Hear This

September 21, 2025March 17, 2026
by Sara Baron

“Hear this…” based on Amos 8:4-7 and Luke 16:1-13

It is Homecoming Sunday! I am always grateful for the slower pace of summer, and then excited to watch the energy rise back up in the fall. On Homecoming we remember that God is our home and this church is too. Also, because this is First Schenectady United Methodist Church there is an expectation that I preach a good just-y sermon!

Apparently, on the Parable of the Dishonest Steward. (FACE PALM) To be fair, my go to commentaries had useful notes on this parable. Truly. The Jesus Seminar colors the passage red, indicating they think it goes back to Jesus even though it shows up only in Luke. They say, “This story does not moralize, unlike so much edifying teaching in both hellentistic Judean religion and early Christianity and that exceptional quality became a large factor in the decision to attribute the parable to Jesus.”1

The Jewish Annotated New Testament points out “some commentators, but not the parable, suggest the manager was removing the interest charge.”2

The Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels makes it clear that the amount the manager releases from the contracts is NOT his fee, he wouldn’t have charged that much and he wouldn’t have written his fee into the contract.3 It also says explains that “It is a scheme that places the landowner in a particular bind. If he retracts the actions of the manager, he risks serious alienation in the village, where the villagers would have already been celebrating his astonishing generosity. If he allows the reductions to stand, he will be praised far and wide (as will the manger for having made the ‘arrangement’’ as a noble and generous man. It is the latter reaction upon which the manager counts.” 4

The only issue after having read all that was what on earth to make of the parable. Particularly if it doesn’t have a moral theme. So, I guess, for me, the primary question was “Why did Jesus tell this story?” And along with it, “why did Luke tell us about Jesus telling this story?” And at that point I was completely stumped.

In essence, to moralize the story, one has to decide if they want to celebrate or condemn the steward/manager. If it is cerebrate it is tricky because the manager is clearly acting in a self-serving way. Or, one could condemn the manager, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that without celebrating the systems that enrich the rich and impoverish the poor. I’m fine with hearing a parable as a description of the world as it is or as a description of the kindom of God as it should be. This is neither. Mostly, I was looking for an understanding of this passage that first with God’s passion for justice like we hear in Amos.

So what does one do when the first 8 books one looks at aren’t helpful? Well, I suppose different people have different answers, but mine is “find a 9th.” This turned out to be a good thing, because I’d forgotten how much I like the 9th. The actually helpful book in this case is Rev. Dr. William Herzog’s “Parables as Subversive Speech.”5

Herzog accepts all the wisdom already offered, and then finds something to actually DO with it to make sense of why this is a story we’re still listening to. That said, he’s dense, so please know I’m glossing over most of the wisdom he offers. First, Herzog points out that the dishonest manager is condemned by rumor. We don’t know if they were true. “Charges were brought that he was squandering” the property of the landowner. This is a really normal situation. Landowners were wealthy elites who derived their wealth from the land they owned and the labor of the peasants working it. But usually they didn’t live on the land, they lived in the cities where they could spend their wealth and engage with their social circles. So they entrusted the land and the work of squeezing all the possible wealth of out of it to managers. The landowners wanted to gain LOTS and LOTS of wealth, and if they got less than what they wanted, they’d blame the manger. So, landowners distrusting their managers was normal. And since they weren’t around, they were often reliant on rumors to tell them what was happening.

But, this is a story told by a Jewish man to his Jewish followers. These are people who knew Amos and the other prophets and had heard, “Hear this, you who trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain, and the Sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah smaller and the shekel heavier and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals and selling the sweepings of the wheat.” (Amos 8:4-6) They didn’t trust the wealthy landowner, they thought the wealthy landowner was taking their wealth from them. (They were right.) They also didn’t trust the manager.

Second, the Hebrew Bible condemns the charging of interest within the community of faith. If the landowner was also Jewish, he would have been prohibited from charging interest on debts. This was a pretty firm rule, but there were common work arounds. Mostly, it happened that the contracts around debt were written in such a way that the repayment amount required simply too into account both the principal and interest. AND, the MANAGER would be responsible for writing the contracts, leaving the owner with plausible deniability. That is, the manager is doing the landowner’s dirty work and the peasants wouldn’t trust him at all either. He is an active participant in oppression, even though he has less power than the landowner.

Dr. Herzog reads this parable in terms of the “weapons of the weak” and people using the tools they have available to take down the powerful. He says, “Because they are virtually powerless, peasants must find ways of resisting their oppressors that do not subject them to the jeopardy of open revolt.”6 Basically, he thinks the peasants started the rumor so to try to take down the manager.

He also points out that:

“There is no monolithic moral system to which everyone consents and by which everyone is judged. The entire system of which the steward is a part is exploitative and predatory. The steward represents the interests of a greedy and oppressive elite; the peasants are struggling to hold on to every bit of subsistence they gan get. … The moral economy of the peasants views the master as exploitative and ruthless; the master’s code treats peasants as resources to be squeezed to get a profit; the steward’s code is to survive while making a profit large enough to secure a lucrative honest graft, yet small enough to avoid attracting the master’s attention and reasonable enough to gain the peasant’s consent.”7

The steward lowers the debts by the amount that represented the hidden interest. By agreeing to this, the peasants have indebted themselves to him and would be obligated to repay the favor. The master is still going to make money, the interest is only a part of his profits, and those debts that are forgiven are now a favor owed to the master (via the steward). And the steward has effectively cornered the master, by easing the lives of the peasants – at least for the present.8

By lowering the debt amounts by exactly the amount of hidden interest, “the steward reminds the master just who has been taking chances to accumulate his wealth, including the questionable practice of charging de facto interest in spite of the prohibitions of the Torah and oral torah.”9 Which is presumably why he is praised for his shrewdness and is likely KEPT ON by the landowner after all.

In this story, despite his power and wealth, the master is outsmarted. I think, that maybe, this is one of the reasons the story is told. Because in the time of Jesus, much like to day, it was far too easy to just give up and assume the powers of the day were unmovable. The rich landowner was untouchable, right? He had more power than all of the peasants combined. His greed endangered their lives.

This was reality as they knew it, I think as everyone knew it. The rich and powerful seeking ever more wealth and power was the way of the world in the Empire and it shortened the lives of most of the people in the Empire.

So, to tell a story where the master landowner is diminished, cornered, and outsmarted helped. It humanized him. It reminded them that his power was limited, that he could be corrected or taken a notch. That the way things were was not the way things had to be. The nearly invulnerable turns out to be vulnerable.

I did not expect it when I started with this text, but it is in a way another version of the resurrection story. In resurrection the Empire uses its final and ultimate too, the power over life and death, to stop the work of God in the world. And it fails because you can’t stop the work of God in the world. Here, again, the powers of the world turn out not to be all that.

Instead, the prophets calling out “hear this…” and calling for justice for the peasants turns out to be louder and more powerful. The real power, the truly unbreakable one is, in love and relationships. It is shared.

In the end, I think this parable told its first hearers that there was hope. Luke shared it, including to his wealthy listeners, maybe to tell them that the powers that ruled their lives weren’t as impenetrable as they thought either! I wonder how many of them were able to hear it as good news. It is good news. The system that requires oppression benefits no one. Systems that take the abundance of God’s resources and share them benefit everyone.

Those who have the power, especially those who have power and use it to amass wealth, consolidate power, and vanquish their perceived enemies, they’re vulnerable. The power can be broken. Life doesn’t have to be like this. God isn’t for having things like this. It isn’t time to give up hope.

Thus says the parable. I think. Its a parable. This is my best work but they’re slippery.

Thanks be to God for the chance to struggle with a story until a meaning emerges. Amen

1Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Autthentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), page 359.

2 The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) page 134.

3Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) “Textual Notes: Luke 16:1-16” page 292.

4Malina et al, 293.

5William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech, (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994).

6Herzog, 252.

7Herzog, 253.

8Herzog, 255 in summary.

9Herzog, 257.

September 21, 2025

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

100 Sheep

September 14, 2025March 17, 2026
by Sara Baron

“100 Sheep” based on Psalm 14 and Luke 15:1-10

These parables don’t make any sense. For some of us they’re familiar, so we’re used to pushing them into a framework of meaning and then mostly ignoring them. That framework is often the one that Luke imposes onto them, “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” But it is clear to scholars that the whole sinner/repentance angle is Luke’s and isn’t what Jesus was doing with the stories. It is also likely the stories actually go back to Jesus.

And, when they stand alone without Luke’s interpretative help, they’re really quite weird.

“Supposed you had 100 sheep.” And…we’re off on the weirdness already. First, we’ve got the bias against shepherds going on, people didn’t want to imagine themselves as shepherds because shepherds were a disrespected group of people. In particular, shepherding required being with the sheep all the time, and so required a man to be away from his family. “Being away from home at night, they were unable to protect their women, hence considered dishonorable. In addition, they often were considered thieves because they grazed their flocks on other people’s property.”1 But, also, we have a romanticization of shepherds in the Bible, including with King David, we have Psalms celebrating God as a shepherd, and this is the book of Luke which informs us that it was shepherds keeping their flocks at night who were first told the good news of Jesus’ birth.

So, the shepherd thing is complicated. But so is the 100. Because 100 sheep is a lot of sheep. It is more sheep than a shepherd would be expected to have, they represent an unusual amount of ovine wealth. It is likely, at a flock that size that we’re dealing with a family of shepherds rather than a single shepherd because one person simply didn’t take care of 100 sheep. Well, in real life. But this is a parable of Jesus, and it’s weird, so we don’t know.

OK, so we’ve established that Jesus is asking people to consider having wealth, derived from a hated occupation.

Huh. Rather despite myself, this is starting to make a little bit of sense. Because the OPENING of the Gospel story isn’t a walk straight into the parable. Instead, it says, ‘Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ So he told them this parable:” (Luke 15:1-13, NRSV) This whole thing is set in the context of responding to those who are grumbling about Jesus hanging out with tax collectors and sinners.

Amy Jill Levine explains this really well.

“The problem with ‘tax collectors’ is not that they denied the covenant; it is that they work for Rome and so would be seen by many within the Jewish community as traitors to their own people.

Sinners are not ‘outcasts’; they are not cast out of synagogues or out of the Jerusalem Temple. To the contrary, they are welcome in such places, since such places encourage repentance. The Gospels generally present sinners as wealthy people who have not attended to the poor. That is a dandy definition of the term. Thus, in a first century context, sinners, like tax collectors, are individuals who have removed themselves form the common welfare, who look to themselves rather than to the community.”2

She goes on:

“As for sinners – that is those who think about themselves and not of others- Paul provides the standard instructions. In 1 Corinthians 5.11, Paul advices his fledgling church, “But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother or sister who is sexually immoral or greedy, or who is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber. Do not even eat with such a one.” They are the ancient drug pushers, insider traders, arms dealers, and, especially, colonial collaborationists. And yes, Jesus eats with them – that’s part of his genius, that he recognizes that they are part of the community and goes out to get them.”3

So, Jesus takes the grumbling about his eating with sinners and tax collectors and invites people to consider being a wealthy shepherd. OK. We’re caught up. What happens next again? "Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep.’” (Luke 15:4-6, NRSV)

But, here is the thing. The question, about who would leave 99 really vulnerable sheep alone in the middle of no where to go find one lost one… generally speaking, one should not leave 99 vulnerable sheep alone to go get one sheep. If you did that, you’d come back to maybe 80 sheep, and then if you went to get another sheep, you’d have maybe 60 and truthfully it just wouldn’t work. Sheep without a shepherd get lost easily, they fall, they get snagged, predators get them, they can fall in water and sink or fail to find “still waters” and get dehydrated. Grazing sheep are intensive, and you can’t leave the group to go get one.

Unless, of course, the shepherd works in a team, like we might think given how many sheep there are, in which case it makes sense to go get the one. So that’s one good point – that it is better to work in a team when caring for the vulnerable – but Jesus doesn’t set it up that way. Jesus has the ONE person go do something ridiculous. And succeed. And throw a party. AT WHICH, given the number of people have been invited, it would be reasonable to assume that there may be a need to butcher a sheep.

Have I established my point that these stories are weird yet?

The second story is a bit of a retelling of the first. A woman has 10 coins, which isn’t an obscene amount of wealth, but is a pretty lovely nest egg. The coin referenced is the standard daily wage for a laborer. Two of the coins would feed a family of four for 5-7 days at 3000 calories a day, or for 9-12 days at 1,800 calories a day. We don’t know who is in the woman’s household but we know it is her house and her coins and relative to the truly impoverished people of that era, she was doing relatively well. She loses a coin, she finds it, she throws a party for her female friends, which probably cost more than the coin.

These two stories build up to the Parable of the Lost Son, but they also stand on their own.

What on earth do we do with these weird stories? They are stories of people making financially bad decisions. The people are overly generous in their gratitude. They’re unrealistic. Perhaps they’re living kingdom values and not the world’s values. That’s probably worth some consideration.

But the crux of a parable is to make us think. To help us see how things are, and help us consider if we’re happy with how things are. A single shepherd wouldn’t leave 99 sheep. A party shouldn’t cost more than what it celebrates. That’s not how things work.

And yet…. What are the exceptions? What are things that exist in the world where if you had 10 of them, lost 1, and got that one back, you’d throw a part regardless of cost?

I think one important answer is: people. If I had 10 kids and lost one, and found that one again, I’d throw a party. If I had 10 friends and lost one and got one back again, I’d throw a party. If I lost a person and got them back again, I’d throw a party. If a child, or anyone really, was lost, I’d go after them.

I will say, as a camp person, that I get back to that team idea on this. If a camper is having a problem, we always have two counselors with a group. So one counselor takes care of the rest of the campers and the other counselor sits with the camper and talks through what is going on. They’re both imperative. You can’t risk the 99 for the 1, but you can’t ignore the 1 if the 1 has infinite value either! Which definitely means we have to work together.

And, kingdom math doesn’t math like capitalistic math. Capitalistic math says people are expendable and wealth matters. Kingdom math says wealth is dispensable and people matter. That’s really the crux of the weirdness of these parables. They’re in kingdom math.

I’ve never lived in fear that God’s love is insufficient for any person, so I don’t worry a whole lot about the mechanisms of traditional sin, repentance and forgiveness. But the Gospels aren’t really working with mainstream Christian teachings either;) To repent is to turn around. My favorite image of it is of a person who is veering down a difficult path, who hears God’s gentle whispers, and turns around to see God and God’s love. When turned around, they attend to where God is looking, and decide to follow that path instead.

In practical terms, that turning around often happens when we’re hurt and tender and someone listens to us. It happens when the women sweeps for the coin or the shepherd goes after the lost sheep, and the tenderness of being sought out and cared for changes our lives.

Jesus seems to be telling the religiously faithful that the tax collectors and sinners needed to be loved back into community. Not to be judged, or ostracized, not to be condemned or even ignored. To be loved back into community.

I think the people of the day would have had plenty of objections to this. I think we have plenty of objections to this if we’re honest. But, if we took the powerful people who are living out greed rather than seeking the well being of all God’s children, and we thought of them like lost sheep in need of tender care, that would be listening to Jesus. That is the way of peace, and the story of the power of love, that is the kindom values at work, that is the profound rejection of the world’s violence and tendency to dehumanize.

Hmmm.

Help us all, Holy One. Amen

1 Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) “Textual Notes: Luke 16:1-16” p, 232

2 Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus (USA: HarperOne, 2014), p 33.

3 Levine, 34

September 14, 2025

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

Loving Your Enemies

September 7, 2025March 17, 2026
by Sara Baron

“Making Space" based on Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18, Luke 14: 25-33

I spent some time this week annoyed at myself for my scripture selections and wishing for a do-over. Particularly relevant, I should share, was that I have been *a little* tender over kindergarten starting this week so a text on hating mothers wasn’t resonating super well. Add to it a Psalm that is beautiful and wonderful and also has been used in the anti-choice movement for decades and I was ready to throw my hands up in the air.

So, I turned to my commentaries, and the Jesus Seminar colors the line about hating families and life PINK meaning it is likely to have been spoken by Jesus. They say,

“The severity of this saying can only be understood in the context of the primacy of filial relationships. Individuals had no real existences apart from their ties to blood relatives, especially parents. If one did not belong to a family, one had no real social existence. Jesus is therefore confronting the social structures that governed his society at their core. For Jesus, family ties faded into insignificance in relation to God’s imperial rule, which he regarded as the fundamental claim on human loyalty.”1

So, while the language itself IS about hating family, and is meant to be shocking, there is something even more going on there. Jesus is taking down fundamental identities, and claiming that God’s love is more than even the things we identify with most.

Then, out of the blue, Helen Ryde died. Helen (they/them), was an organizer for the Reconciling Ministries Network, which is the largest group in the United Methodist Church been working for the full inclusion of queer and trans people in the church and the world. Helen was assigned to the Southeastern Jurisdiction, which is the Southeastern United States and that wasn’t necessarily an enviable area.

Unless you were Helen.

Helen was queer and non-binary, and Helen had a special heart for those who thought Helen and those like them were going to hell. In the days since they died, I watched a sermon they gave where they talked about the people most resistant to change, most set in their ways, most unable to be reached. In organizing language, those people are called “the laggards.” Officially, as organizers, the laggards are to be ignored, because they can’t be reached.2

In their sermon, Helen talked about reaching out anyway.

And, in my experience, that was Helen to the core of their being. My most significant experiences with Helen were in the Love Your Neighbor Coalition Strategy Teams. Let me unpack that. The Love Your Neighbor Coalition is a group of coalition partners including all of the racial-ethnic caucus groups in The United Methodist Church, all the groups that have worked for Full Inclusion of queer and trans people, umbrella justice groups like MFSA, and those working for disability rights, and creation care, along with those seeking justice for Palestinians. The Love Your Neighbor Coalition worked together as one at our United Methodist General Conferences where the rules of The United Methodist Church are written and can be changed. The Coalition has many different teams for General Conferences, and the Strategy team works with committees and the plenary floor to support legislation, oppose legislation, build alliances, organize talking points, name speakers, and work with the boundaries of parliamentary procedure.

So, Helen (and Kevin) and I were on this team and we were preparing for General Conference and there are always these fundamental questions about how we treat those who are working against us. I mean, even that language is kind hard, right? We don’t want to perceive anyone as the enemy or the opposition, but how do we talk about those who were organizing just as hard as we were but for the opposite priorities? And, how do we do it in CHURCH?

We would talk about wanting to acknowledge the fact that everyone was a beloved child of God, even those who wanted to prevent the church from sharing that everyone is a beloved child of God. We would talk about praying for people. We would talk about loving them.

And Helen would be quiet.

And then sometimes we’d talk about our frustrations, about the “how dare they”s about how clearly the people “on the other side” are beloved by God but they are GETTING IN THE WAY of God’s work on earth and it is time to stop them…

And then Helen would speak up.

Because somehow, Helen loved everyone with God’s love for them. Someone said this week that Helen was the best of us in the progressive UMC and that person was right. With Helen around, we could never dehumanize the opposition, we could never forget God’s love for the other side, and we could NEVER consider underhanded strategies counterbalanced the underhanded strategies being done to us. Stuff like that wasn’t possible when Helen was around because this quiet saint wouldn’t allow it. They would remind us about God, and God’s love for others, and that we were in the church, and that we had to model the love even if it meant losing for the time being.

That was Helen.

And sometimes I’d want to contradict them because I wanted to protect my queer and trans friends and family and parishioners but I couldn’t fight with Helen about it because they were vulnerable and engaged with love first anyway.

Helen is the one who, this past May after The United Methodist Church FINALLY shed its homophobic skin, stood up on the floor and spoke FOR letting the churches that disaffiliated from The United Methodist Church BACK in if they changed their minds.3

That’s who Helen was. They’d had their heart changed, and they therefore always left space for others to to change too.

And, on Tuesday, suddenly and in their 50s, Helen died. And for me and many, many others, it was as if the world itself changed colors. In the following days my Facebook contained nothing but tributes to Helen. Helen stood with people in their hardest moments. Helen saved lives. Helen loved. Helen called us to love. Helen changed us. So many of us, it is hard to fathom their death. After Helen’s death, I came back to this scripture, and it had changed.

Because Helen was the best of us in The United Methodist Progressive Movement, because Helen was the one who loved the conservatives the best (and the rest of us too.) They showed that whoever can’t see beyond their own team cannot be following Jesus. Whoever can dismiss another person’s full humanity, isn’t working for the fullness of the kindom of God.

Whoever has limits on their love isn’t doing things God’s way.

All of a sudden the scripture made sense, in the light of Helen’s life.

And, beloveds, this is terrifyingly applicable to us now. There are people we perceive to be on the other team, in a few ways ;). In Helen’s life I hear the echos of Martin Luther King’s teachings that the change we seek in the world is the change that is better for everyone, even the ones currently engaged in oppression.

“hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends. Somewhere somebody must have a little sense, and that’s the strong person. The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil. … You just keep loving people and keep loving them, even though they’re mistreating you. Here’s the person who is a neighbor, and this person is doing something wrong to you and all of that. Just keep being friendly to that person. Keep loving them. Don’t do anything to embarrass them. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with bitterness because they’re mad because you love them like that. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. “love your enemies.”4

We don’t seek to change hearts with hate, but with showing the power and depth of love. It is LOVE that changes hearts, even the hearts that seem too brittle to change.

There are people doing harm right now, there are people doing us harm right now, there are people who we experience as the opposition. We need not be naive about this (Helen wasn’t), but it turns out we are still called to love them. May God help us. We need it. Amen

1 The Five Godspels: What did Jesus Really Say? ed. Robert Funk (NY: HarperOne, 1993) page 353.

2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=D64loNQzG94&t=0h4m44s

3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sfIGBgF8SM

4Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, “Loving Your Enemies,” Sermon Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church

“Loving Your Enemies,” Sermon Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church

September 7, 2025

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

Radical Invitation

August 31, 2025March 17, 2026
by Sara Baron

“Radical Invitation”based on Psalm 18:1, 10-16 and Luke 14:1, 7-14

The Psalm gives us a chance to hear God saying, “Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it….I would feed you with the finest of the wheat, and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.“ (18:10b, 16) It is a beautiful and succinct summary of much of the Bible itself. God wishes to give us good and abundant gifts, including making sure we are all fed with “the finest wheat.” God wishes for us to be satisfied and whole. God dreams of people engaging in mutual care and concern so that the whole earth is an expression of God’s abundance and all people are able to open their mouths wide and be filled with good food.

This fits into one of the central themes of the Bible itself – God’s desire for just distribution of resources – rest, land, food, housing, labor, knowledge, wisdom, healthcare, and everything else. Because if resources are distributed justly then the abundance of creation is more than enough to provide for all people – and WELL.

The dreams of God for a just society as laid out in the Torah revolve around just distribution of resources along with a system of justice that allows for fair resolution of disputes. To get there, God bans interest, the capacity to sell ancestral land, bribery, lying in court, and forcing ANYONE to work on the Sabbath. John Dominic Crossan points out that in the Creation narrative itself God starts the distribution of resources by having rest and then distributing it to everyone!

For the first 400 years of Ancient Israelite history, all evidence points to the fact that people lived by God’s dreams and the people were fed and tithes were used to provide for those who fell on hard times (and the priests). Then there were kings, and things got complicated and stayed that way.

By the time of Jesus, God’s dreams of all the people having access to abundant and good food was simply in shambles. The rich ate in ridiculous luxury while large swaths of the population died of malnutrition.

In my investigation of this passage, it came up that the Gospel Luke was written to the elites.1 This was not something I new (or maybe retained), but it fits. I know Luke and Acts to be written in the best Greek of the New Testament, indicating that Luke was exceptionally well educated. I know Luke to be the Gospel most aware of the difference between God’s ways and the world’s ways. Luke is always noticing those living in poverty, women, those who are struggling, widows, orphens and foreigners, and those who others might not even consider part of the community. He is always, always, always focused on vulnerable.

And for me at least, it makes sense that a person who came from the ranks of the elites and became a Jesus follower would have that sort of obsession. He had his world turned upside down by Jesus, and that meant taking his focus from the top of the world’s hierarchies to the bottoms. And, in doing so, he called on others to do the same.

The passage we read today is one that is mostly challenging for the elites. Most of the time in the Roman Empire, people ate within their social classes. Even in Jewish circles, it was pretty common for people to create closed “false kinship groups” that they shared meals with, and the exclusivity of those groups pretended to keep people pious.

There was, further, an expectation of obligation with invitations. If you went to dinner at someone’s house, it was expected you would invite them over for dinner later – to a meal at least as expensive. If you couldn’t do so, then you wouldn’t’ go to dinner.

The early Jesus-following community blew these norms to oblivion. The early Jesus community expected people to show up at shared meals and eat together across every line that society might use to divide people. Not just social class, or marital status, but also those who were slaves and those who were free, those who were Jewish and those who were Greek.

The thing is, while everyone benefited from knowing each other in the Body of Christ – especially across hierarchical lines – the people for whom it is most dangerous was the elite. Because for the elites, especially those in cities where propriety was most carefully protected, engaging with people “below” them in the world’s hierarchies meant they might lose their elite status. Their families might cut them off, their friends might disengage, they had power and status and even wealth to lose by showing up in mixed communities.

My favorite commentary, The Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels points out “Exclusive fellowship required an exclusive table, while inclusive fellowship required an inclusive one.”2 The early Jesus Community was an inclusive fellowship. And it was challenging. We hear a lot in the letters of Paul about people really struggling to let go of the world and it’s hierarchies in order to truly eat together as the Body of Christ.

All of this helps make sense of why the Gospel of Luke teaches the elites to invite people in poverty and people who were disabled to their tables. This is the Jesus way, as Luke has experienced it. And Luke’s audience is most in need of learning it. Instead of being repaid by a similar invitation, Luke tells them they’ll be repaid “at the resurrection of the righteous.”

That is, Luke says they should be more worried about God’s ways than the world’s. I worry Luke’s nuance is a little bit too “afterlife judgment focused” and I’d rather if we just thought about it as “because that’s how we practice the kindom.”

It is interesting to try to think about how we take this passage today. There are a lot of possible lessons in it. I mean, subverting the hierarchies is the Jesus way is the prime one, but you all have heard that before! Another easy option is “it is important to practice the kindom of God” but, again, nothing new there.

Perhaps this passage serves as a simple reminder to invite someone to dinner, particularly someone you don’t know yet and who might be different from you. That’s a good and really practical response to this passage. It is also fabulously good for the faith community when we do invite each other over and get to know each other more deeply.

There is another possible radical invitation in this passage, but its impact varies. Because, like the early church, we are a gathering of people that the world sees as having different “values” or coming from different “classes.” We know that all of us are made in the image of God and beloved exactly as we are, that nothing at all in the world can make one person more important than another. Yet, like the early church, we still have to do the work to dismiss the teachings of the world and practice the kindom of God.

So, for those of us who don’t attend Breakfast already, I think this passage offers us an invitation to attend our Breakfast AS A GUEST and experience it as such. That there is something really hard about accepting help. One of my mentors often quoted Simone Weil who said, “It is only by the grace of God that the poor can forgive the rich the bread they feed them.” I have such respect for our breakfast guests who are willing to receive the gifts we give them, and who do so with such grace.

For those whose finances are secure enough that a free breakfast doesn’t make a difference, it feels very Lukan to show up at a free breakfast anyway. It can be hard to be served. It can be hard to accept a free gift. It can be hard to wait in line. It can be hard to see other people struggle. The work that our breakfast guests already do is work that some us may also need to learn how to do.

For those in our community who already come to Breakfast, the invitation looks different. God wants everyone to have access to good and abundant food, delicious food, to fill your bodies and lift up your souls. I think the radical invitation here is to continually shake off the myths of capitalism and sink more deeply into the stories of God. To pay attention to the ways that poverty is a condition created by society, and that it is society’s sin that anyone would struggle to find enough resources in this created world of abundance.

Because, that’s important – God created with abundance. There is enough food for everyone! There is enough rest for everyone! There is enough space for everyone! There is enough!

We just have to distribute resources fairly. We are called to practice the kindom. That probably means we should invert any hierarchies we find. After all, those are the teachings of the God we know. Thanks be to God! Amen

1Footnotes in The Jewish Annotated Bible editted by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler

2Page 382, “Meals”

August 31, 2025

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

As pictured in our photo show by Larry McArthur

Sermons

To Be Set Free

August 24, 2025March 17, 2026
by Sara Baron

“To Be Set Free” based on Psalm 103: 1-8 and Luke 13:10-17

I’m going to preach on Luke. But, before I do, can we take just one more moment to be grateful for the Psalm? It is magnificent. The words echo throughout history, “Bless the Lord, O my soul.” It contains those universal truths that God’s steadfast love endures forever, that God is a healer and forgiver, that God is satisfying and satiating. It is pretty rare for me to read scripture and not fight with it, to instead just sigh with relief to hear good truths. This is one of the texts that does so for me. It is truth-filled, grace-filled and wise. If it is what you need today, you may want to just pick it up and read it over and over letting the wonder of it flow through you. 😍

Now, Luke.

The story seems simple. Jesus was teaching in a Synagogue on the Sabbath, and a woman showed up who had been crippled for 18 years. She was unable to stand up straight. “When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, ‘Woman, you are set free from your ailment.’ When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.”

And, just like that, I have a lot of questions. I think the biggest one is: why her?

It seems impossible that she was the only person struggling who was there that day. Groups of humans always include people who are struggling, including with health. Was she the one who struggled the longest? The most severely? The most visibly?

Or was it just that she was the one he was ABLE to heal? Was she “ready” (whatever that might mean)? Was she open to it? Were his particular gifts well matched for that particular healing?

Or did she grab his attention in some particular way? Did she smile at him? Did she grimace so quietly no one was able to notice? Was it that she was there in the community of faith despite it all? Did he know her from before? Was it how others responded to her that he could tell if he healed her he’d heal then all?

That’s the thing about healing, they’re even larger than they seem. The diseases and illnesses and chronic pains of life separate people from their communities, and from the fullness of their lives. When a person is healed of any of it it not only heals their bodies but their whole being and heals the community they’re part of.

Maybe the whole community needed healing and by healing her he could bring them all to wholeness. Maybe that’s why it was her.

We aren’t going to know. But we are allowed to wonder.

I also end up wondering: what ails us? What has bent us over and kept us from being able to stand upright for all these years? If Jesus were here and ready to heal us, what would Jesus pick to heal here?

Maybe it would look the same… an injury, an illness, a chronic pain. But maybe those end up being the easy ones and Jesus would look more deeply. Maybe the healing some of us need is forgiveness. For something that happened years ago that we’ve been guilt-ily dragging along with us ever since. Perhaps Jesus would be looking for places healing would be in the capacity to let go of the guilt, and live in the now.

Maybe we need healing from the nagging worry that we’re not enough: not good enough, not kind enough, not something or another enough. Perhaps, then, the healing would be Jesus reminding us that we’re Divinely-made, Divinely-loved, and not required to be or do anything to earn it. A time of being able to “rest assured” that the God loves us and we’re not alone.

Maybe the healing we need is from grief that aches in us for years on end without changing. A healing that would help us move from simply aching to also remembering the sweetness of who or what we lost.

Maybe the healing Jesus would offer would be the hardest kind of all – the healing of the traumas we hold. To hold us safely and tenderly and heal us from the inside out, starting with the hurts that are most tender and long-held within. I think that kind of healing would make the crippled woman standing up seem mundane. To reassure those of us who have experienced the unthinkable that it wasn’t our fault, that we didn’t do anything to deserve it, it didn’t taint us, that we are perfectly lovable as we are, and we are really and truly safe.

Imagine how that could impact our lives and our community, if the deepest, most traumatic wounds we carry were healed! Some among us might be unrecognizable with the burdens lifted off their shoulders. Hmmm. I guess they might be able to stand up straight, for the first time in a really long time.

I am under the impression that God is pro-healing. I am so under the impression that healing is much harder than any of us wish it was, including when it comes to the guilt, emotions, fears, and traumas we carry.

So I invite us to imagine. To take this story as our own, and imagine Jesus here, teaching away, blowing our minds with his loving insights, and then one by one turning to each of us with God’s own love for us and setting us free from our ailments. What would Jesus chose to free you from so you can be whole, reconnect more fully with your community, find and share peace?

[Pause for pondering]

Perhaps some of the answers we’ve named in the silence of our hearts ARE things that we are ready to let go of and able to be healed from. Others of them them are just bigger than our capacity to let go at this point. But what would it feel like to take seriously God’s wish for us to be well? To be whole? To be freed from what we carry? And to consider how that might impact others around us?

Perhaps, as well, it makes sense to focus on the ways Jesus acted to heal the community, even by healing one person in it. Maybe we need healing as a whole community too. Healing from the pain of being in homophobic denomination for 50+ years. Healing from the pain of misdeed and abuse from clergy. Healing from the pain of misdeeds and abuse of fellow church members. Healing from disagreements and dis-enchantments and ways we mistrusted or misused each other. Healing from the pain of being able to see what the world is supposed to be and what it is. Healing, maybe even, from the times when the church seemed strong and powerful and full and now doesn’t. Or, on the contrary, the pain of yearning for others to be at peace with the miracle that is church now. There is plenty of shared communal pain.

What would it be like to see the love of God transforming that pain, freeing us from it, letting us stand strong? What would it mean for us to hear God calling and hear Jesus tell us we are free from our communal ailments? How might we respond differently? Where might there be more flexibility, more patience, more joy, more hope?

I often fear that there is a pain in churches in America in the 21st century that relates profoundly to decline. There were many people in pews in the 1950s are there is a fear that the fewer people sitting in them now is a sign of failure (of some sort.) Having looked at it historically, I don’t think that’s the case, but it is a place I hear Jesus calling us to healing and freedom anyway.

In this community of faith, we tend to rather love science. Most of us are inclined to trust doctors and medicines too, although plenty of have concerns about some aspects of Western medicine while we’re mentioning it. 😉 Nevertheless, we may struggle to understand what it means that Jesus healed someone’s crippled back with his words. That question may distract us from other meanings of the passage.

One of the most important facets of Jesus’s healing was that by healing the physical ailments of individuals he healed whole communities. He took away what separated people from life-giving relationships. He re-united them. He took seriously the needs people have to connect.

The ancients didn’t separate body and mind like many of us have been taught to, which is probably good because they were likely right! Bodies and minds and spirits are all intermingled and impact each other – just like all of us impact each other along the way. Healing a body, or a mind, or a spirit heals the person and the people around them. Healing has ripple effects.

We also can hear in this passage and all healing passages God’s desires for our wholeness and well being. Which is where I think we are led today. God yearns for our healing, our wholeness, our well-being. Likely, for most of us, there are things we can let go of and be free from and thereby be healed. Let today serve as an invitation to to hear, “beloved child of God, you are set free from your ailment.” And know that as you are freed, so too are we all.

Thanks be to God. Amen

August 24. 2025

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

Frustration

August 17, 2025March 17, 2026
by Sara Baron

“Frustration” based on Psalm 80:1-2 and 8-19, Isaiah 5:1-7

Photo by John McGarvey found on flickr

In our texts today, God is frustrated. In both texts, the same metaphor is used. God is like a vineyard owner who did everything right. God picked good land, dug it and cleared it, planted it with good vines that had been carefully selected and nurtured, protected it with a wall and even a watchtower, and waited the required years before it would yield grapes. In the meantime the wine vats were prepared. The vine grew and was massive.

But the grapes never came.

Isaiah makes the metaphor transparent. God expected JUSTICE but saw bloodshed. God planted for right-living but instead got domination.

So, the story is that God carefully selected people to share a new vision of love in the world, brought the people to the promised land, nurtured and protected them, and watched to see how the vision of justice and equity would play out. It didn’t.

I’m told, actually, it played out quite well for 400 years or so, and maybe that shouldn’t be trivialized. 400 years is a decent amount of time and archeologists who dig in ancient Israel find that for those years the houses were all the same sizes. Which means there wasn’t an accumulation of wealth nor of poverty and that seems to fit the prescribed vision of God pretty well.

It is important for me to hold on to those 400 years – the ones before kingship – as well as to remember that in a lot of societies over the course of history, societies have been capable of mutual care and concern. There have been a lot of ways humans have organized themselves where resources are justly distrusted, where many voices are heard and listened to, where the needs of the whole are prioritized over the desires of the powerful.

What I can’t figure out is why all societies aren’t like that. Because, truly, that’s better for everyone. The Intersectional Justice Book Club has invited us to read “Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning” by Vanessa Priya Daniel. I’ve been reading it and I thought she summed things up well when she said, “So much of the fracture of humanity is about our seeming inability to upgrade away from two bugs in the original factory settings of our species: greed and dominance.” (Page 59) She also has some great suggestions on how to respond 😉

When I read the Bible, when I look at Christianity history, and when I look around today, I see that. I see greed and dominance in a variety of formats and formulations. And I see God and God’s people pushing back to say “this isn’t right.” We aren’t supposed to live in a world of hierarchies – we’re all made in God’s image. We aren’t supposed to live in a world obsessed with the “now” at the cost of the future – killing creation is killing a sacred gift. We aren’t supposed to live in a world where justice applies to some and not all, where food is accessible by some and not all, where care and support are given to some but not all.

It isn’t supposed to be this way. And it hasn’t always been this way. But heavens, Biblical history isn’t particularly short and these greed and domination problems are PERSISTENT. But it doesn’t have to be this way, it hasn’t always been this way, and it is possible to do it differently.

Which makes even more sense of God being frustrated, because God had set up the people to do it differently. And they had. And then they stopped.

Which isn’t the best news. That even when a just society exists, it can stop being one. Darn.

But, let’s be clear, that’s not our issue right now. Our issue is that we’ve lived in various formations of societies with greed and domination taking precedence for millennia now and at the moment every single bit of progress is slipping away. Compassion wasn’t exactly having an easy time of it at any point in our lives in this society but what was able to be done in the name of compassion is being destroyed systematically.

Our question is: what know. Bishop Julius Trimble, who is the General Secretary of the General Board of Church and Society of The United Methodist Church wrote an email this week that included these words:

This is our season for agitation, sustained resistance and disciplined hope. The kind of hope and witness born of our Wesleyan heritage and Christian Discipleship. Our Bible and our Book of Discipline give witness that the divine imprint of human dignity and sacred worth originates with God and cannot be taken away by the stroke of a pen or promulgation of any theological or ideological thesis of superiority and isolation.

The Love Ethic that is so central to the teachings of Jesus and marching orders for the church cannot be free of radical resistance to the oppression of peoples with expectation of quiet acquiescence.

…This is a time to be counted in the work of bold resistance to all who make adversaries of our neighbors. Join us to do more, speak up more, give more and continue to push for social justice no matter how hard the barrier.

This is a time to love boldly, serve joyfully and lead courageously.

In the words of a bold American Academic, Brené Brown, “Courage is contagious.”1

My question, then, is what we can do together to keep ourselves focused on God’s dreams for a just society, to support each other in the work of the resistance, and keep ourselves fueled and aflame. Or, to say that more simply – how do we do this and not burn out?

The really good news here is that those particular questions are the ones that a faith community are particularly suited to answer!!! We are people who gather together. Who dream together. Who listen to God’s dreams in scriptures and sing them in hymns and pray them together and seek even to live them together. We are people who slow down and try to hear God in nature and in silence and in each other and in those struggling and in EVERYTHING else. But the key is we are people who encourage each other to slow down and listen.

We are people who PRACTICE the kindom of God. Right? We share – “our prayers, our presence, our gifts, our service and our witness.” We share what we have in trust that when we all give what we can do together is even more powerful than what any of us could do apart. We engage in shared decision making. Which, let’s be honest, can be slow and annoying. BUT it gets us to better decisions than any other model. We INTENTIONALLY invert hierarchies, pay attention to power, and refuse to accept society’s definitions that suggest some people don’t matter. We practice TRUST – in God and each other. We, sometimes despite ourselves, work together to maintain hope, because we know hope matters.

Most of all, we’re in it together. We have shared wisdom, shared resources, shared resilience. When one of us is overwhelmed, others can step up. When one of us needs rest, others can provide it.

I often think of the wonder that is the fact that choir can hold a note of music indefinitely. No singer can do that, but together, a group of people can. I don’t think there are any organizations better poised to respond to this moment than justice-seeking faith communities and while times ARE hard, I am so grateful to be with you in this. I need to be a part of a community that practices the kindom’s values and you give me hope.

Because one of these days, those vines that God so carefully planted ARE going to bear fruit and it will be beautiful. And until then, we keep each other going. Thanks be to God who gave us each other. Amen

1 Email entitled “If The Foundations Are Destroyed What Can The Righteous Do?“ Psalm 11:3-4 sent on August 14, 2025

August 17, 2025

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

Love Boldly, Serve Joyfully, Lead Courageously

August 10, 2025March 17, 2026
by Sara Baron

“Love Boldly, Serve Joyfully, Lead Courageously”based on Isaiah 1:1, 10-20

The radicalness of our ancient Jewish ancestors in faith was that they came to understand their God as a God who cared about how people treated each other. This was a faith revolution in its time and place in the world. Surrounding nations believed in gods and goddesses who were fundamentally self-serving and needed to be cajoled and bribed to care about people. Our ancestors in faith came to know and understand a God whose care about people is foundational, immutable, and unchanging.

God’s steadfast love endures forever. That’s how they described God, that’s the faith that has been handed down to us over many generations. We know and connect with God whose steadfast love endures forever, whose fundamental nature is love, who assesses how the people are doing by how they’re caring for the vulnerable.

According to the prophet Isaiah, the people were not doing well. They were engaging in the acts and rituals of prayer and worship, the things intended to help them connect with God and God’s ways, but they did so without following the most basic facet of God’s wishes: caring for the vulnerable.

God accuses them of praying with the blood of the vulnerable on their hands.

And then asks them to wash their hands and try again, “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove your evil deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil;

learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan; plead for the widow.” (Isaiah 1:16-17) This God whose nature is love, whose care is for people, is really quite radical. Not only does God care and love, God’s care and love isn’t centered on the king, it is centered on the vulnerable.

I remain so grateful for those who listened well enough to God’s voice to differentiate what they expected to hear from what God was actually saying! And all of those since then who have affirmed the importance of knowing a God of love.

In 2008 The United Methodist Church updated it’s mission statement. The original one, passed in 2000 was “To make disciples of Jesus Christ.” In 2008 a second phrase was added, “To make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.” I’ve been grateful for the addition, as I believe the point of connecting with Jesus and God is increasing the capacity to love the world into fullness.

We all see, every day, examples of injustice and wrongness and extreme examples of the sorts of things God was mad about in Isaiah 1. The world is in need of serious transformation. Most recently The United Methodist Church’s Council of Bishops added a vision statement to complement our mission statement. I admit to a healthy amount of skepticism about how much things like that matter, but it turns out I like it.

The new vision states: The United Methodist Church forms disciples of Jesus Christ, who empowered by the Holy Spirit, love boldly, serve joyfully, and lead courageously in local communities and worldwide connections.1 Now, it is too wordy. But the keys are “love boldly, serve joyfully, and lead courageously,” which is explained this way:

Love Boldly: Passionately love God and, like Jesus, embrace and include people of every age, nation, race, gender and walk of life.2
Serve Joyfully: With a Christ-like heart, journey alongside the most vulnerable, offering care and compassion with joy.3
Lead Courageously: Follow Jesus’ example by resisting and dismantling all systems of evil, injustice, and oppression, striving for peace, justice and reconciliation.4

It seems to me that the guidance of the Holy Spirit that helped people hear the radical nature of God’s love in ancient times is still working among us and prodding us forward. These are words about caring for the vulnerable, taking notice of who the modern “widows, orphans, and foreigners” are today. (Sometimes they are widows, orphans, and foreigners even today.) These are words calling us together to do the real work of God – LOVING. Even better, they feel like words we need right now, because loving with God’s love today does take a lot of courage and one of the best ways to have courage and maintain love is to use the resilience given to us by joy!

Isaiah tells us God wants us to “learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan; plead for the widow.” The Council of Bishops says we can do that by loving boldly, serving joyfully, and leading courageously.

Thanks be to God for being the God whose Steadfast Love Endures forever. And, thanks be to God for the chance to be in a church-at-large – a denomination – who is working together for good. Amen

1 https://www.umcjustice.org/latest/the-united-methodist-church-unveils-new-guiding-vision-statement-5983

2Inspired by Matthew 22:37-39 and John 13:34-35

3Inspired by Psalm 100:1, Nehemiah 8:10, John 13:14-15 and 1 Peter 4:10

4 Inspired by Joshua 1:9 and Ephesians 6:10)

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

August 10, 2025

Sermons

Cords of Human Kindness

August 3, 2025March 17, 2026
by Sara Baron

“Cords of Human Kindness”based on Psalm 107:1-9, 43 and Hosea 11:1-11 August 3, 2025

Content note: this communion Sunday we also said goodbye to our former lay leader, youth group leader, Breakfast Coordinator, Social Worker, and sibling in Christ Sylvester as we send him off to retirement.

A lot of Bibles, and even the Lectionary page at Vanderbilt Divinity Library, label our Hosea passage “Like a mother, God loves Israel.” I can see why. The passage clearly talks about God as a nurturing and loving parent. The one who taught their son to walk, who picked him and snuggled him, who fed him and healed him.

But, when I read the passage I was struck by the fact that there isn’t anything actually maternal about those acts of care-giving. Unless, of course the Hebrew for feeding referenced nursing and I just missed it because I was reading in English. But, it doesn’t – I checked. According to the New Interpreter’s Bible, the passage refers to parental work, but doesn’t have any gendered nuances – other than the ones we project on to it.

Now, as you may know, I’m all for holistic conceptions of the Divine and push back on masculine language and imagery of God instinctively. The concept of God as a loving MOTHER can be a gift to heal wounds that some people hold, and certainly moves towards wholeness in conceiving of the Divine. But, also, the concerns I have about the ways human fathers can make the conception of a Divine father too violent can also apply to human mothers. Human parents come with a lot of failings.

In this this case though, I wonder if we want to stay with it, in part. I wonder if there is healing in thinking of The Divine as a Gentle and Compassionate FATHER and in sanctifying Gentle and Compassionate FATHERHOOD rather than in pigeonholing Gentle and Compassionate Parenting to Motherhood.

We are a church that see Gentle and Compassionate Parenting on the regular. And we are blessed to see it from people of all genders. We know, because we see it, that people of all genders love their children. We watch mothers, fathers, and parents teaching their children to walk. Well, let’s be honest, its bigger than that too. We watch parents and grandparents and friends in Gentle and Compassionate Nurturing Care. I noticed months ago that I found it hard to track where my infant son Michael was in after-worship events because he got passed around so much! Many humans have lifted him to their cheeks, and led him with cords of human kindness. This community offers this Gentle and Compassionate Nurturing Care that reflects the Divine. And it is BEAUTIFUL.

With Michael though, he would get passed around – back before he got mobile – UNTIL he got to Sly. When he got to Sly, he stayed. All of you, somehow, read the room and wouldn’t separate the two. Sly’s Gentle and Compassionate Nurturing Care and Michael’s love of it was attended to with grace.

When I was looking for Photo Show entries this Lent, and “relationship” came up, I tried to find a picture of Sly holding Michael where Sly’s face was visible and Michael’s wasn’t. I couldn’t, so I didn’t submit one. Another of you did the same. Two of you submitted stunning pictures of the two them, and got cautious emails from me letting you know that the pictures were great and we’d savor them but not put them on the internet.

As a community we have seen something sacred in the care of one man for one baby, and made space for it and celebrated it.

It makes sense to me. There are a lot of ways that Sly has acted as Gentle and Nurturing Father in this community. (He is NOT the only one, but he is the one leaving after today, so I’m naming it today.) Sly feeds us. He makes things more beautiful. He shows up, time and time again. He brings his best and uses it to care for others. He brings laughter along with him everywhere he goes. And, in his time with us, he has devoted much of his energy to the care a youth group (now grown into young adults) and showing young people how to share love in the world.

I’m not supposed to be embarrassing Sly today. (Shrug). But normally I have to worry about him getting me back, and this time he’s leaving so he can’t 😉

Friends, I think it can be healing for our souls to think about the Divine as a Gentle and Compassionate Nurturing Parent. Far too often the Divine Parent imagery is that of judger, or punisher, dominator, or some other form of “Daddy-knows-best” weirdness. In Hosea the Divine Parent gets MAD because the child is being super awful. God claimed Israel as child, and asked Israel to be a beacon and example of mutual care and compassion and Israel KEPT ON FAILING. But the key is in verse 8, “How can I give you up, Ephraim?… My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.” God is mad, but God’s love is the defining parental act. The passage says, “I loved my child to teach them love, but they failed. And I love them anyway and will take care of them anyway.” It tracks perfectly with the Psalm affirming that God’s Steadfast Love Endures Forever, and God helps people even in the most dire of situations.

Beloveds, there is sacredness in nurture, in compassion, in care, in care-giving. Our society tends to minimize the value of care-giving, but as people of faith we live by a different value system. We see the sacred work that is tender and loving care. It is work that reminds us of God, it is work that shows us God with us. When we see tender and loving care, we are reminded that God is like that. Not one who powers over us, but one who holds us with gentleness.

So, thanks be to God for all the people who show nurturing, compassion, gentleness, and care. And, while we’re at it, thanks be to God for the moment we – as individuals – pull that off! (Quite often only by the grace of God.)

And, thank you Holy One, for a community that sees the power of Love that is compassionate and nurturing rather than overpowering and dominating. We are so grateful to be able to see the sacredness of gentleness. We are so grateful to show the world the power of nurturing love! 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

August 3, 2025

Sermons

Praising God

July 27, 2025March 17, 2026
by Sara Baron

“Praising God” based on Psalm 138 and Luke 11:1-4

When I think of God, I think of God as the ultimate empath. God is with us feeling all the things we’re feeling, and not just with us, nor even with EVERYONE on earth, my belief system says that God is feeling the feelings of all creation. Which means God is feeling what our pets feel when they are apart from us, and what other mammals feel looking for food. And then, perhaps we move out of “feeling” exactly, but whatever it is that a reptile experiences when it is cold, or whatever feeling a leaf has when the plant is parched, or however we conceive of a rock experiencing erosion.

I believe God is with, for, and attentive to every part of creation, and even guiding all of us along to the extent that we’re willing to listen. The good news here is that the rock doesn’t need too much encouragement, and I’m not sure the leaves do either 😉

But, to go back to the beginning, as I think of God as the ultimate empath, I also believe God dreams good dreams for all of us and for all of creation. So not only does God feel our feelings with us, I tend to think of God as also having God’s own feelings of sadness and disappointment in the ways we hurt each other, fail to care for the vulnerable, and harm Mother Earth.

And I say all that to say: I think God is holding a whole lot of sadness, grief, anger, hunger, loneliness and disappointment. I mean A WHOLE LOT. An inconceivably large amount. God holds within God’s own self all the sadness, grief, anger, hunger, loneliness, and disappointment of all the people, and all creation, and all God’s own dreams for justice. All of it, all at once, and probably for all time.

The God of Compassion holds soooooo much. More than enough to drown a person, more than enough I fear to drown all the people together. The God of Compassion is doing a lot of holding of hard emotions and realities.

As are we, beloveds. Less, thank goodness, but we are holding a lot of hard emotions and realities. Our own emotions and those of our beloveds; our fears for the world and for the world’s vulnerable; concerns for those who are ill, injured, and aging; generalized discomfort in being a part of this society; and so much more. Heavens it is a lot.

In fact, I often have some concerns that we’re all holding more sadness, grief, anger, hunger, loneliness, and disappointment than we can bear as well. Just our parts are a lot.

Then I read Psalm 138 and listen to it praising God with such profound gratitude. Right? “I give thanks, O Lord, with my whole heart!” (1a) The Psalmist praises God for God’s steadfast love and faithfulness, exalts God’s name, thanks God for answering prayers, thanks God for increasing the strength of their soul, names that everyone on earth has reasons to praise God and sing about God’s glory, expresses gratitude to God for being the God who cares about those who are struggling, expresses assurance that God is with them even when things are hard, affirms again that God’s steadfast love endures forever and ends with a plea that God stay the course and keep working towards good.

And, yeah, all that’s true! Wow. It feels nice to hear it, to say it, to feel it. YES, indeed, God is with us and God is good and that’s great news. And also, sometimes, that reality gets a little bit pushed off center by the other stuff these days. My compassion for the world distorts the view of the wonders all around me.

Beloveds of God, I think that means I am out of balance. I am taking on more of the world’s struggles than I can gracefully hold. So, I’ve been trying to counterbalance it. To my delight, it has been easier than expected.

My primary spiritual tool in re-balancing myself is has been the “Prayer of Creation” that I learned from Dr. Andy Dreitcer in seminary. These days I sit on my front porch to do it, and it is amazing in that once tiny slice of creation how many different things are able to draw my attention with wonder.

To engage in the Prayer of Creation, you find a place to sit or be quietly in nature, somewhere where the abundance of God’s world is present for you. (Really and truly, this is better outside. Yes, things like this church’s stained glass are also awe producing, but nature is always full of wisdom.) Then you invite God’s presence to be with you – which is really about bringing your attention to the fact that God is already with you. Then attend to what is around you, and let something draw your attention. Be with that thing (a tree, a leaf, an ant, a clover, a flower, something else entirely?), and simply rest in the presence of God and this one piece of God’s handiwork. Attend to it for a while gazing with body and soul, a time to simply be in wonder, amazement, openness, and receiving of God and this piece of God’s creation. When it feels like time, engage God in conversation about this thing that you noticed. You may want to ask God questions about it. Andy suggests, “Where has it been? Who has touched, held, seen it? What does God value it? How is it related to what is around it? How is it related to me? – to the rest of creation? What does it tell me of myself? And finally… How is God present to me through this piece of creation? What does it tell me of God? What is God saying to me, offering me?” Finally, thank God for the time and for the wonders of creation.

The end. These days I practice this a little bit more loosely. I go outside and attend to God with me, let my attention wander, let it land on something , rest and be with it, be awed, be in amazed, and then if my attention goes to something else to do the same work, I let it. I love Andy’s questions but I don’t always get to them.

What I find though, is that when I’m sitting outside watching a leaf soak up sunlight, while the birds sing and the breeze blows, I get filled up again. I am filled with the goodness. Sometimes I’m struck by a wet tree trunk, other times a tree that never called to me before fills me with awe. While I’m watching with wonder at how a plant has grown since yesterday, a fly lands on me and pulls me to it. And meanwhile I breath, and I notice God is with me, and God is good and loving and justice-seeking, and that we’re not in this kin-dom building work alone. God is WITH us, and FOR US, and God cares about the leaves on my neighbors un-identified plant, and about the inchworms crawling on the hostas, and God cares about me, and God cares about the people I’m worried about and while things are not OK, God is with us throughout it all.

And I breathe a little more. And I rest, and relax, and trust and hope. And after I’ve been praying with creation for a while (I like an hour, and I’m lucky to be able to take it), I am full and ready to face the realities around me.

I’m also full of gratitude. Because when I notice the pure miracle of sunlight on a leaf, it gives me a sense of magnitude because there are rather a lot of leaves in my view that all get sunlight every day and … WOW. Isn’t that cool? And similarly, there are a lot of humans who ARE getting “their daily bread” and WOW, isn’t THAT cool? It doesn’t take away the sting of my concern for the hungry, but I end up being reminded that there is a multitude of things to be grateful for TOO.

Then, to be honest, my days happen. And I end up holding a lot of pain. Some is mine, some is my families, some I hold because it is my job, some I read about. But I can hold it without being overcome by it when I’ve been filled up with God’s goodness FIRST.

And then I’m IN balance.

This is a little bit more personal than my preference is in preaching, but I’m hoping to remind you all that God is good and God’s goodness is all around us and we are able to attend to it and be filled by it and be able to hold a fuller balance. I’d LOVE it if I were the only one being occasionally overwhelmed by the struggles of the world right now, but I know I’m not.

In Luke we hear a version of Jesus sharing what we now call the Lord’s Prayer. I was stuck by how well it works with Psalm 138. It starts with intimacy, calling God Father in a way that brings a sense of family ties to the relationship with the Divine. (That’s the good part of using Father language.) Like the Psalm, we hear that God is holy and even God’s name should be praised. The prayer asks that the kin-dom of God come to earth – that instead of the reality we live of people completing against each other to survive and harming creation along the way that we might live as God would have us live in cooperation, mutual care, treating each other as kin and receiving the sacred blessings of creation as the sacred gifts they are. Then, comes the request for daily bread. That one, too, is profound. It reminds those of us who have daily food that it is something to be grateful for. It reminds us to be grateful for all who have enough, and brings our attention simultaneously to those who don’t. And then, the prayer turns to asking God for forgiveness and offering forgiveness. (This Jesus guy is good at getting to a lot of points in a short time.) And finally it asks that those of us who pray it be able to face what comes before us.

This, too, is a prayer of praise and of mutual connection with the Divine. It is shockingly good at holding together the truths that not all is well and also seeking that things be well!

This week, a Celtic version of the prayer was shared with me, one by John Philip Newell. It says:

Holy One beyond all names

Eternal Wellspring

May Love rise again in us today

With food for every table

Shelter for every family

And reverance for every life.

Forgives us our failings in love

And free us from all falseness

That the light of our souls may shine

And the strength of our spirits endure

For Earth and all its people’s

This day, tonight, and forever

Amen

I want to end bringing the idea of God as empath full circle. God holds the pain of all creation. But God also holds the delight and wonder of all creation. God holds the happy squeals of children, the awe of new parents, the laughter of shared friends, and the contentment of a person and a pet being petted. God feels the full bellies and well rested bodies of other mammals. God feels reptiles being warm in the sun, and feels whatever experience a leaf has when the right amount of water is flowing towards it and sunlight covers its expanses, and even whatever experience a rock has in being slowly moss covered. God is a God of Compassion who feels it all, and thanks be to God can help us balance feeling it all too. Amen

July 27, 2-25

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

There is a Time

July 20, 2025March 17, 2026
by Sara Baron

“There is a Time” based on Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 and Luke 10:38-42

If this if your first time hearing the story of the sisters Mary and Martha, welcome. These 5 verses pack a punch. Many people who have known this story well end up coming back to it regularly in thinking about their lives and how to live them well.

(Jesus MAFA image)

This week I was thinking about how we are such a Martha church. We are great at doing things! There are so many hospitable jobs to do to make breakfast happen, to prepare worship, to keep our building in good shape for people to use the bathrooms, to host various groups, to provide concerts, to extend our love out into the world in our work with the Sycamore Collective and UMCOR and VIM. We can Martha like anything! Martha was a householder who was hosting I’d guess a party of 30-50 of Jesus, his disciples, their families, and some other followers, and there can be some challenges with a party of that size. We know those. We do them.

But, as I was laughing at just how Martha we are, I realized that we are just as profoundly Mary. Because Mary took on the role of a disciple. That is to say, she sat at Jesus feet as a student and let him teach her. Dear ones, we love to learn! We do book studies. We do Bible Studies. We bring in speakers. We have overly intellectual sermons 😉 We discuss and reflect carefully on decisions, truly to hold in tension various needs and different aspects of things we know. We even do this seeking of the wisdom of Jesus thing in silence, in Contemplative Prayer, in meditative practices. We seek wisdom everywhere we can find it and try to apply it to our daily lives. We are very, very Mary.

And very, very Martha.

Which is probably good because many of us are also people who HATE false dichotomies. (For those who didn’t go to college at the turn of the century a false dichotomy is when many choices exist but only two are presented and those two are falsely assumed to be the only options.)

I think that it is probably really important to hear the two profoundly radical pieces of this story clearly before we do any more projecting on to. This story is a little bit too easy to project onto.

The first thing that is shocking in this story is that Martha welcomes Jesus into her home. To be more exact, for Martha to welcome Jesus into HER home, it has to be true that Martha is the person in charge of the home. Martha, let’s be clear, is a woman and women weren’t usually in charge of household much less households capable of providing hospitality for so many people. If Mary and Martha had a father, a brother, a nephew, or either had a husband the property would be theirs. They don’t. This is a woman owned, women only household and Jesus comes to it.

Nice. I love the stories Luke tells about Jesus.

The second piece is a lot like it. Mary isn’t helping her sister host because she’s too busy learning from Jesus. That wasn’t necessarily unprecedented. Other teachers – that is other rabbis – also taught women. The position of sitting at the feet of the rabbi was a position taken on by that rabbi’s students, their disciples. But not all rabbis taught women, and we certainly hear of challenges in the early church over whether or not women could in particular leadership roles. So when we have Mary sitting at Jesus’s feet as a disciple, and him praising her for it, we have an affirmation from Jesus that women are truly welcome in his circles.

Which gets me back to my gratitude to Luke for the stories he tells about Jesus and how careful he is to point out that Jesus upset all the hierarchies of the world and showed people once again that God’s way is not a way of exclusion or of hierarchy. In many ways the Jewish people already knew this, so Jesus was a reminder of it. In some ways he pushed a little further, but we always want to pay attention to the radical ways that God was already at work in the Jewish people of Jesus’s day and not dismiss the traditions of our siblings in faith.

Now, back to the story, Martha is holding a whole lot and she asks Jesus to kick Mary out of the position Mary chose for herself and make Mary do what Martha wanted instead.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I sometimes feel exactly that way too. (Sorry, Love.) Things like, “While I’m busy making dinner, can you set the table?” Which can miss things the other person is doing like, laundry, or childcare, or reading a book. Or sometimes I find myself thinking, “Why aren’t more people showing up at this one particular ministry I’m passionate about?” while missing that the people are showing up to other things they’re passionate about, or taking time to rest, or preparing for the next important thing they’re doing, or perhaps making dinner 😉 Or, heavens, “why isn’t this person at this protest?” Which forgets that there are many protests and we can’t all be at all them, that there are many roles in the resistance and people get to take on the ones that fit them best, and that this is a marathon and not a race and we all need to pace ourselves!

Anyway, I get Martha on this one. I feel her, hard. I’m often her.

And Jesus, like he does, has none of it. It turns out that EVERY TIME someone tries to triangulate Jesus into judging someone else he turns it back on them. This is rather fitting with the man whose most famous prayer includes, “And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” He took forgiveness seriously, and refused to judge people in the ways he was asked to and told to.

So Martha asks Jesus to condemn Mary and he outright refuses.

Also, every time a person in power makes demands of Jesus he turns it back on them. And while Martha was unusual in being a woman who was in charge of a household, the woman thing didn’t seem to protect her from being a person in power. Jesus criticizes householders because Jesus criticizes use of power over other people.

Which leads me to wonder… what if Mary had complained about Martha? What if she had said to Jesus, “My sister is busy doing many things, but she is forgetting to sit down and learn from you. Tell her to sit with us!” I can’t figure out if Jesus would have condemned Mary for judging Martha or if Jesus would have sided with Mary because she was the one with less power. It may not matter, but it helps me a bit with this story.

Because taken directly, we could hear that learning is more important than service. And that rubs me wrong. I can handle it if they’re supposed to be in balance, or that we need to know about God’s love before we try to share it, or that we need to continue being connected to love to keep having it share or anything like that. But for me connections to Jesus and God and acting to serve those who are loved by Jesus and God are as connected as breathing in and breathing out. One isn’t better than the other, they’re too related to be separated like that.

Which is probably why I paired Ecclesiastes with this text today. For everything there is a season. There are seasons to act like Martha, there are seasons to learn like Mary. There are seasons to rest like Jesus, there are seasons to simply be in prayer (like all of them.)

And, while we are all together in working for the kindom, the particulars of the work come with different seasons. I’m always stuck by “a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together.” Mostly because its true but also because both throwing stones away and gathering them together is a lot of work and maybe we should stop doing things that just need to be undone …. except sometimes we need stones and sometimes we don’t!!! Life is truly seasonal like that.

In any case today when I hear this story of the woman who learned from Jesus and the woman who took care of Jesus and his disciples, I find myself reminded that for everything there is a season. We are Marthas and Marys around here, and both are good!

And, we seek God’s kindom in so very many ways. Some of us need to be at breakfast to connect with the guests who attend. Some of us need to be at book studies to hear other people’s insights. Some of us need to be at protests to condemn injustice. Some of us need to be at the Contemplative Prayer service to savor God’s goodness. Some of us need to connect with others at retreats, dinners, plays to strengthen our wholeness. Some of us need to be at worship to soak up goodness for the week. We’re Mary and we’re Martha, and we’re both and we’re neither.

The key, I think, is in letting people make their own choices in building the kindom and seeking their wholeness. That doesn’t mean we can’t invite people to the things we love! But the way we are not supposed to be like Martha is that we’re not supposed to judge people for making their own good choices when their choices are different from us. This kindom building work is for the long run, and we need everyone to be able to discern for themselves the ways they’re best suited for it. And, let’s be honest, it’s extra hard right now and we all need extra care. Which makes it harder not to judge others. And yet, it also makes it more important. We’re all a little tender.

We all need to hear a little bit of Jesus saying, “Don’t accuse my beloved. They made a great choice, the right one! There is a time for this choice. This is the time!”

Thanks be to God we have this story to remind us that Jesus tenderly defends us and is grateful for the ways we chose to become whole and build the kindom.

Amen

July 20, 2025

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