“Hope for Restoration” based on Isaiah 35:1-10 and Luke…

December 15, 2019February 11, 2020
by Sara Baron

I did my seminary work in
Southern California (Los Angeles county) which is a desert climate.
The choice to be far away in a different subculture of the USA was
intentional, as I figured I could use some perspective on the
Northeast. The desert climate part wasn’t intentional. I just liked
the school, so I decided to go there, and it happened to be in the
desert. I had no expectation, whatsoever, that this would be
relevant.

So, clearly, it was. The first
piece of learning came from the campus itself, which was planted with
biblical plants so we as the students could have a better sense of
what the Bible was talking about. Because I’d grown up in the water
abundant Northeast, I hadn’t really considered the ways that my
visioning of the Bible was insufficiently desert like.

Then came the fact that I don’t
LIKE the desert. I hated that the sides of the road were filled with
pebbles with nothing growing in them, because without watering,
things just didn’t grow. I hated being dehydrated, and the amount of
water I had to drink to be hydrated. I didn’t like the heat. I came
to resent Palm Trees for being there when trees I knew and loved
couldn’t be. (Can you tell LA wasn’t a natural fit for me?)

Somewhere along the line as we
learned about Christian history it became clear how much of early
Christianity was formed by the words and actions of solitary desert
thinkers, and later monastic desert communities. The so-called
“Desert Fathers” were new to me, but heavens they were important.
My classmates who were native to the area waxed poetically about the
beauty of the desert, and its starkness, and the rich spiritual
depths of being alone in such a stark environment that was so
unfriendly to life. I understood part of what they meant, I love the
great outdoors, and I have felt closest to God in nature. Except, I
don’t actually LIKE stark and dangerous landscapes. They are
DEFINITELY beautiful. For me they are startling in good ways too,
but not really in God-connection ways. My soul isn’t a desert soul,
although I recognize that desert is as good of a climate as any
other. (This is all about my preferences, not about what is good.)

But then, in the winter of my
second year, a friend read that the recent rains we’d had were
sufficient to make the desert bloom. The desert blooms erratically,
it isn’t an every year sort of thing. More than that, this was the
100- year bloom, and plants believed to be extinct were in full bloom
under the unusual conditions. We drove out to Joshua Tree National
Park to see it, and it was breathtaking. From afar, the landscape
actually still seemed stark – it wasn’t as if the plants were more
abundant than they’d been before. But as you looked, flowers were
EVERYWHERE. The flowers were more diverse and more delicate than I’d
ever seen before. We saw a burning bush in bloom – you can
definitely tell why it is called that. Out of what seemed to be bare
rock came tiny flowers. Rock faces exploded with color.

There was nothing in my life
that had prepared me for the desert bloom. Even now, it stuns me,
the transformation of it all. That hidden in the starkness was
beauty beyond my imagination. The flowers were bright, and
different, but sooooo fragile. It was often hard to believe they
existed. It blew my mind to see yards of dusty pebbles in every
direction, the floor the desert, and then to notice a tiny little
flower breaking through all on its own.

To say it directly, I have seen
nothing that proclaims resurrection more than the desert in bloom,
and I think it is radically unfair that this desert hating
North-easterner got to to savor the 100-year desert bloom, and see
life emerge from what looked like lifelessness. But I’m thankful
anyway.

Isaiah starts this profound
passage with imagery of the desert in bloom. I shared all that,
because I don’t think that we who know spring flowers, and summer
flowers, and even fall flowers can hear how BIG the vision of the
desert in bloom is for desert people, nor how much of a miracle it
is. The clear joy of this passage fits incredibly well with the
desert in bloom. It is abundant, it is colorful, it is unexpected,
it is hope-filled, it is transformative.

Isaiah is talking about the joy
of homecoming in this passage. The assumption is that the people
will be taken into exile (true, they will) but that someday God will
act and let them come home (also true). This vision of homecoming is
bursting with joy. The act of coming home after the exile is called
“restoration” or “the return” and this restoration passage
bubbles with joy in God.

It starts with the imagery of
the desert in bloom, and then it EXPANDS into human healing.
Physical limitations are lifted, healing occurs, strength is given
where there has been weakness. Then it takes the desert metaphor
even further. Streams of water will flow, pools of water will
emerge, springs will break out. I think my favorite line is the one
that says, “the haunts of jackals will become swamps.” Now THAT
is a transformation.

In the midst of this beautiful,
blooming, and now lush landscape, with healing for all in need of it,
there will emerge…. a way home. And the way will be safe from all
attackers, and easy to follow – impossible to get lost on. On that
path, the people will travel home, and life will be restored to what
it shall be.

And, of course, there will be
joy and singing, and so much of it that sorrow itself will fall away.

What. A. Vision.

It seems hard to believe Isaiah
could start with the desert in bloom and then grow imagery from
there, but he does it. Exile and return/restoration is one of the
big themes of the Bible, likely because while the story happens once
to the Israelite people, it happens time and time again to us in our
lives.

When I was 13 I broke my femur
and was put in a straight leg cast. For months I was unable to
navigate stairs on my feet (well, my foot) at all, I had to sit on
the steps and move up or down them one at a time. During that time I
restlessly dreamed of the day when I would be restored to walking up
and down stairs on my feet again. And then, of course, once I was,
it mostly lost its luster. For better or worse I’ve had plenty of
injuries in my life though, and my capacity to do stairs has
dissipated and then returned rather a lot. Perhaps because of the
depth of the yearning in my younger years, sometimes while I’m on a
set of stairs, I remember to be grateful for the capacity to use
them.

I think exile and restoration
have a lot of emotional resonance too, because in large part they are
about “home.” And home is a big huge deal to humans. What does
home feel like? What does it mean to leave home? How does it feel
to be between homes? Or homeless? Or someone with a foot in more
than one home but no one place to call home exclusively? When we are
sick, or injured, we yearn for home. When we think of displaced
people in the world, we recognize the pain of being far from home and
without a new place to try to make home. And, as North Americans, we
come from people who have left homes. Those whose ancestors came
from Europe or Asia often left home voluntarily. Those who ancestors
came from Africa were enslaved and torn from their homes. Those who
ancestors were native to the Americas were displaced by the Europeans
who came here. I sometimes wonder if some of the displacement in our
society comes from our shared histories of being displaced in the
world. In any case, “home” is something that matters to humans,
and exile and restoration are all about home.

Now, the imagery of Isaiah is
assumed when we come to Luke. Isaiah’s vision of restoration and
return home are premised on God’s actions, and so are Luke’s. John
the Baptist is going to be seen as the forerunner of Jesus, the one
who starts the path in the desert so Jesus can complete it – and we
walk it. The language of Zechariah’s song is that of redemption,
salvation, mercy, and rescue. ALL of those emerge out of the desire
for restoration and return. They are the yearning not just for home,
but for a safe home, and Zechariah names that “fearlessness” is
an impact of God’s work in those days. As John, whose name means
“God is Gracious” will prepare the way, and Jesus will walk it,
the result will be peace, fearlessness, and light. Redemption,
salvation, rescue all resonate with people being safely HOME.

It is the tradition of
Christianity to follow Christ, since Christians means “little
Christs.” I’m all for this, but sometimes I think it is worth
considering when we are being asked to be “little John the
Baptists.” Often, I think our work is the prepare the way, and to
be prophets of what is possible with God. Perhaps this is just the
longview of building the kindom, acknowledging that some work gets to
make the BIG changes, but before that happens, there have been years
or decades or centuries of preparing the way for that to happen.

In our Advent Study on John
Shelby Spong’s “Unbelievable” last week we discussed his idea
that morality is always contextual, and thus always in flux. So, we
talked about how public morality has changed in our lifetimes, and
you know what? It has been GREAT!!! Space has been made for people
to be who they are and to be accepted and loved as they are in ways
that once seemed impossible. LGBTQIA+ rights have expanded, and
rights and opportunists for people with disabilities have been
normalized, people who are divorced as no longer stigmatized, nor are
those who have sex outside of marriage. Women’s work opportunities
have exploded. All of us in the room had grown in our awareness of
racism and privilege, and had hope for the country to change its
practices. The changes were truly inspiring. Also, work on all of
that inclusion and all of those rights was being done well before any
of us were born. Many, many people have prepared the way and we are
able to see their work with gratitude.

The work we do to prepare the
way is the work that we may never see the impact of. But, we trust
that God will make sure the next steps happen, and God’s people will
follow through, and the preparation will not be in vein.

So, dear ones, prepare the way.
Work on building that safe and beautiful highway home for ALL of
God’s people. Because, someday, it will be complete and the people
who walk it will be singing songs of joy and gratitude for what God
has made possible. And that which God makes possible, God lets us
work on!! Thanks be to God for that, and for beautiful homecomings
of many varieties. 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

December 15, 2019

Sermons

“Hope for New Life” based on Isaiah 11:1-10 and…

December 8, 2019February 11, 2020
by Sara Baron

It
is common to call the writer of the Gospel of Luke… Luke, which
makes plenty of sense. It isn’t likely to be historically accurate,
but it is pretty simple to remember. Whatever the writer’s real name
was, the person who wrote the Gospel of Luke and its 2^nd
volume
the book of Acts, is said to be the best writer in the New Testament.
From my perspective I can tell that Luke does great work with
foreshadowing, telling stories within stories to enrich both stories,
symbolism, and themes. However, the really good stuff, I’m told is in
his Greek vocabulary and syntax which are simply just outstanding.
“Luke” was a VERY well educated person, and a master of the craft
of writing. Given how small the percentage of literate people were at
that time, being so well versed as a writer indicates not only
brilliance and skill but also power and privilege. One simply would
not become that great of a writer without a lot of access to unusual
levels of resources.

Luke
is probably my favorite Gospel writer, and I love Luke for his
emphasis on people who are poor, marginalized, and vulnerable, and
because they fit those categories, the women. Luke tells the story of
my faith, presenting Jesus as an ally to those most in need of
rescue, and as an organizer able to help people rescue themselves.
This has a bit of cognitive dissonance to it. Based on WHAT he
writes, Luke is a writer of the people. He is empowering, noticing
those society disregards, and telling the stories that the powerful
don’t want told. Yet, based on HOW he writes, Luke is one of
society’s elites.

Which
sounds to me like Luke being a living example of the power of Jesus –
to convince people to work together to build the kindom no matter
where they begin life, to be FOR ALL the people as they grow.

Isaiah
was a prophet, and from what I can tell, a prophet is a speaker for
the people. The Torah set up a society that treated people justly,
and prevented an upper class from ruling over a lower class. Yet,
people being people, power, money, and influence tended to coalesce
at a top and become a burden to the many. God’s prophets spoke out
against it, and called people back to God’s vision of a just, equal,
and equitable lifestyle.

Which
is a long-winded way of saying that we have two passages today that
are “of the people” and yearning for justice. They do so in ways
that can be a little bit uncomfortable. There are not simply passages
that suggest “a rising tide lifts all boats” but rather ones that
talk about REDISTRIBUTION of wealth¹.
These are passages that are good news for the poor, the lowly, and
the meek … but not for the rich, the proud, and the powerful. I
find the “rising tide lifts all boats” sort of justice easier to
swallow. This stuff is … harder.

And
yet, my activist friends assure me that we aren’t going to get to
justice only by being nice. So, let’s examine these texts for wisdom.
This shoot that come from Jesse in Isaiah, have you noticed that it
comes AFTER the tree has been cut down. This is a sign of hope after
destruction and hopelessness. The passage as a whole feels like a
cousin of last week’s passage. In this case, the new offspring of
Jesse (which is to say the new Davidic king) is going to be so
perfectly imbued with the Spirit of God that the new King will rule
as perfectly as God’s own self would.

The
impact of life as ruled as God would have it ruled is shockingly
different. When God’s spirit is in leadership, and when the people
are following in God’s ways, there will be peace even among animals
who are in each other’s food chains 😉 Safety becomes the center
point of this – the lamb, the kid-goat, the calf, and the human
child are all safe in the presence of those most apt to harm them.
This is another way of talking about not needing to be afraid,
because there is no motivation to do harm. In this case, it is clear
that there are no people oppressing other people, no one is “eating
up” the resources of the weaker people to make themselves stronger.
Security, hope, and peace are the result of God’s Spirit. That’s the
kindom.

Mary’s
song hits the same notes. Mary is continuing to process that she, who
is lowly by the standards of the world, is now “blessed.” She
attributes this change to God, and notices that this is how God
works. She says it is God’s nature to do great things, to show mercy,
to be strong…. to bring justice. And she names how justice comes.
It is by scattering the proud and bringing down the powerful –
while lifting up the lowly. It is by feeding the hungry but NOT
giving more to those who already have too much. Mary’s song is,
itself, strong and justice seeking. She identifies with the lowly,
who God lifts up. And it is even more interesting to hear that
knowing that the writer of the Gospel probably identifies with the
rich, and wrote her song this way anyway.

While
we know absolutely nothing about Jesus’s mother with any certainty,
we do know Jesus had a mother. The name Mary was associated with her
a few generations after his death, which isn’t a great reason to
assume it is true, but sort of like “Luke” we can go with it. I
suspect Mary got associated with the name of the mother of Jesus
because Mary is the Greek version of the Hebrew name Miriam. Miriam,
the sister of Moses, has the oldest words in the Bible attributed to
her, and saved her brother so he could save the nation Israel.
Associating Mary with Miriam is A-Ok with me.

Other
conjectures we can make about Mary include: she was Jewish, she was
from Galilee – most likely Nazareth, she was poor, and it is likely
she was young. She may have been a very faithful Jew, as Judean
settlers were intentionally reclaiming Galilee for Judaism around
that time, and the ones who went were often the ones who were
committed to the cause. She also might have been influenced by either
the Roman Empire’s violent destruction of the nearby city of
Sepphoras in her childhood or by the radical Jewish teachers in the
Galilee who taught that the God of liberation was going to liberate
again. In any case, while the leaders of the Temple during her
lifetime were appointed by Rome and the “official” religion had
been compromised, it is possible (probable?) that Mary knew a faith
that was untainted by the influence of power.

Which
is to say, that while Luke wrote the words we hear today, and put
them into Mary’s mouth for our story – they MAY well reflect her
faith itself. At the very least, Mary’s song words as an incredible
foreshadowing of the power of God that people saw in Jesus, and I
believe Jesus’s faith was likely formed by his mother’s.

In
Mark, Jesus is referred to as Mary’s son which is unusual in that he
was not referred to as his FATHER’S son. With the presence of a
punishing military force nearby, before Jesus’s birth, there are some
particularly awful possibilities about his father. What we know is
that at some point Mary was pregnant, expecting a child, and likely
pretty scared. I say that because maternal mortality rates were high,
infant mortality rates were high, and resources in Nazareth were
scarce. It is very likely that Mary herself was hungry, including
during her pregnancy and while she was breastfeeding Jesus. She had
seen extreme violence from the Empire, and had reason to believe it
could come back at any time. She MAY have been facing the possibility
of being ostracized from her community. Thus, I think it is fair to
assume she was scared.

Even
stripping away most of that, scared seems right. For years, Kevin and
I have struggled with some big questions: is it OK for us to choose
to bring a child into this world knowing the dangers of Global
Climate Change? Is it ok for us to choose to bring a child into this
world when there are other children who need to be parented? How much
capacity do we have to offer care and support for a child given our
other commitments?

After
long talks, prayer, and good counsel, we decided that our ideal
family would include a child born to us and a child adopted by us. So
we started trying to have a child and…. well, nothing happened.
Eventually we made an appointment with an adoption lawyer, and
decided to try private infant adoption. We filled out paperwork, got
background checked, had a home study, and were ready to sign a court
petition requesting that we be approved to be able to become adoptive
parents when we learned that I was, in biblical phrasing, “with
child.”

Now,
I live in the 21st
century,
with pretty great access to resources. While our country is weaker
than it should be, particularly in the care of women of color,
compared with ancient Galilee we have low maternal mortality rates,
low infant mortality rates, plenty of food, and low threat of
violence. Yet as an expectant mother, I’m scared. While I find it
excessive to overly identify with “Mother Mary,” preparing to
parent has certainly helped me see why she’s so popular. Also, why
she has every right to be scared. We have been wondering how on earth
will we prepare a child to be kind, compassionate, and moral in this
crazy world? How will we teach them of God in ways that feel relevant
while the world shifts under our feet?

Let
me assure you that we did NOT sign that paperwork and adoption is
officially on hold. Let me also admit to you that being the pregnant
pastor of this church for the past two months hasn’t been the easiest
thing I’ve ever done. I haven’t been puking (WIN) but I have been
constantly nauseated, and instructed to eat every hour. I’ve been
exhausted and my emotional resources have been down. At the same
time, I have experienced significant collateral friendly fire as this
church has worked together on the reality of our budget deficit.

Between
the friendly fire and being less resilient than usual, I have spent
time considering if pastoring this church – or even being a pastor at
all – continues to be the right path for me. Some of this is simply
about parenting: I’m nervous about being away from home 4 nights a
week like I usually am now. Some of this is about ministry’s
demands: what will it mean to have to establish the sort of
boundaries my child will need, and what will I do when the needs of
the church are in conflict, and what will happen when someone feels
that their expectations aren’t being met? Some of it is about our
child and this church. On one hand I can’t imagine any church but
this one being part of raising our child. I love the way children are
cared for during worship. I love our Sunday School and its teachers.
I love the way children are treated here, and I love the ways God is
understood and taught here. However, on the other hand, my stress
level has been sky high, and recently I’ve seen a lot of behavior I
wouldn’t want a child to learn about much less associate with this
church. So I’ve been wondering, is this a safe and secure place for a
child – our child – to learn about God? Will this place fulfill
Isaiah’s vision of a child being able to put their hand in a snake’s
den safely?

In
slow, careful deliberation, with conversation, and consultation, and
prayer, and a LOT of obsessing and worrying, I’ve decided not to give
up on ministry just yet. Then, even more slowly, I realized that –
for now – this church is worth the pain. I simply love you all.
Furthermore, I don’t believe that this church IS its worst behaviors.
Dear ones, I believe that this faith community is an expression of
the kindom of God. I believe it is a little bit of Isaiah’s vision,
and has the capacity to build the world into one of peace and
justice. I’m well aware that we have lots of hard times ahead (and I
am terrified
of
the boundaries I’m going to have to have as a parent, please be
gentle with me) but I believe you are worth it.

So,
anyway, I see why a prospective parent would be scared. And I am
gaining a new appreciation for the ways in which a new generation
provides new opportunities: 1) for regeneration, 2) for making right
the things we haven’t gotten right yet, and 3) hope for the future.
We are hoping to raise a child to know God’s love, follow Jesus, and
speak with and for the people. And I find myself reflecting on how I
hope this community will continue to exist and teach and raise up
future generations to do the same. Given all this, I see why a
prospective parent would choose to stick with the God of Liberation,
of Hope, and of Peace. And I see why Mary was amazed at her luck in
getting the chance to do so. Being a part of the work of God is a
blessing and a great opportunity. Thanks be to God. Amen

1 Someone
pointed out after worship that a rising tide may lift all boats, but
it doesn’t help people who don’t have boats.

Sermons

“Hope in God” based on Isaiah 2:1-5 and Luke…

December 1, 2019February 11, 2020
by Sara Baron

This
Advent we are Waiting in Hope, and our guides for that waiting are
going to be Isaiah and Luke. All too often we jump into Luke chapter
2 on Christmas, without examining Luke chapter 1 to prepare the way.
This means we are going to spend Advent with Mary, with Elizabeth,
and with Zechariah. Which means that we need a content warning
for Advent.

Luke
1, not unlike Genesis, spends a lot of time dealing with issues of
fertility and infertility. These are tender topics for many people,
and I will be seeking to deal with them tenderly. However, you are
not obligated to stay present if these topics are simply too much for
you right now, and I am available to talk if you want to. (Or, I’m
willing to find you someone else to talk to if you’d prefer.)

Luke
starts by telling the story of Zechariah, an old priest, and his wife
Elizabeth. They had no children. This is a VERY common story in the
Bible, in fact it feels like a throw-back to the matriarchs and
patriarchs who all had trouble conceiving until God intervened. (And
this is part of why these stories are so hard. If infertility could
be solved with prayer alone, there would be much less of it.) This
story rings of Abraham and Sarah, of Issac and Rebecca, of Jacob’s
wife Rachel, of Hannah and Elkanah.
This is a familiar story. An angel tells Zechariah, while he is
serving in the temple, that his prayers have been heard and Elizabeth
will become pregnant. Zechariah expresses some disbelief because of
their age, which is punished with being unable to speak until the
baby is born. The baby to be born will be, according to Luke, John
the Baptist.

A few
months later, with Elizabeth pregnant, the story is interrupted with
our reading today. This story is NOT familiar. It doesn’t sound
like the Hebrew Bible at all – although it does sounds like its
contemporary Greek stories. As far as the Bible goes, though, this
is a brand new account. And it is breaking into an old, old story.
In this new account a young woman, who has been legally married to
her husband but is still in the one year waiting period in her
father’s house before she joins her husband in his house, is greeted
by that same angel. The angel says “‘Greetings, favored one! The
Lord is with you,” and the story says that Mary is perplexed.

This
make sense, I think. By the standards of the world, Mary wasn’t
favored. She was poor, she was young, she was female, she had very
little power, and she lived in an unimportant little village that was
outside of a city that had recently been ransacked by the Roman
Empire. She was, by no means, favored by anyone nor anything. Nor
was their any previous evidence that she was favored by God. R. Alan
Culpepper writes in the New Interpreter’s Bible, “’Yet, Mary, God’s
favored one, was blessed with having a child out of wedlock who would
later be executed as a criminal. Acceptability, prosperity, and
comfort have never been the essence of God’s blessing.”¹
Mary seems to still be processing this.

She
is, however, wise enough to keep her objections to herself – unlike
Zechariah. So the angel continues to tell her about her upcoming
pregnancy with the child who would be named Jesus, “the rescuer”,
and would claim a unique connection to the Divine. This time Mary
expresses her confusion, indicating that she understands how
conception works and thus that it shouldn’t be happening to her.
Perhaps because she doesn’t ask for proof, she is given it, in the
form of Elizabeth’s pregnancy.

At this
point, the story comes to one of the greatest acts of courage I know
about. This impoverished young woman, with everything to lose by
taking this risk (including her own life), responds “Here am I, the
servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” I
know that this story is Luke’s creation, Luke’s intentional
foreshadowing of the Jesus story. I know this didn’t HAPPEN. And
yet I can’t help but be stuck by this line. It feels like the sort
of answer that the woman who raised Jesus and taught Jesus of God
would give. It feels true in a way that is deeper than the story
itself. Mary is a risk-taker for God. She trusts in the
Divine even when it makes no sense and by all reasonable standards
should be done.

In this
story, through this brief interaction, Mary moves from confused at
the idea that she could be favored by God to an unquestioning
willingness to do whatever it is God needs of her. The foreshadowing
of Jesus couldn’t be much better. This unique story about Mary has
echoes all over it of Hannah and her faithfulness. These are the
stories of the women’s faith, the women who raised men of great
faith. The men didn’t come to their faith alone.

We
will come back to Mary next week, and to her extraordinary courage
and unique insight. But for now we’re going to transition to the
vision of Isaiah, a vision that came when everything else looked like
it was going downhill. Most of the time first Isaiah (the first 40
chapters) has to warn the people of what will happen if they don’t
trust in God, but this vision is an after vision. Of what will come
SOMEDAY, one way or another. The more I examine it, the more
striking it is.

Many of us
are familiar with the closing lines,

“they
shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and
their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword
against nation,
neither shall they learn war
any more.”

but it
really struck me this week that these lines are about much more than
peace and a lack of a need for war. These lines are about not
needing defenses anymore, about not needing borders anymore,
about being unafraid for safety, and a sense of deep security.

The only
way that people could be so secure is if they AND EVERYONE ELSE
already had enough, and resources were already fairly shared, and
there was no injustice or inequality that needed to be rectified.
I’m told that the threat of violence is what allows for income
inequality. Thus the opposite must be true, where there is equality
there is no need for violence. Furthermore, this has to be
widespread equality and equity, because there is no fear that
outsiders will break in wanting to share in the prosperity –
because they have it too.

Now
this makes perfect sense as a correlation to the earlier parts of the
passage. It has already said that YHWH-God has become acknowledged
as THE Sacred one, and EVERYONE is worshipping YHWH-God.
Furthermore, they’re all learning God’s ways. Well, God’s ways is a
way of speaking of the Torah, the first 5 books of the Bible, which
contain a vision of a just and equitable society. In that society
land is distributed to all so all can provide for themselves, those
who struggle are helped by their family and community, anyone in need
is cared for by the excess of those who have enough, and justice
itself is blind to power and influence. This is the society that God
dreams of, and this is what people would be studying as “walking in
God’s ways.”

In Isaiah’s
vision, this message is shared far and wide AND God’s self is the
judge arbitrating between people – so justice is definitely just.
So, yes, this is a reasonable set up for what otherwise feels like an
overly idealistic vision of peace.

In this
context, it is the reasonable extension. If everyone buys into God’s
vision and enacts it, of course there would be equity, equality,
justice, and peace. Of course weapons of destruction could become
tools of creation and means of food production. That’s what God is
capable of doing.

And this
got me to thinking. Do we dream this dream deeply enough? Do we
consider what it would be like to be fearless? To feel safe? To
live in peace?

I
haven’t spent nearly enough time living into this dream. What would
it be like to assume that all people, as they age, will have enough
resources to be cared for with tenderness and love in ways that
respect their humanity and maintain their freedom? What would it be
like to know that all children, whether or not they have living and
able parents, will be nurtured, played with, fed well, have safe
places to sleep, clothing appropriate for the season, and access to
great education to help them thrive in body and spirit? What would
it be like to remove locks from all doors, knowing that no one aims
to do us harm, and no one would have a need to take anything we have?
What would it be like to know that all people, regardless of their
employment status, or marital status, or socio-economic status, could
receive great healthcare when they need it? What would it be like to
know that people all around the world shared all these gifts, and no
one in any other nation wished us harm because of harms we’d caused
taking resources we needed? What would it be like to know that there
were no guns left in the world, and no one had motivation to make any
more? What would it be like to live without the threat of nuclear
war, nor biological warfare, nor even internet viruses????

What if we
weren’t afraid, and didn’t need to be? What if we could all care for
each other, and support each other, and grow together?

Friends,
that’s the sort of hope we’re preparing ourselves for in this season
of Advent. Not because we necessarily expect to see it in our
lifetimes, but because that’s what we’re working for and we have to
keep God’s vision in front of us so we can be a part of enacting it.
May we, indeed, beat swords into plowshares, nuclear warheads into
flower gardens, and study war no more – because it isn’t needed!
Amen

1Alan
Culpepper, “Luke,”
in The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. 9
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994) 52-3.

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 1, 2019

Sermons

“Connecting Joy and Gratitude” based on Deuteronomy 26:1-11 and…

November 25, 2019February 11, 2020
by Sara Baron

Kevin
and I have three cats, which is one more than we think we should
have. However, all three are very sweet, and unusually
human-centric. It is difficult to walk in our house without a cat
underfoot, and unusual to sit without a cat making space for
themselves on one’s lap. I cannot tell you how many sermons I’ve
written with a cat sitting on a wrist, although before you worry too
much, I’ve stopped allowing that out of fear of carpal tunnel.

Because
we have three, sweet, human-centric cats, we experience a lot of
purring in our lives. This is unconditionally a wonderful thing. We
fall asleep to cat purrs. We wake up to cat purrs. Often, our cats
will walk up to us, look at us, and start purring – expecting that
as soon as we see them, they will get petted. (Yes, they are spoiled
rotten, we know.)

It
is so easy, if you are noticing it, to hear a cat’s purr, or a
brook’s gurgle, or the wind whispering in the trees as songs of
praise and contentedness to the God of Creation. When listening to
those sounds, it can feel like all is well in the world, and that as
creation itself sings a love song to God, my soul is moved to join
in.

I
love those moments when it feels like all is well in the world, and
the majesty and wonder of God is visible and celebrated in creation.
I love it just as much as when I see unexpected grace and kindness
between people – which also seems like the majesty and wonderful
God being visible and celebrated in creation.

Those
sorts of moments used to come to me a lot. After all, I have been
blessed to spend a lot of time in the beauty of creation and with
wonderful people who show grace in shockingly beautiful ways.

One
of the great honors of being a pastor is being allowed into the
vulnerable parts of people’s lives. In moments of transition and
identity shifting, to be welcomed in feels like a miracle. I am
always grateful when people are willing to let me be with them when
things are at their hardest, and God feels particularly close when
people are in their deepest needs. God’s care meets people’s
tenderness, and I get to see it happen.

Over
the course of years, cumulative patterns within people’s hardest
times have formed for me. Some of the patterns are beautiful and
striking – from God’s grace, to people’s capacities for strength,
to the ways we can build up each other’s resilience. However, some
of the patterns have also been heartbreaking. I am able to see the
impact of poverty on people’s lives, the prevalence of family
violence, the profound lack of effective mental health care for the
most vulnerable, the enormous number of traumas in our society, the
depth of the impact of the -isms on individual and communal life, and
the myriad of ways the church itself has harmed God’s beloveds.

Some
of you wish that I was more comforting in the pulpit, that I could
ease the anxieties of life and lead you to a higher plane of praise.
Dear ones, I do too. I would love to ease your lives, as well as to
offer you comfort and hope for the future. Those are reasonable
desires, particularly when the world feels so heavy.

The
challenge is that the world feels heavy to me too. Further, the
brokenness I see in the world and the impact it has on wonderful
people’s lives feels like a broken promise to me. I know that many
people were raised to see the brokenness, in large part because they
didn’t have a choice not to, but I thought the world MOSTLY worked
and only OCCASSIONALLY didn’t, and when it didn’t all we had to do
was work together to fix it. And I believed this for a very long
time. And still, today, I notice in myself that I’m shocked every
time something I thought worked fine actually doesn’t. While my
mental and spiritual analysis of the world is – I think – largely
clear-sighted and aware of power and privilege, I’m still emotionally
disquieted with every new piece of information about avoidable harm
that is done.

While
this may be appropriate human development in one’s 30s (or, I fear,
one’s 20s – I may be behind based on how lucky I’ve been), many of
you are well beyond it. You’ve seen the brokenness, made peace with
it, and are ready to focus on the good stuff again. And you have
every right to be impatient with me while I struggle to catch up with
you. In the model Marcus Borg suggests, I’m still working out
critical thinking about how the world and God work, while many of you
are already fully in post-critical naivete (which is a WONDERFUL idea
and place to be), ready to make meaning out of life – however
beautiful and broken it may be.

I’m
pushing myself to try to catch up, but I’m not sure the pushing will
work. I’m pretty sure my only option is to be where I am, and try to
hold in tension that other’s aren’t in the same place. I do want you
to know that I hear you, and I’m trying. I am also open to learning
from you, how you moved beyond being aghast at what is wrong and into
a fuller connection to life as it is.

There
is one trick I’ve found, and I think it might be useful to others, so
I’m going to share it. I’ve been taught to see anger as a USEFUL
thing. This was not immediately obvious to me. My prior
relationship with anger had been one of strict avoidance (in myself
as well as with others). The teachings of Nonviolent Communication
say that anger is a red flag – not the bad kind- that lets us know
that something we really value is being violated. Thus, when we feel
anger, we can know that something we care about is being harmed, and
we can stop and find out what it is that we value so deeply. That
gives us two incredibly important gifts: first, knowing what we
value is always important to know (although it isn’t always obvious
to us), and secondly that now we have a potential productive path
forward. Anger itself is rarely productive, other than as a way to
point out that something is deeply wrong. However, once we know what
we value, we are a big step closer to finding out how we might
respond to that value and ask others to join us.

So,
for example, there is a lot of anger in this church right now. The
work being done to attempt to balance the budget has arisen great
passion. Almost everyone is upset, most are angry, and many of you
want to stay home and avoid the whole mess. However, there have been
some amazing insights from the anger, already, even though no
resolution is in sight. We are able to see clearly that MANY, MANY
people care deeply about this church and are willing to show up to
care for it. Similarly, people are willing to sit through long and
uncomfortable meetings out of their love for this church. I’m hoping
that some of that care and passion might be shared in stories (like
the HW you got two weeks ago to share your faith stories with another
member of this congregation, just in case you didn’t do it yet…).
One of the things I’ve heard most consistently, under the anger and
under fear, is that people want this church to survive and continue
to be a gift from God to its communities for the long run – and
thus there is strong motivation not to make decisions that might harm
the church’s long term well-being. That’s a value on this community
and its positive impact in the world. Thanks be to God that so many
people care so much about this church and its impact!!

Similarly,
I hear a lot of anger about the possibility of changing the way that
we do some of our ministries, making it clear that the ministries we
do are of value in people’s lives and are worth taking very
seriously. I’ve also heard a passionate desire to be just in our
decisions and to be good and fair employers, values that we advocate
for in the world and want to enact in our lives together. So, yeah,
there is a lot of GOOD that anger is a clue for, and anger can be
mined for many valuable insights.

That
is not to say that an obvious way forward has emerged from those
passions or values. To some degree, they conflict, and other
constraints exist. However, as long as everyone’s passion comes out
of a love for this community and a desire for it to be well, we have
a better starting place to hear the possible ways forward.

For
me, all of this is really about the gratitude we are encouraged
towards in the Epistle reading which tells us to “rejoice in the
Lord always, again I will say: Rejoice” and “whatever is true,
whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever
is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and
if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

It
is easy to tell people to be grateful, and it is easy to show
evidence that gratitude is a good spiritual gift that leads to
improved lives. I suspect that we all agree on gratitude being good.
However, that doesn’t make it easy. Sometimes to get to gratitude
we need to work through anger and notice what is actually wonderful
and valuable underneath. Sometimes we have to slow down and smell
those proverbial roses. Sometimes we just need a moment to savor a
cat’s purr.

I
do think that there is a whole lot more worth celebrating in life and
in the world around us than we could name if we spent the rest of our
lives naming things. And I think spending a significant amount of
our time working on noticing and appreciating those things is
worthwhile. Even better, it think anytime we are getting angry, we
have a clue about something we really care about – something we are
already grateful for. So, however you get there, may you find the
ways to “rejoice in the Lord, always” because God IS good and
creation has innumerable wonders for which we can give thanks. May
we do so. Amen

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/

November 24, 2019

Sermons

“The Stories We Have to Tell (and tell, and…

November 10, 2019February 11, 2020
by Sara Baron

Several
years ago I had the honor of celebrating the life of a woman who had
spent her life as a nurse. She was fiercely independent, had never
married, was wonderfully fashionable, and LOVED being a nurse. At
the end of her life, she had dementia, and it took almost everything
from her – knowledge of her loved ones, words, mobility, and the
rest. All that was left of HER at the end of her life was one simple
motion. It was the careful, life-saving motion of surgical
preparation – washing her hands. After she’d lost even her own name,
she kept on washing her hands.

I
often wonder what that piece of me would be – the one last
lingering aspect of myself that would go last. Truthfully, I’ve
never figured it out, but it feels like an important question.
Similarly, when I am spending time with a person earlier stages of
dementia, I pay attention to what stories come up time and time
again. My theory is that those stories are core identity stories,
they are key to how the person understands themselves. As such, I
try to notice what stories I’m telling repeatedly (hopefully to
different people), and figure out why those are the stories I’m
telling.

Not
to give away all my secrets all at once, but I also pay attention to
the phenomenon of repeated stories in groups – because I think
stories that more than one person tells are likely stories that
matter. Also, I find the nuances and differences extra interesting.

The
stories that we repeat are the stories that are important to us. I
suspect there are at least two aspects to why we repeat them: first
because they are part of how we make sense of the world and secondly
because we’re still trying to make sense of the stories. Telling our
stories, and having others respond to to them, helps us figure them
out.

A
few years ago I came across a distinction between two types of
stories we tell. Most of us, most of the time, tell what this theory
calls “ego stories.” Ego stories make us look good, focus on
life’s high spots, portray us as having control in our own lives, are
well practiced and linear, well told, and sometimes well spun. These
are the stories of interviews, of parties with people we don’t know,
of invulnerability and image crafting.

The
other option, according to this theory, is “soul stories.” Soul
stories are the stories underneath ego stories, ones that tell about
both shadow and light, suffering as well as gladness. They have a
lot of twists and turns, including telling about when our plans were
undone by life. Telling soul stories allows us to integrate the
fragments with the whole, in part because they are unafraid of
change, fear, loss, failure, shame, mystery, passion, or ecstasy.
They are often told in poetry, music, or art. They are the stories
we hold onto in the hardest of times, and the ones most important for
our loved ones to know. Soul stories are likely to be the ones we
are revisiting at 3 AM, or when we have dementia, or when we die.¹

The
truth is that in most settings, soul stories are hard to tell. They
make us vulnerable, and they tell about things we are afraid of or
ashamed of. Yet, when we don’t tell them, they get told through
us without our awareness.

All
of this thinking about stories started for me with the language of
Job and the desire in that passage to immortalize Job’s story. For a
little context, we are hearing Job himself speak in this passage and,
“Since Job has parodied and rejected the language of prayer (vv
21-22) and realized that his outcry brings no response or justice (v.
7) there appears to be no way for him to bring his words before
God.”²
In part, Job worries about how his story will live past his death.
That’s what this is about – preserving his words as a testimony to
the injustice of his life. “It appears that Job describes three
materials on which his words might be recorded – scroll, lead
tablet, engraved rock – each more enduring than the last.”³

The
phrase translated “For I know my Redeemer lives” refers to a
“kinsman redeemer”, that is “It designates the nearest male
relative, who was responsible for protecting a person’s interest when
that individual was unable to do so. The [kinsman redeemer] would
buy back family property sold in distress, recover what has been
stolen, redeem a kinsman sold into slavery, or avenge a murdered
kinsman blood. The [kinsman redeemer] is the embodiment of family
solidarity.”⁴
Now, just to be clear, this means that what Job was actually saying
was “I have a family member who will avenge me, and even after I
die, he will be working for justice on my behalf.” And, further,
the assumption is that the kinsman redeemer will be working towards
justice for Job against Job’s opponent: God. Which is to say that
this passage means exactly the opposite of what I thought it did when
I first read it. It is NOT the same gist as the Psalm from a
different angle. This is a passage really angry with God. (The fact
that I missed this means I wasn’t really thinking about this being
the book of Job when I read the passage, definitely a poor choice.)

In
terms of understanding the passage, there is one more important
piece. The very end is distinct from what comes before it. The
commentator in the New Interpreter’s Bible suggests it makes the most
sense to read it this way, “’I know that my defender lives, and
that at the last he will arise upon the earth – after my skin has
been stripped off! But I would see God form my flesh, whom I would
see for myself; my eyes would see, and not a stranger.” That is,
Job returns to his constant refrain in the book: that he wants to be
heard by God, that he wants justice from God, and that he wants a
REPLY from God. Even having his kinsman-redeemer fix things after
his death, or having his story be immortalized isn’t enough. He
wants to take up this issue with God directly.

In
function, the book of Job is one long soul story, interspersed with
some ego story assurances from Job’s friends. Even God’s answers
take the form of a soul story. The yearning that Job has to have his
story heard fits with the description that they are the stories we
want the people we love most to know – and I think in this case
that includes God.

I’ve
always assumed that God knows my stories, in fact thats one of the
assurances of life – that even if I forget my own stories, they are
still alive within the Divine. But that means I don’t tend to tell
God my stories as often, even though the telling of stories to God is
inherently good. And, the book of Job is the great reminder in the
Bible that God is big enough to handle our anger, and it is OK to
RAIL against God. God doesn’t punish us for expressing our anger,
and God knows the injustices we’ve experienced, and yet we are
welcome to keep on telling them to God as long as they need to be
told. Because God, of course, can handle our vulnerable soul stories
with shadows and light, and doesn’t need or expect things cleaned up
into ego stories. This is sometimes one of the weaknesses of formal
worship. When we have hymns, anthems, and prayers in poetic and
formal language it can lead us to thinking that God requires us to be
able to express the inexpressible. When in fact, God can handle any
communication, including “sighs too deep for words.”

Have
you tried telling God your stories, instead of just going over them
again and again in your head? Sometimes it can really help. For me,
it is most helpful when I WRITE to God (longhand!). I keep a prayer
journal and I find that all the things swirling in my head and
smashing into each other can be extricated one by one, examined, and
a bit of order can sometimes be found among them. Or, at the very
least, I can find out what things are in conflict within me. What
seems massive within, when written to God, becomes less heavy and
more manageable. I also notice, as I write, what themes I go back
to. Which is helpful because it helps me to have a better idea what
my version of handwashing might be.

I
thought, before I did my research, that I’d be ending this sermon
talking about the stories we have to tell of God’s goodness. Our
versions of “I know my redeemer lives” before it became clear
that was NOT God after all. (Oye). I do actually think those are
important stories, imperative ones even. None of us are here without
a good reason. That’s just not how life works. But do others in
your church family know the core stories of your personal faith
journey? Do they know why you trust in God, or what you are
struggling with in trying to trust God, or why you keep showing up at
all? Are these some of the stories you keep on telling? (Why or why
not?) Those might be interesting stories to start telling – even
if they are soul stories and more than a little vulnerable. So here
is your homework this week. (Homework!?!) Tell one member of this
community one of your personal faith stories – why you are
committed to being a part of this Jesus-movement. Together, these
are the stories we have to tell, and tell, and tell. Amen

1 Parker
Palmer and Marcy Jackson, “Ego Stories & Soul Stories” ©
2012 found at
https://www.clearpathcounsel.com/files/4313/3029/8683/Ego_Stories__Soul_Stories.pdf

2 Carol
Newsom, “The Book of Job” in The New Interpreter’s Bible
Volume IV ed. Leander E. Keck et al (Nashville: Abingdon Perss,
1996) 477-8.

3
Newsom, 478.

4 Newsom,
478.

Sermons

“Those Who Walked the Walk” based on Habakkuk 1:1-4;…

November 3, 2019February 11, 2020
by Sara Baron

(Thanks to Kevin Kempf for the great picture!)

Have you heard of “thin
places?”” I’ve heard it described as places where the veil
between this world and the next is thinner – or where God’s
presence can be especially felt. Ideologically, thin places don’t
make any sense to me. I believe that God is all-present, so God
isn’t any more or less present anywhere.

And yet… I have experienced
thin places. I don’t understand them, but I know them. You may be
needing some examples. Mountaintops are commonly thin places, which
I suspect has less to do with the altitude and more to do with the
effort to get to them and the views they offer. Things just feel
different at the top of a mountain, and many people have experienced
them to be thin places. Sanctuaries are another common choice –
ones in churches or ones at camps. I have often wondered if places
where many people have prayed are changed in some way by the
pervasiveness of the prayers – and thus made more holy. (Again,
this doesn’t fit my understanding, but it fits my experience.)
Sometimes, I think, thin places are not places even, they are
moments. I once had a chance to ask a church about when they’d most
strongly experienced God and a whole lot of them mentioned the births
of their children. It is also very common (but not universal) for a
death to be a thin place.

I
also suspect thin places might have a lot more to do with us being
open to the presence of God that is always with us than a change in
the amount of presence, but however it is, I think they ARE. And,
further, one of those moments that has often been a thin place for me
is All Saints Sunday. Over the course of my ministry, more years
than not, this has been the holiest worship service I’ve led.

This year, like every year, the
names we are about to read lie heavy on my heart. Oh friends, the
saints who have gone on ahead of us taught us so much! We are who we
are because of them! It is an honor to read their names and remember
their lives, but it is also heavy to live without them. One of our
traditions, in this church, is to also name the saints whose loss is
still especially heavy on our hearts, even if their departure was
more than a year ago. The list of those names is also dear – and
beautiful and sad and heavy.

Today conjures in my mind that
simple line “the great cloud of witnesses” from Hebrews 12, which
is an incredibly comforting image. Life can feel overwhelming at
times, and sometimes I have no idea where to turn, but remembering
that those who taught me, and loved me, and guided me – guide me
still and show us the way – is very powerful. It is even better to
notice how many of there are!

So, indeed, All Saints Sunday
is, for me, a thin place, and the names we are about to read and the
lives they represent are an honor to remember and name.

Now,
the gospel passage may not seem terribly well connected to all of
that, perhaps because of the terrible Sunday School song that too
many of us learned about Zacchaeus. (If you don’t know it, I beg
you, stay ignorant.) The story itself, however, is not as trite as
the song. There are surprises all over this story, if you pay
attention to them. One is that a wealthy and powerful man was
particularly interested in Jesus, who aimed his ministry particularly
at people who were living in poverty and disempowered. The second is
that the wealthy and powerful man was willing to forgo his dignity to
try to see Jesus, which seems to want to remind us just how exciting
Jesus was in real life and how worthy of seeking out he was (is).
Then there is the amazing turn in the story when Jesus decides to
focus his attention on Zaccheaus, this wealthy and powerful man,
which I think absolutely no one expected. Zaccheaus, however, was
happy and gracious. Then there is the unsurprising grumbling of the
crowd, who are peeved that Jesus is hanging out with this guy (tax
collectors being about as popular then as border patrol agents are
today). And then there is the turn around where Zaccheaus, having
had this experience with Jesus, commits to a moral and fair life.
(I’m going to disregard my assumptions that he probably couldn’t
afford to pay back 4 times as much as he’d over taken…. that’s not
the point.) It seems that being with Jesus was a thin place for
Zaccheaus, where he could access love, hope, and wonder, and be
changed by it.

The beautiful thing about the
Zaccheaus story is that sometimes we are ALL Zaccheaus, and the story
seems to say that’s OK. Sometimes we have power, and sometimes we
use it wrong, but we’re still TRYING our hardest to know what’s right
and do it, and when we figure what what we’ve done wrong, there is a
chance to change it.

Now,
that’s where this fits in with our Saints today. Because none of the
Saints we celebrate today were actually perfect in their lives. Not
a single one. Our memories may get fuzzy around that, but all the
people we are remembering were fallible. All of them, as well,
sometimes had power and sometimes used it wrong. That’s human life.
What’s WONDERFUL is when people realize what they’ve done and seek to
change it. That’s why they are our saints – because of their
willingness to grow, learn, and change.

Friends, this is an interesting
reminder for those of us trying to follow in their footsteps. And it
is a two-fold reminder: (1) we are not expected to be perfect.
Really. We can’t be, and trying just makes it all worse. (2) And,
when we discover how we’ve erred, if we are willing and able to
change, it makes all the difference. This is, often, a cycle we have
to keep on living. I see it clearly in myself in working towards
anti-racism, a goal I yearn for. However, every time I learn
something new, I have to realize how much I’ve erred in the past, and
change it. AND THEN, you know what, the next thing I learn shows
that I’ve still been erring and I still need to change, and I’m not
there yet. It feels AWFUL, and yet it would feel way worse to keep
messing up once I know what I’m doing.

The
Habbakuk passage feels a little bit too on point for a while, doesn’t
it? It is bemoaning the injustices of the world, and THEN it totally
changes!! The prophet’s concerns are met by GOD’s response, and God
says, “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner
may read it. For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it
speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for
it; it will surely come, it will not delay. Look at the proud! Their
spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.”
Oh. My. So our work is to dream, and vision, and make the vision
for God’s goodness clear and visible to others. A commentator
writes, “At at time when the wicked are in control, when the vision
describing God’s intention to reestablish justice has not yet become
a reality, Habakkuk is called in the interim to trust God’s
assurances and to remain faithful.”¹
Not to lose hope, not to give up, not even to keep on bemoaning
reality, but to trust and share the vision.

And the vision that has been
shared with all of us is why we are here. We want to be part of
building God’s vision in the world into everyone’s reality. And the
saints taught us it was possible and showed us the vision. And their
lives have made this a thin place, where we are able to see, a little
more clearly, the beauty of the vision of God and the hope that is
the world for the present and the future. Thanks be to God. Amen

Sermon Talkback Guiding
Questions:

I talked about “thin”
places in the beginning, does that idea make sense to you and if so,
where have you found some?
How are “Saints” related to
learn, growing, changing – and admitting erring?
What else do you see in the
story of Zaccheaus that I didn’t bring out?
Did the Habbakkuk reading
switch too fast for you? (Or not fast enough)
How do you name God’s vision
that we’re working on?
Of the saints we celebrated
today, or have celebrated previously, how did they teach you of
God’s vision for the kindom?
What helps you remember that
you don’t have to be perfect?
What helps you have the courage
to change when you’ve erred?

1Theodore
Hiebert, “Habbakkuk” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume
VII, ed. Leander E. Keck (Nashville: Abindon Press, 1996), p.
638)

–

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 3, 2019

Sermons

“The New Covenant” based on Jeremiah 31:27-34 and Luke…

October 21, 2019February 11, 2020
by Sara Baron

Formally, a covenant is an agreement or legal contract,
although the word is used more often in the religious arena. In
fact, in the religious arena, LOTS of agreements get called a
covenant. The “marriage covenant” the “covenant of the
ordained” (which, btw, doesn’t actually exist but the powers that
be in the church like to hold us to one anyway), behavior covenants
at camp or on mission trips. I was a little shocked when John
Dominic Crossan was here a few years ago to learn that covenants
aren’t as morally neutral as I’d thought.

Religious groups use covenant language because our Bible
does, but it turns out that our Bible uses it because that was the
normal means of making agreements in its day. And covenants are
inherently power dominant. The dominant party sets the standards and
tells the less powerful party what the consequences will be if the
less powerful party doesn’t meet the standards of the dominant party.
It isn’t some particularly holy thing – it’s a form of agreement
between unequals, that functions as a means of naming the punishment
if the less powerful party doesn’t hold up to their end of the deal.
(Which they may not have had much choice about getting into anyway.)

The Hebrew Bible is full of covenants, and almost all of
them have condition in them and punishments delineated as well. They
tend to say, “If you do this, then I will be your God and you will
be my people and things are going to be OK. If not, then it follows
that the inverse will happen.” However, today we are talking about
the exceptions. The first exception is in the covenant made with
Abraham, mostly.

The story of Abraham’s covenant appears 3 times in
Genesis, and in 2 of the 3 versions it is unconditional. The the
3^rd, it is conditional on circumcision. The three
versions relate to the three different “voices” in Genesis, and
this story is important enough that all three versions are known and
told. My favorite is the Priestly version in Genesis 15, whereby God
intentionally takes on the roles of both the powerful and the
powerless in covenant making and thereby takes all the responsibility
for the relationship continuing to work.

That covenant is the one most like what we hear in
Jeremiah 31, where we hear of the “new covenant.” Jeremiah is
generally considered a downer prophet, as his role was to say that if
the nation of Israel didn’t change its ways, it was going to be
destroyed.

However, Jeremiah 31 is the middle of three hopeful
chapters whereby the prophet names that after the destruction that
would come, an even better relationship with God would be possible.
The hope is even more potent in the midst of the the rest of the
book, and its threats of dire destruction. The particulars of the
new covenant are worth noting. Let’s hear that part again:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will
make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a
covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord.
But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel
after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I
will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they
shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to
each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the
least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive
their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

The comparison for the “new covenant” are the
covenants in the Torah. In those covenants God made promises to the
people that were CONTINGENT on the people upholding their promises to
God. In this new covenant God takes all the responsibility on God’s
self. The people don’t have to learn, or memorize, or interpret the
Torah because God will “put it within them” and “write it on
their hearts.” And in this way the people and God will be
inseparable.

The part that is particularly inspiring to me is, “ No
longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know
the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to
the greatest.” God’s self is not entirely knowable within the
human realm, and it is easy to get lost in figuring out God even when
we’re trying our hardest. The idea that everyone could know, and
intuit the goodness and love of God AND act out God’s kindom is
really powerful.

The final line is both really powerful in its original
context, and likely the reason that the Christian Tradition has so
strongly claimed this text. The line is, “for I will forgive their
iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” For those who heard
Jeremiah, and for those who complied his remembered speeches into a
book, the reason for the exile was that the people had been
unfaithful to the covenant with God. They had not followed the Torah
laws, they had allowed the rich and powerful to abuse the poor and
powerless, and they had forgotten God’s will. Whether or not that
was the reason for the exile, it is the reason that is assumed within
the book. To forgive iniquity and sin, then, was a form of
restoration. To continually forgive iniquity and forget sin is to
take away the threat of punishment and create the hope of security.

Now, as the Christian Tradition has strongly claimed
authority over God’s forgiveness of sins, it makes a lot of sense
that it has strongly claimed this “old” (by the standards of
Christianity) idea of the “new” covenant. However, claiming
Jeremiah’s vision of the new covenant is a really radical claim for
Christianity to make! Sure, Christianity also claims that we and God
have made an eternal covenant, God is our God and we are God’s
people. That one is easy. We also claim forgiveness, that fits.
But we aren’t yet in a time, as far as I know, where we are past
having to teach each other of God and God’s goodness. Nor are we
living in a time when all people intuit and live out right action
that allows the kindom to come and continue.

The “new covenant” of Jeremiah in some ways reminds
me of the kindom itself – it is here and now! But it is here and
now IN PART and we are working towards the day when it is here and
now in completion! I love, though, that Christianity is claimed this
deep and profound dream as ours. Of course, I hope we all remember
that the dream is one from our Hebrew Bible and we don’t have a
unilateral claim to it.

A while ago, one night at Bible Study we came across our
Gospel passage for today, and someone raised a question, “What is
this ‘new covenant’ thing?” The answer referred us to the Jeremiah
passage. For a lot of people present that night, things CLICKED. The
United Methodist communion liturgy refers to the new covenant twice.
The first time it shows up describing the life and ministry of Jesus
where it says:

Holy are you, and blessed is your Son Jesus
Christ.
…
By the baptism of his suffering, death, and
resurrection
you gave birth to your Church,
delivered us from
slavery to sin and death,
and made with us a new covenant
by
water and the Spirit.
When the Lord Jesus ascended,
he promised
to be with us always,
in the power of your Word and Holy Spirit.

The second time is when the communion cup is named and
raised, where it says:

When the supper was over, he took the cup,
gave
thanks to you, gave it to his disciples, and said:
“Drink
from this, all of you;
this is my blood of the new
covenant,
poured out for you and for many
for the
forgiveness of sins.
Do this, as often as you drink it,
in
remembrance of me.”

Those who had grown up hearing those words, over and
over, without context, were excited to know the context of it.

In addition to showing up in our communion liturgy, the
concept of the New Covenant is also found in our language for our
Scriptures. The so-called New Testament which is alternative
language for, yep you got it, “New Covenant.” Our Bible itself
claims that the stories of Jesus and the early church ARE the stories
of the new covenant of Jeremiah being lived out on earth. And, I
think this is claimed because it is believed. And, I think the claim
that our faith tradition is an expression of Jeremiah’s “New
Covenant” is both excessive and hopeful.

Someday, may it fully be so. 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

Sermons

“Afterlife?” based on Job 14 and Mark 12:18-27

October 13, 2019February 11, 2020
by Sara Baron

I want to start today by asking
for your trust – particularly from those who are here particularly
for the baptism. I do know that the first hymn and the scriptures
have been an odd match for a baptismal Sunday so far, and it is going
to get worse before it gets better, but it IS going to get better, I
promise.

The question of “what happens
after we die” is relevant to us for two separate reasons. One
reason is entirely personal: we want to know if we are simply mortal
and if we cease to exist when we die. The other may be just as
personal, in a different way: we want to know if the connects we
have to those who have died before us are still alive or if they only
feel that way.

Both of these are good reasons
to want to know, but nevertheless, we don’t know what happens after
death. And our believes about it end up being profoundly personal.
If we are looking at afterlife through the lens of the Christian
Tradition, there are three big questions people to disagree over:

Does afterlife exist?
If there is an afterlife, do
both heaven and hell exist, or just heaven?
If both heaven and hell exist,
how are people sorted between them?

While many people have deep
conviction about their answers to these questions, and believe their
answers to be the “normal” ones, the truth is that Christians
have disagreed about this for about as long as there have been
Christians.

For
centuries, Christianity has taught about afterlife and the existence
of heaven and hell, all while arguing about the means of sorting
people into each. Yet, there is also a large group of Biblical
Scholars who think that we’ve gotten those assumptions wrong. They
say that 1^st
century Jews, Jesus, and the earliest Christians did not believe in
heaven and hell the way we do. At best, heaven and hell were
temporary resting places while waiting for bodily resurrection that
would come along with the Kindom of God on earth.¹
More commonly, people believed that there was nothing until the
moment of universal bodily resurrection, which they expected to come
within the first generation after Jesus. For some others the
perspective of Job 14 was accurate: humans die but at least God
doesn’t.

For
the most part, I think afterlife is an aside to Christianity. The
goal is to build the kindom on earth, not in heaven. However, the
reality of deaths of those we love and the looming reality of our own
deaths don’t let us go. We really want to know, and for many people,
what they believe about afterlife profoundly connects to how they
understand God.

Now,
this is the fifth and final sermon in a sermon series
comparing the salient points of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, the
tradition of the Christian Right, and what I’ve been calling
“Jesus-followers”. (That final group is us.) Moralistic
Therapeutic Deism was discovered through sociological research on the
belief system on teenagers, and we have reason to believe it is the
default belief system of most Americans. Unfortunately, as we’ve
found, its a rather problematic belief system, at least in my
opinion. It consists of 5 intersecting assumptions:

“A
god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human
life on earth.”
“God
wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in
the Bible and by most world religions.”
“The
central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.”
“God
does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when
God is needed to resolve a problem.”
“Good
people go to heaven when they die.”

Today we are looking at the 5^th
and final point, “Good people go to heaven when they die.”

Of course, if you asked most
people what Christians think, that would be a key part of the answer,
“good people go to heaven when they die,” but – of course – our
tradition is far more complicated than is generally known.

Historically,
I think the concepts of heaven and hell came into clarity in the 3^rd
or 4^th
century, as that’s when the fights over who went where really picked
up. So let’s look at our three questions:

Does afterlife exist?

Christians
of good faith disagree about this one. Some, including some in this
community, say, “no. This life is all there is, so let’s make the
best of it instead of pretending there is more.” Others, including
some in this community, say, “I think so. I’ve had some
experiences that lead me to that conclusion and/or it just feels
right.” Still others simply aren’t sure. Because the “word on
the street” about Christianity so profoundly conflates belief in
God with belief in afterlife, I feel the need to say this explicit:
all of these are faithful statements that are congruent with knowing
a loving God through Jesus.

So, the second question, which
presumes an answer of “yes” to the first one about afterlife
existing. The second question is:

2. If there is an afterlife,
do both heaven and hell exist, or just heaven?

I’ll admit that I nuanced this
one to lead to a particular answer. While I’m not always confident
about afterlife (and yet sometimes I am, it is a confusing place
inside my head), I never think there is a hell. It just doesn’t make
the tiniest bit of sense to me that over the long run anything but
God’s grace could win out. I read one time a suggestion that people
continue to have free will after death, and so if heaven is unity
with God, people can take AS LONG AS THEY WANT to get there, but in
the end, they will because grace wins. Put another way, I simply
don’t believe in a God of eternal punishment, it is incomprehensible
to me. That said, I think most modern Christians believe in a heaven
and a hell, and most of them think it is heresy not to. (oh. Well.)

I
think that for most people who believe that “good people go to
heaven when they die” and the unspoken but obvious corollary “bad
people go to hell when they die” there is a desire to believe that
there is fundamental justice in the world and that bad things are
punished and good things are celebrated and even if we don’t see
evidence of that on earth, it will get balanced out later. I can
understand a desire to believe that!

Now, for me the third question
is null and void, but since Christianity has spent the past 1600-1700
years fighting over it, I guess we should take a moment to hear the
arguments. 😉

3. If both heaven and hell
exist, how are people sorted between them?

Possible answers:

In order to get into heaven you
have to BELIEVE the right things ( “Justification by FAITH.”)
This is the primary perspective of the Christian Right, although it
intersects some with the next idea.
In order to get into heaven
you have do DO the right things. For many of those Christians there
is a list of good things and a list of bad things to guide behavior.
( “Justification by WORKS” or “Works Righteousness.”)
In order to get into heaven one
must be baptized. This is often even subconscious now. This is one
of the strongest arguments for infant baptism. It is also one of
the strongest arguments against it. Some in this mindset will claim
that only baptism in their PARTICULAR part of Christianity will
matter. However, when Christianity was much younger, this often
resulted in people refusing to be baptized until the very last
moment. (I think, in fact, this is the historical basis for the
Catholic ritual of last rites.) They thought that once baptized all
their sins were forgiven, and if it was done late enough they
wouldn’t have time to sin. I’m not kidding. This was very common
practice.
In
order to get into heaven we need God’s grace, and God’s grace given
to us results in our ability to have faith. (“Justification by
grace alone though faith.”) UMC option
Thus it is not what we do or do not do; nor what we believe or do
not believe that results in our welcome into heaven. It is simply
God’s nature. This does raise a rather large question about those
who do not believe in God though.

As
a reminder of how complicated all of this is, I do not think that
our Gospel lesson supports or disproves any of the schools of
thought. Rather, it urges humility. The Sadducees were trying to
trick up Jesus, and they brought him a tricky question in order to do
it. The question supported their belief about what happens when
we die, but Jesus’ answer did not let them trip him up. He says,
““Is
not this the reason you are wrong, that you know neither the
scriptures nor the power of God? For
when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in
marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the dead being
raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the story about
the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of
Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is God not of the dead, but of the
living; you are quite wrong.”

This
passage keeps me humble. I don’t know what it means, I don’t know
what heaven is like,or if it exists, and that’s OK. Many of us are
not same worldview as moralistic therapeutic deism who say “good
people go to heaven when they die” or the Christian-Right who say
that and have clarity over who counts as “good.” Many of us
simply don’t know what happens after death.

I
think that at the core, the questions of if afterlife exists or not
and whether there is cosmic justice are really questions about
existential anxiety. That is, as beings who are conscious and who
know we are mortal, we struggle with the reality that someday we
won’t be (at least in this form) anymore.

I
think that our shared, all the way back to Jesus, Christian Tradition
offers Jesus-followers two ways we can respond to existential anxiety
and the claims of the other traditions. If we are about continuing
the work of Jesus – about building the kindom and inviting others
to be partners with us in building the kindom – then our work does
not end with our deaths any more than Jesus’ did. This is not same
as individual afterlife, but is really powerful in a different way.
Certainly the ways that each of us work towards the kindom is unique,
but the end goal is shared, and after we are gone others will be
following up on our work with theirs … until the kindom comes.

The
other piece of our response to existential anxiety is simply trusting
in God. Whether or not we cease to exist at the end of our lives,
God and God’s memory will still hold our lives, our loves, our
actions, our thoughts, and our feelings. And, whatever is on the
other side of the proverbial curtain – God IS and God is GOOD and
what will be is possible to trust in.

And
that brings us full circle to say, that while I know it is awful to
acknowledge death while celebrating a new life, I am happy to say
that the kindom building and the goodness of God will outlast even the life of the baby baptized today life and thanks be to God for that! Amen

(http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/april/13.36.html?paging=off)

Sermons

“Communion with Migrants and Refugees” based on Exodus 17:1-7…

October 6, 2019February 11, 2020
by Sara Baron

Our faith says, a wandering
Aramean was our ancestor – that is, Abraham and Sarah, displaced
people from Syria, are our shared ancestors.

Our faith says our people were
enslaved, oppressed, and hopeless until God acted to free them.

Our people were desert nomads
for generations, looking for a home but not finding one.

Our people, when they found a
home in the so-called “Promised Land” struggled with those who
already lived there, and centuries (ok, millennia) of unrest
followed.

Our faith says, that a poor,
foreign widow came to live in Israel, and became the great
grandmother of the King of Israel.

When our people had lived in the
land for centuries, had built a temple, had established a government,
and had found peace and stability – a foreign empire defeated them
in battle, destroyed the temple, killed the king’s descendants, broke
open the defensive walls, and took the leaders away as exiles.

Our leaders in exile were told
to “work for the good of the city they were in” because it was
going to take a while.

Our faith says that generations
later, God worked to bring the exiles home, and guided the people to
rebuilt, and restore, and it was hard and there were disagreements.

Other nations fought for power
and control over the land of the Israelites, empires grew and empires
fell, tributes were paid and governments were seized. The people
sought freedom, and sometimes they got it.

Eventually the Romans came to
power, and 30 or so years later, Jesus was born.

Matthew says that Jesus’s family
fled to Egypt to protect him from death, and resettled in Nazareth
after they returned.

Nazarenes knew destruction and
its power, but Rome didn’t yet know the power of the stories of the
Jews, who knew their God to be one who overcame oppression time and
time again.

Jesus’ ministry was most often
with people who were poor and had been displaced from their families’
lands. His was a ministry in motion – homeless and dependent on
the hospitality of strangers. He sent his disciples off with nothing
but the clothes on their back and trust in God.

Our faith says that our
ancestors have known displacement in all of its forms. Our faith is
the faith of slaves, of immigrants, of refugees – people who have
had nothing but hope in God, who has proven faithful time and time
again. The fact that God is with and for displaced people is
particularly important as our world has more displaced people than
ever.¹

Today in 2019 there are known to
be 70.8 million people²
who have forcibly displaced from their homes, and that number is
likely lower than reality. Of those, this year the USA says it will
welcome at most 30,000 (and likely only half that).³
In this country we hear horror stories about people trying to enter
our country – but we often don’t hear about how small the numbers
are compared to the global crisis.

In the USA, the stories we hear
are of concentration camps at our Southern Border, children being
torn from their parents, and atrocious conditions for people who are
simply trying to survive after being displaced from their own homes
and countries. These situations are worthy of our strongest
condemnation and protest. Tthe situation in our own southern border
is AN ATROCITY and, because the USA is welcoming so few of the
displaced people in the world we must also look beyond our country to
see the extend of the problems.

For me, step one in wrapping my
head around the experiences of people who are displaced is simply an
act of empathy. What would it be like? While I have spent most of
my life in the United States, there are two exceptions: 2 months in
Ecuador when I was a teenager and 3 months in England when I was a
college student. My brain simply can’t wrap itself around what it
would be like to have to leave this country and never come back. I
know from my time in Ecuador how HARD it is to be in a place where my
brain struggles with the language, and how disconcerting it is to
have intelligent thoughts in my head and no way to communicate them
so that other people know they exist. I know how much I can yearn
for familiar things – food I know, using water directing from the
tap, the plants and terrain that feels familiar. But I don’t know
what it is like to leave those things behind and NEVER be able to
come home again. Nor can I wrap my head around the atrocities being
committed at our Southern Border to people who have already been
displaced, who have already had to show resilience, who have left
their homes and their communities, their people and their dreams in
order to (hopefully) live– only to be dehumanized again by our
government.

While things feels stable, to
me, here, the world is noticeably destabilized. There are twice as
many displaced persons as there were FIVE years ago, and the trend is
only upward. Half of displaced people are children. Less than 3% of
those who have been forced to leave their countries are able to
return there.⁴
It is important to stretch our imaginations, our empathy, and our
LISTENING to those who are refugees, because from their stories we
can learn how to be allies to those who are struggling.

The book of Exodus, in our
reading today, gives us a great example of the challenges of being
displaced. The people, having been freed from slavery in Egypt, are
in the midst of their wanderings in the desert before they settle
into the Promised Land. The people are displaced, all that is
familiar has been stripped from their lives, and even though the
familiar was awful, it was the familiar and the unfamiliar is
overwhelming. The people were whining, and grumbling, and
threatening Moses. God took mercy on them and their fear, and
provided for them when they needed affirmation that they would
survive.

It is a powerful reminder that
it is hard to leave home EVEN when home is AWFUL, and that even when
where you are going is GOOD, it is still new and different. Worse,
for many displaced people, a new home isn’t on the horizon yet.

Our faith tradition, the one
that KNOWS the reality of displacement, also knows that we can forget
or ignore the pain of those around us. In 1 Corinthians, Paul names
that at the early communion table some were eating and drinking too
much while others had nothing at all, and he says that the table is
to be SHARED. Those who have plenty share with those who have
nothing. This is the earliest teaching we have in Christianity about
communion.

There are those in this
community who have plenty, and there are those who don’t have enough.
Together, though, we have this table. It isn’t something we tend to
pay a lot of attention to, but a table, in a shared community of
faith, is something many of God’s displaced people no longer have
access to. For us, today, this table is extended, and we seek to
share it with God’s people who are displaced around the world,
including at our own southern border. We know God’s table is big
enough for all people, and we ask God to extend our hearts until they
are grow as large as God’s table. May the blessings of God’s table
be with all who need them, and may we who receive of these gifts be
mindful of those who can’t access them today. Amen

1 https://www.unhcr.org/innovation/10-infographics-that-show-the-insane-scale-of-the-global-displacement-crisis/

2 https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html

3 https://immigrationforum.org/article/fact-sheet-u-s-refugee-resettlement/

4 https://www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2018/

October 6, 2019

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

“Central Goal of Life” based on Rev. 21:1-6 and Matthew…

September 15, 2019February 11, 2020
by Sara Baron

The
original meaning of the word “believe” didn’t have anything to do
with what we think or what we mentally affirm. It had to do what
what we “belove” – how we act. We’re looking at beliefs right
now, for the purpose of considering what we belove, and to check and
see if our lives are lined up with what we belove.

We
are comparing three different believe systems: Moralistic Therapeutic
Deism, the Christian Right, and “Jesus Following”. Moralistic
Therapeutic Deism was identified by sociologist through a large
research project with US teens, and is the actual belief system of
most teens, despite any religious tradition they claim. Furthermore,
as teens are most heavily influenced by their parents when it comes
to faith, we have reason to believe that a rather large segment of
the population actually believes “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”
So, we are looking at it, and finding where it does and doesn’t match
our actual faith tradition.

“Moralistic
Therapeutic Deism” has 5 salient points.

“A
god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human
life on earth.”
“God
wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in
the Bible and by most world religions.”
“The
central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.”
“God
does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when
God is needed to resolve a problem.”
“Good
people go to heaven when they die.”

This
week we are going to take a closer look at the third of the them:
“The
central goal of life is to be happy and to feel
good about oneself.” For me, at least, this is a complicated
statement. I don’t disagree. However, before you get your hopes up
for a really short sermon, I don’t actually agree either. I have no
objection to happiness or feeling good about yourself – I’m all for
that – but I still think it falls short as the CENTRAL goal of life.
So, YES, we are meant to be happy and it is great when we can feel
good about ourselves BUT….

And
the BUT has three parts. We’re gonna take two of them together. So
first,… BUT we don’t really know how to seek our own happiness and
actually find it! And, secondly, … BUT we are not called to be so
individualistic. We are meant to increase joy in the world, yes, and
to increase the ways that people notice goodness and God-ness in
themselves, but not JUST for ourselves – for each other! More
interestingly, most studies suggest that the best way to make
yourself happy is to bring joy to others.

In
one of those studies, they gave people money with instructions.
Those told to spend it on themselves did, and those told to spend it
on others did. And who was happier the next day? Those who spent
the money on others. The boost in their joy was bigger and longer
lasting – having given someone ELSE a gift. They tried it with
various amounts of money, in a few countries, under different
scenarios, and it held. Further, they also found that if people were
given money and instructed to spend it on a team member, the success
rates of the whole team when up! (True of sports teams and business
teams.)

Studies
also say that the happiness of our friends friends friends impacts
our own! We are social animals, impacted deeply by one another, and
the best way to increase our own happiness is to increase the
happiness of others. On the converse, self-indugence doesn’t bring
happiness.

If
you want to increase your happiness, spend more time with people you
love – engaging with them – and bringing them joy. These two
objections really end up being similar. We are called as Christians
to seek goodness together, and that’s how it really works.
Other studies also point out that when we are doing the work we love
best we are profoundly happy. This suggests a way of understanding
our roles in the world as our calls by God. Amazingly though, that
happiness that we have when we lose ourselves in a task we love –
we all tend to describe it as a way of NOT being in ourselves. There
is something to giving ourselves away that is deeply related to
happiness.

I
chose two scriptures this week to offer the Christian perspective on
happiness, mostly because either of them individually seemed
incomplete. The Gospel is the Sermon on the Mount, the beatitudes,
the “blessed are they…” which are sometimes actually translated
“happy are they….” or could be translated “fortunate are
they…” but the blessing or the happiness are definitely NOT the
assumed ones.

The
beatitudes don’t say blessed are the rich because they can buy what
they want or blessed are the young because they don’t have aches and
pains or blessed are the aged because they have enough wisdom or….
or anything like that! They say, blessed are the peacemakers,
blessed are the humble, blessed are those who mourn! The beatitudes
turn upside the idea of who is lucky, and with whom God’s presence is
found, but they can be read, easily, as a means of social happiness.
This fits with the Gospel message itself.

Let’s
look at them: Blessed are the:

…the
poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (5:3) – those
who do not seek wealth for themselves, or well-being for themselves,
but for others.

…those
who mourn: for they will be comforted. (5:4) – those who have
loved.

…the
meek: for they shall inherit the earth. (5:5) – those who let
others get what they need.

…those
who hunger and thirst for righteousness: for they will be satisfied.
(5:6) – those who care for the needs of others

…the
merciful: for they will be shown mercy. (5:7) – those who are
merciful and kind to others

…the
pure in heart: for they shall see God. (5:8) – those who love with
purity.

…the
peacemakers: for they shall be called children of God. (5:9) –
those who bring wholeness to others

…those
who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness: for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven. (5:10) – those who believe enough to be willing
to take on pain for others

Who
are the happy? The blessed? The fortunate? The ones in deep and
wonderful relationships with others – the ones giving themselves
away to others. The ones whose lives intersect.

The
second scripture is a vision of the completion of the kingdom of God
on earth, the coming of God’s spirit to dwell with the people, in a
time without death or pain or sorrow. Its the ultimate “happiness”
and its for the people as a whole. Its the goal toward which we aim,
as Christians, the completion of the kindom of God.

Which
gets us to the third objection. YES,
we are meant to be happy and it is great when we can feel good about
ourselves BUT….it is not the central point. The central point is
building the kindom of God. Because I believe these two things are
the same thing expressed in different ways, I can also say, the
central point is sanctification – creating space for the process of
growing in love for God, self, and others. Our Jesus-following
tradition says that sanctification is a gift from God, but there are
known “means of grace” that are likely to open ourselves to the
process.

I
think joy is a means of grace, and hope that people take their joy as
a source of wisdom about their particular roles in the world. I
think God wants us to be joyful both because God loves us AND because
each instance of joy in the world is a blessing to others and
increases the wholeness of joy. But in the end I agree with the
often shared (and regularly misattributed) quote , “The meaning of
life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”
Yes, this bring joy and happiness, but it also blesses the world.
And, dear ones, we are blessed TO BE blessings. Not just so we’re
happy while others … aren’t!!

Thus
far I’ve left the Christian-Right out of this conversation. I’ve
argued only with the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism perspective, and
shared from the Jesus-follower one. In this case the Christian-Right
perspective is radically different from both. Within the
Christian-Right, suffering is seen as redemptive. This one has bled
into mainstream Christianity in ways I’ve often worried about. In
other churches I’ve served there has been an innate fear of too much
pleasure, as if it is unholy to enjoy the goodness of life. But in
the Christian-Right this goes deeper, suffering is assumed to be a
punishment from God, a “gift” in the form of a lesson to be
learned, a way of knowing that one needs to seek forgiveness from
God. I’m told, however, that this assumption is sometimes biased:
other people’s suffering is thought to be good for them, but in one’s
own life the goal is to be blessed through righteousness rather than
suffering. The idea that the righteous are blessed directly and the
unrighteous are blessed through correction is inherent in this
perspective.

The
part of this that REALLY concerns me is that if suffering seen as
redemptive, the desire to lift people out of oppression is hindered.
You see, if suffering is … necessary… then there isn’t a reason
to worry about people in poverty, or about people being mistreated by
employers, or about people being abused…. because their suffering
brings them closer to God’s desires for them so it is … sort of
anyway… good. And, since the Christian-right is focused on
afterlife, the idea is often presented that suffering in this life
will be rewarded in the next… another motivation to allow the
suffering of people or groups.

Now,
I’m not entirely sure that the Jesus-following movement has a
fantastic theology of suffering. We tend to do one of two things:
ignore it and hope it goes away, or fight against suffering as
oppression as hard as we can. While the latter is something I value
in our believe/belove system, there ARE some sufferings of life that
are simply unavoidable. Making space for people to be in pain, and
to be heard and valued when they are in pain definitely matters to
making space for all of God’s people – and we can’t solve
everything. We can’t solve cancer, we can’t solve trauma, we can’t
solve grief. What we can do is be with people where they are, and I
hope that some of our work on sanctification/ kindom building is work
in increasing our capacity to sit with people who suffer.

I
think God is with people in suffering, and sometimes suffering can be
very holy work. However, I don’t think God ever GIVES people
suffering as punishment NOR as a lesson to be learned. That’s where
the Christian-Right and the Jesus-follower movements disagree.

So,
in the Jesus-follower perspective, happiness and joy are GOOD, but
they’re not everything. Suffering and pain are real, but they’re not
“gifts from God.” The central goal of life is not our own
happiness. Instead, the central goal of life is
sanctification/building the kindom. That is, the central goal of life
is increasing communal well-being – and with it communal joy and
happiness. God is working with us to bring more joy into the world –
for all. Thanks be to 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

September 15, 2019