“An Audacious Gift” based on Deuteronomy 15:1-18 and Mark…

April 2, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Before
we can examine this story of a woman anointing Jesus’s head, we have
to separate out what the story is from what it isn’t. Much like the
Christmas stories of Luke and Matthew being subconsciously melded
(FYI: Luke has shepherds, Matthew has magi, no one has both!), the
multiple versions of this story have been conflated into a rather
confusing whole. Each gospel tells of Jesus, at a meal, interrupted
by a woman giving him an extravagant gift. Each gospel indicates
that someone(s) is horrified by it, and leads to Jesus responding,
“The poor you will always have with you” and informing us that
her story has now become an intricate part of his story.

Matthew
and Mark tell the same story, so there are three stories get
conflated. Here are the relevant pieces: in LUKE, and only in Luke,
the woman is named as a sinner; in JOHN, and only in John, the woman
is Mary (sister of Martha and Lazarus); in Luke and John Jesus’ feet
are anointed whereas in Matthew and Mark his head is anointed; the
whole wiping his feet with hair and tears thing is unique to Luke;
the objector is Judas in John while it is the pharisees in Luke, some
people in Mark, and the disciples in Matthew; and in Luke an extra
parable is thrown in as part of Jesus’ counter objection.

As
the Jesus Seminar puts it, “In all probability, the story of a
woman intruder anointing Jesus during a symposium (dinner or males)
took various forms as it was related in the oral tradition,”¹
and “The Fellows of the Jesus Seminar were of the opinion that the
original form of the story is beyond recovery.”²

Which
is to say, there are three stories based on something that might have
happened, which are each told to make their own points. Today we’re
looking at Mark’s story, and we’re going to derive meaning from
Mark’s story. One of the great benefits of having various versions
of a story is that we can assume they’ve each developed to offer us
different – and necessary – points of view and lessons.

In
Mark, Jesus’ head is anointed. According to The Jewish Annotated New
Testament, “Jesus is anointed; the
action could be either that of anointing a king or of preparing a
body for burial. Mark’s principle of irony would suggest both.”³
The story comes 2 days before Passover in Mark, giving an easy
connection to the need to anoint his body before his burial
(especially since it wouldn’t be anointed after his burial).
However, that also means that it comes after the Palm Sunday parade
in which Jesus’ actions claim the kingship of Israel. Thus it fits
well as an affirmation of his role as Messiah, a symbolism very
important to the early Christians who would have passed this story
along. I agree with the Jewish Annotated New Testament, I think the
implication is very intentionally both and: kingship and burial.

Now,
this unnamed subversive woman broke into an all male dinner party,
one to which she was inherently not welcome. She broke in to offer
an extravagant and intimate gift to Jesus. The alabaster jar of a
very costly ointment of nard was likely imported from the Himalayas,⁴
and was more commonly used a few drops at a time. I’m guessing, sort
of like a new car, that once the jar was opened the value decreased
significantly. This unnamed woman opened the jar and poured it ALL
onto Jesus’ head. Mark says that this is a gesture made with
fragrant ointment worth about $15,000.

As
Pheme Perkins puts it in the New Interpreter’s Bible,
“The
expansive gesture, breaking and pouring out the entire vial of
expensive ointment rather than using a few drops, forms a foil to the
cheapness of Jesus’ life in the eyes of those who seek to destroy
him.”⁵
SNAP. Wow. This unnamed woman is presented as understanding Jesus’
ministry, passion, purpose, and value. In particular, she’s
presented as understanding what the disciples do not. Perkins says,
“The
nameless woman’s gestures shows that Jesus’ followers still do not
grasp the necessity of his passion.”⁶
(The passion in this case being the more formal definition of his
suffering and death.) She stands in contrast to the men. Her action
indicates a profound understanding of what is happening, while they
remain in denial. Their RESPONSES to her action indicate exactly how
deep that denial runs.

They
respond with objections, suggesting that her action was an
inappropriate use of resources. I don’t believe them. I think they
were jealous of her wisdom, or infuriated at her audacity in
breaking into their dinner, or ashamed they hadn’t thought to respond
with such vulnerability, or just annoyed with the drama, or maybe all
of it. I think they were displeased with this woman, and her
presence at their dinner, and her grand gesture and they found some
justification from their displeasure and projected it. I think this
because I’ve been human for a while now, and I know that’s how I
work, and my reading suggests I’m not alone! We feel things, and
then we justify them. The disciples with Jesus that night did it.
They felt annoyed, jealous, ashamed, or something uncomfortable and
they justified it by condemning this woman’s profound and generous
gesture and proclaiming that she was acting unrighteously.

They suggest that the vial
should have been sold and the money given to the poor. This is how
we know they really didn’t get it. Jesus has been teaching them
about kin-dom values for quite a while, but they still stand in the
normal values of the world. They see the expensive ointment and
assign to it a monetary value. The woman looked at resource she had,
and used it for the best possible use. Here’s the thing, at some
point, if it is not to be wasted, an expensive container of perfumed
ointment will be used, right? I mean, it is possible that it could
be bought and sold for years or decades on end, and I suspect it
would eventually even lose value in aging (who knows, I could be
wrong), but in the end the purpose of it is to be USED. So, if it was
going to be used someday, what better day and what better person than
Jesus?

The
unnamed woman uses what she has to acknowledge his importance
(anointing of kings), to respond to his faithfulness (which would get
him killed), and to prepare him for burial (a gift he received only
from her). By using it on Jesus, she implies that there is no higher
purpose for this gift than to anoint Jesus. By using on Jesus, she
implies that she understands that the time of his death was
impending, and she wanted to ease his terrible journey.

It is a profound gift. Selling
the ointment so that someone else had it and could use it some other
day for some other person, even to give the proceeds to the poor,
would have valued Jesus less.

The
disciples were still in denial about the imminent death of Jesus, I
think that’s the core of why they responded so poorly to her action.
They didn’t want it to be true. However, this woman – whoever she
was – was willing to face reality. When Jesus speaks of her, and
says her action will be told, there is another irony. Her action is
told, but her name is not. As The
Jewish Annotated Bible
puts it, “The
anointing will be told in remembrance of her,
but her name is not given. Perhaps the omission of her name is
ironic: the unnamed ‘everywoman’ understands him, while the named
disciples, the authority figures of old (from the author’s point of
view), do not.”⁷

Now,
the named objection
to her action is in the care of the poor, and commentators believe
that Jesus’ answer was a reference to Deuteronomy 15:11⁸,
a portion of the text we read this morning about the Sabbatical year
which was aimed to prevent generational cycles of poverty. It says,
“Since
there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore
command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your
land.’” Perkins takes this a bit further, saying, “Jesus
points out that the Law (Deut 15:11) makes everyone responsible for
helping the poor. If the poor are in desperate need, then this
woman’s failure to donate the cost of the ointment is neither the
cause nor the cure.”⁹
I would agree. The whole of society was aimed at enriching the
already wealthy and powerful on the backs of the poor and powerless.
One charitable action would not have transformed that system. On the
other hand, she guided Jesus on his way to death, and his death and
resurrection have been significant in transforming society (even if
the process is still ongoing).

I’ve
always struggled with that one line in this story, about the poor
always being with us. It has felt like a contrast to the vision of
the kindom, and the values of the Sermon on the Mount. It has felt
like giving up on the world as it should be. However, the referenced
verse, in context, sounds much different. Instead of passively
accepting poverty as a part of the economy of the world, the
Deuteronomy passage aims to minimize extreme poverty, AND AT THE SAME
TIME admits that no system will be perfect. Thus it calls for
compassion and generosity as well. The whole of the Torah seeks to
create a just society, in particular by giving each family access to
land the freedom to benefit from its wealth. However, it knows that
widows, orphans, and foreigners will not benefit like everyone else,
and so it finds ways to care for them too. In this context, it
sounds more like Jesus saying, “life will never be totally fair,
and some people will always be on the bottom, but create a fair
system anyway and take care of those who struggle in that system
too.” Its a bit different than the verse I’ve tried to make sense
of for all these years.

To
return to this profound, subversive, audacious, and compassionate
woman, I wonder what it would be like to follow in her footsteps.
She listened well, and maybe not even to Jesus. We don’t know that
they’d met. It may simply be that she knew the ways of the world and
could read the signs of the days and could tell what was coming. But
she listened, even to the unpleasantness, and she found a way to
respond.

I
think some of us are more like this woman than we are like other
Biblical characters. The most likely explanation for her having a
very expensive container of perfumed ointment is that she was
wealthy. Like many generous donors around here, she choose to use
some of what she had because it was exactly what was needed at that
moment. Unlike in his response to the “wealthy young man,” Jesus
doesn’t ask for all that she had, he simply accepts the gift that she
gives.

She
uses what she has for the kindom of God, and the vision of Jesus.
Its value in her eyes is its usefulness to Jesus, not the resale
value! What a wonderful way to think of our resources – both the
physical ones and time, energy, passion, and labor we have to give.
Whatever the market value of them may be, the most important
usefulness of them is in loving God and loving our neighbors.
Figuring that out may not be simple, linear, or obvious, but will
always be wonderful. May we figure it out! Amen

1Robert
W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar The Five Gospels:
The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA,
1993), 115.

2Funk
et al, 116.

3The
Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible
Translation,
edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 88.

4The
Jewish Annotated New Testament, 88.

5Pheme
Perkins “Mark” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. 8
(Nashville: Abingdon Press,
1995), 698.

6Perkins,
698.

7The
Jewish Annotated New Testament, 88-89.

8Funk
et al, 116.

9Perkins,
699.

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

“Woman at the Well, With a Twist”based on1 Kings…

March 26, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

When I was in seminary, I had the great privilege of interning at the Hollywood United Methodist Church. That church had a deep commitment to the people in its community, a thirst for a deeper faith and ways of following Jesus, incredible diversity, and joy that in being community to each other AND whoever showed up. They were wonderful teachers and in two years of being in ministry with them, my heart and mind grew.

I often took public transportation to Hollywood, which meant that I emerged from the subway onto the Walk of Fame next to Mann’s Chinese Theater. It was one long block south of the church. If you haven’t been there, then you might not know that the Hollywood Walk of Fame is an intriguing combination of tourists, people dressed up as cartoon characters, people paid minimum wage to hand out leaflet advertisements for clubs and tours, and…. most annoyingly of all… evangelists.

It was my practice to ignore the evangelists. They were usually new Christians who were part of mega-churches from some state far away, expressing their new-found devotion by trying to terrify others into believing in Jesus. While I found them to be the most annoying part of my commute, I kept my head down, and kept moving.

My last semester of seminary, however, we had an exchange student. He was a college junior who had been raised in a conservative evangelical tradition, and he mentioned that he didn’t know how deconstruct the argument that the street-evangelists made. So a bunch of us went to Hollywood: 3 last semester seminarians, 1 very interested college exchange student, and the seminary dean; to be evangelized.

We were accosted as soon as we emerged from the subway. It was so easy to deconstruct their arguments that I felt a little bit guilty doing it, like we were teasing a hungry child by putting food out of their reach. However, the young man needed to know, so we played. Their argument was developed in this way: they sought to establish that we had “sinned” in some simplistic way (lying, stealing, etc), they meant to inform us that our sin condemned us to hell, and then they intended to establish that the only way to avoid hell was by professing specific words about Jesus. If there was a plan after that I don’t know it, we started messing with them on step one 😉 Eventually I admitted to being a pastor at the church which was visible from the corner, and they got even more confused. (After all, I’m female.) I fear we may have even messed up their new-found, overly simplistic, faith.

Most of the time, when reading a dialogue between Jesus and religious authorities, it feels like Jesus is playing with them in the way that we (the overly theologically educated) played with the street evangelists. Jesus terrifies and stumps the Pharisees, Sadducees, priests, and scribes whenever he talks to them. The religious authorities of the day were presumably brilliant men who had spent their lifetimes studying the Torah and seeking to know God. Jesus doesn’t even appear to exert any effort in beating them at their own game. He’s GOOD. He’s the master. He wins every round with the religious authorities and doesn’t even break a sweat – well, at least according the Gospels, books written to make him look good 😉

I don’t think we can fully appreciate this story without remembering how effective Jesus is at deconstructing the arguments of the wisest scholars of his day. Jesus treated her as a partner, and equal, and enjoyable conversation partner. He didn’t aim to stump her, terrify her, or silence her. He spoke to her without an audience. It wasn’t a competition. It was a conversation.

The Samaritan woman was the opposite of a religious authority. She had no formal religious education, she was female, she wasn’t considered “Jewish,” she was part of a hated group of “others,” she was an unmarried adult woman, she may well have been socially ostracized from the other women in her village, and compared to just about everyone she was powerless. We don’t know for sure if she was socially ostracized, scholars and preachers have been deriving it for centuries from the fact that she was at the well at noon, when the women gathered to get water at dawn and dusk when it would be coolest to do so. Being at the well at noon MAY suggest that she was trying to avoid the other women, who may have been pretty mean to her.

We also don’t really know her marital status or its significance. Jesus says she’s been married 5 times and “the one you have now is not your husband.” The way I see it, there are two possibilities for this: one is that she is having an affair with someone else’s husband and the other is that she is living with a man who she is not having sex with. However, as Jesus doesn’t seem particularly INTERESTED in this fact, he just names it and moves on, we are going to as well. If she’s “been married” 5 times than either she’s been a widow many times, she’s had men divorce her and leave her without financial recourse many times, or some combination of the two. The few facts we know suggest her life was very difficult.

She is a person on the margins in many intersecting ways. If you defined where power and privilege lived in that society and then you took its opposite, she’d be sitting in the position of its opposite. In Judah, in Jerusalem, in Jewish society, the chief priests and scribes sat in the middle of power. When Jesus interacts with those who have power and privilege he decreases their power. When Jesus interacts with those who have no power and privilege he increases their power. He lives the verse from Isaiah (40:4) that says, “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.”

There are two other super important pieces of context that we need to review before we can look more deeply at this text. However, they’re both much shorter than my first point 😉 One is location. The text says that Jesus “had to go through Samaria,” but that’s simply not true. Jews who were traveling from Judah to Galilee did not go through Samaria. They went around, even though it would be as convenient as driving from here to Ohio without driving in Pennsylvania. However, that’s how people did it. So no one who heard the story in early times would have believed the “he had to” go through Samaria. He CHOOSE to go through Samaria. That’s the sort of crazy, out of the norm, guy Jesus was. This conversation is said to happen at the well at Sychar, which means that it was near a historical location of Samaritan worship AND at a historic well dating back to Jacob (as mentioned in the story). The conversation about appropriate places to worship God is placed in a particularly apt location.

Finally, we need to remember what happens when a woman and a man meet at a well. Throughout Genesis there is a less than subtle theme whereby a meeting at the well means a marriage is about to take place. Issac’s wife Rebecca is found at a well. Jacob meets Rachel at a well. By the time you’ve read Genesis (as the Young Adult Bible Study did last year), every time you hear “well”, you hear wedding bells. Setting up Jesus and the disempowered Samaritan woman to meet alone at a well seems to open the door for flirtation, or a romantic interlude, or the possibility of an impending marriage that would horrify everyone who heard of it. (So, it sounds like Jesus.)

Jesus is sitting by this well, and an unnamed woman from the village comes out to draw water. Jesus initiates conversation with her by saying, “Give me a drink.” Now, this is how all the other well stories begin, so it is consistent, except for ALL the social barriers that exist between them. So she calls him out on it – she asks him, essentially, if this is really want he wants to do. By speaking to her, he is acknowledging her humanity, and breaking rules that kept unrelated men and women as well as Jews and Samaritans apart. She responses with grace, making sure is willing to take the risk involved in being seen speaking to her. This woman responds to Jesus by trying to take care of HIM, and his reputation.

Now, it is very clear throughout this interaction that the writer of the Gospel of John is interesting in making his points about who Jesus is, ad he does so by having Jesus say the things he wants said. However, we’re going to take them as they’re written, because we have no other source for this story. They pontificate about water, and then Jesus has his famous line about her husbands. The really interesting part starts after that. The woman doesn’t argue with him, nor is she silenced by him. She doesn’t apologize, actually, she doesn’t even respond directly! She uses what he’s said as an opening for the question that represents the BIG HUGE ELEPHANT near the well. She uses it as a transition. She says, “Ah! From what you know of me, you must be a prophet. So, then, prophet, help me understand. My people have worshipped God on this mountain, but YOUR people say that God can only be worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem. Are you really going to stand at the base of the mountain where we have worshipped for generations and tell me that our worship is invalid? You came here, when others don’t come here. What do you mean by it?”

This, my friends, is why so many members of Congress are afraid to have Town Hall meetings, because of constituents like this woman! But Jesus is the one who helps to empower the disempowered, and he answers her as if this is the question he came hoping to hear! His answer is radical, and transformational for the faith of the Samaritans, the Jews, AND the Gentiles. He responds that God is everywhere, and can be worshipped everywhere, and that in order to connect with God one most only worship in “spirit and truth.” He throws away the power of the Temple and the chief priests, and gives it back to the people. (Almost as if this is a theme of his 😉 )

Once she hears THIS answer, she starts to get seriously curious about this man who is breaking all the boundaries, and she opens the door for him to reveal his true nature. (She is the first to hear it from him.) She believes him and runs off to tell all the people who had judged and excluded her about the good news. It even leads one to wonder if the reason Jesus went to Samaria, and the reason Jesus sat alone by the well, was to find a person who could help him connect with the Samaritans. Seems reasonable, right?

She goes out and tells all of her neighbors about what Jesus said and did, and they believed her and came to him. He taught them for days! She opened up the door for Jesus to engage with people he couldn’t access on his own. She’s often been called the first evangelist, which means the first one to share the good news on Jesus’ behalf, and I think that’s fair. I also think is worth noting that she shared GOOD NEWS, and unlike those street evangelists on the streets of Hollywood, she did not attempt to frighten anyone into loving God and listening to Jesus.

It seems, as the story ends, that Jesus wasn’t seeking a wife. He was seeking a partner in ministry, someone to open a door to which he didn’t have a key. He was open to the one willing to do it for him, and she was willing to take great risks for him. She is presented as kind, considerate, wise, deep, and honest. What a woman!

While there are many take-aways that could be drawn from this unnamed woman, I think the way to follow Jesus in this story comes directly from Jesus. We too live in a world where the powerful keep gaining power and the powerless keep losing power. The system sustains itself without anyone even trying, and there are a lot of people trying to keep the status quo in place anyway.

To follow Jesus is to refuse that system! It is to allow those in power to lose power and those without power to gain it. It is to see those who are least like us as being most important to us. It is to argue convincingly against the authorities who would do harm, and allow ourselves to be bested by those who rarely get heard at all. To follow Jesus is to turn inside out and upside down the values of the world, and believe deeply in that each and every person is a beloved child of God. May we learn his lessons and follow his twisty example! Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

“Indictment of the Temple”based on Deuteronomy 6:4-5; Leviticus 19:18;…

March 20, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Home Missioner Kevin M. Nelson and Rev. Sara E. BaronFirst United Methodist Church of Schenectady603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305http://fumcschenectady.org/For
us, the primary question is, “Why did Jesus overturn the tables in
the Temple?” We were both raised with one explanation, and have
come to believe another one entirely!

A
man named Rabbi Hillel was said to live an extraordinarily long life,
born around 110 BCE, about a century before Jesus’ birth, and lived
into Jesus’ early years, around 10-20 CE. His primary rival
in thought was Shammai. Once, they say, a Gentile approached Hillel
and Shammai and challenged them to explain the Torah to him while he
stood on one foot. Shammai dismissed the man. Hillel accepted the
question but gently chastised the man by responding, “What is
hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole of the
Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”^¹If this brings to
mind anything Jesus said, I don’t think it is a coincidence.

The
Gospel of Mark records an episode that rings similar to that
experienced by Shammai and Hillel. This happens during the testing of
Jesus’ teachings and authority in the days that followed the Temple
episode that my mother-in-law, Joan, read a few minutes ago. In it,
Jesus was asked which commandment is the greatest. Jesus answered
that the Shema ( this
morning’s Deuteronomy passage—love God with all your heart, soul,
mind and strength) is the
greatest, and loving our neighbor as ourselves
(this morning’s Leviticus passage read by my mother, Elizabeth)
is the second greatest.

These
commands are at the heart of how Jesus understood God’s nature; one
of love, justice and compassion, and they are central to the
individual and collective ways in which we are to live out our lives.
They are also going to be central to why Jesus was at the Temple on
the last Monday of his life. In order to explain this, let us provide
some more context.

Jesus
lived from around 4 BCE to around 30 CE. He was raised in Galilee,
an area that had been re-colonized by faithful Jews and was an
impoverished backwater of the Roman Empire. In particular, he grew
up in Nazareth, a tiny village that was 4 miles from the CITY of
Sepphoris. Sepphoris had been part of a revolt against the Roman
Empire in 4 BCE, in response to the death of Herod who had brutally
oppressed everyone under his reign. In response, the Empire had sent
in legions of troops to reconquer the city, leveling much of it, and
selling those who had led the revolt into slavery.^²

Did
you hear that? Approximately the year Jesus was born, the city under
whose shadow he was raised, was leveled by the Empire. It is even
likely that his father’s work was in rebuilding the city. The
revolt, and its aftermath, would have infiltrated his consciousness
in ways similar to kids born in 2001 in New York City.

The
Roman Empire was an empire in all of the traditional ways that
empires are empires. It existed to extract wealth from the people it
conquered in order to give the wealth to powerful elites. In his
book, “Jesus:
Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious
Revolutionary,” which
was chosen by the Intersectional Justice Committee for the January
book discussion, Marcus
Borg refers to the Roman Empire as a preindustrial agricultural
domination system. Domination systems emerged about 5000 years ago
when humans figured out how to produce metal and domesticate animals
(at roughly the same time). Domesticating animals enabled larger
scale agriculture and thus agricultural surplus and larger scale
societies. Surplus also meant enabling the existence of wealth,
which, when combined with larger societies, led to motivation for
domination, at a larger scale.^³

Preindustrial
agricultural domination looked something like devising systems
through which taxation enabled wealth to flow upward, thus causing
people to live on the edge of subsistence and not just poverty, but
indentured servitude and slavery. In other words, virtually everyone
who wasn’t part of the elite, was a peasant. Agriculture, and thus
land, was a family’s primary source of productivity. A bad year for
crops could lead to debt, and in a subsistence world, it was all but
impossible to produce enough to pay off debt
once a family fell into debt. As little as one
bad year for crops could lead to debt, potentially loss of your land
and indentured servitude in which you were working the same land but
now someone else owned it and gained the productivity from the
land and your labor.
As
little as two or three
bad years could lead to loss of land and slavery.^⁴

In
the system Jesus lived under, wealth was thus derived from farming
and the wealth flowed up to the ruler and his aristocrats. In fact,
between ½ and 2/3 of all
production ended up in the hands of the elite 1-2% of the society,
making them VERY wealthy. They used some of this wealth to maintain
armies in order to keep the wealth, and the role of religion was to
legitimate the concentration of wealth by claiming the ruler as
ruling by Divine will.^⁵
Some of this should sound familiar from either history class or the
newspaper. 😉

In
this system, the poor, who comprised at least 90% of the population,
worked very hard and died very young. Those who survived childhood
lived to an average age of 30. The production they engaged in
benefited the elites who tended to live to an average age of 70.
Now, the Roman Empire wasn’t unique at all. This was exactly the
same domination system that the proto-Israelites had encountered in
Egypt and from which they had experienced God leading them into
freedom. This was also the same domination system that their own
kings had often attempted to implement, although their kings were
kept a bit in check by the prophets CONSTANTLY calling them out.

This
system was well known, but it stood in marked contrast with the world
as envisioned by God, shared by Moses, articulated by the prophets,
and sought by the people. The vision laid out in the Torah starts by
giving each family access to their own land to farm. It is designed
carefully, intended to prevent any system where a group of people
could economically dominate any other people, and THUS intended to
prevent a situation where a peasant class could exist and be
dominated. The vision of God in the Torah involved each family
having access to land AND being able to reap its benefits. The
vision of God in the Torah requires making food accessible even to
widows, orphans, and foreigners – the only ones who wouldn’t have
access to land. The vision of God in the Torah requires sharing 10%
of food production in order to BOTH feed the priests AND feed the
hungry. The vision of God in the Torah aims to keep society level so
that no one dominates and no one is dominated. That is the faith of
the Jews.

That
is the faith that the Temple was built to support. The Temple stood
as a symbol of that faith, as a way to remember that faith, and as a
way to enact that faith. The Temple stood near but APART from the
King’s palace, with an intention to keep powers separate and
accountable.

The
Roman Empire preferred to keep local leadership in place when it took
over new areas. However, it made the leadership accountable to the
Empire and required that the leadership do the work of gathering up
the wealth of the people to “pay its taxes.” Furthermore, it
replaced “local” leadership as it deemed necessary to maintain
stability and keep the money flowing upward. To be clear, this means
Rome appointed the high priest, and the appointment lasted only so
long as Rome was pleased with him. From 6 CE to 66 CE, Rome appointed
18 high priests.^⁶
The Roman Empire wasn’t stupid. It knew that the real power in
Israel by the time of Jesus was in the Temple – there hadn’t been a
monarch in centuries. The power that the Temple derived from its
function and symbolism as the centerpiece of living out God’s vision
for a JUST society was thus co-opted for the sake of the domination
system and its insatiable hunger for greater wealth.

Thus,
the Temple that stood as an emblem and reinforcement of God’s
justice and compassion was co-opted by the preindustrial,
agricultural domination system of the Roman Empire.

The
Temple, meant to function as an equalizer, a seat of prayer, and the
home of the priests who taught about God’s vision was – by the time
of Jesus – being used to extract wealth from the peasants for
benefit of the already wealthy. Jesus, after his upbringing as a
peasant near the aftermath of a revolt, had a particularly high
awareness of this system and its brokenness. He was interested in
breaking the PERCIEVED power of the Temple which would decrease (or
break) its usefulness to those in the domination system who would
abuse it. And that brings us to today’s story.

Many
Christians, when they think of the seminal moment in Jesus’ life
and career, probably think of the Resurrection. In contrast, I
understand this
story, the story of the indictment of the Temple, to be the seminal
moment of Jesus’ career.

In
the version we read in Mark, Jesus and his followers enter the Temple
and begin what I would recognize as a disruptive act. They knock over
the tables and throw out the vendors
and the money changers. For most of our lives, we have probably heard
this story in a way similar to a summary provided by biblical scholar
N.T. Wright in his book, Mark
for Everyone.
“Many people have thought that Jesus was simply protesting against
commercialization. On this view, he only intended to clean up the
Temple—to stop all this non-religious activity, and leave it as a
place for pure prayer and worship.”^⁷

In
Borg’s book he reminds us that the courtyard of the Temple was 40
acres! This simple fact gives us reason to question the narrative
we’ve been taught. To create a notable disruption within a space
that large would require intentionality, a plan, and many people!
Thus, this can’t have been a temper-tantrum response to commercial
activity. That opens up the question even wider: why did Jesus PLAN
a disruption at the Temple?

But
first, was this REALLY a disruption? Through Sara’s subversive
women of the Bible sermon series, we’ve been talking about
subversive actions for months, and this is classic subversive
activism 101—staging a disruption. Mark affirms this by sandwiching
this episode in between the two halves of the fig tree story, using
the fig tree as a symbol
for the Temple. In that story, the morning before the Temple
episode, as Jesus and his followers are on their way to the Temple,
Jesus notes that a fig tree has not produced any fruit and curses it,
never mind that figs were out of season.
The NRSV version of the Bible titles the concluding section, “The
Lesson From the Withered Fig Tree.” In it, when
they pass by that fig tree
the
morning after the Temple disruption,
the tree is already dead.

N.T.
Wright explains, “But Mark makes it clear, by the placing of the
Temple incident within the two halves of the fig tree story, that he
sees Jesus’ actions as, again, a dramatic acted parable of
judgment. This was Jesus’ way of announcing God’s condemnation of
the Temple
itself and all that it had become in the national life of Israel.”
Jesus judges the tree and it dies. Jesus judges the Temple to kill
its power, in particular its power to dominate.

So,
why did Jesus plan a disruption at the Temple? It was so Jesus could
indict the Temple, knowing that between this action and his Palm
Sunday entrance the day before, it would likely result in his death.
Indeed,
it is within the Temple passage that
the author of
Mark notes for the first time that the chief priests and scribes
decided to kill Jesus and began plotting to this effect. The author
of Mark illustrated Jesus’ plan through the fig tree, but a
contemporaneous audience would also have recognized it through Jesus’
own reported words. “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called
a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den
of robbers.” Marcus Borg helps us to better understand these
references, explaining them as a combination of Isaiah 56:7 (the
Temple as a house of prayer for all nations) and Jeremiah 7:11. The
latter is part of what is called Jeremiah’s “temple sermon,” in
which, according to Borg, Jeremiah “warned that it would be
destroyed unless those who worshipped there began to practice
justice.” Earlier, the text reads

,
“If you truly amend your ways and doings, if you truly act justly
one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan and the
widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go
after gods to your own hurt, then I [God] will dwell with you in this
place.” (Jeremiah 7:5-7)

Borg
goes on,

Then,
still speaking in the name of God, Jeremiah said, ‘Has this house
[the temple], which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in
your sight?’ The phrase in Hebrew suggests not just thievery, but
robbing with violence. In what sense had the temple become ‘a den
of robbers,’ a cave of violent ones? In Jeremiah, the meaning is
apparent: it was a ‘den of robbers’ precisely because it had
become the center of an oppressive system that did not practice
justice, but exploited the most vulnerable in society. It was an
indictment of the powerful and wealthy elites of his day, centered in
the monarchy and temple. Their everyday injustice made them robbers,
and they thought of the temple as their safe house and place of
security.

Thus,
when Jesus called the temple ‘a den of robbers,’ he was not
referring to the activity of the money changers and sellers of
sacrificial animals. Rather, he indicted the temple authorities as
robbers who collaborated with the robbers at the top of the imperial
domination system. They had made the temple into a den of robbing and
violence. Jesus’ action was not a cleansing of the temple, but an
indictment of the temple. The teaching explains the act. Indeed, it
was the reason for the act.”

This
was why Jesus planned a disruption of the temple. This is why it was
worth it to him to accept the consequences of having publically
indicted the Temple and its authority.

We
don’t live in a preindustrial, agricultural domination system
anymore. Obviously. Now we live in a post-industrial,
non-agricultural, domination system. The rules are both different
and the same. The work of the many is still used to enrich the few,
although we have new ways of blaming the many for not being wealthy
themselves. Our domination system is dependent on racism, sexism,
transphobia, heteronormativity, xenophobia, and all kinds of other
ways of dehumanizing God’s beloved people.

The
system falls apart when we look at each other, no matter the
differences, and see another human being, a beloved person of God,
worthwhile and worth listening to. However, it is not just that we
are called to do this individually. Like Jesus, we need to pay
attention to how our institutions (including faith traditions) are
being systematically used as part of the domination system. Then,
like Jesus, we need to disrupt the system. It turns out this Temple
cleansing is NOT, as many of us thought, the one counter-example to
an otherwise calm and loving Jesus. This story is the epitome of
Jesus loving God’s people, it is Jesus loving God’s people enough to
upset the system to give them a chance, even when it would inevitably
lead to his own death.

Today,
we are similarly called to disrupt. It may or may not involve
dramatic
acts
of disruption. However, when we see actions of thievery, of
state-sanctioned robbery, of oppressive political systems
that do not practice justice and
instead
create legal structures for the exploitation of the most vulnerable
in society—we are called to indict the powers that do such things
and to seek ways to disrupt these actions. Look for the ways in which
you can step outside of your normal behaviors in order to dramatize,
shed light on, injustice
and indict the powers behind it. Look for the ways in which you can
step outside of your normal behaviors and activities in order to
advocate for the vulnerable, the marginalized and exploited. Look for
the ways in which you can work collectively and organize in order to
address the systems that marginalize and exploit the vulnerable.
Imagine these actions and others like them. Sit with whatever
discomfort these thoughts may bring. Pray over how you are called to
respond. Then, join with others to do. As Jesus did. Amen.

1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_the_Elder
accessed
March 14, 2017.

2Marcus
Borg, “Jesus:
Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious
Revolutionary” (USA:
HarperOne, 2006) page 89-93.

3
Borg, 79-80.

4Borg,
79-80.

5Borg
81-82.

6
Borg, 90.

7N.T.
Wright, Mark
for Everyone,
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), p. 151.

Home Missioner Kevin M. Nelson and Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

Welcoming and Loving in Difficult Times

March 13, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305Pronouns: she/her/hershttp://fumcschenectady.org/

By Michele Cole

03/12/17

You know, one of my
favorite holy days is Ash Wednesday, odd as that may sound. I can’t
really explain why that is, except that there’s something very
grounding about being reminded that we are from the earth and to it
we shall return. It’s a reminder that we are a part of the big
cosmic dance that includes all living things as well as inorganic
creations like rocks and sand (particularly beach sand! 
) Or maybe it fulfills some kind of need to take a step back and
really look at how I live in and relate to the world outside myself.
I know these days I love to hear Pastor Sara read the litany from Yom
Kippur when she preaches in the joint ecumenical service; it’s
beautiful and life affirming. The downside to Ash Wednesday, at least
for me, is that it’s the beginning of Lent, which I’ve never
liked very much. As many of you know I grew up Catholic, although in
talking with others I find it was much the same elsewhere during that
time. I was a very imaginative and sensitive child and my very
traditional parish emphasized during Lent what was wrong with me, and
what I needed to do to be worthy. I was taught, or at least I
believed, that I was so bad that Jesus had to die because of me; and
so of course I felt very guilty that I helped to kill God. This isn’t
a judgement on the religion in which I was raised. This is how it
was, and I took it all in.

However, that’s not the
end of the story. As I was reading an online article on the United
Methodist Church’s General Board of Discipleship website a light
bulb went off in my head. I realized that the focus of Lent has
changed since my childhood, and indeed began changing across
denominational Christianity a few decades ago. Rather than a time of
grimness that we just need to suffer through, the theology and
practice of Lent has changed its focus to embrace a quiet time of
reflection and preparation. This shift in perspective brought us back
to the days of the early Christ followers, when they saw Lent as a
time of preparation for the sacrament of Baptism. For them, Lent was
the home stretch, as it were, when converts to Jesus’ Way received
their final faith formation before they entered the sacred covenant
with Christ and Christ’s church. This time was not all inward
focused, however; community members and soon-to-be members were
expected to look outwardly as well, tending to those in need. Lent
culminated in Easter, but also in baptism into a new way of living
for oneself and others.

I also learned that for
this Lenten season, the Methodist Church has decided to focus on
living out our baptismal calling, with a look each week at a
different baptismal question. Now, before you decide this sermon is
going to be as dry as dust, please hear me out! Maybe it will be, but
I’m finding it quite interesting how all of this is coming
together. You see, this week’s question is – “Do you accept the
freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and
oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?” Quite a
well-timed question, as it fits in rather nicely with the Scriptural
passages I chose for today and, unfortunately, with the tenor of
world events that have been happening recently.

Our second reading for
today recalls the sheep and goats parable that is told just before
Matthew’s recounting of Jesus’ passion and resurrection. Given
the timing as the last instruction before the end, it can be thought
of as holding special emphasis as the final word on Jesus’ social
teachings. Let me put a little context around it, as I pulled most of
it out. This comes at the end of Matthew’s chapter 25, where Jesus
has been cautioning His followers about the coming of God’s kingdom
and what their attitudes and activities should be. He has already
told them to be alert, lest God come when they are not prepared, and
also to be bold, not cautious, as they go about spreading the Good
News and growing the number of disciples. Now he is taking those
teachings to a new level; not only are they to be concerned about
their own day to day living, but they are to notice and enhance the
lives of the neediest among them. This is not just a morality tale,
though, of how we are to act … it is also a tale of how we are to
BE in the world and what attributes we are to cultivate in ourselves.
For if you read the rest of the story, you will see that neither the
sheep who were kind to the needy nor the goats who were not, did it
because Jesus was alive in the marginalized. They didn’t realize it
was Him. Those who reached out expressed their compassionate care of
each other, their desire to help another in a time of great need. The
goats had no such compassion and in fact, by saying “we didn’t
realize it was you” betrayed their cynicism; had they known it was
Jesus certainly they would have done something for Him. For their
neighbor, not so much.

So ultimately this is a
love story, a story where we are the lovers, where because we are
loved we can in turn pass it on. It is a story that reminds us in
fairly clear language what we, in our love for each other, are to do.
Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit those in prison, welcome the
stranger – while I imagine that we’ve heard these words many
times before, they are taking on new meaning today, in a world that
seems to get meaner and harder with each news cycle. I admit to being
somewhat of a Facebook junkie, and I spend some time each day reading
story after story about one group pitting themselves against another
more marginalized group, as if there is just a finite amount of love
and kindness in the world and it shouldn’t be spent on ‘them.’
More people are being overtly demonized, with more dire consequences,
than in any time in my memory. It’s easy enough to do, and there
are certain segments of our society now that seem to relish the task.
I was reminded of this when I saw Wicked last weekend, which was
fabulous by the way! 
I don’t know how many of you know the story but in a nutshell, it’s
a story about the ‘wicked’ witch of the west and how she came to
be wicked. And it turns out that it wasn’t her doing at all. She
was not ‘the bad one,’ but rather the victim of ‘othering.’
She was different from birth, with a different color skin from
everyone else, and so she was ostracized. She developed a talent for
doing spells and went to see the Wizard of Oz, who turned out to be
just a man, not really a wizard. She realized that he’d come into
power on a lie, and was in the process of eliminating all diversity
in the land of Oz. She argued with him and refused to join him;
instead she ran away. At which point the ‘Wonderful Wizard of Oz’
began to systematically demonize her, spreading rumors about her
evilness and telling lies about bad things that she had not done. By
the end of it, the people of Oz were thoroughly convinced that she
was bad to the bone, an evil wicked witch, even though her whole
reputation was built on lies. She was trying to do good, but the
castle was twisting everything she did, until finally she was no more
…

Which brings me back to
the present time, and the demonization of the ‘other,’ whether he
is an immigrant, or she is a refugee child fleeing from destruction
in her homeland, or they are a family of Muslims who are seeking
safety from an extremist organization that wants them dead. How are
we to think about the rhetoric that is flowing over us like so many
words, telling stories about the people who are leaving all they know
to come to where they hope is a safe place, guided only by their
hopes and the love of God who wants all God’s children to be safe.
Let’s take a moment to look at the lessons in the first reading,
when God called Abram and Sarai out of the land of their birth to
venture into a new land where their descendants will number like
stars in the sky.

Abram and Sarai were the
ultimate strangers; at a time when there were no Motel 6s or Google
Earth maps, they trusted God and went where they were told. They were
promised that they would be safe, that they would be led to a new
land, and that they would be a blessing to the world. This story
doesn’t say how they were treated along the way, whether they were
hassled or confronted, or whether they encountered the hospitality
that is so critical to so many stories in the Old Testament. What we
do know, though, is that they made it through to each place they were
led. They brought their customs and beliefs to a foreign land and
worshiped their God, and apparently were left alone to do this in
peace. And of course from them was born the Jewish people. This isn’t
just a creation story, though, detailing how the people of Israel
began. It is also a metaphor for how we are supposed to live, and to
think about others who are strangers in our lands. As Timothy F.
Simpson has pointed out in the online forum Political
Theology Today, this story is intended both
to make us think that we should be them (that is, that we should be
following where God leads, and trusting in God’s promises), but
also that we could be them. That like Sarai and Abram if we follow
where God leads we could be traveling to places we’ve never been
before, meeting people unlike us and bringing blessings to whoever is
there before us. This heightened sensitivity, or empathy, for the
stranger takes us in a couple of directions. It can lead us to put
ourselves in their place, encouraging us to treat them as we would
wish to be treated if we were far from home and family. We are also
led to recognize the blessings brought into our communities by those
whose talents and perspectives are different from our own. We are
called to be inclusive, to recognize the humanity of the stranger, to
be welcoming …

Welcoming … it can be
very hard for us to do, especially when those we greet look or act
differently from us, or from how we think they should. Heightened
tensions in the United States and around the world are resulting in
policies targeting Muslims and brown skinned people, murders of
people with brown skins or turbans, anti-Semitism resulting in bomb
threats and cemetery desecrations, and more murders of trans women of
color. In the absence of facts, ‘alternative truth’ is leading
Americans to fear and hate immigrants, refugees and anyone outside of
our comfort zone. Yet all is not yet lost, even though sometimes I’m
not sure I recognize our country anymore. Amid yells of “go back to
where you came from” we have to be the people of welcome, of
abundant love. We have to recognize the humanity of those who others
demonize, and share our humanity with them. We must model for the
world what we would like the world to become, and represent not only
the wanderer but also the One to whom we belong. If that sounds vague
I’m afraid it is, because each of us has a different talent to
share, and more or less time to exercise it. Each of us has a
different perspective on current events, and how we would like to
influence them. What I’m really suggesting is that we need to be
awake to what is going on around us at all levels of our society, and
to be ready to respond in whatever way makes the most sense for each
of us. As we seek to reach out to the least of these, and welcome the
strangers among us, we often need to look no farther than next to us,
or down the street, or sometimes even no farther than our own mirror.

In
the Matthew passage, the point is made that Christ has aligned
himself with the ‘least of these’ and in so doing, is found in
all of us. I would argue that when we think about bringing compassion
and love to each other, we should also pay attention to how we can
care for ourselves. It can be hard to do, I know, because I’m
working on it myself. It can be very easy to look after everyone else
but ignore our own very real needs for love, connection, compassion.
Right now I’m very concerned about how many people are hurting,
both the targets of nastiness and those of us who care about them and
for them. The 24 hour news cycle is producing lots of anger, despair
and hopelessness as it seems we go from one painful episode to
another. Many of us are simply exhausted and are struggling to make
sense of what’s happening around us. It’s in times like this that
we are called to nurture ourselves, to bring that same abundance of
compassion and love to ourselves that we give to each other. It’s
ok to recognize that our energy isn’t limitless and our passion
needs feeding before we can feed another.

This brings me to another
challenge that I’m struggling with; I don’t have an answer for
it, I just want to put it out here for your consideration. I’ve
talked a lot today about loving the least of these, and reaching out
to our neighbors, especially those who are being oppressed and
marginalized by society. But, that leaves out a group of people whom
we may not want to consider but who I feel we must. What about those
folks who are doing, saying and believing things that we find
absolutely abhorrent? Those whose attitudes we believe to be
completely wrong and even contrary to the Good News that we listen to
and love? I don’t know if you remember, but Sara preached about the
question I raised at the Connection gathering a few weeks ago,
wondering how peace and anger can co-exist, how we can be peaceful
without losing the edge that draws us into social action. I am now
raising a similar question, but one that may make us a little more
uncomfortable. At least it makes me squirm. I’m trying to figure
out how to love someone who I would much rather hate, or at least
detest a lot. Who I may actually think is dangerous to me or to our
society. I don’t mean that squishy kind of love that Kay Jewelers
sings about, but instead the robust love that we are told to bestow
on each other just for being a child of God in whom Jesus lives. What
does that love look like when its object is someone we don’t like?
How do we manifest it in our lives, and how do we come to terms with
it ourselves? I also wonder if, by saying that there are people who
by their words or actions don’t merit my love and concern, am I not
being just like those very people who hate others and wish ill for
them? Does the guilt or innocence of the person impact my Christian
love for them? Just a few of the questions swirling around in my
head. I’d welcome a conversation about them sometime if anyone
wants to take that one on!

Our readings for this
morning provide guidance as we consider the baptismal question I
posed earlier … “Do you accept the freedom and power God gives
you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they
present themselves?” If we are to answer yes to this question, we
must follow the direction we receive from God to welcome the stranger
among us. To feed, clothe, visit and care for the least among us
with an abundant compassion and love that reaches out because our
neighbor is in need, recognizing that Christ lives in everyone we
touch. To care for ourselves because we see the Christ in ourselves,
and to provide us with the strength and determination to keep
reaching out where we are needed. And finally to love without measure
not only those who are loveable, or those who we ‘should’ love
but also those who think differently from us or who have different
values. Because to resist evil and injustice do we not need to
counter it with love as well as with action? As Martin Luther King
Jr. said in his 1963 book of sermons Strength
to Love, “Returning hate for hate
multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of
stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies
hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies
toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says
“Love your enemies,” he is setting forth a profound and
ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an
impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies– or else?
The chain reaction of evil–hate begetting hate, wars producing
wars–must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of
annihilation.” These were timely words in 1963 when Martin
Luther King Jr put them to paper. They are equally of timely today.
May we find it in ourselves to love our enemies, even as we struggle
for a world where all are treated fairly and welcomed without
hesitation.

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

“Nevertheless Delilah Persisted” based on Judges 16:4-20

February 19, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I’m told that back in the day, and the day wasn’t so
long ago, the town of Hanover NH had a coffee shop called “The
Perfect Woman.” The sign for the shop featured a woman’s
silhouette, without a head, implying that the perfect woman was a
body existing for male pleasure without a voice with which to express
herself. The coffee shop had been named during a time when Dartmouth
had only male students and that reality created a hyper masculine
worldview around those parts. The store name and sign reflected the
values that attracted customers at that time.

Sometimes the Bible has a hyper masculine worldview too,
and one of the most blatant expressions of hyper masculinity is found
in the narrative of Sampson. Sampson’s story is complex, it has
clearly been retold over the years so that Sampson is at the same
time supposed to be one particular man, all the judges in the Hebrew
people’s history, AND the nation Israel itself. There are layers
upon layers of meaning, and most of them express distrust of the
power of women.

In order to start to make sense of any of this, I think
I better start by explaining “what is a judge?” You may remember
the story of the people of God being enslaved in Egypt and then led
to freedom by Moses. After they had wandered around the desert for a
few generations and Moses died, Joshua led the people into the
Promised Land.

Once the people got into the Promised Land they didn’t
have a king and they didn’t always have a unified leader. Instead,
for several centuries, there was a pattern of events. Things would
be going pretty well and then one of the neighboring countries or
tribes would want to take over Israel. A leader would emerge
(assumed to be the leader God wanted) and lead the people in a
military victory over the aggressor. The military leader would
continue to have the respect of the people and offer leadership to
the 12 tribes until his or her death at which point the tribes would
go back to functioning on their own. The next time an aggressor
showed up a new leader would emerge. Those leaders – the military
generals who gained power through winning battles and kept the power
for their lifetimes without creating dynasties – those were called
the judges.

So now you know.

Sampson is the last judge, and that has resulted in his
story also being used to reflect on the era of the judges as well.
It may be worth remembering the stories of the Hebrew Bible were
written down after centuries of oral tradition around the time of the
Babylonian exile. Thus they were written down more than 400 years
after King David and even longer after the judges. They were written
down in a time when the people were trying to answer the question
“why did God allow us to be defeated by the Babylonians?” and the
particular ways that the stories got told were formed by trying to
answer that question. In that way, he’s the nation Israel too.

Sampson is presented as supernaturally strong, I mean
Superman strong. I don’t say this to make any sense of it, just to
help you understand the story.

Sampson is a Nazirite. That meant that he was a holy
man set apart from others by his devotion to God. Generally
Nazirites avoided alcohol and anything unclean (like dead bodies) and
didn’t cut their hair. In the beginning of Sampson’s story his
barren mother is told to avoid alcohol even during her pregnancy to
set him up for the work God had for him. I say that GENERALLY
Nazirites did this stuff because Sampson broke every rule other than
the hair one well before this story. However, the ANGEL who came
down to speak to his BARREN mother about her upcoming conception is
meant to get our attention about the greatness of the man who would
be born as well as to remind us of the matriarchs in Genesis –
creating the symbol of Sampson as the nation itself who was born
because those barren women gave birth. The angel who spoke to his
mother told her that “he would begin the deliverance of Israel from
the hands of the Philistines.” (13:5b)

So, Sampson’s mother is the madonna of any madonna-whore
complex, she is faithful, pure, and subservient. Sampson is really
attracted to non-Israelite women. Women are his downfall. First he
laid eyes on a Philistine woman and decided that he had to marry her.
His faithful parents objected, indicating that if he was going to
lead the Hebrew people it would best if he married a Hebrew wife. He
refused to listen, and he married the Philistine woman.

Why do we care, you ask? Well, we may not. But his
parents did because the Philistines were at the time the aggressors
who were trying to take parts of the Israelite land and engaging them
in battle and having the leader of the Israelites marry one of them
just didn’t seem like it would help.

It didn’t. The story is too weird to summarize well but
the Philistine wife ended up manipulating Sampson by indicating that
if he didn’t do what she wanted he didn’t love her. Then she
betrayed him, so he left her. Then, in order to appease his rage the
Philistine’s killed her and her father.

At some point later Sampson saw a woman he liked so he
slept with her, she was a Philistine prostitute, and the Philistines
tried to kill him while he slept afterward, but he got away because
of his supernatural strength.

Then comes this story. This story fits well into what
we already know about Sampson: he is strong, he is rash, he is
fickle, he is susceptible to the charms of women, and his enemies are
looking for a way to take him down. This fits all three versions of
the Sampson story, as does the perception of Delilah as an evil
seductress. The story of Sampson as a man is the story of a man
whose Achilles heel was his attraction to inappropriate women. The
story of Sampson as the judges is the story of leaders whose moral
character was lax, who could be distracted as easily as by a
beautiful woman. The story of Sampson as Israel itself during the
Exile is the story of a nation of men who choose foreign women and
were ruined by the way those women led them to unfaithfulness to God.

Delilah is the symbol of temptation and seduction as
well as greed. Her name means, “flirtatious”¹
while the name of her town means “choice vine.”²
It is intentional symbolism. She represents all of humanities fear
of the power of sexual attraction and the way it make us lose our
head. More specifically she represents the mystery of womanhood and
the fear that some men have about women and their different ways of
being. Delilah could easily step in as the negative female character
in just about any simplistic movie or book. She’s the one the hero
is attracted to, she’s the one who brings him down, she’s the
original femme fatale.

That is, unless you look at the story from her
perspective. Sampson had taken a walk one day, seen a
woman, and married her. That woman had no say in it. His wife had
attempted to do right by her people, and had gotten killed for it –
along with her father. Delilah, similarly, did not have any say in
entering a relationship with Sampson. The text says “he fell in
love with” her. It does not say, nor imply that the love was
reciprocated. It does not suggest that they got married. It
certainly seems that they were intimate, but he was so important that
he got what he wanted and normal limits didn’t apply.

Delilah would have known all this. She knew that it was
dangerous to have Sampson in love with her, that it could end as soon
as it began, and that no one was going to help her if that happened.
We have no way of knowing if he was kind to her, but we also have no
reason to assume he was. He isn’t presented as a man with a lot of
empathetic or listening skills. Most of what is said about him
suggests he may have been abusive.

We also don’t know Delilah’s ethnicity. She is said to
come from a town that is on the border, just inside Israel. If she
was from there she may be an Israelite nor she may be a Canaanite.
But since the Philistines come to her, and since every other woman
Sampson is said to have been attracted to is Philistine, I think it
is likely that she was a Philistine. Now, we can’t KNOW this, but
2/3 three choices mean that Sampson was not the leader of her people,
and I’m willing to take that seriously. While the way the text is
usually read blames Delilah for selling out her man/leader for money,
it may well be that she was trying to save her people as well as her
own skin. If she was a Philistine then what she did was patriotic!
She saved her people. If she was a Canaanite, there was no reason
why she should have been loyal to the Israelite leader who had taken
over their land. And if she was an Israelite (which I think makes
the least sense in the story) she at least had incentive to try to
end his life before hers got abruptly ended for her like his first
wife.

Delilah decided to seek the information she needed. We
don’t know if the money induced her or simply gave her courage, but
she tried. She tried a bunch of times and he seems to be playing
with her. He certainly seems to know what she’s up to, which is why
it makes no sense that he answers her.
However, she plays the one card she has. This is the key to this
story. It is verse 15, “Then
she said to him, ‘How can you say, “I love you”, when your
heart is not with me? You have mocked me three times now and have not
told me what makes your strength so great.’ “ She throws
his claim of love back in his face, claiming that if he won’t tell
her his secret than he doesn’t really love her. This was EXACTLY the
way his first wife got a secret out of him. Apparently he found this
argument particularly convincing.

He
told her. She did it. It worked. He was captured, humiliated, and
enslaved. SHE lived. If her people were the Philistines or the
Canaanites, then her people were better off as well. She used her
power, which in this case was something she didn’t even want to begin
with. The power she had was that this man said he loved her (or
maybe did love her) and she manipulated that to survive.

The
thing is that we often don’t have the upper hand in life. Sometimes
it is like this: being a woman walking down the street in the village
and then suddenly, by force, being the mistress of the strong-man
leader everyone fears. Sometimes we have that little power. But we
always have SOME power. Delilah had a little tiny bit of power and
used it. We have choices we can make and we have the capacity to use
our words, our actions, our relationships, our trust, and our energy
to whatever end we find worthwhile. Sometimes, like Delilah, that’s
in survival. When we’re lucky, and we’re surviving already, we can
use it to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms
the present themselves (#baptismalvows) Sometimes we get to resists
evil, injustice or oppression – big or small.

The
power we have, as small and insignificant as it may seem, can take
down the strongest human or the most feared enemy. Like Delilah
though, it takes persistence. A little power goes a lot further when
it is used persistently, and even FURTHER when it is used with
other’s little bits of power – persistently. Come to think of it,
especially this far into the Subversive Women sermon Series, maybe
there is something to being afraid of women. However, it isn’t our
mystery nor our seduction. It is that we, too, are humans who want
to survive and take care of those we love. And if you get in our
way, we will persistently defy you and subvert you. Thanks be to God
for people of all genders using their power for good. Amen

Sermon
Talk Back

To
get into the mindset of the story, who are other “femme fatale”
characters, and can any of their stories be inverted by taking their
perspective seriously?
What
does conventional masculinity find frightening about femininity?
How
could Sampson be so easily manipulated?
What
stories can you think of when people with VERY little power used it
to overthrow oppression?
Where
is God in this story?
Does
the enmity between ancient Israel and the Philistines serve to teach
us anything today?
How
can we have that much courage and persistence without having our own
backs against the wall, fighting for our lives?

And
how can we do that while also living whole and balanced lives while
we’re at it?

Where
else might we have taken this story?

1Dennis
T. Olsen “The Book of Judges” in the New Interpreter’s Study
Bible Vol II (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1998) p. 858

2Herbert
Wolf, “Judges” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary Vol 3
(Zondervan: Grand Rapids, MI, 1992), p. 475

Sermons

“Justice-Seeking Mothers”based on 1 Samuel 2:1-10 and Luke 1:46b-55

December 11, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

It
has been said about Mary, “No woman in scripture is more honored,
blessed as she was ‘above all women’ (Luke 1:42), and she holds an
iconic status shared by no other woman in Christianity. Through the
accounts of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke, Mary is one of the
first biblical characters many children encounter. Along with Eve,
Mary is integral to shaping how Christians understand the nature of
womanhood and motherhood.”¹
What is said is true. Mary, along with Eve, has both shaped how
women are understood in Christianity AND the inverse: perceptions of
Mary (and Eve) are indicators of how Christianity is understanding
women. How Mary is seen is a bell-weather for how women are seen.
Cary Gibson, the author of the opening quote, also says, “Mary is a
container into which we pour ideas of what it means to be a woman. In
turn we then draw from her image ideas about our own womanhood.”²

Most
commonly, Mary is said to be meek and mild. Usually, it is her
subservience that sets her up as the ideal woman. The pedestal of
womanhood that Mary most frequently occupies as the ideal woman is
the pedestal of the selfless mother, the one who exists simply so her
son can exist. She’s faithful, sweet, and biddable. There is,
however, one issue with this common perception Mary: it completely
ignores the words of Mary found in the Gospel of Luke.

Now,
I’m not saying that I really think some literate scribe was following
Mary around during her pregnancy to record her insights for
posterity. However, I am saying we have a rather long monologue
attributed to Mary that defies the way she is most commonly defined.
The meek and mild ideal does not match the actual Gospel. The myths
around her are more about what Christian women have been told to be
than they are about the actual stories about and words of Mary.

Therefore,
it seems worth exploring the words attributed to Mary. Whether the
words are what Mary said, or something Mary could have said, or
simply what it made sense to someone that the Mother of Jesus WOULD
have said, they are attributed to her. Since the general perception
of Mary is based on 20 centenaries of trying to put women in their
place, and I’d prefer to get to know Mary as presented in the Gospel.
It may be that we can take a look at Mary-the-ideal-woman and get a
different answer about what it means to be an ideal woman.

For
starters, these words are not meek, nor mild. In fact, Cary Gibson
says Mary, “voiced a defiant and righteous hope in the face of
violence and injustice.”³
It is true. These words express a HARDCORE faith and a great ideal
for women to seek to live up to. 🙂 Men too. This is the sort of
faith we can all aspire to!

First
of all, Mary’s song is deeply rooted in her faith tradition. It
echoes Hannah’s song of celebration after Hannah fulfilled her
promise and brought her son Samuel to Eli to serve him as a priest.
It also echoes with phrases from the Psalms. The version of this
song that we have is a work of theological and scriptural brilliance
and sophistication. Hannah’s song is powerful, but reflects a less
mature faith. Hannah yearns for God to smash the powerful, deride
her enemies, and break the mighty. In her mind the powerless are
lifted up BY making the powerful small. There is violence in her
imagery, even as there is celebration of the goodness of God and of
her sense of becoming more significant in the world.

Mary’s
song, though, is not vengeful. She also speaks of lifting up the
poor and lonely. Like Hannah she speaks about God’s power, but she
also adds God’s mercy. Mary speaks of lowering the mighty, but the
lowering isn’t violent or dangerous for them: the proud are
“scattered in the thoughts of their hearts” which sounds like a
way to be more humble; the powerful step down from their thrones (but
she doesn’t suggest they’re harmed afterward); the rich are sent away
empty – as if they don’t need any more. Hannah had the the
formerly “full” “hire themselves out for bread.” Mary is
interested in lifting up the lowly and removing their oppression, not
in oppressing the oppressors. She is a actually meeker and milder
than Hannah, Hannah’s is pretty rough. Mary is simply less violent!

Hannah
speaks of her victory, Mary speaks of being treated with God’s favor.
While both are grateful for the child they are able to nurture, and
while both express incredible gratitude to God and deep theological
reflections, they have different energies. The insertion of material
from the Psalms into Hannah’s original poem changes it into a more
gracious piece. One scholar found that in addition to the source
material of Hannah’s poem, the song of Mary includes 7 pieces of
different Psalms, as well as a quote each from Deuteronomy, Job,
Micah, and Isaiah. By that scholar’s reckoning all of the words of
Mary’s song are attributable to Hebrew Bible quotations.⁴

Mary’s
song starts in the specific. She is grateful to be useful to God,
humbly aware of her status as a poor woman in her society, and
attentive to the change of her status because of God’s favor. She
attributes her life change to God’s greatness, and she praises God.
She expresses who God is: merciful,
consistent, strong, and powerful. She talks about a God who cares
about the lowly,
and feeds the hungry with GOOD food.
Her song makes another journey outward, celebrating God’s care for
all of the Jews and then attributing God’s care to God’s merciful
nature and God’s promises. She moves from celebrating God’s work for
her, to celebrating God’s work for the vulnerable, to celebrating
God’s work for all her people. It is as if she is expanding her
gratitude in increasingly wide circles.

While
it is unlikely to be factual, this text suggests that Mary knew her
scriptures well enough to combine them creatively into a truly
beautiful and majestic song celebrating God WITHOUT demeaning anyone
else. It suggests that her humility was real, but it wasn’t a form
of self-deprecation. It says she was genuinely honored to be able to
serve God and be useful in forming the world in God’s kindom of
shalom. She was delighted and amazed to be chosen. She recognized
the depth of the blessing she received, seemingly without thinking
that it made her more important than others. She said she was
blessed, and was amazed that people would remember her as blessed.
That indicates she didn’t think she’d done anything right or worthy,
it was God’s choice not her worthiness that mattered. Her gratitude
was expansive and celebratory and still focused on lifting up the
lowly and attentive to the hungry. She kept her head!

The
Mary of this song is wise, strong, compassionate, creative, humble,
and grateful. She knows and celebrates a God who is a fierce
advocate of justice. John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, in their
book “The First Christmas” point out that each of the Gospels
start with a “Gospel in miniature” (with the possible exception
of Mark which starts at a gallop and just keeps going!). Luke 1 and
2, which likely do NOT represent authentic memories of things that
really happened, DO represent themes of the Gospel, understanding of
Jesus, foreshadowing of things to come, and ways to see how God is
known in the Gospel. Luke pays particular attention to women – as
we can see here where Mary gets a prolonged monologue – as well as
to the poor and vulnerable. We can also see that here in the words
Mary speaks. The writer of Luke, and/or the Christian tradition,
and/or the editors who came later attribute these words to Mary
largely to help those of us who came later to understand her son.

Now,
I don’t want anyone to think that I’m disparaging Hannah’s song. Her
song is FIERCE and profound, and reflects an era one whole millennia
before Mary’s. Hannah, as well, sought justice. She sought it for
herself and she sought it for all of God’s people. She understood God
to be one who cares about the poor, the hungry, the feeble, the
barren, the low, and the needy. That is a reflection of the unique
tradition of Judaism, from a pretty early time. Other ancient
peoples believed in god and goddesses. The Israelites were unique,
however, in believing in a God who cared about how they treated each
other, and in a God who cared about the people who had the least
power and influence. There is a constant tension in the Bible
between this belief – in a God who cares for the poor and lowly –
and the human tendency to prefer the rich and powerful. Hannah
reflects the God who cares for the poor and lowly without being
pulled toward the rich and powerful at all. Then Mary manages to
take it a step further and acknowledge a God who cares for everyone.
They sought justice, and believed in a God who wanted justice. This
is our radical tradition. This is the wonder of worshiping a God of
compassion.

Those
sons of those women took their justice-seeking natures and their
understandings of the God of Compassion, and changed the world. We
mostly know about the mothers because of the sons. Samuel anointed
kings. Jesus healed the sick, fed the hungry, ate with sinners, and
told parables that still confound us today. Both sons changed the
world. Both mothers are presented as sources of wisdom for their
sons. Their stories are preludes to their sons stories, and yet I am
so grateful that the Bible gives them voices and songs and stories!
They are not ONLY vessels through which their sons come to be, they
are interesting in their own right.

I
do wish for all of us to be able to be a bit like these justice
seeking mothers. And if we are going to hold up Mary as the ideal,
then I hope it takes the form of being moved to sing our gratitude
to God and celebrating the wonder of God’s good work in the world. I
hope we can become so steeped in our faith tradition that we can use
it in creative ways that bring more caring, compassion, and justice
to our tradition. I hope that we can see and name the goodness of
our lives without taking ourselves too seriously. And I do hope that
when push comes to shove we are more like Mary than like Hannah, and
that we can hope for the transformation of oppressors – not the
oppression of them. I hope we too can always remember the people of
God who are struggling the most, and find ways to help lift them up.
I hope we can be part of our tradition that remembers God as a God of
compassion for the least, the last, the lost and the lonely.

If
Mary is the ideal, and she seems to be well set up to be the ideal,
then let’s seek to be like her: fierce, grateful, and brilliant.
Amen

1
Cary Gibson, “Mary, Jesus’ Mother” in an email from The Common
English Bible send by Abingdon Press on December 2^nd,
2016.

2Ibid.

3Ibid.

4Joseph
A. Fitzmeyer “The Gospel According to Luke I-IX” in the The
Anchor Bible Series (Doubleday and Co.: Garden City, NY, 1981) p
356-357.

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

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

December 11, 2016

Sermons

“The Hard Work of Departing” based on Genesis 16:7-15 and…

November 6, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

We are told that in order for life to exist three things are necessary: a source of energy, liquid water, and essential chemicals. To expand on the last of these, “Life as we know it contains specific combinations of elements including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen that combine to form proteins and nucleic acids which can replicate genetic code.”¹ It could be that life could exist with a different combination of chemicals, but the theory remains: a source of energy, liquid water, and essential chemicals are necessary to life.

Those three things exist on this planet, and given that reality, life seems irrepressible. Tiny cracks in pavement or cement sidewalks sprout grass and weeds. Puddles that stand too long grow algae, wet wood grows mold and moss. I’ve been considering this unstoppable quality of life ever since I visited Bryce Cannon National Park and was motivated to take this picture. At one and the same time there is a huge evergreen growing at the base of “hoodoos” easily 5 times its size AND there are tiny little evergreens popping up at the top of hoodoos with remarkably little soil available to them. Yet, life won’t stop. The trees grow.

The Bible is a remarkably interesting document, and within its complexity and contradictions it sometimes feels like there are unquenchable truths gleaming through it. These truths are like the force of life on our planet – no matter what is done to try to stop them and no matter the strength of the circumstances that would prevent them – they prevail. Our two stories today tell profoundly of a God who cares about ALL people, while existing within a narrative about God choosing to focus on just one people.

The story going on here is supposed to be about God choosing Abraham. There is supposed to be a special bond with Abraham, and less so with Sarah, and yet the story keeps diverging to include and bless others. It is as if the universal love of God cannot be contained, even in the stories trying to tell the back-story of the people who long claimed God’s love was particularly for them.

Our two readings today are most likely two versions of the same story that were adapted differently with time. The one in Genesis 16, which we read first, is the version from the Southern Kingdom and much older. The one in Genesis 21 is the version from the Northern Kingdom. The Bible got edited A LOT. Most of the stories in the Torah (first 5 books) were passed on in oral tradition for centuries before they first got written down, and oral tradition naturally changes stories as it goes. Likely each version had changed over time in different ways to suit different time-relevant needs. Then, after being written down, the stories continued to get adapted, including by editors so that they would make a more coherent story. The people responsible for translating the Bible into English also made difficult decisions that functioned as further editing. The stories we have now are the complicated compilations of milenia, with many fingerprints on them.

That is, the two stories we read today are likely the same story with different fingerprints on them. Yet, they are edited into the current version of Genesis whereby they fill two different roles. They are, at one and the same time ONE story and TWO stories that happen sequentially. The editors aren’t perfect, in the second version Ishmael is a 17 year old that his mother carried away into the wilderness in her arms like a baby. (Oops.) But the work of the editors to make a coherent story makes both stories important, and not just the older one.

Throughout both stories, extraordinary things happen to Hagar. Explains of this are coming from the work of the amazing Biblical Scholar Phyllis Trible. In Genesis 16 Hagar has run away from Sarai/Sarah because of Sarai/Sarah’s harsh treatment of her. Hagar is a subversive woman choosing to run away, likely to die, and taking with her the heir that her slave-master husband wants most desperately. She reaches a point where she claims her life as her own, and she acts on it. In Genesis 16, Hagar is pregnant, and when she runs away she is near the border with Egypt, and finds a spring to sustain herself.

“The Hebrew word ‘spring’ (’ayn) also means ‘eye.’ The association resonates with Hagar’s having acquired a new vision of Sarai, and it anticipates the new vision of God that she will soon acquire. She, an Egyptian and a slave, is the first person in the Bible to whom such a messenger visits. Moreover, for the first time in the narrative a character speaks to Hagar (rather than about her) and uses her name. … The messenger promise Hagar innumerable descendants, thereby according her the special status of being the only woman in the Bible to receive such a promise. … The messenger affirms Hagar’s conceiving. She will bear a son and will name him Ishmael. Hagar becomes the first woman in the Bible to receive such an annunciation. … The messenger specifies the meaning of the name Ishamel (God hears): ‘For God heard your affliction.’”²

Now, unfortunately, in the form of this story that we have now, the messenger of God tells Hagar that God hears and knows her affliction, AND sends Hagar back to it anyway. The first act of subversiveness doesn’t get her free, although she is different afterward. Perhaps the only reason it doesn’t work is so that we can get to the second story though. After the words of the messenger, Hagar speaks for the second time, and from the way the story explains it, what happens is astounding. Trible puts it this way:

“Hagar’s next words bypass the messenger’s words. She does not comment on her continued affliction, the promise of descendants, the naming of her son, the meaning of his name, or his future. Nor does she comment on the God who hears. Instead she names the Lord who sees. The narrator introduces her words with a striking expression that accords her a power attributed to no one else in the Bible. Hagar ‘calls the name of the Lord who spoke to her’ (Gen 16:13*). She does not invoke the Lord; she names the Lord. She calls the name; she does not call up on the name. ‘You are El-roi [God of seeing],’ she says.”³

And then, after all of that astounding-ness, the text seems to revert to the mundane. “Hagar bore Abram a son.” (Genesis 15a). It isn’t as mundane as it seems. Trible says, “Hagar becomes the first woman in the ancestor stories to bear a child.”⁴ Mostly sons are attributed as coming to their fathers (as if that’s how it works.) But, that isn’t all. Hagar gets a lot of “firsts” in the Bible. Moving onto the Genesis 21 version, according to Trible “She is the first slave in Scripture to be freed. At the same time, she becomes the first divorced wife – banished by her husband at the command of his first wife and God.”⁵

In the Genesis 21 version of the story, Hagar prepares a deathbed for her son, and sits to wait for his death. The story is clearly about a very young child. Within this story, Hagar “becomes the first character in the Bible to weep.”⁶ According to Trible, “The God who she saw (r’h) long ago in Shur opens her eyes enabling her to see (r’h) a well of water at the site of the ‘well of seven’ (Beersheba).”⁷

Whether the stories are taken sequentially or as two versions of the same narrative, some themes emerge. First and foremost, God takes care of Hagar and cares about Hagar. She is given extraordinary access to the Divine, paralleling Abraham’s. Unlike any other person in the Bible, she gets to NAME God. Her survival, which is inherently threatened by being sent out alone into the barren wilderness of the desert, is assured by God who SHE renames “The God who sees.” It feels like she names God, “The God who sees ME” because that seems to more completely articulate the wonder spoken by Hagar. She knows she’s a woman, a foreigner, a slave, and in both stories she is profoundly alone and utterly powerless.

Yet, God sees her.

Isn’t it weird? Throughout the rest of the Bible, God is referred to as the “God of Abraham”, but “The God of Abraham” goes with Hagar to care for her. God refuses to be contained by the stories boundaries. God’s love and grace are too expansive to be held within the walls of the narrative. Hagar is meant to be placeholder for Sarah, simply the womb to the woman who matters – and THAT woman only matters enough to be the one to provide descendants. That’s how this is supposed to go, according to the story itself! Instead we get Hagar naming God in the desert.

God disrespects human separations, especially about who matters in the world, even within a story trying to articulate how the ancestors of Israel came to be in the world! Even in that story, the sparkle of God’s love for outsiders shines through. Hagar is one of the least empowered characters in the Bible, by any set of human standards, and she is one of the people given the most access to God in the Bible. Her experiences of God are more expressive and profound than Abraham’s.

That is, Hagar matters. Those like Hagar matter. The Native Americans whose tribal lands were taken by the United States matter, even when the USA disregards its treaties, even with energy companies want protests squelched, even when protesters get arrested. Those seeking to protect the land from the Dakotas Access Pipeline matter like Hagar matters. Women and girls who are used in sexual trafficking matter, even when they are being used to make profits for others, even when they are using drugs to try to escape, even when they are being raped for other people’s pleasures. Women and girls living in modern sexual slavery matter like Hagar matters. Refugees around the world fleeing violence and horrors matter, even when no country wants to welcome them in, even when they use all that they have to get onto ships that may sink, even when getting to a new country means they’ll be labeled ‘illegal.” Refugees and immigrants matter like Hagar matters.

If a refugee, a slave girl of an ancient nomadic herder was important enough to name God, then the world’s standards are COMPLETELY irrelevant. Everyone matters because Hagar matters. Thanks be to God. Amen

1“Life Needs” found at http://phillips.seti.org/kids/what-life-needs.html on 11/3/2016

2Phyllis Trible, “Ominous Beginnings for a Promise of Blessing” in Phyllis Trible and Letty M. Russell, editors, Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Muslim, and Christian PerspectivesTrible, (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, Kentucky, 2006) p. 40-41.

3Trible, 41.

4Trible, 41.

5Trible, 46.

6Trible, 49

7Trible, 49.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 6, 2016