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Sermons

“On Not Being Silent in Church” based on 1 Corinthians…

  • July 16, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

This passage starts out so well. It starts out reminding me of the good things about Paul, including that Paul would have made a good Wesleyan since he really likes order. His suggestions are sensible, and aimed at creating a positive experience for everyone present. He suggests that worship should be communal, that all who show up should have something to offer. For a small house church, that’s a great model! Even for a larger community, it serves to remind all of us that being the Body of Christ is an active thing, that each of us have things to offer and the Body is at its best when we receive gifts from many people and use them together!

Paul reminds the church in Corinth that the purpose of their shared time of worship is to build each other up. The book of First Corinthians has a whole lot of suggestions like that, and most scholars think that’s because the church in Corinth was spending a lot of time fighting with each other.

Paul seeks to limit the gift of tongues, which he does a lot in his letters. Paul is said to have the gift of tongues, but in the early church there were those who believed speaking in tongues was the best gift of the Spirit and the most faithful people all had it. Paul spends a lot of time fighting that, including in this passage. Here he limits the number of people who should do so at any one gathering AND he says that unless a partner in ministry is present who can interpret tongues, they shouldn’t be spoken out loud. That is a very inclusive perspective, it means that no one present would end up just listening without getting anything out of it.

Paul gives instructions to those who speak prophecy too, also very practical stuff. He tells the church to carefully weigh what is said, not to take it as truth without discussion. Furthermore, he suggests that if two people are getting the same message, only one of them has to say it. That suggestion feels very much like a response to a direct complaint, and a reasonable response at that. He returns to the reminder that the work is to build each other up, and encourage each other. He says on theme in the end of the first paragraph, still responding to a direct issue. I imagine he was told, “They say that they can’t prophesy one by one because the Spirit is moving in them!” As if in direct response, Paul says, “the spirits of prophets are subject to the prophets, for God is a God not of disorder but of peace.”

Beautiful. Uplifting. Profound. Reasonable. Paul is building up the church, he is guiding the people, he is dealing with the reality of human struggles, he is doing it all.

And then.

And then I want to duct tape his mouth shut. The rather interesting passage offering insight about the early church and the sensible solutions of Paul takes a turn for the worse, or more precisely it falls off a cliff. We’re going to see if we can find a safety net for it in a moment, but first I feel the need to convince you to take it seriously. Those of you in the room who join me in wanting to duct tape Paul’s mouth shut may also want to just ignore this passage as irrelevant, or even use it as proof that the Bible is irrelevant. You may not want to talk about it, and you may not think it is worth your time to bother with it.

The issue is that this passage has been used to silence women since the time it was written (which itself is unclear) and is STILL used today. So we need to face the passage and its role in our broken body of Christ, like it or not. The numbers aren’t entirely clear, but in the United States about 11% of religious communities over all, and 10% of Christian faith communities have female clergy leading them. If you want to feel good about your denomination, you can here. The highest number of female clergy in any denomination in the USA is in the UMC 🙂 However, that’s still about 1/3 of UMC clergy. The numbers of clergy women are low in part because of the many denomination that don’t allow clergy women including the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Traditions, most of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Lutheran Missouri Synod, the Church of Latter-Day Saints and a whole lot of non-denominational churches.1 They quote this passage as justification.

Furthermore, you don’t want to know how many times I’ve gotten this text quoted at me, and been asked to justify my calling. Nor do I really want to relive all of it. This is a safe congregation where the love of God prevails and we all work together to minimize the impact of sexism in our community and our world. The very few overtly sexist comments I’ve received here have resulted in incredible support coming my way. (Thank you all!) However, as is true for other issues as well, this community of faith is like a well protected and vibrant tidal pool – and the rest of the Christian ocean seems very far away and unimportant. However, the rest of the Christian ocean doesn’t actually go away when we ignore it.

People still quote this terrible text, and they still follow its instructions. These simple words are used to justify the institutional sexism of the churches, which are as a whole much more sexist than the culture at large.

So, while I believe that all of you already have ways to respond to this text, I want to make sure we all have a quiver-full of them. You never know when you might want one. Here are a whole lot of ways that a reasonable human could approach this text without assuming that their female pastor should be out of a job, without just ignoring it:

1.  If you read along in the NRSV you’d notice that this text is put in parenthesis. That’s because the majority of Biblical scholars believe that it is not an original part of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Rather, they think a later scribe wrote this into the margins to reflect the common practice of his time and it got accidentally moved into the primary text over time. This belief is justified by the fact that in our most ancient manuscripts this paragraph is in two different spots. It is also supported by the fact that in the rest of the 6 authentic Pauline letters, there are ABSOLUTELY NO LIMITS put on the activities of women in churches. To the contrary, in chapter 11 of this letter, women are instructed about how to pray and prophesy in church. There are MANY more examples of Paul speaking to, or about, women leaders of churches and supporting their work, but I think the point is already made: This particular text is unlikely to have been written by Paul, and does not reflect his thinking about women. Instead it looks like the conservative reaction of a later generation of thinker who distrusted women.

2.  If, for some reason, you or someone you are in conversation with doesn’t think that is convincing, then we have some ways to work with the text assuming it is authentic to Paul.

a.  If Paul said it, then it said it to one particular community in one place in one time. Since it doesn’t fit with other things he said, it seems like he was offering a solution to a particular problem. As no other faith community is the first century Corinthian church, the solution doesn’t apply to all of us. (As an amusing aside, the “women” told to be silent in church are ACTUALLY “married women” according to the word used. This would suggest that if I took this text literally and believed it to be God’s will then I shouldn’t have gotten married this spring.)

b.  If this text is assumed to be authentic to Paul, then perhaps it fits into the argument he is already making in this passage. He has given subgroups limits in order to benefit the whole. He told those speaking in tongues to limit their gift, so as not to take over. He told those prophesying not to repeat each other, so as to respect the time of the others gathered. Many commentators have suggested that the women in the Corinthian church were really excited about Jesus and the chance to learn all they could. Because intensive Torah study had been limited to men in Judaism, the women may have been overwhelming the worship services with their questions. Thus, in order to not take over, Paul suggests that they work those questions out in private. It fits with his reactions to overwhelming subgroups AND his tendency toward practical solutions.

c.  Because of the lack of punctuation, it is not clear if Paul is actually speaking the words OR if he is quoting the men of the church! (This hypothesis holds a surprising amount of water.) In that case Paul is quoting that women should be silent, that they should be subordinate, and even that they should ask their husbands, that it is shameful for a woman to speak. But then HE is responding to those men who said so with, “Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only ones it has reached?” (1 Cor 14:36, NRSV)2

Great. So, there are 4 reasonable responses to this passage which do not require that I sit down and stop talking. Amazingly a lot of Bible Commentaries don’t come up with any of them though. One of them (that we own) tried to make this passage about keeping women from publicly embarrassing their husbands, and another (that we also currently still own) suggested that Paul was just making a good point about gender differentiated roles. Sometimes I think the Bible is one big ink blot test, something we all just project our already established biases onto. This serves as a commercial for the evening Bible Study: where we together read, question, learn, question, wonder and still question. We do our best to get information from many sources so we aren’t led astray by other people’s biases or our own.

Speaking of biases, this text has been used to weaken the Body of Christ throughout history. The Body is ALWAYS weaker when it represents less diverse voices. It takes the fullness of humanity to best be the Body of Christ, and the way this text has been used has stood in the way of that. The church has been weakened for nearly 2000 years because of misinterpretation of this passage. Let’s be part of turning that around! Everywhere we go we can attend to who is at the table and who isn’t. We can be voices that speak when groups of people missing (women, people of color, people living in poverty, members of the LGBTQIA community, younger or older people, etc), and in doing so heal the Body of Christ and the world. Thanks be to God it isn’t yet too late. Amen

1 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/09/the-divide-over-ordaining-women/ and http://hirr.hartsem.edu/research/quick_question3.html  These numbers are a bit dated, but I don’t believe much has changed, unfortunately.

2 Summary worked from the insights found in “First Corinthians” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. IX, Leander Kirk, general editors (Abingdon Press, 2002)

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

July 16, 2017

Sermons

“As if Jesus Cared About THAT” based on Luke…

  • July 9, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

In my experience, there is very little in the world more frustrating to the hard workers in church congregations than a sermon dismissing Martha. About 4 months ago the Subversive Women of the Bible Sermon Series celebrated Mary’s subversive action of sitting at Jesus’ feet and claiming her place as one of his disciples. Today, at last, we get to celebrate Martha’s subversive action – and her acts of service!

I think I’ve been waiting my whole life to preach exclusively in support of Martha, and I’ve been told by several of you that you’ve been waiting to hear such a sermon. When the Young Adult Bible Study came back to this text to hear it on Martha’s behalf, it rather surprised us. You’d think that 5 verses we’d looked at only a few months earlier would have been sort of boring the second time around, but we’ve been learning through this study that perspective is EVERYTHING. The story sounded different taking Martha as the heroine, in the same ways that we’ve been hearing deep wisdom in other stories we thought we knew but had only heard from the male perspective previously.

This story carries a lot of baggage, particularly it carries a history of being read with the world’s misogyny. Most Biblical commentators from the earliest times to the present have indicated that Martha’s work was less important than Mary’s, and associated Martha with the “concerns of the world” while Mary is seen as caring about “the things of God.” There are a few issues with this: in the story Martha is in a traditionally feminine role while Mary is in a masculine one. Celebrating Mary thus became another way of dismissing the work of women. Similarly, associating women with earthiness, worldliness, practical matters, AND negativity perpetuates the view that women are of less value in the world. The contrast, Mary’s role which fits into masculine norms, which is presented as Godly, holy, good, and right continues the idea that women just aren’t of that much value.

Let’s be practical for a minute here. Jesus traveled with an entourage. We know about the 12 disciples who seemed always to be with him, and we reasonably assume that their families were with them. We also know that the crowds around Jesus grew with his ministry. This story takes place on the journey to Jerusalem, so near the end of his year of active ministry according to the Synoptic Gospels. There were likely a LOT of people traveling with Jesus and Martha was offering them ALL hospitality. I mean, I’m thinking 50-200 people??? I know very few humans who can offer hospitality to 50-200 people without being a LITTLE frenetic about it, and even fewer who would be happy to do so without any help.

Furthermore, it is all fine and good to acknowledge that learning about God in study is an excellent priority to have, but it is much easier to make those claims when one is well-fed and has one’s with thirst quenched. Any time a person or group of people are given the opportunity to focus on study and learning we can assume that happens because some other person or group of people are doing the practical work of preparing food, drink, and lodging, and errands to support them. The traditional work of women; the undervalued work of this world in caregiving, cleaning, and food preparation; simply have to be done, and it is only because someone else is doing them that anyone is free to devote their life to study (or anything else for that matter).

Sometimes those doing the work are spouses, sometimes they’re people being paid to offer services. I recently read a ridiculous article proclaiming how much easier it was to be a self-sufficient woman in a big city because of the availability of take out food and laundry services. The author seemed to miss that the work she wasn’t doing was still being done by human beings (and mostly by women of color), that she wasn’t actually making her life work on her own, she was merely ignoring in the work involved in supporting her life!

Now, as to the truly radical thing that Martha does, the thing that I will be grateful to Martha for the rest my life: Martha assumes that Jesus cares about “women’s work.” She thinks Jesus has a clue of how much work there is to be done to offer this hospitality, she thinks that Jesus will seek justice for her and create a better balance, she thinks the work she does matters enough to interrupt Jesus while he’s teaching!!!! Martha herself thinks “women’s work” matters, and she thinks Jesus does too. She seems to have a healthy does of self-esteem and a good relationship with Jesus to be willing to initiate this conversation.

Many times in history the work of offering hospitality has been invisible to those who receive it, and it might have been common for women offering hospitality to assume that the men who received it neither knew that it happened nor cared how much work was involved. They would only notice if something went wrong. But Martha, who knew Jesus well, trusted him with reality that it WAS a lot of work and that she needed help, and that he wouldn’t laugh at her or ignore her or her concerns. She is the only one of the sisters who speaks, and she speaks to Jesus about her concerns about women’s work. She acts as if Jesus cares about women’s work, about women’s LIVES, and thus about women!!

Now, Jesus may not have done exactly as Martha wanted, but he didn’t dismiss her either. He didn’t instruct Mary to get up and work with her sister as requested. Jesus doesn’t ever tend to do the that he is asked to do when he is triangulated, and this is no exception. But he also doesn’t yell at Martha for asking, or make fun of her before the others. Jesus’s response supports Mary’s right to learn from him, and to make her own choices, without dismissing Martha or her concerns.

I admit, he says Mary has made the better choice. Furthermore, his answer MAY imply that he thinks Martha is making things more complicated than they need to be. But he doesn’t tell her stop! He doesn’t instruct her to sit down and let the work go undone. He doesn’t actually imply that the work Martha is devoting herself to is unimportant. He backs up Mary and her choice, and refuses to ask her to leave. He supports the more radical option, the person acting out of the norms society puts people in. He gently chides Martha.

But his words leave a lot of space for interpretation. Or, to say it with more integrity, Luke’s words placed in Jesus’ mouth leave a lot of space for interpretation. As intriguing as I find this story, as much as it is the second time I’m preaching on it this year, I do need to tell you that the Jesus seminar puts Jesus’ words in black. That means they don’t think there is any chance that Jesus actually said them. These words indicate Luke’s perspective on Jesus and Luke’s understanding of how Jesus acted in the world. That means that they fit how an early Christian community understood Jesus, which makes them very important, but doesn’t mean that they actually fit something Jesus said. Nevertheless, the story has been used for all of Christian history to make sense of our world, and I think there are new lessons in it that can make it richer, so we are going to keep working with it.

The words attributed to Jesus leave a lot of space for interpretation. Some have said it means that Jesus thought Martha should cook only one dish. Some say it had more to do with her actions of serving than cooking. Most commonly people have said this has nothing to do with cooking or serving but is instead about the world vs. God. (Eye roll.) As if God and the world are entirely separate and don’t inform each other. (Sigh.) Some, though, suggest that the thing Martha is chided for is the kind of energy she brings to the work. Jesus is not upset at her choices to serve or to be hospitable (which makes a lot of sense since in other places those who welcome Jesus are praised), but rather for being worried and distracted. The Africa Bible Commentary offers a beautiful example of this perspective:

“the name Martha is an Aramaic one that means ‘sovereign lady’, ‘ruling lady’ or ‘lady’. The name helps to emphasize Martha’s autonomous, well-off and dominate position. She is the hospitable mother of the house who welcomes a preacher and performs the practical tasks that the visit demands. In fact, her work is repeatedly described as diakonia, which would later become a technical term referring to serving at the Lord’s table, proclaiming his message, and providing leadership in the church. Given that diakonia is presented positively everywhere else in the NT, it is difficult to see that here is should suddenly represent a mistaken choice. Rather what Jesus disapproves of is the way in which Martha goes about her work, with fuss and agitation. We do not need to separate the gentle, listening, self-surrendering Marys and the pragmatic, busy Marthas. In other words, the Mary in me ought not to repress the Martha, and the Martha in me ought not to repress the Mary.”1

Ah! The freedom of that idea! The recognition that each of us have within us the prayerful scholar AND the hard-worker! No single person is fully one or the other, and the balance between them exists within each of us. That’s much more realistic that separating them out into two groups of people, and even better, the commentator suggests that and that neither part within us need to judge or repress the other! Extended this idea out even further, to counter the common readings of the passage, it serves to remind us that the stereotypical attributes of both gender identities ALSO exist within each of us, and need not be repressed either.

In this perspective, I’m not entirely sure what Jesus most wanted for Martha. What was he hoping would happen next? What did she need? Was she to make a self assessment and simply stop working if she wasn’t enjoying it? Was she simply to check her attitude at the door? Was she to figure out what would make things more reasonable (without demanding action of her sister) and figure out how to offer the hospitality without running herself ragged? I’m not sure. But I think that some of those are within the answer.

I have said it before, but I’ve gotten feedback that it needs to be heard more often: doing work we resent does NOT build up the kindom of God. There are many jobs within the Body of Christ and there is much work to be done to build justice and peace into the fabric of societies, but we don’t get there doing work we hate and resenting it. That leaves us all with several options:

  1. We can stop doing work we can’t find joy or meaning in.
  2. We can check in with ourselves to find out why we do what we do, and assess if we think our reasons are worthwhile.
  3. We can rebalance what we offer to the world so that the way we offer it brings joy or meaning to us and thus into the world.

There is much work to be done, Martha has that right! But there are a lot of ways to do it (or not do it)! If you are doing things you hate out of obligation with resentment, stop!!! The kindom of God needs joy and meaning, gratitude and delight. Please, don’t give gifts you resent. It will do more harm than good!

Martha believed that Jesus cared about women’s work, and it seems she was right. Now all of have the responsibility that Martha has after Jesus speaks to her: to figure out what gifts we will offer and how we can do so with joy, meaning, gratitude or delight – OR to stop giving those gifts so we can find ourselves free of distraction and worry. May God help us find our way. Amen

1Paul John Isaak, “Luke” in the Africa Bible Commentary, Tokunboh Adeyemo, general editor (Nairobi, Kenya: WordAlive Publishers, 2006), page 1226.

–

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

“Commissioning Commencement” based on Psalm 146

  • June 25, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Rev. Sara E. BaronFirst United Methodist Church of Schenectady603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305Pronouns: she/her/hershttp://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Psalm
146 not only instructs us to praise God, it tells us why we would
want to praise God.  It tells us who God is, and thus why God is
worthy of praise.  I tend to think this is a very interesting
question, because there are many possible answers!  For example, most
of the gods and goddesses worshiped around Ancient Israel would have
indicated that they praised their gods and goddesses because of what
they had or what they wanted.  The assumption was that divine beings
gave out favors based on preferences and on the offerings made to
them.  

Those
divine beings were sort of like human rulers, they used the power
they had to help the ones who made them feel good.  In that
understanding, sacrifices to the gods and goddesses were really ways
of preparing feasts for them, as a way of influencing their good
favor.

YHWH
was understood in differently.  YHWH wasn’t understood to be
susceptible to bribes, sacrifices, or other manipulations.  YHWH
cared (and cares) about a just society where the vulnerable are
well-cared for, and where bribes and other manipulations don’t
influence human decisions either!  

YHWH
is described in this Psalm as the one who brings justice to the
oppressed.  That’s such a common description in the Bible that I fear
we may not pay much attention to it!  Our God is a God who seeks
justice, and who in particular seeks justice for those who are not
treated justly in the world as it is.  

Our
God is also described as seeking to free prisoners.  That’s also
common language, language we even hear in our communion liturgy.  It
fits Luke’s description of Jesus, one that quotes Isaiah.  This
phrase is all over the Bible!  But have you thought about it!?  God
is the one who empties prisons!?  I, for one, wanted to make sure
that this meant the same thing back then that it means now.  I
wondered who was imprisoned in Biblical times.  It turns out, it is
about who you’d expect: debtors, prisoners of war, political
adversaries, and most commonly those who broke the laws of society.
Prison was sometimes a holding cell until a punishment was decided,
particularly in cases seen as validating the death sentence.
Prisoners were forced to perform cheap labor, and at times that lead
to intentional increases in the prison population in order to access
said labor.1
While this isn’t entirely a description of prison in the United
States today, it is close enough that the meaning of “The LORD sets
the prisoners free” is the same now as then!

We
hear sometimes of prisons in the Bible.  We hear that Joseph was
imprisoned because of an accusation of sexual assault, and he was
imprisoned with people who had displeased a temperamental king.  Of
those two, one was freed, one was killed. The empowered and strong
had influence over who was jailed and who was set free, then as now.
We hear of the man in Gerasenes, in Luke, who “lived in tombs”
and was bond with chains whenever possible.  Thus the mentally ill
were imprisoned then as they are now.  We hear of Paul and his
compatriots being imprisoned rather regularly, for sharing news and
information that the authorities didn’t want shared.  

I
don’t know how the words about prisoners being set free would have
struck those who listened in the time of King David, or in the time
of Peter and Paul.  I don’t know if they would have been afraid of
freedom for those who were mentally ill, or those who had a bone to
pick with society, those who were dangerous to government, or those
who broke the laws that kept society stable.  Today, I think most
people would feel afraid setting all prisoners free.  Even though we
incarcerate about 10x more people per capita than similar countries,
our common narrative is that we are safer for doing so.  I do think
there is an need for a justice system that includes keeping society
safe from repeat violent offenders.  Of course, I’ve been convinced
over time that the long term safety of everyone is achieved through
restorative justice… and not the punitive system we currently have
that most often takes severely traumatized people and traumatizes
them further.  Still, I think it is possible that the concerns we
have now about setting all the prisoners free would have had
resonance with those long ago.  Yet, God is regularly referred to as
the one who does so.  Our God is a radical God.

To
think of God as a God who sets prisoners free indicates that the
world, as it is, doesn’t reflect the world as God wants it to be.  It
indicates that more people are unjustly imprisoned than justly
imprisoned, that prison doesn’t make the world better, and that
things are so bad that God would rather have no one in the system
than all the people who are.  Oye!!  That answer is  reflected in
earlier verses of the Psalm itself.  Verse three tells us not to put
our “trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help.”
This Psalm has some serious issues with human institutions, and
encourages serious distrust of them.

The
world lets people be hungry, God wants the hungry to fed, God doesn’t
want anyone to be hungry!  The world has prisoners and prison guards,
God wants freedom for them both.  (I would suggest that moving toward
restorative justice, like the work of the Center for Community
Justice, gives freedom to everyone.  We are pleased to be a part of
their work, giving people volunteer opportunities as an alternative
to jail.)  The world has people who are bowed down by the weight of
their burdens, and those who are lifted up other people’s shoulders.
God wants to lift up the burdened, and help them stand tall.  The
world takes advantage of those who lack power, those without legal
counsel, those who can’t afford to fight, those who don’t have the
means to support themselves.  In Biblical times those were summarized
as the strangers, the orphans and the widows, which meant those who
had no native male to care for them.  God is said to watch over them
directly, upholding those who have no one else to uphold them.

The
very idea of righteousness and evilness in the Hebrew Bible relates
to the care of the vulnerable.  Good living, that is righteousness,
means living in a sustainable system that has built in systems to
care for those who can’t care for themselves.  Even the tithe was set
up as a way to care for those who didn’t have other access to food!
Rules existed about not being too careful harvesting so that others
could glean from the fields.  Extended family was well-defined in
hopes of making sure there were a minimal number of people left
outside of the support of family.  Then, because power and influence
naturally condense in human systems, the prophets continually hold
the Kings accountable for overseeing a system where profit is made
off of the poverty of widows.  What is called evil in the Bible is
taking advantage of the widows, orphans, and foreigners.  

And
so, the Psalm says, don’t trust in the institutions of the mortals,
which will take advantage of the vulnerable.  Trust in God, and seek
to be like God who cares for those who need to be upheld.  

This
is what the Psalm finds praise-worthy about God.  This is why the
Psalmist instructs their own soul to praise God as long as they live.
It seems possible that the Psalmist wasn’t a part of the elite, and
was grateful to know a God who cared.  It seems likely that the
Psalmist’s greatest hope was in the rules of the Torah that protected
them, and in those faithful to God’s commandments who upheld the
rules.

The
Psalmist even connects these acts of justice of the Holy One to God’s
acts of creation. They are in continuity with each other, and the
Psalmist seems to think that God’s working toward justice is as
eternal as God’s own being.  There is such HOPE in this Psalm.  When
it ends saying that YHWH will reign for ever, it implies that justice
will be the end point of human life on earth.

None
of this really answers the question of WHY human institutions are so
incredibly untrustworthy.  The Psalm is sort of kind about it, it
seems to imply that we sometimes try to do good, but we die before we
finish.  (Isn’t it sad that this is optimistic?)  In contrast, it
points out that the steadfastness of God is more trustworthy.  Yet,
the Bible just seems to know that human institutions will seek to
consolidate power, and in order to do so will consolidate wealth and
mistreat the vulnerable to gain both.  The Bible isn’t naive about
this part of human nature, and it has many explanations for it, but
no single one suffices.

But
perhaps the one the Psalm is even deeper than it appears.  Perhaps
human institutions seek to consolidate power because of existential
anxiety?  That is, we are all afraid we are going to die we are
seeking to prevent it in any way we can!  Power and money seem like
the most successful ways to postpone death, so people seek it when
they can!  Then, of course, we see the contrast between the human
fear of death and mortality and value of faith.  Faith gives us a way
to acknowledge our fears and live with them, without letting them
dictate our actions.  Faith reminds us of what justice looks like,
and tells us that God cares about how we treat each other.  That is,
God cares about who has access to food, and who doesn’t; who has
access to housing, and who doesn’t; who has access to healthcare, and
who doesn’t; who has access to a fair chance in the justice system,
and who doesn’t; who has access to protection by the police, and who
doesn’t; who has access to clean water, and who doesn’t; who has
access to toilet paper, and who doesn’t.  God’s care about how we
treat each other is practical.

It
is as practical as the ways that humans oppress each other, and as
practical as the ways societies have used prisons as means of
control.  God’s vision for us in the execution of justice, upholding
of the vulnerable, freeing the prisoners, keeping open eyes, lifting
up those who are knocked down, keeping of faith, access to joy, and
loving goodness.  God is seeking full and abundant life for ALL of
God’s people, and that requires acknowledging that human systems that
consolidate power and money do so at the expense of those who lose
power and money.

Whatever
forces exist that move human institutions into evilness, God’s
nudging is always toward righteousness.  As stubborn as we all are, I
think it is most likely that God will win out over the long run, but
I’m pretty concerned in the short run.


So,
a word to our graduates, whether they are here or not.  (Family
members can send links to the sermon if they wish.)  As you’ve
reached a new apex in your life, you have also increased your
likelihood of accessing powering and money in the world.  It is
likely that multiple human institutions will seek your skills to help
them consolidate power and money.  It is likely that your own fears
will be a strong voice within, if you are human like the rest of us.
But today I commission you, to be part of God’s work in the world.
Seek righteousness, attend to the disempowered, be concerned about
the vulnerable, fight back against systems of injustice, and be
careful who you think deserves imprisonment.  You, too, can be a part
of making the world that is into the world as God would have it be.
But it requires distrust in human institutions and a willingness to
let faith take control of some of our fear.  May we all find the
ways.  Amen

1David
Noel Freedman, Anchor Bible Dictionary: Volume 5 O-Sh,
“Prison” (New York: Doubleday, 1992) p. 468-449.

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

“Favoritism in the Family” based on  Genesis 27:1-29

  • June 18, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

If I have a favorite matriarch, its Rebekah. This is not because of this story. This story is Rebekah at her worst. However, her worst isn’t as bad as Sarah, whose treatment of Hagar is atrocious. Nor does Rebekah’s worst even relate to being married to the same man as her sister, a reality that make Leah and Rachel appear rather petty and immature.

Rebekah has a chance to shine her own light through the texts, and they show her as a woman who chooses. Not only does she choose, but her choices change history, repeatedly. The first time we meet her she’s at a well. Abraham’s servant has been sent to find a wife for Issac from Abraham’s home country. The story is told well in scripture, from Genesis 24:

“Abraham said to his servant, the oldest of his house, who had charge of all that he had, ‘Put your hand under my thigh and I will make you swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and earth, that you will not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I live, but will go to my country and to my kindred and get a wife for my son Isaac.’ The servant said to him, ‘Perhaps the woman may not be willing to follow me to this land; must I then take your son back to the land from which you came?’ Abraham said to him, ‘See to it that you do not take my son back there. The Lord, the God of heaven, who took me from my father’s house and from the land of my birth, and who spoke to me and swore to me, “To your offspring I will give this land”, he will send his angel before you; you shall take a wife for my son from there. But if the woman is not willing to follow you, then you will be free from this oath of mine; only you must not take my son back there.’So the servant put his hand under the thigh of Abraham his master and swore to him concerning this matter.”(Genesis 24:2-9)

The servant, still rather overwhelmed with his task, comes up with a plan. He’ll head to the well, which would be both practical for accessing water after a desert journey AND practical for finding a woman as the women tended to gather at the well. Then he prays asking for God’s help in identifying the woman. He asks for God’s guidance so that that whichever woman he asks for water from who ALSO offers to water his camels will be the woman he’s seeking.

Then the beautiful young Rebekah attracts his eye and he asks her for a drink. She immediate responds with water and then offers to water to water his camels too. Since there were 10 camels, this seems like a rather vigorous task, indicating rather significant hospitality and a commitment to the care of a stranger. The servant’s plan worked out to identify a hard working and caring young woman. Even better, she was kindred to Abraham, granddaughter to his brother, which was the goal. (The matriarchs and patriarchs are incredibly inbred, sort of like the European royal families in the 19th century, please don’t get too distracted by it.)

Then Rebekah invites Abraham’s servant to stay with her family and heads home to prepare the welcome. When the servant comes to her family home and tells his story, her father and brother IMMEDIATELY offer to send her off to marry Abraham’s son. As she was still unmarried and available, it is likely that she was also pretty young, prepubescent. Perhaps the journey home took long enough for her to grow up a bit more. (Let’s hope!) In any case, they did forget to ask her if she wanted to go initially, but when the servant wanted to leave immediately the next morning, they asked Rebekah if she wanted to go, and she agreed to it, including the immediately part.

Now, in these first few choices, we already see that Rebekah’s open heart and hard working nature are changing the course of history! She choose to give him a drink, to water his camels, to invite him into her family’s home, and agreed to go and marry a man she’d never met (nor heard of previously), and to do so immediately.

If she had not, the story suggests, Issac would not have married and the lineage would have stopped there. But it doesn’t. In fact, Issac and Rebekah’s meeting continues to indicate Rebekah’s openness to this marriage and her willingness to engage in it. (Here you see why I hope the journey was long enough for her to mature a bit.)

“Now Isaac had come from Beer-lahai-roi, and was settled in the Negeb. Isaac went out in the evening to walk in the field; and looking up, he saw camels coming. And Rebekah looked up, and when she saw Isaac, she slipped quickly from the camel, and said to the servant, ‘Who is the man over there, walking in the field to meet us?’ The servant said, ‘It is my master.’ So she took her veil and covered herself. And the servant told Isaac all the things that he had done. Then Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent. He took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.: (Genesis 24:62-67)

The next time we hear of Rebekah is said to be 20 years later when she hasn’t get gotten pregnant. #AllTheMatriarchsStruggledWithInfertility Issac prays for her and she gets pregnant, with twins. I know that the Bible predates the modern concept of romance, but it is SO easy to project it onto these two. Until this point, that is. Once pregnant,and for the first time, we hear of Rebekah praying to God. This is significant because the monotheism of the Bible starts with Abraham and Sarah on their journey away from their home-country. It is not assumed to extend to the family they left back home, and it is clearly a choice on Rebekah’s part to accept the faith of Issac’s family.

The story goes on to say that Rebekah had a terrible pregnancy:

The children struggled together within her; and she said, ‘If it is to be this way, why do I live?’ So she went to inquire of the Lord. And the Lord said to her,
‘Two nations are in your womb,
  and two peoples born of you shall be divided;
one shall be stronger than the other,
  the elder shall serve the younger.’  (Genesis 25:22-23.)

Sarah never had direct contact with YHWH, although Hagar did. In fact, I think Rebekah is the only one of the matriarchs who is said to have an experience of the Divine. None of us are shocked that the result of the Divine experience is an inverting of the normal ordering of human society. God is like that. The order of human life mean that the elder son would be the one in charge, the inheritor of a double portion, the patriarch. Yet, Rebekah hears otherwise while they are still in her womb.

The story continues to indicate that the parents had different favorites in the family, “When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents. Isaac loved Esau, because he was fond of game; but Rebekah loved Jacob.” (Genesis 25:27-28) This little snippet reminds us that the stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs are meant to function in two ways simultaneously: both to tell a good story that makes sense about an individual, and to explain relationships between groups claiming to be the descendants of those individuals. Thus the story is about relations between nations AND about individuals at the same time. This little bit reminds us that the ancient Israelites, by the time they wrote this story down, were domesticated people who had distanced themselves from the nomadic hunter-gatherers of their recent past.

And now, we are caught up and ready to deal with the story read today! Rebekah is committed to the fulfillment of the prediction she’d heard during her pregnancy. She acts as if it is very important. The story believes that blessing is … an act of God of some sort. Issac needs to strengthen himself so that he can function as God’s emissary in the giving of the blessing, and the story clearly believes that the future itself is changed by the speaking of the words. The blessing can’t be taken back, but it can be tricked onto landing on the wrong person. This is an OLD story. The blessing seems to reflect back on the words of God that Rebekah heard during her pregnancy, ones that guided her to make them true.

Rebekah has a plan on hand. (I’ve been told that this subversive women sermon series could also be called “women who plan.”) She is willing to take any curses onto herself. She pushes her favorite son to trick her husband into giving him the blessing he’d reserve for HIS favorite and eldest. She is remarkably committed to fulfilling the words of God, even at cost to her own existence. She pays a high cost for it too. By the end of the story her favorite son is sent away, and we don’t think they ever meet again. I say we don’t think because her death is never mentioned in scripture. Her participation in this deception and her final work to have her son sent back to her family for safety (and the marrying of a woman from Abraham’s home country and family) are her last notated actions. These are the final choices she makes. She fulfills the words of her husband’s God, even at the risk of his fury and curses.

Rebekah starts out leaving her home and her family to marry a man she’s never met who is following a God she doesn’t know. (Seriously.  The radical openness and adventurous spirit of these ancient women is astounding.) Then she has an experience of this God, more of one than her husband is ever said to have. Issac is said to have prayers answered but not to hear God’s responses. Furthermore, given the narrative about child sacrifice, Issac also has some serious reasons to distrust God. But Rebekah is given comfort and knowledge to use.  Her actions, ones that seem like they break apart the family she created, are done to fulfill the promises God made to her. Her husband’s God at that. She leaves her own family, and then willingly participates in breaking her family out of her faith in this God! By the end of the story she loses her favorite son, her husband is near death, and her other son is (appropriately) mightily angry with her. And she’s not mentioned again. She burns all of her power and influence in this one story that disrupts her entire life.

So, there she is, this adventurous, courageous, pushy, manipulative, faithful matriarch. However, I’m not sure I want anyone to mimic her choices, and there aren’t a lot of moral compass points in this story if you take it directly.

Many scholars have suggested that the Northern Tribes (Israel) identified Jacob as their primary ancestor while the Southern Tribes (Judah – Jew) identified Abraham. In the process of forming a united identity the two were linked. In order to make it less hierarchical, neither was made the son of the other, instead they were separated by Issac. Issac, indeed, is more visible as the son of his father and the father of his sons than he is a stand alone figure. He’s the link. These stories exist to create shared identity! They are successful in doing so, in part, by having a very relatable matriarch, and in part by naming an enemy as the “other” that the group can differentiate from.

Those the Bible identifies as Edomites (descendants of Esau) were the nation to the south of Judah, sometimes friends, sometimes enemies of the Israelites. They became a vassal of Judah for a while, but also contributed to their destruction and exile. This relationship is all being explained with the characters of Esau and Jacob, and in this story the behavior of their parents.

Which is to say, that this is a formative story about the nation, and its relationship with other nations. Similarly, we have narratives that explain our different relationships to Canada and Mexico, ones that aren’t entirely honest about the reasons we worry more about one border than another. We have stories about our relationships with Great Britain as our (I recently heard this) “longest standing ally,” which conveniently forgets that they were our first opponent in wary; we have stories that pervade our subconscious about the relationships between European Americans and Native Americans, ones that include the idea that Columbus “discovered” a continent with millions of people living on it; we have stories about relationships between people of different races that dismiss the history of slavery, segregation, and choices to limit US citizenship to people who were “white enough.” We have stories, as a nation, who tell us who we are, who we are supposed to be, and who we need to exclude and dis-empower to get there.

Those stories today are more overt and readable than they’ve been in my lifetime. More than ever the stories that are being told to our nation sound like telling the so-called descendants of Jacob that Esau (and thus his descendants) was freakishly hairy, smelly, and uncouth. In fact, many of the stories I hear today are intended to create fear of the people who claim to descend from Ishmael (the Muslims). It turns out that the patriarchs, the matriarchs, and their stories still impact global relations today.

It also turns out that at the end of this narrative Esau marries a daughter of Ishmael, symbolically restoring relationships between the two “unblessed” parts of Abraham’s family. While I don’t actually encourage marriages as means of restoration (symbolic or otherwise), I hear God calling us to expand our definition of family, including by telling new stories about who we are and who we can be. May we hear, and tell such stories. 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

June 18, 2017

Sermons

“Young, Widowed, Sisters-In-Law” based on Ruth 1

  • June 12, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Life didn’t go well for Naomi. I mean, it didn’t go terribly to begin with: she married, she had two sons. Compared to most heroines of the Bible, that’s saying something! She didn’t go through the long barren years we’re used to hearing about with the matriarchs.

We don’t know how her marriage was, but we usually don’t. She got married, she had two sons. All that is OK, good even.  If feminine expectation was fulfilled in the procreation of sons, she was successful. Then there was a famine. For ancient Israel that really meant that there was a drought, and food couldn’t be grown. In response to that desperation, Naomi and family left their homeland and went in search of place where there was food.

They ended up in the land of Moab, east of the Dead Sea. The book of Genesis tells us that Moab was Lot’s son/grandson. I find it interesting that the Bible always identifies enemies as extended family. Throughout much of ancient Israelite history the Moabites were on the opposing sides of wars. Today the land that was called Moab is a part of the nation Jordan, and the boundary lines still run down the middle of the Dead Sea.

Naomi was a refugee, forced to leave her country because of lack of water. This was in the era before climate change, there are many more people in her situation today than there were then.

In ancient Israel, Naomi’s family had access to their own land.  They were farmers. Things were so desperate that they left the land they had, that they freely owned, so that he could be a day laborer in a foreign land, because they thought it was more likely that they’d survive the lack of water THAT way. Since this story predates currency, I suspect they left their country without any wealth, with just the clothing on their back and maybe a few farm tools. They were desperate, hungry people, trying to survive when the land they lived in couldn’t provide for the people who lived on it.

It seems likely that they lived a live of poverty in Moab. It seems like there WAS enough food, or at least enough MORE food that it was worth stopping there. I’m not entirely convinced there was fully enough food, since we aren’t told how all the men die, and malnutrition is an open option. Ancient Israel had some laws in place to minimize the hunger of foreigners, but I don’t know if Moab did. Most likely Naomi’s husband and sons were day laborers, struggling to make enough for the family to eat day by day.

I point this out, in part, because I want to acknowledge that Ruth and Orpah were likely also from very poor families, because I can’t imagine that any family with any sustainable income would have married their daughters off to an impoverished refugee family. (This was not a time when marriages happened because of love.) And Ruth and Naomi WERE married into this family. They were also married into this NUCLEAR family, when that wasn’t the norm yet either, and when that would have been a reason to distrust the foreigners further.

Now, as we all know, poverty and wealth do not define happiness. There are very happy, healthy families who live in poverty and very sad, mad, and dysfunctional families who have great wealth. In fact, studies say that money only increases happiness when it makes the difference between being homeless and hungry and being terribly housed and having just enough to eat (even if it isn’t that good). After the point when there is housing and food, money doesn’t increase happiness. (Though I do wonder if it decreases stress.)

I’m proposing that Ruth and Orpah likely came from families in poverty. We don’t know if they came from healthy, happy, loving homes. They seem especially fond of Naomi and well bonded to her. It makes me wonder if she’d been kinder to them than others in their life had been.

On the other hand, perhaps they were just following convention. It is hard to know. The convention at that is defined by levirate marriage. That is, if a married man died before producing an heir, his brother would be responsible for marrying his wife and thereby producing the heir. With both brothers dead, this was a problem. The women were still bound to the family they’d married into, but no spouse was forthcoming. In those days the most vulnerable people in society were the ones who didn’t have a NATIVE male to take care of them, including by making a living. The Hebrew Bible of speaks of the vulnerable in society as the widows, orphans, and foreigners – with a note that an orphan was a person without a FATHER. These were the ones for whom special laws existed as protection. All groups of people without a native male who had power in the system and access to land in Israel.

These women qualified. All they had was each other, and none of them had a path to care for themselves much less the others.

Naomi frees the younger women from their bonds to her. I suspect that couldn’t really be done without a man doing it, so it sort of didn’t count, but they didn’t have any men around to do it. I wonder if her lack of authority in the system is part of why Ruth felt she had the freedom to disobey Naomi’s instructions.

In any case, both Ruth and Orpah, who made opposite decisions, were disobeying the rules of society. Society didn’t have a way to care for them at this level of brokenness. Oprah abandoned the family she’d married into. Ruth disobeyed her elder. They both broke the rules, because there wasn’t a way forward within the rules.

Naomi had one what was expected. She’d married and procreated, and then she’d gone with her family to seek enough food to survive, she’d grieved for her husband and children. Her choices were, seemingly, exhausted. Either she could stay in a foreign land with NO ONE to take care of her or she could go home and HOPE that someone still lived who might take responsibility for caring for her. Or, if not, she would at least die at home. She decided to go home.

That left her daughters-in-law to either abandon her (presumably the only family they still had from their so-called adulthood) or their country of origin and all they’d ever known.  They seem to genuinely like, to want to stay with her. Maybe I’m missing cultural memos, but it FEELS like they want to stay with her. This mother-in-law had been good enough to them that they wanted to stay with her rather than return to their own mothers’ homes.

We don’t know why, and while I could project things, they wouldn’t be accurate. But they both said they wanted to go. It was only after Naomi pointed out that staying with her likely meant a life of barrenness without any hope for the future that Orpah reluctantly returned to her family of origin.

We don’t know what happened next for Orpah. She’s never mentioned again. I don’t think anyone would have had a way to know. Perhaps she returned to her mother’s house and quickly found a new husband and lived a pretty normal life. Perhaps she was tainted by her first marriage to a foreigner and lived and died a widow. Maybe life changed for her and she had a taste of existence beyond hard work and poverty, although it isn’t very likely. In that moment, standing on the road that returned Naomi to Judah, Orpah had no way of knowing how it would end either. She had two terrible choices before her and she picked one, hoping that it would work out.

So did Ruth. She decides to leave family, country, language, culture, and even her faith to follow her mother-in-law to a foreign land. I’ve often used this text at weddings because it comes from a woman freed to make her own choice, and in that freedom she chooses to bond her life to another’s.

“Where you go, I will go;
  where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people,
  and your God my God.
17 Where you die, I will die—
  there will I be buried.”

With the saying of those words her life changes. She becomes an immigrant, and enters Israel as a foreigner and a widow. She doesn’t have a reason to expect that she’ll find anything easier there, and many things will be harder. Yet, it seems clear, she genuinely loves Naomi and wants to spend her life bonded to Naomi’s life.

The book goes on to tell Ruth and Naomi’s story, and presents Ruth as a heroine and matriarch of the Davidic line. It seems to suggest that Ruth “choose correctly” but I don’t think that conclusion is sustained by the story. These three women were stuck without a clear way forward, with good reason to worry about how long they could live. Each made the best choice she could given the knowledge she had, and given the constraints of her world. I don’t think the story would have ended as well if all three went back to Israel, it would have been harder to feed three mouths. I don’t think it would have ended as well if only Naomi had returned home, I don’t think anyone would have noticed or cared about her. The story ends with a male relative noticing Ruth and deciding to care for them both. What happens when there isn’t one?

This story acknowledges the struggles of women without male support in patriarchal systems, it points out the vulnerability of women dependent on men, and makes clear that women end up making impossible decisions to survive – even ones others might want to judge. The story assumes that refugees and immigrants are more vulnerable than natives in their own lands. It also makes it clear that some people have WAY more power than others – that without a native male to care for them, the women had no legal recourse nor means of survival. The story also points out, clearly, that without water, people can’t survive. The changing weather patterns of the world are creating more and more Naomis.

The world today has more displaced people than it ever has before. Climate scientists tell us that this is a number that will keep rising. Until we can hear Naomi, Ruth, and Orpah’s stories as universal, we may miss the plight of many of God’s children. Can we imagine Naomi as a refugee from Yemen today, because of the drought there? Can we imagine Ruth walking “home” with Naomi across the desert to start a new life in a unfriendly foreign land? Can we hear in them refugees from Syria, Somalia, or South Sudan?

I suspect God can hear the echoes. This story speaks through the ages of the difficult choices vulnerable people, particularly refugees and immigrants, make to survive. It reminds us to pay attention to who in our society and world lack access to the means of survival and/or justice.

May we be brave enough to keep listening. 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

June 11, 2017

Sermons

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

  • June 4, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3O’Day,
847

4New
Interpreter’s Bible, John, 848.

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

Set in Stone”based on  Joshua 4:1-9

  • May 22, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

In a recent Mission Moment, Pam Brucker from the Center for Community Justice, spoke about the experience of entering our church building. She told us that when she walks in with children who are hurting, they are awed by the sense of love that pervades our building. She attributed it to generations of people at prayer and in worship. I want to add that people have been loved, accepted, and affirmed in this space for many years, and that changes the energy too.

God’s work has been done here. This space has seen nearly countless baptisms, communion tables, and celebrations of life. Preludes, postludes, and anthems have filled the air with wonder.

God’s work has been done here. Not perfectly, but consistently. Love has been shared. Gifts have been given. People have been seen and heard. Welcome has been extended. Grace has lived.

Pam’s words reminded me of the wonder of space, and how important space can be for our connection to God. For the most part (in moments other than the miraculous), I think we have to be open, vulnerable even, to connect with the Divine. That happens either when we feel safe or when we are beyond our capacity to hold up own own barriers. There are truly miraculous moments with God breaks through our walls, but that’s another story for another day. The need for vulnerability that we don’t worship as well in just any space, and that prayer can be easier in some spaces and harder in others. It isn’t that God is more present in some places than others, it is that we can get our guard down to connect to the always present One more in some places than others!

I’ve often wondered if an experience of God that happens in a place then opens that place to greater trust and therefore more God experiences. I think it might be so. In any case, like Pam, I’ve experienced the sense that the air itself is different in places where people have prayed, been open and vulnerable, sought God, worshipped God, and shared love consistently over the years and it helps to open my heart to God as well.

It seems that this is the crux of our story today. After generations of wondering in the desert, the people FINALLY came into the Promised Land. The Bible says the people wandered for 40 years which is Bible for a LONG TIME. Archeologists think that perhaps the people who came into ancient Israel with the story of an experience of God in the desert were a motley group of nomads who had wandered for countless generations. Either way, its been a while that they’ve wandered in the desert. The Bible says that they learned dependence on God in the desert, which makes sense. The Bible calls the desert the wilderness, and understands the desert wilderness to be a place where life can’t survive without God’s help.

The people were ready for a change. They’d been the desert for a long time, and they were dreaming of stopping their nomadic ways, settling into their own land, and becoming farmers. They felt drawn to a particular land. The crossing of the Jordan River was the entrance into their land, a significant transition point in their communal lives. The nomads are about to have a home. Their wandering days are coming to an end.

The transition between their many years of desert wandering, kept alive only by the Spirit of God, and the settled life they yearned for happened at the River. They were on the western side of the River. Their life as a settled people would start on the Eastern side. The crossing represented a change in identity for the entire people.

The story indicates that they experienced God as present in the transition as God had been on the journey. The way they tell the story, God says, Joshua commands, and the 12 men DO. God says to Joshua that the men should take 12 stones, carry them over, and lay them down in the encampment. Joshua tells the men to take 12 stones, carry them over, and lay them down in the encampment. Then the men took, carried, and laid the stones. It happened as it was supposed to happen.

The stones become the reminder that God was with them on that day, although I suspect they also held the memory of God’s presence with them in the desert as well. As it is remembered, God stopped the flow of the River so they could pass safely.

The image is particularly striking. The priests carried the Ark of the Covenant, which physically contained the 10 commandments, but was understood to contain the very presence of God. They went first. The river parted as they walked. They then stood in the middle of the river, the presence of God holding the River back, until the people had all passed through. The priests are standing on stones, holding up the Ark. It seems to me that this indicates the river bottom might have been left a bit mucky, even in the midst of the miracle 😉 Or, even, that the memory of the river STOPPING was a later development, but that the priests still led and their presence holding the Ark helped the people trust they could cross over.

The stones are the safe place where the priests are confident they won’t slip, fall, or drop the Ark of the Covenant. Joshua has one man from each tribe gather a stone to remember the occurrence. They take the stones, carry them out of the river, and lay them down on the far side where the people sleep for the night. Its funny, isn’t it? The transition from being homeless nomads to entering the Promised Land was complete, but not immediately impactful. The first night they camped, like nomads, on their land. The houses weren’t build, the wells weren’t dug, and the seeds hadn’t been planted. Their lives had changed forever, but at first it wasn’t so different.

The stones that had held up the priest so that the priests could hold up the Ark, so that the presence of God could assure and hold up the people, were the symbols that they brought with them from that transition. They carried the stones a safe distance from the river to the place they laid their heads, and then they put them down to mark the first night of their new lives together.

In later generations the stones would reconnect the people to the faithfulness of God and the ways that God cared for them when they could not care for themselves. The day it happened, though, it seems carrying the stones served as a physical symbol of the transition that had transpired. It was necessary, because without the stones, one side of the River might quickly have looked like the other side of the River.

For the generations to come, the place the stones were laid was a holy place, a space where they knew that people had connected with God, and thus a place they went to seek out God. It may be that it felt like entering this place, or another holy space, and that with the prayers piled on top of each other, it became more holy with time. The first ones who camped there had an experience of God that day, and used the stones to mark the place so others could find it in the future. The first ones of the ancient Israelites who camped there held onto the stones that had steadied them as they embarked on the next part of their lives together.

This story is the opening narrative that will be used at our Camp and Retreat Centers this summer. The camp curriculum will use it to teach campers that we , “designate special places as sacred and created physical reminders of our relationship to those spots. Anywhere we notice and are aware of God’s presence with us can be such a place – especially at camp.”1 They also intend to talk about the ways that the stones were present to many generations – the ones that placed them, the ones who came back to see them, and the ones who asked questions to their parents about them. The stones became a way to pass down the stories of faith, even as they were a thin place for people to connect to God. So too, at its best, are our Camp and Retreat Centers. They are even filled with buildings with names that come with stories of our ancestors in faith. They are filled with art from those who came before. At times, there are even symbolic stones. When I was a camper my group walked a large stone a long way, and painted it with our names. It still stands, lo these many years later, and when I walk by it I still smile. The stone brings me back to people I love and a time that was saturated with God’s presence.

Those ancient stones from the riverbed were all set down TOGETHER. 12 men from 12 tribes each carried one. Even then the people were united and yet distinct. It would not have been enough for one stone to be carried. The 12 marked the fullness of the people, everyone was included with the 12. Conveniently, the 12 also made a much longer standing marker of the holy place than any one stone ever could have.

A long time ago a friend (I’m no longer sure which one) told me of a sermon they’d heard, I have no idea from whom. That friend’s pastor had told the people, “When the going gets tough, go to the water.” I’ve held onto the idea so long now, that it likely doesn’t mean what it started out as meaning. However, I have understood it as an encouragement to go to a body of water, and sit, and allow your soul to let go. I’ve never thought the water was the holy part, although it may be for some. My version of this is, when the going gets tough, go to a place where stones mark the spot.

When our souls are weary and needing solace, when we are lost in confusion and can’t find our way, when we are restless and ill at ease, it isn’t easy to connect to the Holy One we need most in those moments. Thus, we need to seek out the Holy Places that will help us be safe enough to led our guards down and become vulnerable. In those places we can connect to our own wisdom, and heart with the Divine who is already with us.

It might be that the places you seek are entirely unique, but for many of us, they’re places that have already been set in stone, sanctified by those who came before, and marked so you can find them again.

Thanks be to God for those who take the stones, carry them to the sacred places, and lay them down so we can find them.  Thanks be to God for the places we can go when the going gets rough, to sit with the Sacred and simply be. Amen

1“The Vine” 2017 Camp Curriculum used by Upper New York Camp and Retreat Centers.

–

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

May 21, 2017

Sermons

“How to Love God” based on  Acts 17:22-31 and John…

  • May 15, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

One
of the squeal worthy moments of my life was being asked to serve on
the Board of Directors for the Methodist Federation for Social Action
(MFSA).  When the official request came in I was surrounded by young,
United Methodist clergy people, and the announcement led to an
immediate toast.  The Methodist Federation for Social Action has been
a justice leader in both the The United Methodist Church and the
United States for more than 100 years, starting with worker’s rights.
Calls for justice expanded, as they do, because any justice work
always intersects with other justice work.  By 1940 Mary
McLeod Bethune joined the board to help focus the work on combating
racism in the denomination.1 

 

Our
“spring” board meeting, in March, was outside of Philadelphia.
(So, it was our winter board meeting.)  Trainers came from
“Crossroads Antiracism Organizing and Training” to work with the
board for two days.  It was very different training than I have done
before.  Almost all of the anti-racism training I’ve done has been
focused on the personal.  That is, I’ve often looked at my own
behaviors and biases with hope of becoming more aware and less
biased.  Those trainings have all been a blessing.  Some educational
opportunities I’ve had have been important in educating me about the
history of race and racism in our country.  Those have also been very
important. 

However,
the training we did at the MFSA board meeting was different than any
of those.  We looked at institutional and structural racism.  In
fact, our training was really “anti-white supremacy” training,
and we looked at the ways that white supremacy lives in our society
and its institutions.  One of the most useful ideas I brought home
from the training was the idea of the “center” of power and
privilege in our society and its contrast, the “borderlands”
outside of power and outside of privilege.   

 

I’m
going to offer here a very extended quote because I don’t trust
myself to find the language to summarize these ideas quite yet:

 “There
is a center in US society that is considered normal:
white, male, heterosexual, married, Protestant (Christian),
Anglo-American, English speaking, upper middle class, able-bodied,
educated, middle-aged and embodying a particular standard of beauty.
It is the standard by which all are measured.

Around
this center exist the rest of us – at varying distances from the
center. Some of us are closer and some further apart. The borderlands
surround this “center of normalcy.” Power, time, place, and
position dominate their interaction.

The
borderlands is a juicy place. It is a place full of possibilities,
chaos, creativity, conflict, beauty. It’s the place where harmony
and conflict exist – simultaneously. It’s a place that transcends
and defies dualism, where rigid linear reality cannot exist; a place
where multiculturalism and diverse identities mix and mingle in a
constant ebb and flow of mess, mediation, and mitigation.

Our
institutions are structured to rein force and maintain the center.
When
institutions ‘embrace diversity’ people of the borderlands must
assimilate in order to come in to the center, though they will never
fully belong there. The tension that results is troublesome for the
center. It creates conflict that the center is not structured to
tolerate. Thus, brining the borderlands into the institution means
forcing it to conform, contort, and homogenize.

There
is peacefulness in the borderlands but not peace. The power and
privilege of the center causes separation, divisiveness, and
ultimately destruction within the borderlands. The center demands
conformity and sameness, making scarce the resources required to
creatively and collectively resolve conflict. This is the daily
experience of the borderlands.

The
power of People of Color and other oppressed groups is in the
borderlands. Coming to the center disempowers the borderlands and
destroys its spirit.

Our
institutions are defined by rigid boundaries, which isolate both
institutions and the center. The challenge for anti-racism
transformation teams is to make these boundaries more permeable
and to move the institutions to the in-between-ness of the center and
the borderlands.

Journeying
through the in-between-ness brings the center to the borderlands,
making permeable the walls and boundaries of the institution. It
pushes the center out into the borderlands, making it part of its
chaos and creativity, conflict and beauty.

In
doing this, the borderlands becomes what is normal, diversity and
justice become the standard. The borderlands becomes the Beloved
Community for which we all yearn.”2 

This
model of the world as it is, and as it could be, has been playing
around in my mind for 2 months, and I needed to share it with you.
It has helped me to see more clearly.  Within this model it was
useful to learn that one of the ways the center maintains its power
is through the control of resources and “legitimacy” which sets
up different groups in the borderlands to compete with each other.
It was also helpful, if radically uncomfortable, to be confronted
with the idea that charity is a means by which the center deals with
its guilt AND attempts to bring the borderlands into conformity.
(I’m still squirming.) 

After
this training, when I was invited to work on dreaming an anti-racist
United Methodist Church at the Change Maker’s Summit led by the
General Commission on Religion and Race, I was super excited!!  When
I got there and started listening, I realized that my newfound
knowledge of how white supremacy works and the language I
could use to talk about it was ALREADY shared language among the
people of color I was in conversation with.  I’d had this MAJOR
learning experience that had reformed my thinking, which I’m still
struggling to fully understand, and then I realized that I’m still
super far behind.  

I
think, perhaps, that knowing how far behind I am is an appropriate
place to be, at least as  long as I don’t get comfortable and stay
here.  Part of the way that white supremacy, and “the center” are
maintained are by encouraging white people NOT to see the structural
and institutional ways that they’re maintained.  From within the
center, things just look “good, orderly, and right.”  As we
looked carefully at the sorts of factors that impact how closely an
individual lies to “the center”, I realized that I share ALMOST
all of those characteristics, and I have been socialized to seek the
sort of power that “the center” brokers, and move myself closer
and closer to the center.  

Thanks
be to God, I’ve also been introduced to Jesus, the Bible, the vision
of the Torah, and the concept of the kin-dom of God.  The values that
I’ve learned in THOSE places are the values that led me to every
anti-racism training I’ve ever gone to, and are the values that give
me a way to counter the narratives and socialization of “the
center.”  Now, to be clear, The United Methodist Church as an
institution operates with a confusing mix of the values of “the
center”, the language of Jesus, and an occasional reflection of the
actual values of Jesus.  It is a very confusing place to be.  That
mix of values and language pervades all the levels of the church,
albeit in different concentrations of each ingredient.  

One
of the other take-aways from the anti-racism training is that no
person, institution, or experience is truly free from the values,
power, and impact of “the center” and we kid ourselves if we
think we are.  Yet, together, we are able to make progress anyway, if
we try. 

So,
loving God and following Jesus offer us a way out of the center and
its values, into the borderlands to be part the Beloved Community in
all of its beautiful diversity.  God’s universal love for all people
leads to God’s dream of world where people are able to survive and
thrive together.  However, even in the Bible, that universal love of
God gets held in tension with other values and ideas.   

 

For
instance, let’s take this brilliant speech of Paul’s in Acts.  He
meets people where they are, and takes what they already know
seriously.  He is speaking to people who don’t share his experience
of God, he started out as a monotheist and was well educated in
Judaism.  He is speaking to polytheists, and he makes space for them.
I love that he notices to their humility in the altar to the unknown
God, as uses it an opening to tell about the God he knows.  I also
love that he quotes one of their well-known sayings, “in God we
live and move and have our being” and applies it to God as he knows
God!  I also think it is really funny that one of my favorite
descriptions of God (“in whom we live and move and have our being”)
was ADAPTED to fit the monotheistic God.  I think it is beautiful
that Paul includes the people he speaks to as being children of God,
and indicating that in his faith God loves them all.   

 

Of
course, then the passage comes to its end, and Paul tells people that
they all have to do things his way, and follow his God while
abandoning what they’ve known, or his God will punish them all.
SIGH.  Paul thinks there is ONE right way, he knows it, they don’t,
and they should all do it his way.  That’s not so beautiful, nor so
welcoming or respectful of the people he is talking to.  He changes
from accepting people as they are to telling them how they should be.
It is a switch from valuing the borderlands to demanding that they
comply with the center.  His speech ends telling them that unless
they think like he does, they’re of less value.  He requires unity
with his ideas rather than joining with the people in solidarity with
their needs. 

John
presents this differently.  He shows Jesus speaking to people who
already know and love God.  The speech says that God has desires for
how people act, but the desires are that people treat each other with
God’s love for them, and build communities centered in love.  This
makes it clear that unless love defines actions, people are not truly
following God.  There is no space for exceptions so that anyone can
be excluded, instead there is a reminder that  the Spirit can help us
live as God wants us to live.  We’re told we aren’t alone, and that
doing God’s work IS the same same as loving God, and then when we
want to seek out God we can do so by loving God’s people.  In this
brief passage I hear the values of God and Jesus without significant
muddling of the center!  (Thanks be to God for moments like that!) 

Loving
God is loving God’s people.  All of them.  Loving people who are in
the borderlands is sometimes a challenge.  So too is loving people
who live near the center.  But God doesn’t make space for exceptions.
Only for love.   

 

I’m
pretty sure that one of the most important forms of loving God’s
people is truly seeing, hearing, and knowing each other.  That means
helping to loosen the walls between the borderlands and the center,
and for me at least, that’s going to require continued anti-racism
and anti-white supremacy work.  But, thanks to the writer of the
Gospel of John,  the Methodist Federation for Action,  and this
church, I know that I don’t go it alone.  Thanks be to God! 

 Amen 

 
1http://mfsaweb.org/?page_id=2692 

  2
Robette Anne Dias & Chuck Ruehle, Executive Co-Directors,
©Crossroads Ministry
http://www.crossroadsantiracism.org/wp-content/themes/crossroads/PDFs/The%20Borderlands.pdf

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

May 14, 2017

Sermons

“Who Do We Feed First?” based on Acts 2:42-47…

  • May 8, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

There are times when I find it invigorating to engage in a robust debate. One of the joys of my childhood was being able to score points in verbal battles with my brother, and if I don’t pay attention, I can still engage in conversation as a competitive sport.

On the basis of enjoying the capacity to play and sometimes WIN, if the opportunity presented itself, I would choose not to debate Jesus. He doesn’t lose much. The gospels consistently describe him winning, scoring match points before his opponents have even started to play.

Today’s gospel is one of the exceptions. I cannot yet say it definitively, but I believe the only people who ever score points on Jesus in competitive debate are women. Consequently, very few who beat Jesus are women. This is one of the stories where the woman is said to have won. Jesus himself declares that she has bested him, and gives her a prize for having done so.

Even so, this is one of the most uncomfortable stories in the gospels. Jesus is … well… um… super mean to this woman. He calls her and her people dogs! That is, he disparages their very humanity, and says that it is of less value than the humanity of his people.

I could tell you that the Jesus seminar doesn’t think this story actually happened. Luckily that’s true, but unfortunately it still requires us to consider why the early Christian community included it. We could tell ourselves that Jesus expressed explicit prejudice simply to show us that it was bad, but that doesn’t truly fit the story. The story says he healed the woman’s child because she beat him in oral combat, NOT because he realized her people were of equal value.

So, how do we deal with this horribly insulting, even racist, Jesus? We still have a few options left to us. The story does say that Jesus left Galilee to be in the land of the Gentiles and entered a house in secret. It would be reasonable to conclude that he was getting away for a bit of a reprieve, perhaps because he was tired and needed to catch his breath. Tired, burned out people often don’t operate as their best selves. And being accosted in this home where he was trying to hide and regain his energy might have brought out the worst in him. I don’t think this entirely explains the story, but I do point it out anyway for two reasons: 1. Because when we’re tired we really do make mistakes and I urge you to get rest as an act of faithfulness to God’s call on your life to be your best self and 2. Because when we’re tired we really do make mistakes and some gentleness with ourselves is called for when those mistakes happen. Human beings in human bodies can’t push on indefinitely through exhaustion.

Another pieces of the puzzle comes from a scholar who doesn’t think it makes a lot of sense for the early Christian church to have remembered such a hostile response from Jesus UNLESS it reflects a larger reality. Gerd Theissen looked for a socio-economic explanation and discovered, “Upper Galilee exported produce through the coastal cities. The cities, in turn, depended on these regions for food. In periods of crisis or food shortage, the populace of the hinterlands may have resented producing goods for wealthy cities.”1 This idea continues, “Those who produced the food, Jewish peasant farmers, see their work consumed by others.”2 In this case, ethnic and religious differences are compounded by economic inequalities. Jesus might simply be suggesting that his people have a right to eat the food they produce.

It stands in interesting contrast to the food sharing on Acts 2, doesn’t it? Jesus talking about the inappropriateness of sharing the food with the dogs contrasts with the people sharing all things in common, breaking bread together, and eating with glad and generous hearts?

Or does it?

This beautiful passage of the joy and communal support in the early church does not extend to ALL people. It extends WITHIN the community, not beyond it. I’m not saying that’s wrong, I’m just saying that it is limited. Supporting the community of faith is not the same thing as supporting all of God’s people. Supporting the community of faith, with firm boundaries around who that means, can actually look a lot like Jesus’s response to the Syrophoenician woman in this story! Jesus, too, was advocating keeping resources within the family of faith.

The first summer I was on staff at Sky Lake the summer curriculum included Romans 12, which we tended to read from “The Message.” which I adored. I quoted it once in a secular setting and one of my high school friends asked if I was intentionally excluding her. It said:

9-10 Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle.

11-13 Don’t burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don’t quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy Christians; be inventive in hospitality.

Until she questioned me I hadn’t heard “help needy CHRISTIANS” at all, but once she pointed it out, I squirmed a little bit every time I read it. I wondered if I was allowed to change it so that the command said, “Help needy people” and wondered why it wasn’t written that way to begin with.

I think that human nature includes a tendency toward thinking in terms of groups, and defining “us” that excludes “them.” It happens too commonly not to be part of our nature, and I suspect that it happens for decent evolutionary reasons! In order to thrive, humans need each other, but we’re finite in time and space. So we can’t bond with everyone! I’m thinking our species developed this way: Close bonds form the basis of units, and units expand until they maximize the relationship with resources in an area, and then other groups are established further away, right? Then, because resources on earth aren’t allocated with equal distribution, there are still some things that each group ends up competing with other groups. That would have helped establish the boundaries between the groups!

So, it isn’t bad, and it is likely part of our nature, but it isn’t the end goal either! The Syrophoenician woman reminds us of this. She was, in multiple ways, an outsider to the groups Jesus belonged to, and yet she came to him with a need. Her needed extended past her group identity!

The Syrophoenician woman is presented as the paradigm of committed parent! She crosses boundaries, takes insults, and argues with all her power in order to gain the care her child needs. She shouldn’t have entered that house by laws of both communities. Her community would have preferred if she had refrained from “bowing down” at the feet of a Jewish teacher. She let him call her, her family, and her community DOGS and responded within his metaphor. She found a way to respond, without accepting his premise, without dismissing his premise, and while staying ON POINT. She kept asking for what her daughter needed, and requested that even if Jesus didn’t see her as a fellow human being, he could still extend his power to help her!!!

And Jesus complements her! Going back to the idea that the city of Tyre was part of a problem within an economic system that was extracting wealth from the Galilean farmers – it is as if she points out that the Galilean farmers DO deserve to eat, but that Tyre is hungry too. She doesn’t argue his premise, but she reminds him that hunger is universal.

While on our honeymoon, Kevin and I took some tours of the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It became clear quickly that many immigrant families survived ONLY because of the support of community – in that case communities based on their countries of origin. This is one of the ways that groups defining clear boundaries can be good – it lead to life not death. But then again, I’m sure it left some people unable to access any help.

In the days of overcrowding on the Lower East Side, the barriers that divided people were real. Resources were limited. In the days of food shortages in Galilee and Tyre, the barriers that divided people were real. Resources were limited. In the eras of needing access to limited water for our ancient ancestors, the barriers that divided people were real. Resources were limited.

There are good reasons to establish groups and boundaries. Those reasons apply today, and we see this sort of thinking ALL OVER the place today. However, in some ways, reality has changed! Technology has made it possible to grow enough food for everyone to be fed – well. At the moment we have enough clean water for all to drink (if we don’t waste it). It may always have been true that if groups worked together there would have been enough, I don’t know, but today it is FOR SURE. The world has produced enough for everyone.

And yet, maybe more than ever, people are trying to draw firm lines between those who get access to resources and those who don’t, those we are worthy, and those who aren’t, those who should become more wealthy and those who should become more impoverished, those who get to access health care and those who don’t, … and so on.

I’m told one of my predecessors in this pulpit, J. Edward Carothers, talked about the purpose of church being “to establish and maintain connections of mutual support in an ever widening circle of concern.” I think that’s the essence of the meaning of the kindom, the primary teaching of Jesus. As it has been described to me, the kindom is the Reign of God that will occur when EVERYONE treats EVERYONE else as kin. That is, everyone is IN the group and there is only one group and we are all working together for each other’s good. That’s how (at their best) kin treat each other, and that’s an expression of the desire of God for the world.

So, who do we feed first? The children? The dogs? The Christians? The Jews?

Our church? Our city? Our country? Our race? Our class? Our political allies?

Or perhaps, whoever is most hungry?

Because if we all work together, there is enough for everyone! And once we remember that, we can distribute based on needs rather than fears. Holy God, may that day come SOON. Amen

1  R. Alan Culpepper, “Luke” in Leadner Keck, ed. , The New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press: 1995) 610.

2  Culpepper, 610

–

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

May 7, 2017

Sermons

“On Kings and Messiahs” based on  Zechariah 9:9-10 and…

  • April 9, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

On
the evening of the first full moon after the Spring Equinox,1
the celebration of Passover commences.  Meals are eaten in
remembrance, with story telling.  Passover starts at Sundown
tomorrow, and Seder meals will be eaten this week.  During the Seders
and through the week, our observant Jewish sisters and brothers will
avoid eating leavened bread.  Leavened bread is bread that has risen,
by either yeast or sourdough.  Nearly all the bread we eat is
leavened, even the crackers I make are leavened!  Matzah, an
unleavened flatbread, is used during Passover.

Do
you remember why?  The formational story of the Jewish (or Hebrew)
people is that of the Exodus.  The story starts with the people
enslaved in Egypt, struggling under harsh conditions and impossible
work expectations.  They cried out to God for help, and God heard
them.

Moses
was born and was raised knowing he was Hebrew but in the Pharaoh’s
house.  He saw a fellow Hebrew being beaten by an Egyptian overseer,
and in his anger he beat the overseer to death.  Then he fled to the
desert in fear that his act would become known.  While in the desert,
Moses experienced God, and became aware that God had work for him to
do!  After great objection, argument, and forcing God into
compromising, Moses returned to Egypt to set God’s people free.

The
story speaks of ten plagues, the first 9 of which are natural
occasional occurrences in Egypt. The Hebrew people took events that
happened and ascribed them to God’s will.  It is likely that this
story developed its dramatic sequences over time 😉  The final plague
is by far the most horrifying.  In preparation for that one, the
Hebrews are said to have killed lambs and spread the lamb’s blood
over their door posts.  Then, the story says, God killed the
firstborn sons of all of the Egyptian people and animals – every
family except those who had lamb’s blood on their doorframes.  (I do
not have words for how horrified I am by this story, and the only way
I can deal with it is by assuming it is the creation of hundreds of
years of oral tradition and not anything like factual history.)

The
Hebrews were then KICKED OUT of Egypt, in fear that God would do
something even worse if they weren’t set free.  They left so fast
they didn’t have time to let the bread rise before they broke it.

Thus,
unleavened bread.

More
importantly though, the Passover story is one of liberation from
oppression, and a liberation that the people did not believe they
could achieve without God’s help.  The enslaved people became FREE.
In her song after the people are free, Miriam refers to God as their
salvation, meaning that God saved them, meaning that God helped them!
This is the first time salvation is attributed to God.  The harsh
conditions were traded in for manna in the desert.  The God of their
ancestors saved them.  The huge Egyptian nation with its vast wealth
and military might caved to let them walk away (and with gold and
wealth too!).  Now, the story may not be historically true as
written, but it is metaphorically abundant, and tells of a God who
cares enough to change the reality of oppressed people.  

The
gospel quotes from Psalm 118, a Psalm that the Jews recited at
Passover celebrations, one that includes the words, “Blessed is the
one who comes in the name of the Lord,” beautifully intermingling
the freedom that God had given the people with the moment that Jesus
walked into Jerusalem.  Psalm 118 has TWO references to God’s
salvation, naming salvation work as God’s work. The Palm Sunday
narrative is saturated with symbolism of the Passover, and of God’s
work to free the oppressed.

Continuing
with a fast history, Moses had led the people to freedom, and led
them to the Promised Land, but died before they could enter the land.
For hundreds of years the people lived simple lives in their
families and tribes without any central government.  Eventually
though, they became antsy and afraid (even though nothing really had
changed) and decided to get a king.  They got King Saul.  He was
either a little bit crazy all along, became crazy over the years, or
perhaps it is just that the propaganda against him called him crazy –
I don’t know.  But after Saul was David, and David was …   OK, I’ll
leave the David insults for another day.  As David was dying he
decided that his son Solomon would become king after him and arranged
for Solomon to enter Jerusalem riding a donkey while people
proclaimed him king.  Thus entering Jerusalem on a donkey became
significant.

This
imagery is used, and added to, in the text we read from Zechariah
today.  In Zechariah the act of a king riding in Jerusalem on a
donkey, again, is used as a symbol of the coming Messiah.  Zechariah
is written after the exile, when there is no longer a king in
Jerusalem and between the destruction of the first temple and the
building of the second.  Zechariah is written in a downtrodden time,
when the people yearned to be rescued from their new oppressors and
for their society to be rebuild.  The people remembered a time when
their lives were centered on God, and they dreamed of a leader who
would guide them back to that.  Zechariah’s words about a king and a
donkey reflect hope for such a leader, usually called the Messiah.
The hope was that the Messiah would bring God’s salvation back, that
God would use one human to save the rest, to free them from
oppression, to restore their nation and their order.

There
are still more symbols in this story that come from Jewish scriptural
context.  Another ancient King (pre-exilic), in this case Jehu (who
was even further from perfection than David), who was greeted in his
kingship when people took off their cloaks and spread them over a
stairway while shouting, “Jehu is King” (2 Kings 9:13).  This
seems like it is referenced with the laying down of cloaks in the
road for Jesus, once again affirming the perception of Jesus as God’s
chosen leader.

This
is a story that is also post-exilic, but much closer to the time of
Jesus.  The Maccabees (200-350 years before Jesus) gained military
victory and freedom for the Jews in Judea and were celebrated with
crowds waving palm branches and thanking God
(1
Maccabees 13:49-52 and 2 Maccabees 10:1-8). Intriguingly, the second
of the stories relating palm branches, parades, and thanksgiving to
God in Maccabees also relates to cleansing the Jerusalem Temple of
foreign influence and reclaiming it for YHWH worship after driving
out the army that had occupied Jerusalem.  

The
more I look at the story of Palm Sunday the more I’m struck with the
intensity of the symbolism.  It seems clear that the people who told
the story, the ones who wrote it down, and those who edited it wanted
their points to be clear.  Now, that means that not all of the
symbolism is likely to reflect history itself, but instead to reflect
an excess of meaning.  The Jesus Seminar puts it this way, “In
Matthew and John the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem mounted on an ass
thus becomes the fulfillment of an Old Testament prophesy and
confirms the early Christian conviction that Jesus was the expected
Messiah.  The Christianization of whatever event lay behind this
story led the Fellows to declare the narrative a fiction based on
prophecy.  At the same time, they held out the possibility that Jesus
may have entered Jerusalem astride a donkey as a symbolic act.”2

In
all of the Gospels, the crowds yell “Hosanna” which means “God
saves” or “God, save us” or “God, HELP!”  The salvation the
Jews had experienced in Egypt as freedom from their oppressors, and
the salvation the Jews had experienced in Babylon as freedom from
their oppressors, was being sought in the time of Jesus while seeking
freedom from Rome.  I think it is important to remember that the
“salvation” they were calling for was a tangible, physical kind
relating to the opportunity to survive as a community, for each
person to be able to live a just and righteous life while thriving.
“Hosanna” wasn’t about afterlife, it was about desperate need in
THIS life.  Hosanna sounds like a shout of glory and acclamation to
us, but I suspect it also carried overtones that would be very
familiar to refugees today.

My
thinking on Palm Sunday follows the lead of Marcus Borg and John
Dominic Crossan in The
Last Week.3
Most definitively, this story tells us that the early Christian
communities who wrote down the gospels believed that Jesus was the
expected Messiah and that his life was as important as any king’s
life had been.  Furthermore, it is very clear from the way the story
is told that Palm Sunday is Act 1 to the Cleansing of the Temple’s
Act 2.  

For
those who haven’t been present on previous Palm Sundays with me, Borg
and Crossan point out that at the same time Jesus is said to have
entered the city on a donkey via the Eastern Gate, there was a Roman
processional entering via the Western Gate.  The Roman governor ruled
from the coast of the Mediterranean, but came to the city for
Passover, along with significant military guard, in order to maintain
the peace while the people gathered to remember their God’s actions
in freeing them from oppression.  The parade that people gathered to
see on the West side of the city was a display of military might,
excessive wealth, and the glorification of the Empire.  People on
that side yelled, “Hail
Caesar, son of God; Praise be to the Savior who brought the Roman
Peace; Caesar is Lord….”  That’s what makes the shouts on the
East side so significant. They defied the power of Rome, and gave the
power back to God and God’s actor.  They were blaspheming against the
Empire, and doing so while seeking God’s help in overthrowing it!

Jesus’
parade was a counter to their Imperial procession. It was
intentionally different—meek, mild, nonviolent, the opposite of
mighty, militaristic and powerful. And it was carefully timed. In
other words, it was subversive and courageous.  While
we don’t know that all the pieces happened as the stories suggest, we
have reason to think that the stories reflect a kernel of truth –
and that the counter parades offered very different visions of the
world as it should be!

The
Palm Sunday processional along with the indictment of the Temple, and
their timing within the Jewish celebration of Passover, seem
carefully planned to present Rome as the new oppressor – the Egypt
and Pharaoh of Jesus’ present day.  In naming Rome as the oppressor,
Jesus also reinforced God as the liberator (savior).  The Palm Sunday
parade offered an alternative to oppression, and suggested that the
alternative was in God’s way and God’s vision.  Jesus entered the
city while the people called for God’s salvation.  This suggested the
Roman officials were NOT the appropriate leaders of the Jews, and
their actions as oppressors delegitimatized them and opened the door
for a rightful leader.  Furthermore, I think it was a popular action
and disconcerted the authorities.  I still think this is why the sign
over Jesus’ head at death read “King of the Jews,” because this
action claimed that he was.  More and more I don’t think Jesus was
aiming at a throne, rather he simply aimed at reminding the people of
God and God’s role as their liberator.  

Jesus
MIGHT have gotten away with Palm Sunday if he hadn’t continued on,
and pressed the issue further with the Indictment of the Temple.  I
think that the two actions were carefully planned, and meant to
subvert the power of Rome while reclaiming God’s vision for a just
society.  They both contrasted God, and God’s acts to save the people
from oppression, with Rome.  Jesus acted to reclaim the power of the
Temple for God worship, as he reclaimed God’s leadership of the Jews.
Jesus aimed to reconnect the people to God. That’s why he would have
engaged in planned actions that destabilized Rome’s power and thereby
lead to his own death.

Connecting
the plight of the Jewish people under Roman rule to the plight of the
Jewish slaves under Egyptian oppression was exactly the sort of thing
the Governor came to Jerusalem to silence.  Yet Jesus pushed the
package, road the donkey, disturbed the peace at the Temple.  It
seems to me that he heard the shouts of Hosanna and was willing to
listen and act.  This leads me to wonder: are we?

Amen

1Well,
except when lunar calendars add a leap month and then it is the
second full moon after a vernal equinox, forgive me for
oversimplifying for the sake of a better story 😉

2Robert
W. Funk and The Jesus Seminar, The
Acts of Jesus (USA
-HarperSanFransicso: Polebridge Press, 1998) 230.

3Marcus
Borg and John Dominc Crossan, The Last Week: What the Gospels
Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem (Harper
Collins:  2006)

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

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