“Sin and Repentance (What!?)” Isaiah 40:1-11 and Mark 1:1-8

December 11, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

My natural instinct, when I hear the word sin, is to stick my fingers in my ears and sing a song approximating “la la la, I can’t hear you.” For the most part, this is not particularly productive. 😉 For the most part. 😉

To a certain degree, I think it is justifiable. Too much of Christianity focuses on individual sin: on guilt, the need forgiveness, and the threat of punishment for said sins. While this doesn’t seem to go back to Jesus, it does have a long history in the church. In fact, this fear based scheme has been a primary funding tool for churches for a REALLY long time. Churches who claim the exclusive power to offer God’s forgiveness have usually offered it with a price tag.

Thus, within the church, sin language has sounded like manipulation, for the purpose of controlling people, that mostly prevents the full and abundant lives that God ACTUALLY wants from us. Furthermore, focusing on individual sins keeps us from having time, energy, and passion to dismantle the CORPORATE sins of institutions and our society at large. (Like, for example, churches manipulating people to get their money.) Since I don’t believe God intends for us to be motivated by fear, and I don’t think good comes from guilt nor shame I really don’t buy into the standard logic on this topic. I do believe we need Divine Grace, but not to prevent us from condemnation in hell; more because all of us seek love and acceptance in our lives and knowing that God is already there loving and accepting us is a very good start to healthy living.

For many people the assumptions about sin, punishment, forgiveness, and God are the CORE of their faith; they think it IS Christianity. Thus, I often disengage from the word, and just tone it out. Tearing down people’s faith isn’t a good thing. However, what serves me well running in Christian circles does not serve me nearly as well when I’m working with the Bible. The Bible doesn’t mean “sin” the way that mainstream Christianity does. When I block my ears from the word, I often miss important things in the text.

All of this is to confess that in all the years I’ve read this Gospel passage, I’ve always mentally skipped over the lines, “John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.” (NRSV)

Suddenly, now, it occurs to me to wonder what sins they’re talking about and why. And suddenly, it becomes clear that Mark is quoting Isaiah, and the context of Isaiah might make sense of Mark … and this might actually be a very important question. (Which means I likely should have paid attention to this earlier.)

The Isaiah text today is the beginning of Second Isaiah, and this is the same text Mark quotes. The massive book of Isaiah (66 chapters) is believed to actually be three different prophets at three different times. The first speaks before the Exile, warning about it. Second Isaiah speaks in the immediate aftermath. The Exile is the name for the defeat and conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Empire in 587 BCE. At that time, after a long siege, the city fell, and atrocious violence resulted. Many were killed, the city’s walls and temple were destroyed, and the remaining leaders were taken into captivity in Babylon. This was the Exile. It lasted 70 years by the shortest counts.

First Isaiah contains many dire warnings about what will happen if the systems don’t change. Second Isaiah represents a huge change in tone in the book starting with the words, “Comfort, O Comfort my people says your God.” Into the immediate aftermath of the horror, the prophet speaks words of comfort and hope. The people generally assumed that their military defeat was a punishment from God, and into that assumption is spoken a declaration that the punishment has ended. It is followed by a vision of God in action, making it easy for those who were forcibly marched as captives to Babylon to walk home with ease and safety. It is this that is quoted in Mark, “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

Then comes the “comfort” of a reminder that those who oppress will also fade, that oppression will not stand. Finally, our passage evokes God as Shepherd King, gathering the people, leading them, feeding them, and carrying them home.

All of this is evoked in Mark. It is as if the people feel like they are back in Exile and are needing God’s help finding their way home – again. The people are experiencing oppression from an outside force, and presumably many of them are now wondering if this oppression is a punishment from God, and therefore if there is a need to repent in order for God to restore them once again. If that experience of being dominated by Rome felt like the experience of being dominated by Babylon in the Exile, then it makes sense that the same theological reasoning would apply to both. Under this perspective, John the Baptist was there to make that repentance possible, and therefore change the reality of oppression.

Now, the ancient Jews, like their descendants today and the Bible itself, focused on COMMUNAL sin: on the injustices of society, on the systemic harm done to the vulnerable, on practices that harmed the weak, on systems that kept some down and some on top of them, etc. Those prophets of old were consistently accusing the kings of abusing their power, of forgetting that their power existed to care for the vulnerable and disempowered. The prophets, time and time and time again, reminded those in power that God had envisioned a just society; and warned that instead it had become exploitative.

Those prophets kept saying that if things didn’t change, the society would not be able to hold up its own weight. This may be why most of the people interpreted the Exile as God’s punishment, even though the prophets saw it simply as a consequence. But since this was a common understanding of how the world works, and since the people in the time of Jesus were living lives of oppression and exploitation from an external empire, it seems likely that they would be aware again of their communal sin and be seeking ways to reconnect with God who was known to act to restore their holistic communal life.

And this John the Baptist guy, he gave them a way to do it. Furthermore, the Temple at that point was understood to be the place to seek forgiveness, but the Temple had been appropriated by the Roman Empire and no longer truly existed to serve God OR the people. In fact, it may have been more of a source of manipulating the people than serving anyone. John had taken power and authority that was assumed to belong to Temple, and was using it to give people a way to connect to God who might act to change their oppression.

This is the man who will baptize Jesus. That means, this is the man who Jesus looked to as teacher. They really were working with some powerful and dangerous ideas! No wonder the Empire felt threatened.

As I’ve reflected on these texts and the themes of Exile and Return, I’ve wondered how those themes fit our lives. Do we feel like we are in Exile even within our own country like the Jews of Jesus day did? There are certainly many ways that is true. And we yearn for the restoration of the country as we thought we knew it and as we think it should be. There are many within our country who do not experience its benefits, who also have reason to identify primary with the Exile.

There are also ways that we might identify with the Babylonians, the captors. This is less comfortable, but sometimes it is true anyway. As citizens of the country with the world’s most significant military might, we might admit that our country is like Babylon to many. Or, we might consider the impacts of unfettered capitalism on the world, of patriarchy, and of white supremacy. Each of these are forms of Exile, and to the extend that we are parts of groups that benefit from them, we are the captors.

Oppression dehumanizes everyone involved. As much as the ancient Jews yearned for God’s actions to free them from oppression, if the Babylonians (and Romans) had known what was good for them, they would have yearned for the same. The Exiles repented in hopes of changing their reality of being oppressed. The Babylonians needed the same change too – but with far less awareness of their need. Everyone was dehumanized, and everyone needed freedom from the system. Please note that the same amount of harm was not done to oppressed and oppressor, but at the same time the oppressor was dehumanized to the extent that they dehumanized others. Does that make sense?

For example, I’m saying that while slavery did most of its harm to the slaves, the actions of dehumanizing the slaves inherently marred the humanity of the slave owners. The slave owners may have thought they were reaping benefits, and financially they were, but significant and yet invisible damage was done to their … to their souls and their humanity. That damage lives on, still harming individuals and the collective today in the form of racism.

So, if what God seeks is people who are living full and abundant lives with their humanity (and their souls) intact, then God inherently is seeking a world without oppression. Throughout many eras, God’s people have repented in hopes of transforming oppression. To repent, as the word comes from the Hebrew, means “change of mind.”¹ Getting out of the mindset of oppression is an imperative initial step of changing it, from either side. (Thought it is VERY rare that transformation from oppression comes from oppressors who reap the visible gain from the system.) That opportunity that John the Baptist was giving individuals to repent of their communal sin is looking better and better.

It does turn out that most of us HAVE gotten to particulate in (at least a variation of) John the Baptisms ritual. 😉 I know, I know, I’m just a font of novel information. As previously mentioned, I’m usually squirmy about “sin” language, and thus I haven’t always been the biggest fan of the first two baptism questions in the UMC. However, as they come to focus with this story, they might be waaaaay more awesome than I thought. Hear them again:

Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world, and repent of your sin? Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?²

These baptismal vows offer us a way to “change our minds” from the oppressive ways of the world, and live in freedom from oppression. They give us a chance to reject the systems of injustice. They let us dream of and be part of the the world we want to build. They free us from the power of sin that keeps us stuck in oppressive systems, and lead us to freedom for ourselves and for all people.

The best part is, as United Methodists, we believe that baptism is a God’s good gift given to us and humans cannot, ever, in any way, mess it up. So, that freedom from sin and that opportunity to repent from systems of oppression so that we can live in (and MODEL) freedom – that’s with all us for the long run. We can always have access. We are never cut off. Thanks be to God, for messages of sin and repentance that lead us to freedom from oppression. May we lean into our baptismal vows and use the power God gives us to live lives of freedom for ourselves and those around us. Amen

1W. Tatum Barnes “John the Baptist and Jesus: a report of the Jesus Seminar” (Polebridge Press: Sonoma, CA, 1994) page 122.

2In this case, I got these from: https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/the-baptismal-covenant-iv so I didn’t have to type them, on December 6, 2017.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

“A Choice of Three”based on Exodus 1:22-2:10

July 30, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

All
the way back in October, we talked about the Hebrew midwives of
Exodus chapter 1, Puah and
Shiphrah. Those two subversive women had pulled out all the stops.
The Pharaoh told them to kill Hebrew boy babies at birth. Puah and
Shiprah disobeyed direct orders from the Pharaoh and used his biases
against the Hebrew people to justify it. Their courage and wisdom had
saved the boys! But only for a moment, after they refused to follow
unjust orders, the orders changed.

And
that’s where today’s story starts. Pharaoh is said to be worried
that the Hebrews are going to overtake the Egyptians (a common way
that oppressors justify inhumane treatment). Since the midwives
won’t kill the baby boys at birth, he orders that all Hebrew baby
boys be thrown into the Nile at birth. As I mentioned when
discussing the midwives, “It took me entirely too long to figure
out why the boys were to be killed. I was thinking of males as
especially strong laborers in the fields, and wondered why you’d want
to have fewer of them. If you wanted fewer descendants, I thought,
why not kill the girls who have the babies and leave the workers?
Our Bible Study participants responded that the death of the male
babies meant that the females would be sexually available to the
Egyptians, and they’d presume that as half-Egyptian – the next
generation would be more pliable and ‘better.’ The participants in
the Bible Study figured this out by considering American slave
history.”¹

This
story is an old story. Order than even the version we have.
Scholars say this story about the birth of Moses is an adaptation of
a story that was already ancient in his time. Sargon
of Akkad, believed to live in the 23^rd
or 24^th
century before the common era, was a ruler of the Akkadian
Empire. According to Wikipedia (which is sometimes much pithier in
explaining things than any other format), “A Neo-Assyrian text
from the 7th century BC purporting to be Sargon’s autobiography
asserts that the great king was the illegitimate son of a priestess.
Only the beginning of the text (the first two columns) are known,
from the fragments of three manuscripts. The first fragments were
discovered as early as 1850.”²
So this story was ALSO written down many centuries after it
happened, which means we can’t be certain what it sounded like in the
time of Moses, but it is the best piece of comparison available. The
text is found the book “The Ancient Near East” and reads:

“Sargon,
the mighty king, king of Agade, am I.
My
mother was a changeling, my father I knew not.
The
brother(s) of my father loved the hills.
My
city is Azupiranu, which is situated on the banks of the
Euphrates.
My
changeling mother conceived me, in secret she bore me.
She
set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid.
She
cast me into the river which rose not (over) me,
The
river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of
water.
Akki,
the drawer of water lifted me out as he dipped his e[w]er.
Akki,
the drawer of water, [took me] as his son (and) reared me.
Akki,
the drawer of water, appointed me as his gardener,
While
I was a gardener, Ishtar granted
me (her) love,”³

It
seems likely that the myth of Sargon’s birth was adapted to explain
the birth of Moses. The similarities are pretty obvious, including
naming that Moses came from a family of Levites, the holy tribe from
which later priests would emerge, while Sargon was the son of a holy
priestess. The whole thrown in a river part is obviously similar,
as is the emphasis on “drawing out” the child from the water,
and raising him as the son of the one who drew him out. The Sargon
story explicitly states that he was loved by a powerful goddess, the
Moses story is the opening to a long narrative about being specially
chosen by YHWH.

However,
when we have likely source material, the interesting part is not the
similarities, it is the differences. The differences here are
astounding. Of course, the Moses story feels more complete, for one
thing. It is since the stone on which the Sargon birth story is
written is incomplete. But we also have a reason for Moses being
put in the river (the decree of Pharaoh), and a masterful turn at
the end that the one who decreed that baby Hebrew boys be put in the
river is the one in whose household the baby is raised. The format
of the story that we have now was polished over many years into an
excellently crafted final form.

Also,
the Sargon birth story has a more limited role for human women: his
mother gives birth and puts him in the basket. The Moses birth
story is an intricate weaving of the actions and intentions of THREE
women, and of whom could easily be “the” subversive woman of the
today’s story. Moses’s mother is not just the woman who birthed
him. She is the one who notices he is an especially fine baby, and
decides to try to save him. She keeps him hidden at home for three
months. And then she carefully crafts the waterproof basket she
lays him in. To this point the story is similar enough to Sargon’s,
but at the same time, the story seems to want us to believe that God
takes care of where the basket floats off to, and wants us to deduce
that God put the basket in the sight-line of the Egyptian princess.
Personally, I think that loving mother who risked her own life for
her son and carefully crafted the basket ALSO would have tried to
make sure the basket went to a good place, but I do think the faith
tradition tells it so we think of it as God’s hand at work. On a
related note, I think this proactive mother might have instructed
her daughter to watch over it!

The
story doesn’t tell us if babies in waterproof baskets were often
floating down the Nile, but the constraints of the story (that is,
the command from the one in charge to put baby boys in the river)
seem to make it likely. It seems like the other women would have
taught her how to weave the basket and how much tar to use. It even
seems likely that for the first 3 months Moses’s mother pretended
she’d had a girl and everyone just played along. I don’t think the
story really believes that Moses was the only baby whose mother
tried to save him, even though the story is designed to help us
believe that Moses was specially cared for by God.

Whether
instructed to or not, Moses’s sister (maybe Miriam) stays at hand
and watches where the basket goes. I imagine her to be at a very
good age for this: young enough not to be noticed by grown ups and
to be free to play as she wished, yet old enough to understand the
importance and be able to convincingly play her role. And she
played her role to perfection! Nothing like this is in Sargon’s
story.

Meanwhile,
in Moses’s story one of the princesses has gone down to the river to
bath, attended by handmaidens. She sees the basket, she sends a
maid to get it, she opens it. She sees a crying baby, and has
compassion for him. I’m told the Hebrew word for compassion
connotes the womb, so this may have some connotations of “and her
womb leapt.” She knew what was happening, what her father’s
decree had been, and she decides to ignore its intentions. She uses
the power she has to adopt him, bring him into the palace, make him
a part of the Pharaoh’s family. She has money that she controls in
order to pay for a wetnurse. We spent some time in Bible study
wondering if she was her father’s favorite, or if there were so many
princesses that no one really noticed her, if she was defiant, if
she was above the law, or if she had special circumstances. By her
presence in the palace, I think it is likely she was unmarried, and
that may well imply she was quite young as well. However, there are
other explanations that might also suffice. Her story is mostly
missing, but her actions are direct and subvert the law of the land.
That’s unique to this story.

Moses’s
sister steps back in with the most brilliant possible solution,
asking the princess if she’d like the baby nursed by a woman of his
own community. Then she brings her brother back to their mother to
be nursed! In fact, it makes me wonder if the whole family moved
into the palace. (maybe, maybe not). But Moses gets fed by
mother’s milk and fed by his family’s story and identity at the same
time. He also gets the privilege of being in the royal family and
the knowledge of how the political system works. The way this story
is used to explain Moses’s identity and compassion for his people
AND his insider knowledge of the Pharaoh and his political system is
a unique part of the Hebrew story – as is the attention to nursing
the baby and the brilliant move by the women of his family to keep
caring for him while also making money to care for their own needs.
All of this is in the portion of the story the Hebrews adapted.

In
fact, given the way the story is adapted, and given the dominance of
human women in it, I’ve started to wonder if it is implied that they
are all working together. Perhaps many people thought the Pharaoh’s
decree was immoral and were working together to subvert it. Maybe
these women had devised this all as a plan, and made it flow so
seamlessly because it was well-rehearsed. Maybe they thought that
the care of babies was more important than decrees of politics. Or
maybe it doesn’t go this far, but maybe there was just a lot of
winking involved when it really happened, and that princess knew
EXACTLY who she was hiring to feed “her” baby.

This
is, after all, a story about saving the baby who would save the
Hebrew people. It is also a story of interdependence. No one of
the three women in it could have pulled off saving Moses alone. The
choice of heroine is any one of the three, but perhaps it isn’t much
of a choice when they all need each other and Moses needs all of
them. The story the Hebrew people tell also says that they needed
Moses, and his cross-cultural competencies, to be free. That means
they needed all three of these women – including the Egyptian one
– to be free from Egyptian oppression.

So,
the Hebrews took an old myth and reworked it in genius ways. They
added several heroines, more intrigue, and a broader context. The
premise that the Hebrew people benefited from the skills Moses had
as someone stuck in-between worlds strikes me as interesting. I
hear a lot about the struggles of being in-between: particularly for
people who have two or more racial identities, or for those who live
between the values of different countries due to immigration in
their family’s recent past, or even those whose social class changes
over their life times. Many people are in-between and it is often
very uncomfortable. Is also a position that enables translations
between groups to be possible, and it can be a position of
incredible power when circumstances emerge in particular ways.

The
liberation of the Hebrews is a meta-narrative of the Torah, and a
story with resonance well beyond the Hebrew people. It was a
primary narrative for African American slave communities in this
country, and is often source of hope for oppressed communities
seeking liberation. I love that it took collaboration, rule
breaking, deep compassion, and connections between unexpected
partners to make it all happen. May we keep noticing the strange
ways God is up to making liberation happen – including by
connecting unexpected partners and using people who stand in
in-between places! Amen

1 Sermon
10-6- 2017.

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargon_of_Akkad#cite_ref-46
accessed July 20, 2017

3 J.B.
Pritchard’s The
Ancient Near East,
Volume I, page 85.

—

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

July 30, 2017