cools the heat and slows the pace, God it is who speaks and names us, knows our being, touches base, making space within our thinking, lifting shades to show the sun, raising courage when we’re shrinking, finding scope for faith begun.

I’ve chosen this hymn as our Advent song, hoping that some silence and slowed paces might be gifts to all of us (and not just me.) I don’t want us to rush to Christmas this year, I want us to slow down the pace, listen to ourselves, and listen for God. I believe that grief takes TIME, and we need to give that time.

I think of what it takes for wounds to heal: they need to be clean, and dry, and protected. They can’t continue to be agitated and still heal. And even when all those factors are taken care of, it just takes time. That’s true in bodies, but I think its true in our spirits and souls too.

It is EASY to feel anxious and act out in unproductive ways, trying to change that feeling. It is hard to sit with our anxieties, and listen to them.

God calls us to do it anyway.

So I ask you some questions for this Advent:

  • What grief needs time to be heard?
  • Where is it that we are waiting for God to break in?
  • Where do we see God with us?

And, I invite you into a time of waiting, in the midst of brokenness, of silence and stillness. I welcome you to Advent.

Amen

–

Call to Advent

Siblings in Christ,

I call you to seek quiet, to seek God,

To let pain be.

To name what you’ve lost, and what we’ve lost,

To name what is broken (at least for yourself)

To let God into the tender-most parts of your being,

to make space for darkness, and allow pain and darkness to set the pace.

God is with us, Emmanuel,

may we take the time to be with God. Amen

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

November 28, 2021

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  • November 21, 2021
  • by Sara Baron

“Questions to Ask” based on John 18:33-27

Today is “Reign of Christ Sunday,” which used to be called “Christ the King Sunday” … which means that I’d really like to spend some time thinking about how it would feel to talk about “Christ the Queen” Sunday, but ALAS it is also “Giving Sunday” (the culmination of our Stewardship Campaign), AND it is the day we are doing our Church Conference AND it is my first Sunday in the pulpit after 8 weeks off, and there just seems to be a lot to talk about all at once.

Let me start with this: It is well with my soul.

I really needed the time off, I was closer to burn out than I knew. I was hurting more than I knew. I was more desperately in need of quiet time with God than I knew – and that simple fact taught me a lot.

Friends, one of my greatest temptations in life is the temptation to be EFFICIENT. I like to get things done, and the particular reality of clergy work is that there is always more work to get done than can actually be done. These are a bad combination, and all too often I’ve allowed them to get in the way of simply connecting with God.

Yet, I’d imagine that if any of you were thinking about the most important thing you want from your faith leader, it would be that I am grounded in my relationship with God. (Hmmm, ok, it occurs to me that you are a vibrantly diverse community and lots of you would have other answers, but I think this would be NEAR the top at least.)

Over the course of my leave, I sought to take an hour a day to simply be with God, most of the time in silence. It was GLORIOUS. I remembered grace from the inside out. I found peace within. And I realized that by prizing efficiency over my own spiritual well-being I’d been draining my own resources and doing a dis-service to those trusting me to remain grounded.

So the most important things I want you to know about my leave is that I found my “Quiet Center”, and that I realized I need to keep it. Start next week, I want to invite you to do some of that seeking and finding too, because I don’t think I’m alone in needing it, but that’s Advent, and this is Reign of Christ, and I’m ready to talk about that now.

For some, this leads to the REALLY good question, “What is Reign of Christ Sunday?” and it is the last Sunday of our liturgical year, and as such we set it aside as a time to remember that God is God and we are not, and the kindom of God is the goal of our lives, and other things are not. Or, in more traditional language, God is King and the Kings and Queens and Leaders of this world are NOT the most important ones to us.

This, I hope, leads us to the big questions of, “What does that look like?” and “How does that matter?” Which is fantastic, because those are the questions that link together Reign of Christ Sunday with Giving Sunday and Stewardship.

Without God, consumerism, Capitalism, and all sorts of other systems that define our value by our economic input and output, and place competition to survive at the center our lives become the default. The Kings, Queens, and leaders vary, but the systems that oppress, dominate, and compete just take on different names and variations.

When we talk of the Reign of Christ or the Kindom of God, we’re talking about an entirely different value system. One where the value of life is inherent, and the goals are collective well-being and collaboration. One where we work towards everyone thriving, without exception.

And THAT is why we give of our resources to build the kindom of God. In the United Methodist Church our membership vows say that we “faithfully participate in the church’s ministries with our prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness.” That’s pretty extensive, and it is a helpful metric. In fact, I think it is helpful to consider how we give of those 5 things within the church and how we use them beyond the church community as well – in our beyond the church kindom building.

How are we using prayer to build up the church community and its ministries? And how are we using prayer to build up the community at large? For me, prayer is about connecting with the Divine, finding God’s wisdom within me, slowing down enough to notice what really matters, and becoming more whole. It is my hope that when I pray, and become more whole, I am more useful to the church and to the community at large. But again, more on that later.

How do we use our presence to build up the church community and its people? And how does our presence act as a blessing beyond the church? Well this one got complicated at the start of the pandemic, didn’t it? One of my favorite confirmation class moments was when the students told me that they feel more open to the Divine when other people who they trust are also present and seeking the Divine, and that’s why they think people commit to each other to show up for worship. I hadn’t found those words before they did, and I think about their wisdom a lot! However, we’re now living in a reality where showing up is more complicated – it may be the blessing of presence but it can ALSO be the danger of exposure!! The work of navigating that tension has been exhausting!! That said, the questions matter just as much as ever, and the need to struggle with how to be “present” and what that looks like is more important than ever.

How do we use our gifts to build up the church and its ministries, and how do we use them to build up the world? Now, while I believe we are all blessed with a multitude of gifts, I think this vow is really largely financial gifts, which don’t fall into other categories. We live in a society with incredible income disparity, much like Jesus did. The Poor People’s campaign estimates that 45% of our NY state population lives in poverty,1slightly higher than the 43.5% nationwide. Clearly, members of our church come from a wide range of socio-economic standings, and what people are able to give varies widely. Kevin and I believe in tithing, and we are able to tithe, so we do. But that doesn’t actually feel sufficient to us. We aim to contribute similar giving to other organizations and worthy causes, which is a goal we’re still working on. But we seek to use our financial resources for the well-being of the church AND of the world. We know that we are lucky to be able to give, and we are grateful to have a church to give to that we believe in, and to know that there are so many fantastic non-profits we wish to support.

How do we use our service to build up the church and its ministries, and how do we use our service to build up our communities? This, I think, is the place for the wider interpretation of “gifts.” I remain amazed at the many gifts present in the Body of Christ – from music to knowing how to help people navigate Social Services to making sure our roofs get repaired and SO MUCH MORE. Furthermore, the contributions that church members make in the community gets noticed – people think there are MORE OF US than there are, because of the contributions that get made. However, these sorts of gifts require some tending to as well. We’re living in an era of BURN OUT, and things that were once life-giving can become life-draining. God isn’t interested in consuming us… or burning us out, and so we have to pay attention to the service we give. On the other hand, there are many ways we can stretch and grow, and PLAY in service, so sometimes a simple change in where we serve can bring relief. Finally, serving is one of the most enjoyable parts of life, and if you need help finding a place to serve, I’m your person!

That leaves us with witness. How do we use our witness to build up the church and its ministries, and how do we use it to build up the world? I suspect many people have the Francis of Assisi answer’s ready, “preach the gospel at all times and if necessary use words.” I love that answer myself, although these days it sounds a little bit too easy, and maybe not quite true enough. People in society are far too often MEAN these days, and I have some fear that many of us are… people in society. We get triggered. We get impatient. We get stressed. We get bored. We get scared. And we act out in ways that do not preach the gospel at all. I know we all WANT to be expressions of God’s love in the world, and I know NONE of us are capable of enacting that perfectly, nor do we need to be judged for our imperfection. Yet the questions remain, how do we use our witness? And maybe that comes with another question, that is “how do I let God build me up so that I have enough love to share?” And, funny enough,that goes back to prayer, to Advent, to quiet, to God, and to the things I’m going to get around to next week and throughout Advent.

Loving God means loving God’s people and God’s creation. Loving God’s people and creation means taking responsibility for their well-being, and THAT means paying attention to the use of our prayers, our presence, our gifts, our service, and our witness. AND THAT is how we aim to recognize Christ as our Queen, or our King, as the one we aim to serve.

May God help us as we wrestle with the responsibilities of faith. Amen

1https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/CostofPoverty_FINAL.pdf

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

November 21, 2021

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  • September 19, 2021
  • by Sara Baron

“Speaking” based on James 3:1-12

Well, here I am preaching on James 3 which is difficult because James 3 is about how strict and impossible the standards are for those who preach. Um, great. That doesn’t seem like a set up for failure at all 😉

James is well aware of Greek culture in his time, and Greek culture had a lot of things to say about the power of the tongue and the difficulty in controlling it. What makes James different is that he is HARSHER than everyone else. James thinks it is IMPOSSIBLE to control the tongue, and James is clear on why people should try anyway.

I see no need to attempt to make his point better than he does – the power of speech is immense, both for good and for evil, and even people themselves often lose control of their speech. Furthermore, perfect speech is impossible.

There is a whole field of theology focused on this. To quote from Wikipedia, who did a good job on this:

Apophatic theology, also known as negative theology,[1]is a form of theologicalthinking and religious practice which attempts to approach God, the Divine, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God.[web 1] It forms a pair together with cataphatic theology, which approaches God or the Divine by affirmations or positive statements about what God is.1

That is, there is a whole field that starts with the idea that you can’t speak truths about God. Talk about a preacher’s bind!!

I do wonder a little bit how time has impacted the truth James shares. He wrote to a primarily oral culture, where most relationships occurred directly face to face. We aren’t in that culture anymore, especially not now. Many of our interactions now happen through screens, typed with our finger tips rather than spoken with our tongues. At the core though, I’m not sure that it makes that much difference. What is said matters.

And, as James eventually points out, his primary concern is how people of faith speak about others. Luke Timothy Johnson, in the Anchor Bible summarizes with, “When one uses the same tongue to bless God, yet curse the human person who is created according to the likeness of God (3:9), one betrays in a fundamental sense the allegiance by which one claims to live. … Something more than the perfection of the human sage is at stake here. What is at issue is the proper mode of perceiving and responding to God’s creation.” (264-5)

If we bless God, we should also bless God’s creation, and God’s creatures.

Our speech should be a blessing.

Our speech should never be a curse. Nothing like being reminded that following in the way of Jesus is challenging, huh?

This feels like the final step in the process of remembering that the way we love God is to love our neighbors (all our neighbors). And then the way we praise and bless God is to praise and bless our neighbors (all our neighbors).

It is to use our words to build the kindom of God.

It reminds of the command to pray without ceasing, and in this case to let the words of our mouths be prayers of blessing whenever we speak.

In the midst of these standards, it becomes a bit of a relief that James doesn’t think perfection is possible. This being James though, I don’t think that means he lets us off the hook. He just says “yeah, it is impossible do it anyway.”

And, that’s practical advice. We have to speak. We have to communicate. We have to speak to God and of God, we have to speak to and of each other. And, quite often, we’re going to get it wrong, and that doesn’t mean we stop trying to get it right.

I find myself thinking about anti-racism conversations I’ve been in, when the space is created for honest conversation and white people become so scared of being called out for what they say that they try just not talking. I’ve done it. It feels safer. But it also cuts of the possibility for growth, learning, vulnerability, and relationship. Perfect speech isn’t possible, but giving up on speaking doesn’t end up helping either.

So what do we do? Our best.

We remember the power of words, and we remember the wonder of God’s creation, and we remember how beloved all of God’s creatures are, and we seek to speak with blessings as much as we can. And when we don’t, we notice, and use it to do better the next day.

(It isn’t so different from the rest of trying to build the kindom, either.)

There are tools. Nonviolent communication theory is one of my favorites. Others like simple reminders like, “before you speak, think: Is it True, is it Helpful, is it Inspiring, is it Necessary, is it Kind?” There are also the most consistent tools of all: spiritual disciplines that keep us connected to the Divine help us to be blessings no matter what comes at us; and breathing exercises and sources of grounding do so too.

In the end, as per usual, I don’t have much more to say than, James is right. And, it is hard to follow his advice. Let’s try anyway.

Amen.

1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophatic_theology accessed 9/15/2021 at 2:45PM

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

September 19, 2021

Uncategorized

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  • September 12, 2021
  • by Sara Baron

“Mutuality” based on James 2:1-10, 14-17

People often think I am a “bleeding heart liberal,” a “tree-hugging hippie,” or – to get to the point – an “everything goes progressive.” I do not deny the bleeding heart nor the tree-hugging, but actually I don’t think “everything goes.” James speaks the language of my faith, and in doing so makes clear why I find it so challenging to live out my faith the way I want to.

Both in Biblical times, and today, the culture is permeated with the premise that deference should be given to wealthy and powerful people. The work of Christians to treat everyone as beloveds of God is profoundly countercultural. James even suggests preferential treatment for the poor, although I can’t tell if this is because it is necessary to counteract the brokenness of the world, because most of the early Christians were poor, or because people living in poverty really do have a better grasp on faith. Maybe all of them.

To make his point, James sets up a believable story about two people gathering with the community of believers. One is a rich man, a senator or nobleman based on his ring, likely running for office. This rich man has some powerful quid pro quos to offer the fragile and vulnerable faith community. He could be a useful protector for them.

At the same time, another man enters the community of believers. He is poor, his clothes are old, ratty, and dirty.

The faith community responds with the world’s standards, James says. They give the rich and powerful man the best seat in the house while telling the poor man that he can either sit in a place of dishonor or stand out of the way.

James is a wisdom teacher. He speaks clearly through the ages. I can easily believe this was an actual experience in plenty of early Christian gatherings, and I know for certain it still is today. The world’s standards infiltrate the church. While Galatians 3:28 says “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” That is a RADICAL claim of equity within the Church. All of the distinctions of humanity are erased by being followers of Christ. All are one. All are equal. All are equally important.

But that is easier said that done. The unconscious bias

gets carried into the church, even when people don’t want it to. And they do great damage. James says, “Siblings, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our Lord Jesus Christ?” I always worry that when we say or hear “Lord Jesus Christ” we hear it with the hierarchy of the English Nobility, a system rife with patriarchy, sexism, and economic exploitation. Which, pretty clearly, isn’t what James is saying here. For the early Christians, calling Jesus “Lord” was the utmost subversion, because it claimed that if Jesus was Lord, Caesar was not.1

By ALL of the worldly standards, Caesar WAS Lord. He was Emperor of the largest empire known to that part of the world, he was wealthy beyond imagination, he had the power of the best armies behind him, he had systems of nobility and administration under him, he could execute as he pleased, change laws when he wished, and of course his FACE was on all the money. He had titles galore, including “Lord and God,” and those were the OFFICIAL declarations of the empire, to claim otherwise was to risk death.

In the face of that reality, the early Jesus followers chose another way. A “narrower” way, a more dangerous way, a way that subverted the understanding of power, and choose nonviolence over the power of violence. They claimed Jesus, a peasant from the backwater Galilee, a rabble rouser of the small but ancient Jewish faith, a man executed by the violent power of the Empire as a the leader of a violent rebellion (even when it wasn’t true)… they claimed JESUS as Lord.

And when JESUS is Lord like THAT, to favoritism to those who hold power and sway in the Roman Empire could reasonably make James question if they actually believe in Jesus or not. Are they following the narrow way, or are they slowing just making the way wider? Are they about the radical equality of all people in the eyes of God, or about making it easier to be a follower of Jesus? Are they overturning assumptions about who matters, or are they just replicating the ways of the world.

And, of course, the crux of this series of questions: are we?

I can see some evidence that we are committed to inverting the world’s values:

  • Our Community Breakfast is an abundance of good food, offered with grace and respect, that anyone would be pleased to eat. We are not only interested in feeding God’s beloveds, we are interested in feeding people AS God’s beloveds.
  • Both the long-running Sustain Ministry Program and Community Breakfast have welcomed and kept volunteers who are also recipients of the ministry’s gifts. This suggest to me that we have been interested in re-distributing God’s gifts of abundance RATHER THAN just in giving gifts to ease guilt or unconsciously hold power over others.
  • Our stewardship pledge sheets ask about all of the membership vows: prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness in order to remind us all that no one way of giving is more important than another, and that all of us are stronger in the ability to give in one way than another.
  • The church has long advocated for living wages, and puts its money where its mouth is, paying its own employees as it believes the world should.
  • Before the pandemic, some church groups offered luncheons with (nonobligatory) free will offerings, making genuine space for everyone to be fed and together regardless of income.
  • Many of the trips we take as a church – hiking, baseball games, canoeing and kayaking trips – are free or affordable to people across a wide income spectrum.
  • Our community is profoundly diverse, especially in socioeconomic status and income. Beloved members are rich, beloved members are poor, beloved members are in between.

And yet truth be told, I see evidence of the values of the world creeping in too though:

  • Before the pandemic, often parts of the church celebrated or connected by going out to lunch or dinner, or offering support by sending a communal gift, which assumes that everyone has the discretionary money to participate.
  • I sometimes hear people living in poverty referred to as “them,” such as in the context, “how can we help them?” which forgets that people living in poverty are part of us. The questions might be, “How can we ease the pain of poverty?” and “How can we transform society to end poverty?”
  • There is a great value on education in this community, one that isn’t always held in enough tension with the reality that in the US access to education has more to do with pre-existant privilege than intelligence.
  • Our primary worship style speaks to people’s heads at least as much as their hearts or souls, which historically fits the values of the upper class.
  • Among some of our members, there is still a sense of discomfort with the struggles of people in poverty. While discomfort is itself neutral, lack of facing it has resulted in people who live in poverty perceiving that they’re welcome to eat at our Breakfast, but not join us for Worship. The perception of a two tiered system, I fear, is not entirely incorrect.

Given these two lists, I think James still has plenty to teach us, even if we’ve been trying to learn along the way.

In order to build God’s Kindom at FUMC, it may mean we have to look deeply at our discomfort. Although discomfort is natural, a willingness to change it is sometimes harder.

To live into the values of Jesus and James requires soaking up God’s grace, and a constant awareness of the ways that the world tries to separate people into worthy and unworthy categories. To be a church that lives out the “Lordship of Jesus Christ” requires us to notice class, notice classism, and actively work to change it – in ourselves and in our community. It means that those of us who do not live in poverty need to listen to people who do live in poverty, and learn from them. Our actions to disrupt the status quo and move the world toward the kindom must be based in mutuality. We can’t serve in the name of Christ if we see those we serve as “others” rather than as a part of “us.” And we can’t claim anyone as part of “us” unless they claim “us” too.

I hope and pray that God will help us take the lessons James offers to heart. Amen

1 Marcus Borg, Jesus: The Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, (HarperCollins) 2015, p. 279.

September 12, 2021

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

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