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Sermons

Untitled

  • January 19, 2020February 11, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Two
years ago, our niece got a new game for Christmas:  Harry Potter,
Hogwarts Battle.  We usually spend New Years together, and it is a
great 4 person game, so Kevin and I got to break into the game with
our niece and her mother.  It is now fair to say that this is our
favorite game, and the four us clocked A LOT of hours playing it.

Beyond
the really fun Harry Potter connections, and the truly excellent game
design, I think we all love it so much because it is a collaborative
game.  The players are all working together towards a goal, so in the
end either everyone wins or everyone loses.  Which also means that no
one of us ends up as the winner while the rest of us have lost.
Truthfully, I really like board games, and most of the ones I play
have winners and losers, and I’m generally OK with that, but there is
something really great about a collaborative game.  It is especially
engaging because each choice we make impacts each other player, so we
have to pay attention to what each person needs and what each
person’s strengths are, and how each person can make the best use of
their strengths.

The
game is hard, and we lose sometimes.  Really, we lose about half of
the games we play, and we sometimes give up a game before playing
just because the starting conditions are too difficult.  But the
collaboration makes it interesting enough that even losing isn’t THAT
bad.  (Most of the time.)

I
find it interesting that the collaborative game is so much fun.  When
I was growing up our church had a copy “The Ungame” which was
mean to be a fun game that was collaborative rather than competitive,
and while I fully support the creators and their intentions it was
the least fun game imaginable.  Yet,
there is so much already in our capitalistic society that is
inherently about winners and losers, and zero sum games, and
competing against each other – and I’m really, really glad that
there are now super fun games that don’t buy into that model.

Collaborative
games seem more like the model of working for the common good.  Maybe
it is just because I was born and raised in the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania, but the moment when I finally actually noticed the word
“commonwealth” and thought about what it meant was eye-opening
for me.  I think of the common good and commonwealths as other ways
of speaking about the kindom.  

Over
the past 3+ years we’ve talked about Intersectional Justice and
Intersectionality a lot, but just in case the ideas are still fuzzy
for you, here is MFSA’s definition of its “intersectional
organizing principal.”

All experiences of marginalization
and injustice are interconnected because the struggle for justice is
tied to concepts of power and privilege.  Intersectional organizing
recognizes that injustice works on multiple and simultaneous levels.
Because experiences of injustice do not happen in a vacuum, it is
imperative to: develop the most effective strategies to create space
for understanding privilege; organize in an intersectional framework
led by marginalized communities; and build effective systems of
resistance and cooperation to take action for justice. Practical
intersectional organizing always focuses on collaboration and
relationship building.

To
bring that a little bit more into reality, intersectionality means
acknowledging that working on ONE issue and making as small as
possible so you can make some gains really doesn’t help that much.
For example, it is said that 101 years ago women gained the right to
vote in NY state, that misses that it only applied to white women.
That came from a choice to empower white women at the expense of
women of color and was NOT intersectional organizing.  There have
been a LOT of times organizing has worked this way, most of the time
it has worked this way, and it has done a lot of harm.

During
an anti-white supremacy training, I was taught to think holistically
about power.  That is, we all know what traits are most associated
with power in our society: white, male, rich, straight, English
speaking, cisgender, citizen, with a full range of ableness,
educated, tall… etc, right?  In each case, there is an opposite to
the description that is disempowered.  I’m expecting you are
following thus far.  Well, because the people who have the traits
connected to power control the resources, they use most of them!  And
then, it turns out, the people who are DISCONNECTED from power end up
fighting to get access to the scraps of resources that the powerful
are willing to share.  There are two
REALLY bad parts of this – first of all, to get access to those
resources usually means playing by the rules of the ones who have
power, and secondly, those without power are usually set up to fight
AGAINST EACH OTHER for access to those scraps.  

That
is, when white women decided to try to get the vote for themselves,
and not seek voting rights for all women, they made a decision to
play by the rules of how power already worked, and to distance
themselves from people of color to try to get what they wanted and
needed.  And, this happens time and time again.

Intersectionality
is about seeing the wholeness of the power dynamics, and the
complicated realities of people – who all have power in some ways
and lack power in others – and holding the whole together while
working for good.  It is really, really hard.

It
is probably also why I teared up when reading Isaiah this week.  The
passage quotes God as saying, “It is too light a thing that you
should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore
the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.“  The way I
heard that was, don’t just work for the benefit of a few, even if
they are the ones you identify with – work for the well being of
ALL.  And all, in all places, including enemy nations!!

Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is best known for his transformational
work on racial justice, work that make our country noticeably better.
Yet, at the end of his life, he had broadened his work, and was
organizing around poverty.  As several of the past year’s
Intersectional Justice Book Club books have pointed out, the powers
that exist in the United States have VERY INTENTIONALLY used race to
divide people, in large part so that impoverished white people and
impoverished people of color wouldn’t start working together against
their common oppressor.  Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign was
designed to bring people together for their common good, and truly
for every’s good.   As King once said, “In your struggle for
justice, let your oppressor know that you are not attempting to
defeat or humiliate him, or even to pay him back for injustices that
he has heaped upon you. Let him know that you are merely seeking
justice for him as well as yourself.”  Because, truly, oppressing
anyone harms both the oppressed AND inherently, the oppressor.

Today,
other’s have picked up Dr. King’s mantle, and there is an active Poor
People’s Campaign underway.  While their “Fundamental Principals”
are expansive – there are 12 – they are a coherent whole and I
couldn’t edit them down.  I want you hear, and be filled with hope,
and maybe even be motivated to work with this campaign, so here they
are:

  1. We are rooted
    in a moral analysis based on our deepest religious and
    constitutional values that demand justice for all. Moral revival is
    necessary to save the heart and soul of our democracy.
  2. We
    are committed to lifting up and deepening the leadership of those
    most affected by systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, and
    ecological devastation and to building unity across lines of
    division.
  3. We
    believe in the dismantling of unjust criminalization systems that
    exploit poor communities and communities of color and the
    transformation of the “War Economy” into a “Peace Economy”
    that values all humanity.
  4. We
    believe that equal protection under the law is non-negotiable.
  5. We
    believe that people should not live in or die from poverty in the
    richest nation ever to exist. Blaming the poor and claiming that the
    United States does not have an abundance of resources to overcome
    poverty are false narratives used to perpetuate economic
    exploitation, exclusion, and deep inequality.
  6. We
    recognize the centrality of systemic racism in maintaining economic
    oppression must be named, detailed and exposed empirically, morally
    and spiritually. Poverty and economic inequality cannot be
    understood apart from a society built on white supremacy.
  7. We
    aim to shift the distorted moral narrative often promoted by
    religious extremists in the nation from issues like prayer in
    school, abortion, and gun rights to one that is concerned with how
    our society treats the poor, those on the margins, the least of
    these, women, LGBTQIA folks, workers, immigrants, the disabled and
    the sick; equality and representation under the law; and the desire
    for peace, love and harmony within and among nations.
  8. We
    will build up the power of people and state-based movements to serve
    as a vehicle for a powerful moral movement in the country and to
    transform the political, economic and moral structures of our
    society.
  9. We
    recognize the need to organize at the state and local level—many
    of the most regressive policies are being passed at the state level,
    and these policies will have long and lasting effect, past even
    executive orders. The movement is not from above but below.
  10. We
    will do our work in a non-partisan way—no elected officials or
    candidates get the stage or serve on the State Organizing Committee
    of the Campaign. This is not about left and right, Democrat or
    Republican but about right and wrong.
  11. We
    uphold the need to do a season of sustained moral direct action as a
    way to break through the tweets and shift the moral narrative. We
    are demonstrating the power of people coming together across issues
    and geography and putting our bodies on the line to the issues that
    are affecting us all.
  12. The Campaign
    and all its Participants and Endorsers embrace nonviolence. Violent
    tactics or actions will not be tolerated.

This
campaign is DEEPLY good news.  I encourage you to look them up, their
demands are even better (but ever longer) and well worth the read.
There are a lot of opportunities to volunteer with and support the
Poor People’s Campaign, and I’d be happy to connect to to those who
are organizing – as would your Intersectional Justice chairs.  

Working
towards justice for all is really, really hard work.  It can even be
overwhelming, but as Isaiah says, God is out for the well-being of
the whole world.  Before you get overwhelmed though, let me remind
you that God has a LOT of partners in this work and no ONE of us is
called to do all the work.  In fact, we’re called to trust each other
and each other’s work, and to carefully discern what our work is to
do. Love exists, its power can spread, justice is possible, and good
people are at work.  We are meant to be a light to ALL the nations,
and with God at our backs, we can and we will.  And it is possible
because of collaboration.  Thanks be to God.  Amen

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

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

January 19, 2019

Sermons

“Thesis Statement”based on Psalm 65:5-12 and Mark 1:14-20

  • January 22, 2018February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Sometimes it seems like my entire adult life has been about realizing that nothing works the way I thought it did, and everything is more broken than I had been lead to believe. Like the Psalmist, over and over again it has become clear what has seemed good, fair, and just wasn’t even basically trustworthy upon further examination. In addition, I’ve learned that what people or organizations claim to be about often isn’t directly correlated with what they actually DO.

One scholar summarizes Psalmist as saying, “No matter how weighty their social standing, we cannot depend on other people to provide security or stability in our lives.”1 Another scholar takes it a step further, adding commentary to the Psalmist’s ideas, “Every human effort, finite cause, and mortal relationship is an unsuitable object for our absolute trust and final hope. The career that shows so much promise, the children that seem so exceptional, the nation that appears so strong: they are like shifting sand which offers no security, no permanent purchase.”2

I don’t think the Psalmist and I are alone in our desire to find trustworthiness in what can’t offer “permanent purchase.” Often, when I hear people in their deepest struggles, they are struggling with a change they didn’t foresee – something they thought was more permanent than it was – and the harshness of reality adds a significant sting to something already plenty difficult. Something in human nature expects more permanence than there is, and wants to trust in that permanence.

The Psalmist concludes that only God is as sturdy, steadfast, and worthy of hope and trust as we need. God is able to be our refuge, time and time again. God doesn’t disappoint, and God is as permanent as we need. Best of all, God’s nature is steadfast love, and it is on God’s steadfast love as a platform, that we can build our lives.

Thanks be to God for that.

The thing is, I’m not sure it is all that easy for us to figure out what it means to trust God while remembering the impermanence of everything else. How do we balance the concepts that God is worthy of trust, but that doesn’t mean our loved ones will all live long happy lives, our jobs will treat us fairly, our bodies will remain strong and healthy, our homes remain in tact, or that our spouses will always treat us well. (To name a few.) God is good and trustworthy, but life remains complicated. I think that this seemingly obvious reality is really hard to master!

Figuring out how to trust in God while being realistic about the world, and without becoming cynical about everything is pretty difficult. It is also very important, in fact, I think it IS adult faith development! That is, adult faith development is: trusting God, seeing the world clearly, and holding hope – all at the same time. Marcus Borg gives a model of how faith develops, and helps clarify the process all people have to go through:

Precritical naiveté is an early childhood state in which we take it for granted that whatever the significant authority figures in our lives tell us to be true is indeed true. In this state (if we grow up in a Christian setting), we simply hear the stories of the Bible as true stories. …

Critical thinking begins in late childhood and early adolescence. One does not need to be an intellectual or go to college for this kind of thinking to develop. Rather, it is a natural stage of human development; everybody enters it. In this stage, consciously or quite unconsciously, we sift through what we learned as children to see how much of it we should keep. …

Postcritical naiveté is the ability to hear the biblical stories once again as true stories, even as one knows that they may not be factually true and that their truth does not depend upon their factuality. … Importantly, postcritical naiveté is not a return to precritical naiveté. It brings critical thinking with it. It does not reject the insights of historical criticism but integrates them into a larger whole.3

These ideas are larger than simply how we read the Bible. They apply to life in general. Pre-critical naiveté then, is trusting that God will make everything OK. Critical thinking comes when we acknowledge that lots of things aren’t OK at all. And then post-critical naiveté is the time of trusting in God and seeing the world clearly and holding onto hope.

Now, I think that during his ministry, Jesus was clearly living in post-critical naiveté. He knew EXACTLY how broken things were AND he trusted in God and worked to make them better. If I’m honest, I tend to think of Jesus as being born in post-critical naiveté, but that’s probably not really true! Mark says that Jesus came to Galilee (the location of the majority of his ministry) and started talking. He said, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” Throughout all of my study of the Bible, I have come to believe that Jesus’ words here are the thesis statement of his ministry, and thus of both the New Testament and the Body of Christ.

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” Because it can easily get confusing, let’s review what repentance is. Repent most literally means, “turn around” or “change direction.” I love my friend Rev. Dr. Barbara Thorington Green’s take on it; she says it means to “turn around, look at God, look where God is looking, and refocus attention where God is looking.” In context, then, repentance is calling people to turn away from the ways of the world (domination, oppression, competition, hierarchy, etc) and turn TO the ways of God (cooperation, collaboration, mutuality, support, solidarity, etc).

Because it is the key to everything about Jesus, let’s review the idea of the kindom of God. The kindom of God is the world as God would have it be, when all people are able to survive and thrive, when abundance and sharing define the ways of life, when justice comes naturally to people, when things are exactly as they should be. That is, when we can look reality squarely in the eye and see nothing wrong at all. Building the kindom of God was the work of Jesus, and is the work of the Body of Christ today. Our theologians tell us that it is both “fulfilled” and “not here in entirely yet.” It is what God is working WITH us in creating, and it exists in moments and instances, but not yet as the earth’s reality.

To be fair, I think this whole thesis statement, and in fact this whole kindom of God thing is a form of circular logic. That is, repenting and refocusing on God and on God’s kindom IS the thing that builds the kindom – it doesn’t happen unless people do it. Believing that God’s way is good news, thus taking on the good news itself as a way of life is the way of making the good news into reality. Living as though the time is now is what fulfills the time.

I’m OK with it being circular logic though. Mostly because I believe it 😉 I also think this means that paying attention to the stuff in life that ALREADY is a glimpse of the kindom is one of the ways that we build it. And I think it is fitting, somehow, that this system only works if we trust that it works – it feels like the rest of faith.

Or, to put it more sufficiently, one scholar wrote, “Right away Jesus not only talks about the reign of God but enacts it.”4 This scholar explains himself saying, “Mark’s brief account of the beginning of Jesus’ Galilean ministry links Jesus’ proclamation of the gospel with his calling of a band of disciples. These activities are by no means unrelated. Jesus’ proclamation is not just a solo recitation of informative words but is an efficacious action that creates community and is taken up and continued by that community.”5 Now here is the key to it all. This same scholar says,  “wherever Jesus was active, the time was fulfilled and the kingdom was present.”6

Now this caught my attention. If wherever Jesus was active, the time was therefore fulfilled and the kindom was therefore present, then does that mean that when we are truly acting out the ministry of Jesus – sharing God’s love with our neighbors – that the kindom is present with us too? Are we able to, together, create the kindom of God – at least in small times and places?

I think we ARE!!!

I see it often enough. I see love being shared in extraordinary ways, I see transformation happening that doesn’t really seem possible, I see hope created in the things we do together, as well as laughter and healing. I see the kindom when we are together as the Body of Christ, it really IS present and the time is fulfilled.

This is humbling to realize, although it is also inspiring! It does lead me to some new questions: when and how are we most successful in having kindom moments? When aren’t we? How can we attend to them well so that we can appreciate them? What keeps us from creating even more kindom moments? How can we change those realities? Is the creating the kindom more work, or play? Is it about authenticity? Does it require community or can it happen with just one? Does it have to happen AND be noticed to have the most impact, or if we miss it, is it OK?

And finally, how is it that the kindom of God can co-exist in the world with the brokenness that is our current reality? (I think that’s just a reality of non-linearity.)

If Jesus, in his life, made the kindom into reality in his present; and if we as the Body of Christ continue his ministry in our shared lives; then we get to make the kindom into reality in our present. How cool is that???

During the passing of the peace today, I ask that you talk to each other about the kindom – when you’ve seen it, felt it, heard it – I think talking about it makes it even more real. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” And, keep on paying attention when you see the kindom. Not only does it take away disillusionment, it also builds the kindom itself. Thanks be to God. Amen

1Marsha Wilfong, Exegetical Reflections on Psalm 65:5-12 found in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 1, edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 275.

2 Timothy A. Beach-Verhey, Theological Reflections on Psalm 65:5-12 found in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 1, edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 274.

3Marcus Borg, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time (HarperSanFransicso: 2001) 49-50.

4Lee Barrett, Theological Reflections on Mark 1:14-20 found in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 1, edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 286.

5Barrett, 284.

6Barrett, 286.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

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First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

January 21, 2018

Sermons

“How to Love God” based on Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-19…

  • October 29, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Sometimes
things are complicated, things like trying to build the kin-dom of
God for example.  This feels especially complicated when trying to
hold together awareness of many people, with many different needs,
and may varied experiences of oppression.  When Rev. Dr. Traci West
was here talking about “Grace and Race” she reminded us that when
we look at things intersectionally, the same people can be both
oppressed and oppressor, in different roles or realities they live.
Actually, it is more that we are all both, which we have to keep in
mind while also trying to get clear on how the systems work that
create and enforce the oppressions, so that we can be part of
changing them.

Sometimes
things are really complicated, like when we try to identify the
driving forces that are important in building a more just society,
and when we look at how deeply embedded how intricate the forces that
keep the status quo in place are.  Sometimes things are really
complicated, like when we try to imagine a world without hungry
people, and then we think about all the changes that would require.

And
then, in the midst of all the complications, come the simplest and
clearest commandments of the Bible. They can easily be remembered.
They leave minimal space for interpretation,  and there isn’t any
wiggle room in them.  Love God, and love your neighbor.  Follow up
question: who is my neighbor is easily answered: everyone.  Done

The
commandments offer a very simple explanation of the sort of love that
God wants from us: to love God the way God wants to be loved is to
love God’s people.  Its all very simple.

Yet,
every one of us who has tried to live these commandments knows they
get very complicated to live out, very quickly.  How is it that
something so simple and understandable is also so very difficult?

Thanks
goodness for Leviticus (things you might not have expected to hear –
ever).  As it is written in the New Interpreter’s Bible, “Leviticus
19 is one of the grand chapters of the whole book of Leviticus.  In
American Reform Judaism it is one of the most quoted and most often
read chapters, especially since it is assigned as the Torah reading
for Yom Kippur afternoon in that tradition.”1
If you are not familiar with Yom Kippur, it is the Holiest day in
the Jewish tradition, and is focused on atonement and repentance.
The Yom Kippur prayer of atonement is so vast and inclusive that I
find it exceptionally healing, by the time it is over it truly feels
as if the slate of past wrongdoings is wiped clean and we can start
anew.  

The
part of the chapter that we are focusing on today reflects on what it
means to love one’s neighbor, and the commandments it contains seem
to clarify what tends to go wrong!  By noticing how people are
instructed to do right, we can see what has gone wrong too
frequently.  

The
first part of the set of instructions are about how to care for
people who live in poverty, and they are consistent with other
passages in the Torah.  As one commentator puts it, this set of
instructions

“seeks
to help poor people by legislating that the three chief products of
agriculture – the grain, the product of the vine, and the fruit of
the trees, are not to be harvested entirely; some is to be left for
poor people to glean.  … the Lord is the ultimate owner of
everything; thus the land is a gift from the Lord.  If the landowners
are only stewards of the land and all that it produces, there is no
reason to be selfish and stingy. … Disadvantaged persons have a
right to harvest the edges of the fields; they are not to depend on
voluntary gifts alone.”2

In
modern terms, I wonder if the comparison is to be made to welfare,
and other assistance that comes through the Department of Social
Services.  The comparison isn’t perfect, gleaning the field was seen
as a human right, however it does compare well to the idea that there
needs to be a way to provide for the basic needs of life for all
people, and that on top of those very basic needs there will be need
for further support.  (Please note the video on Sustain and the idea
that those who are getting help from DSS are still struggling to
access basic necessities of life.)

That
idea that all that is, is God’s, and that we are to use it
appropriately is one of the most humbling ideas in our faith.  Do we
do it?  How well?  What would God have us be doing with our resources
that we aren’t doing?  How have things gotten to where they are?  

The
second bit of instruction deals with truth; there are commands not to
steal, not to deal falsely, not to lie, and not to swear falsely in
the name of God.  Apparently these are also common issues in all of
humanity, the temptation to take what isn’t ours or tell untruths for
our own benefit.  Their inclusion in this passage is notable though:
to seek a benefit from an untruth means taking that benefit from
someone else. It is not to act as we would wish others would act
towards us.  

The
third set of instructions seems to focus on balancing power.  In
particular the instructions are against fraud and against stealing.
Then comes yet another instruction that seems to be timeless: “you
shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning.”
Laborers were usually living day to day, using the labor of the day
to buy the day’s bread.  By keeping it for just a bit longer, the
person who didn’t pay on time would be keeping a person from their
daily food.  This has compassion for the poorest workers.  Finally,
the instructions condemn taking advantage of a person’s disability
(and I’d expect this expands to any weakness).  Specially it says not
to speak harshly to a deaf person nor attempt to trip a blind person.
In summation, this part of loving our neighbors as ourselves seems
to be about not taking advantage of anyone just because we can.  

The
fourth part of this set of instructions
worries about “just judgements” and in particular the
availability of justice to people who are poor.  This is practically
an obsession of the Torah.  It is as if there is something inherent
in human nature that biases people toward partiality, towards giving
the rich and powerful more wealth and more power while taking it away
from the impoverished and disempowered.  I don’t much like thinking
about humanity that way, but I can’t see any other reason why the
Bible would spend SO much effort trying to correct for it.
Furthermore, I suppose, that when dealing with justice in combination
with wealth and power, any human could come face to face with a
self-preservation instinct.  A wealthy person who is displeased might
be capable of significant harm.  Perhaps it is just self-preservation
that makes it possible that all justice systems need constant
reminders and corrections to ensure that justice serves the poor and
the wealthy equally well.  It is distributing however, that the
issues that exist today in our nation’s justice system are neither
new nor unique, but reflect a problem with humanity itself.  That may
mean it is will be quite reticent to correction.
#Schooltoprisionpipeline #privateprisons

The
final set of instructions about neighborliness in Leviticus 19 is a
bit surprising.  It explicitly states that to love your neighbor
means you can’t hate them.  That may be a lot harder than it sounds.
It also says that you have to call them to account when their
behavior isn’t loving.  That’s definitely harder than it sounds.
Then we’re told not to seek revenge AND not to hold grudges.  Then
this part of the passage seamlessly draws itself to a conclusion, the
one we already knew was coming, “You shall love your neighbor as
yourself.”  

One
thing seems true, the last few millennia haven’t seen much change in
human behavior.  The explicit instructions in Leviticus about what
loving our neighbors looks like hold up well to the test of time.

So
what do we do with these easy to understand, difficult to enact
commandments?  We could discuss further instruction, but that hasn’t
yet proven productive.  We could offer inspiring stories, but I think
that’s been done enough.  I wonder if our time is better spent
considering what holds us back from loving our neighbors, and what we
might do to overcome those barriers.

Now,
this list is just my best guesses (I’m a little sad we don’t’ have a
sermon talk-back so I can hear what you’d add or remove), the things
that make it hard for us to love our neighbors:  fear of our own
deaths (“existential anxiety”) and an instinct toward self
preservation, combined with believing in the myth of scarcity;
in-group thinking and fear of others; and finally a lack of love for
ourselves.  (If the commandment is to love our neighbors AS
ourselves, it implies we are also supposed to be good at loving
ourselves!)  That isn’t a terribly extensive list, I was attempting
to be as clear like the commandments themselves 😉

If
you are willing to take a homework assignment, I’d encourage you to
spend some time considering if the list above feels true in your
experience, and then to consider what things make you more
susceptible to those challenges to loving our neighbors and which
make it easier for you to overcome them and love your neighbors well.
The answers to those questions are pretty important, especially if
we’re all willing to work on them.

For
me, there are two key pieces to overcoming those challenges, two
things that help me truly love our neighbors.  The first is quiet
time to soak in God’s love and hear my own inner voice, and the
second is having opportunities to learn about the world and to
connect with people – especially those whose lives have been
radically different from mine.  To start at the beginning for this,
when I’m tired, or drained, or anxious, I’m not very loving –
including to myself.  While sleep and also good food matter, the key
to keeping myself from getting drained is taking time for my
spiritual well-being.  For me, at my best, this means an HOUR a day
spent in contemplative prayer, although the particular form of the
prayer isn’t consistent.  When I stop all the doing and just listen –
both to God and myself – I’m more centered, more loving, more
focused, and waaaaaaaaaay less anxious.

At
the same time, one of the great dangers of trying to “Love our
neighbors as ourselves” is misunderstanding what love looks like
for a particular person or group of people.  If I don’t understand
the problem, and if I don’t take the time to listen to the one(s)
struggling, then the love I try to share may end up doing more harm.
Also, I really like learning, connecting, and trying to understand
the world and its people.

What
guides you?  What helps you be more loving?  I know some of you need
forests, others need music, others need exercise – and for many of
you, I don’t know!  If you do know what you need to be more loving
the next question is: are you DOING it?  I think God would appreciate
it if we spent our time doing the things that help us be more loving
toward our neighbors, in fact, I think that’s how we best love God.
Amen

1Walter
C. Kaiser, “Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections on
Leviticus” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume One
, Leander E. Keck, editorial board convener (Nashville: Abingdon
Press, 1994) p. 1131.

2Kaiser,
1133.

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

October 29, 2017

Sermons

“Nope, We’re Not Doing That” based on  Jeremiah 44:11-19

  • August 13, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

After she retired, my friend the Rev. Dr. Barbara Thorington Green spent a year away from organized religion so that she could open herself to thinking about the Sacred in new and different ways. Her year off resulted in poetry that became the book “Calling God She? Reflections and insights of a great-grandmother, retired clergywoman, and doctor of theology.” This is one of my favorite poems in it:

Perhaps God is a quilter,

The quilter creates something warm and beautiful

out of bits and pieces of fabric,

using a variety of colors and designs.

The quilter takes things apart and puts them together again

creating something new, unpredictable, unique,

and perhaps never envisioned.

The quilter uses what is at hand

to create a blessing, sometimes planned,

sometimes created in the process.

You can see yourself as a piece of fabric

being used as part of the whole,

or you can envision the various times of life

as the fabrics and yourself as the end product.

Of course more will be added tomorrow

and the next day.

The quilt of our lives is ever changing.

Fabrics we would never chose

often add interest and character.

There can be many shapes and designs

as well as many fabrics in a quilt.

Each quilter has her own style

and way of being and doing.

The marks of the quilter

are everywhere on the quilt.

Hours of labor are required.

The results are always different,

yet in the end there is warmth and comfort.

When God is the quilter,

working internally and externally

Her marks are everywhere

creating beauty, warmth, and comfort.1

For me, Barb’s work offers freedom and respite. The ways it offers to conceive of God make space for a broader and fuller picture. I’ve spent years thinking about Barb’s assumption that she couldn’t make space for the feminine aspects of God while being connected to the institutional church – because the church’s God is too masculine. I’ve always wanted to be able to argue back at that point, but I’ve yet to find a truly valid point to use 😉

Institutional religion promoting a masculinized version of God is not new. Unfortunately, it may be a particular facet of OUR faith tradition, to start with. The ancient near eastern neighbors of the ancient Jews liked to keep their deities in gender balanced pairs. Judaism’s monotheism was particularly odd because it proposed a stand-alone MALE deity. (We may want to acknowledge that God isn’t gendered, but that’s not the same as saying that the way the ancients saw God lacked gender.) Jeremiah seems to be speaking of a masculine deity in 585 BCE, in today’s passage. He is speaking to Judean refugees, people who escaped Jerusalem during the Babylonian siege in 587-586 BCE and are residing in Egypt. These are traumatized people, as is the prophet, who have all seen the destruction of their homeland and way of life.

Jeremiah is sometimes called the prophet of the Exile. He is believed to have lived and prophesied before, during, and right after the Babylonian siege that started the exile. His early work was an attempt to convince people to change their behavior something terrible happened. In Bible Study we wondered if he got stuck in that message and forgot to update it after the terrible things all happened.

I cut most of his diatribe from our reading this morning, it is particularly miserable to listen to. His speech makes God sound like an abusive spouse. Jeremiah is angry that the Egyptian refugees are worshiping a Goddess. Now, seemingly every commentator in every Bible commentary in existence takes Jeremiah’s side in this argument, supporting the idea that worshiping a Goddess is idolatry and God had a right to act like a jealous (raving lunatic) spouse.

So, I’m going take on all of them! (Although not just for fun. I think they’re all wrong.) The women respond to Jeremiah’s furious accusations in a quite unexpected way. They respond, “Nope, we’re not doing that.” Actually, their words are even better than my summary. They respond, “‘As for the word that you have spoken to us in the name of the Lord, we are not going to listen to you.” GIGGLE. I love the contrast between Jeremiah ranting and raving and expressing fury (I imagine him spitting a little bit at the sides of his mouth while he speaks) and the women calmly denying his authority over their lives.

The women go on to say that they’d worshiped the Goddess for generations, and that she’d always taken good care of them. The women say that things were going fine for them until they stopped worshiping the Goddess, and that everything went to hell when they stopped. Thus, they say, they’re going back to what worked.

Now, early in Jeremiah’s ministry, he got the young King Josiah to listen to him and they instituted serious reforms. The reforms including monotheism, which most scholars think is the first time it was practiced in the history of ancient Judaism. (I could proof text this for you, but I’m not going to. Let me know if you want references later!) Monotheism mean that only YHWH was to be worshiped, and that meant that the long term worship of the Goddess was suppressed. (More on this theory of the long-term worship of a Hebrew Goddess to come.)

Now, I think the theology of both Jeremiah AND the women is flawed. Judea sat on land that was the cross-roads of the ancient world and every empire that existed wanted to control it. Both groups assume a Deity who micromanages and who punishes the people for lack of faith by destroying their nation. I don’t believe in such a Deity, rather I think it stunk for the Jewish people that the “Promised Land” was such a highly prized crossroads. But, to be fair, I think that both Jeremiah and the women’s arguments are EQUALLY problematic.

All those Biblical commentators who take Jeremiah’s side claim that the real issue here was the people’s idolatry and that the response of the women shows the hard-heartedness of the people. They claim that the Jewish women were worshiping some sort of Canaanite or Babylonian Goddess, or perhaps a hybrid of the two. The Biblical commentators seem to think that God is justified in the abusive, violent language of a jealous spouse.

Ironically, they seem to miss that the presentation of God made by Jeremiah is HYPER masculine. To be fair, the origins of YHWH are in a warrior God, so there has always been a hyper masculine tone there. But Jeremiah claiming that this masculine warrior is angry and ready to kill and shame is really the very worst stereotype of masculinity imaginable, right? That’s toxic masculinity. Masculinity can be so much more and so much better than that, and it almost always is! But Jeremiah is speaking of God who is violent, jealous, and murderous, as a warrior – he is presenting God in the very worst of masculine ways.

The women are claiming that there is more to life, and more to the Divine than that. So, I’m on their side. In 1967 Raphael Patai wrote seminal book entitled The Hebrew Goddess2. It has been summarized this way, “Raphael Patai argues that the Israelites experienced the same Goddess-hunger that can be found in peoples and cultures all around the world in every age – and Patai insists, too, that the worship of a female deity by the Israelites was not an act of apostasy but rather an integral part of the religion of the Hebrews.‘”3 Patai,and those who have followed in his footsteps in looking for clues about folk religion, think that many ancient Hebrews worshiped a female Goddess they saw as YHWH’s spouse and counterpart. I think this is pretty reasonable. If you conceive of God purely in the masculine, the human need for balance well find a way to also understand God in the feminine.

The Women’s Bible Commentary thinks so too, and take it a step further. They say, “It seems certain that the Israelite women worshiped the queen of heaven. Women were excluded from full participation in temple worship, and the predominate Israelite conception of God was masculine. The queen provided them with a female deity who offered them protection and prosperity.”4I think this passage is the most overt place we can see the women’s faith. There are other places that traces of it can be found (and Patai’s book explains them all), but this is the one where it is in plain sight.

The women admit to worshiping a Goddess, and they think it is not only good, it is imperative. They reject the prophet who claims that only the male version of God can be worshiped. They just won’t! In fact, Patai mentions a letter from 419 BCE written by a military man about the Judean colony in Egypt. The collections given to the Jewish priest are enumerated. 123 people donated in the name of YHWY, 120 donated to the Queen of Heaven.5 Jeremiah appears to have lost this argument.

Now, as a 21st century Christian, I don’t think God is male, nor female. I prefer to think of God as existing beyond gender, but I also recognize that our minds are limited and metaphors are often more powerful with more specificity. Sometimes I need to imagine God as a Latina grandmother, in order to remember God’s fierce protection and love. Sometimes I need to remember my own paternal grandfather and use his unfaltering affection as a way to access God’s acceptance. I suspect most of us need metaphors for God that have gender, but that whenever we limit God by holding one image alone (particularly an image that reflects only one gender expression or only one ethnic identity), we end up missing much of God’s nature. The institutional church has often done this, and as a result, splinter groups have left in order to see God more fully. Particularly, when the conception of God that institutional religion propagates fits in with the authority figures of society (ahem, white supremacy and the patriarchy) we know that religion is NOT reflecting God, but rather its own values.

I do, vehemently, support thinking about Goddess imagery sometimes. (And thinking about God as genderqueer sometimes too.) I think those women in Egypt were right to refuse Jeremiah’s decree and to trust their own experience. I’m so thankful that their voices refuse to associate violence and abuse with the Divine! It really matters that they saw more to Holiness than what Jeremiah was claiming! It also matters that they worked together and trusted themselves more than an external authority figure! Finally, I think it matters that they choose to worship the Sacred they know to call them to life and wholeness, not the one who punished and threatened. Those women knew a lot. May we be wise enough to listen to their wisdom. Amen

1 Barbara Thorington Green, Calling God She (Middleton, DE self-published), 84-85. Used with permission.

2 Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967 first edition, 1990, 3rd edition)

3 Jonathan Kirsch, The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997) p. 224.

4 Katheleen M. O’Connor, “Jeremiah” in Women’s Bible Commenatry edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992, 1998) p. 182

5 Patai, location 1149 in Kindle version (end of chapter 2).

–

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 13, 2017

Sermons

“The Healing Earth” based on Psalm 8 (& James Weldon…

  • May 28, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

A few years ago I was informed that Sky Lake was a prime example of “Celtic Christianity/Spirituality.” I had no idea what that meant. So I looked it up, and discovered that it was true, AND that there is a name for my spirituality. Isn’t it wonderful when we find names for things we’ve known without having words? Looking up Celtic Spirituality reveals a description that starts with “Love of the Natural World.” It is explained this way:

“The prayers of the Celtic Saints are filled with experiences of God’s presence in creation, simplicity of living in harmony with creation, and awareness of the sacredness of all things. The Psalms are full of praise for God’s handiwork in nature, and Celtic Christianity followed in that tradition, reflected in prayers and poems which spoke of the Sacred soul in everything. As it says in the first chapter of Genesis, all things originate in the Divine Source, and so all things are sacred. The Presence permeates all of nature, and speaks to us of the ‘Original/Essential Goodness’ of everything. To enter into this Presence is a sacramental experience so that when we walk in nature everything is a visible reminder of the Invisible presence.”1

One of their saints, “Columbanus said – ‘If you want to know the Creator, first get to know the creation.’ If there is any one word that would sum up the essence of Celtic Spirituality, it’s the word ‘PRESENCE.’ Awareness of the Sacred Presence at every moment of life, in all places.”2The other defining factors of Celtic Spirituality are community, hospitality, soul-friends, art and music, pilgrimage.

I suspect that for some of you, Celtic Spirituality is a part of your connection to God. For some, maybe it isn’t. In any case, it is helpful to remember that within Christianity itself there are many developed roads and paths to God, and the ones that fit you best may have road signs and maps, if you want to find them. There are multiple spiritual paths, even within Christianity, because humans connect differently. For today, I’m going to continue to explore within a Celtic vein, but please remember this is one among many.

At this time of year I’m mesmerized by how many shades of green there are, and how many I can see in one glance at the world around us. Each tree and plant offer several shades, with the grass itself adding more. For me, this is a feast. I love seeing the verdant, vibrant, living world, and my soul is satisfied watching the wind blow through the various leaves. The Presence of God seems especially visible.

This is a colorful time of year, even beyond the green. Flowers are plentiful and many trees are still covered in flowers or leaves of other colors! It is a time of visual abundance, as richly and vibrantly beautiful as a snow covered winter day is beautiful in its unbroken stillness and grace.

This time of year I am most receptive to the creation narratives of the Bible, perhaps because spring seems to speak them all by itself, and the words of the narratives add to the story the world is telling! James Weldon Johnson’s poem is one of the most famous re-tellings of Genesis, and Psalm 8 is one of the most glorious reflections on creation in the text. They remind us that God’s fingerprints are found all over the world, and when we look for them, we can find them.

The natural world is the source of all the things we need for life, as well as being a source of deep wisdom. It is a reflection of God, as are all of God’s creatures. One of my seminary professors offered us a way of praying that opens us to the wisdom of creation, by simply paying attention to one little aspect of the whole. He instructed us this way:

1. Go to a place where God’s creation meets you: ask for God’s presence with you.

2. Attend to the works of creation around you. Does one thing seem to invite you, strike you, impress you, or somehow attract you?

3. Come to a sense of quiet rest in the presence of God and in this piece of God’s handiwork.

4. Simply gaze upon this part of creation for an extended time – a time of wonder, amazement, openness, receiving.

5. Eventually, engage God in conversation about this thing you have noticed. You may want to ask God questions such as: 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?

6. Remain for a time in the experience of whatever follows these questions.

7. Offer God thanks for this time and for the wonders of creation.3

This prayer form seems to derive particularly from Celtic Christianity, and the wisdom of the natural world and our capacity to hear it! The prayer, trusts creation and those listening to it.

This sounds a bit like the Psalmist, who spoke of star-gazing as source of wisdom. I’d like you to hear the Psalm anew, this version written by Barbara J. Monda. Her version focuses on the nurturing aspects of creation and our response to it. She refers to God as “Shekkinah” which according to Google means, “the glory of the divine presence, conventionally represented as light or interpreted symbolically (in Kabbalism as a divine feminine aspect).” Here is her version:

Shekkinah,4 how glorious is this world that everywhere bears the mark of your touch!

I sit among the mountains and am in awe of your beauty.

Babies in their mother’s arms remind me of how you care for and know our every need.

We are safe in the cover of your clothes.

You hold at bay those who want to harm and take vengeance.

Your steadfastness is all around us and your love makes our hearts jump.

When I look up to the moon I see you there.

When I see the stars I know they are jewels worn by you, signaling your presence.

You have made us just less than yourself.

You have given us the caretaking of all the earth

and the creatures on it as our companions.

Birds sent by you to sing cheer my day.

Fish swim at my feet and the fox and deer bring joy to my life.

The work of your fingers is everywhere my eyes turn.

The sun warms us from above and the rocks hold us from below.

The rhythms of the oceans and the passing of the moon are all ours too,

woven in us so we will be fruitful as you are.

Shekkinah, I feel greatness of you in my bones.

How can I properly thank you for all you have done for me?

My soul reflects your love and my heart holds what you have made.

I will be the cup from which others may drink of you and we will all sing of your wonders.5

Another seminary professor, Marvin Sweeney, told us that the ancient Hebrew Temple was themed on creation.  He said that indicated that creation was the primary miracle of ancient Judaism, and everything else was derived from it. Similarly, creation is a theme throughout scripture, likely because the natural world has been a source of wisdom about God for all of humanity’s history. Some are more in tune with it than others. The poets, the Psalmist, and Monda, and Weldon Johnson are particularly in tune. They each speak of humanity as connected to God, thus given special responsibility for caring for creation. Christian theology sometimes speaks of us as “stewards of God’s earth.” That means that the earth and all that is in it is God’s, but God trusts us to take care of it on God’s own behalf. That is good, and meaningful work. However, given the impact of humanity on Global Climate Change and extinctions, we certainly have plenty of ways we could do that work better!

While the self-descibed defining factors of Celtic Spirituality were love of the natural world, community, hospitality, soul-friends, art and music, pilgrimage; I think the biggest difference I see is a focus on goodness: Goodness of God, Goodness of Creation, Goodness of Humanity. So much of Christianity has chosen to focus everything BUT the goodness. There is plenty in life that draws our attention that is not good. But, there is also much goodness, and when our souls are hungry, they hunger for goodness.

In Weldon Johnson’s poem, creation begins as a response to God’s SMILE.

Then God smiled,

And the light broke,6

And that image, which is itself a blessing, feels like the essence of Celtic Spirituality itself. God Smiled, light broke, creation began, and it was good….

And it is good still. Thanks be to God. Amen

1 http://celtic-spirituality.net/what-is-christian-celtic-spirituality/ accessed 5/27/17

2http://celtic-spirituality.net/what-is-christian-celtic-spirituality/ accessed 5/27/17

3Andrew Dreitcer, March 1996, All Rights Reserved.

4Google dictionary.

5Barbara J. Monda, Rejoice, Beloved Women! The Psalms Revisioned (Notre Dame: Indiana, Sorin Books), 22.

6James Weldon Johnson, The Creation: A Negro Sermon

–

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

“Why Galilee?” based on Acts 10:34-43 and Matthew 28:1-10

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

I tried to start writing this
sermon on Thursday (my normal sermon writing day).  This is one of
the challenges of Holy Week: in order to prepare worship services and
sermons you have to be out of sync with experiencing it.  On Thursday
we remember Jesus’ last night with his disciples.  In Matthew, Mark,
and Luke (the “synoptic gospels”), Jesus adds symbolism to the
Passover meal during in the Last Supper, which is the model for our
communion.  In John, Jesus instead washes the feet of the disciples,
modeling for them the behavior he hoped would define their
relationships after his death: that they would be known by how
lovingly they treated each other.

Truly, I love remembering those
stories in Holy Thursday worship. There is a stillness to our
celebrations, a knowing of what will come next, that I suspect
pervaded the actual night Jesus sat with his disciples, but primarily
there are blessings.

On this Holy Thursday, as I sat
to write an Easter sermon, the news was shouting about the “Mother
of All Bombs” being dropped for the first time in history.  It was
a shocking amount of violence. I was still recovering from the shock
of not quite a week before when 59 bombs had been dropped, and from
the chemical weapons that had been used days before that on
civilians.

It wasn’t just the direct
violence though.  As I sat to write on Thursday, I was thinking about
the vulnerable people in the world and their struggles.  Many in this
church have been actively advocating for the care of our immigrant
sisters and brothers, and yet I keep hearing of young families torn
apart. As many in this church have helped the clean up in Middleburgh
after horrible floods, I was part of the clean up in the Southern
Tier in 2011.  The increase in extreme weather has already impacted
so many lives, and yet in the midst of this crisis for human life on
earth, our country is doing less and less to prevent it.  Lives
continued to be lost and impacted by floods and droughts, mudslides
and major storms.

There was more, all piling on
top of each other on Holy Thursday.  I love our breakfast program and
SUSTAIN ministry (I think they embodies the command to be known by
how well we love), but I hate that they are necessary! I’m so
grateful to serve a church willing to discuss white privilege and
racism, but I’m sick and tired of white privilege and racism.  I’m
tired of fighting for fair and equal funding for Schenectady city
schools, which like most schools with mostly brown and black students
in New York gets the short end of the stick.  I’m exhausted fighting
for LGBTQIA lives in The United Methodist Church, and just annoyed
that homophobia still defines our church at large.  I am grateful for
my co-teachers in confirmation teaching about sexual harassment this
week, but as we’d reiterated how common it is, I was horrified but it
all, all over again.  That is to say, the pile of problems I was
attending to, while trying to write an Easter sermon, was pretty
large.  

That may explain why on Holy
Thursday, when I sat to write and I asked myself the question “what
does Easter mean today?” in the depth of my mind I heard a small
and terrified voice ask “is even Easter enough given the
brokenness of the world?”


It is very hard to write an
Easter sermon on Holy Thursday.  Luckily I had to put it down to go
the Maundy Thursday service we shared with Emmanuel Friedans.  My
roles included reading the story of foot washing from John 13 and to
inviting those present to allow me to wash their feet.  The foot
washing story is the narrative example of the command to the
disciples at the end of chapter: that they would be known by how
lovingly they treated each other.
It is a defining moment differentiating the ways of the
world from the ways of Jesus.
While “important” people in the world are served by those said
to be “less important” than they are, in the Jesus movement all
of us are asked to love and serve each other. Instead of dominating
others, Jesus used his life to support them, and he asked us to
follow in his ways.

Having heard the foot washing
story explained when I was 13,  I desperately wanted to be a part of
it!  It started my call to ministry, this desire to be a part of
turning upside down the values of the world and what it looks like to
live a life that matters.  I wanted to be part of a movement that was
known by how lovingly it treated its own members (and beyond). I was
drawn in.  Foot washing is one of the stories that grounds me in my
faith.  So, while in the most hidden parts of my brain I was
wondering if Easter was enough, I stood at microphone and the story
out loud, and everything clicked back into place.  

Sure, things aren’t great right
now, and many of God’s beloved people are hurting.  Then again,
that’s how it was during Jesus’ time too.  The vast majority of the
Jewish people living in Judea and Galilee were struggling to survive.
The peasant class was about 95% of the population, and they tended
to die young, after a life of hunger and hard labor.  Families were
torn apart by poverty and debt, because family members were sold into
slavery so that the remaining members could eat. Things REALLY
weren’t going well for the people, back in Jesus’ day.  The system
existed to make the rich and powerful more and more wealthy, on the
backs and the lives of the peasants.  The narrative of the Empire was
that they were the peace bearers, and yet the reality was that they
were the oppressors who kept fighting at a minimum because of the
power of their military might, and kept their military mighty by
paying them from the profits they reaped from the peasants.

Jesus’ life and ministry was
with the peasants in Galilee (although he did take some side trips to
Judea and Samaria).  He saw the humanity of the peasants, listened to
them and ate with them.  His healings were for them, and his
teachings designed to teach them.  He was known as a great teacher
and healer, but the stories in the gospels also indicate that his was
a ministry of presence among the people.  He loved the people with
God’s love for them. He showed them they mattered to him by being
present with them.

The peasants were seen by the
Empire as a means of wealth production, and at the same time as a
potential threat to the famous peace.  They were seen by Jesus as
beloved children of God worth his time, energy, and passion.  As
his fame grew and his ministry became well known, he continued to
spend his time with the people living in poverty.  His life showed
that the people the Empire found expendable, God finds worthwhile.
It may be that the most powerful piece of the story isn’t in any one
of the parables, healings, or teachings, but rather that they
happened primarily among the peasants, reiterating God’s care for
all people.  One of the most significant pieces of Jesus’ ministry
was his presence.

Each Gospel tells a unique
Easter story, and Matthew is no exception.  The piece of Matthew’s
story that strikes me this year is that he suggests that the women
continued Jesus’ ministry of presence for Jesus at the end of
his life. They were at his crucifixion (27:55), they were at his
burial (27:61), and they were there on Easter morning.  They held
vigil.  They stayed, even when it was too late. They weren’t there to
change things.  They were just with him.  Based on how clear the
Gospels are about the women being present, I suspect that in
retrospect the disciples were grateful to the women for staying and
being present when they had run away. Jesus wasn’t alone in his death
and his body was cared for afterward, because the women continued
his ministry of presence,
a form of loving Jesus as Jesus had loved them.

And then, in the midst of their
ministry of presence, they are greeted by the angel.  As if that
wasn’t awesome enough, immediately afterward they experience the
presence of Jesus again! The NRSV says that Jesus “met them.” It
means both that he “joined” them and “accompanied” them.1
His presence was returned to them, and the Christian story ever
since is that the presence of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, has remained
with us.

Both the angel at the tomb and
Jesus ask the women to convey to the male disciples that he’ll meet
them again in Galilee.  This is especially significant.  First, it
reiterates that the presence of Jesus has returned.  Secondly, when
Jesus says it he calls the disciples “his brothers.”  They had
denied and abandoned him, and nothing that they had yet done had
changed that reality.  They hadn’t repented, or apologized, or shown
back up.  Yet Jesus calls them his brothers, which was an upgrade
from their previous titles.  As it often is in the Bible, grace and
forgiveness come from God’s nature alone.  As Eugene Boring says in
the commentary in the New Interpreter’s Bible,
“The women become not only missionaries of the resurrection
message, but also agents of reconciliation.”2
It would be the words of the women that would call them back together
and start the process of the disciples living the ministry of Jesus
in the world.  

Finally though, there is the
duplicated message to the disciples about going to GALILEE.  Why
Galilee?  Jesus was killed in Jerusalem, in Judea, where the final
phase of his ministry had occurred.  He was killed in the place he’d
rode into on a donkey, by the authority of those who saw his
indictment of the Temple. His body was placed in a tomb in Judea,
near Jerusalem.  Why were the disciple to meet him back in Galilee?

It
seems like there are three possible answers.  First, they were to go
back to the people Jesus had been in ministry with and continue the
ministry of presence among the most vulnerable people.  (Those in
Galilee were even more vulnerable than those in Judea.)  Secondly,
Galilee was more DIVERSE than Judea, and in Matthew Galilee is
referred to as Galilee of the Gentiles (4:15).  It was home to Jews,
and to the Gentiles.  This is one of Matthew’s references to the
universality of Jesus’ message, and that Galilee was the place to
expand God’s love beyond its traditional boundaries with the Jews
into all the world.  Third, and finally, to go back to Galilee was to
go back to the beginning.  It was home, for Jesus as well as for the
disciples, and it was where his ministry started and grew.
Easter marks the transition point, what had once been the ministry of
Jesus supported by the disciples becomes, on Easter, the ministry of
the disciples supported by Jesus.
They go back to Galilee to go back to the beginning and start the
story again, to be God’s presence to the people once again.  They
went back to continue the ministry of Jesus, the ministry of
presence, that the women had held up in the meantime.

The ah-ha moment I had in Maundy
Thursday worship was really pretty simple.  It is one I’ve had
before, even, I just had to remember.  The brokenness of the world is
very real indeed, and unconscionable things are happening.  But
instead of negating Easter, the brokenness of the world reminds us
of how much we need Easter!  Easter is, as Marcus Borg puts it,
“God’s yes to the world’s no.”  Easter affirms the life of
Jesus, who loved the people and was present to them, and Easter
affirms the commandment that the disciples continue his ministry and
be known by how lovingly they treated each other.
Easter is the explosion of the ministry of Jesus from one life
to many, the expansion of love from one human to many.

The world, like the Empire of
old, teaches us things that do harm.  It teaches us that there isn’t
enough for everyone, so we have to compete and we have to hoard.  The
world teaches us that some lives matter more than other lives, and
that since their isn’t enough we should take care of the lives that
matter first.  The world teaches us about borders that aren’t allowed
to be crossed and separations that aren’t allowed to become
connections.  The world teaches us to be afraid, and to be careful,
and to distrust those around us.  The world teaches us that the
economy matters most, and keeps us alive.  The world teaches us to
take care of ourselves and “ours” first.  

Easter is God’s yes to the
world’s no as well as God’s NO to the world’s YES..  Easter denies
the world’s fallacies and offers us alternatives.  Easter is a
resounding YES to the life and teachings of Jesus.  In the Gospel of
John, Jesus teaches us to be known by how lovingly we treat each
other. In  Easter, the
message of Jesus is passed on and expanded, given to us to live and
teach.  

It doesn’t mean that we can make
everything OK, at least not over the short run.  It doesn’t stop
weapons in in midair, reunite families, or reverse climate change.
But it does mean that we have received the command to be known by
lovingly we act, and that being present to God’s beloved people is
now our work (supported by Jesus).  Doing that will be plenty to
change the world.  Easter, it turns out, is more than enough.  Thanks
be to God.  Amen

1M.
Eugene Boring, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VII: Matthew
Leander E. Keck editorial board convener (Nashville: Abingdon Press,
1995) 500.

2 Ibid.

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

April 16, 2017

Sermons

“The Bible’s Only Self-Description of a Woman” based on…

  • February 27, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

I
find it truly exciting that the only time a woman describes herself
in the Bible she describes herself as “black and beautiful.”1
The joy comes from both a woman describing herself as beautiful –
which I find incredibly subversive on its own – and the fantastic
inversion of our messed up culture that she is dark-skinned AND
beautiful.  It is a lovely match for Black History Month.  And then,
on top of all that, Song of Songs is a book of erotic poetry in the
Bible!   Its very existence flies in the face of the ridiculous
Christian prudishness that has done such great harm for so many
centuries.

Thus,
I’ve been really excited to preach this sermon for weeks.  However, a
few problems have emerged. Song of Songs has humbled my prowess as a
scholar.   I’ve done some my most significant Biblical study on Song
of Songs.  Yet, when I came to the important questions related to
preaching this text I found that I had NO possible way to discover
their answers.  What I would really like to know is (1) how radical
it was for a woman to say “I am beautiful” in that time and place
and (2) how radical it was for a woman to express sexual desire in
that time and place.  There are a few impediments to knowing.  First
of all, the black and beautiful woman is the only woman in the whole
Bible describing herself AND the only woman in the Bible naming her
sexual desire, which means that there is no one to compare her to.  

Secondly,
there are the incredible complications of the text itself.  This book
is very, very difficult to make assertions about.  To begin with, you
may know it as Song of Songs or Song of Solomon because its OPENING
LINE is difficult to translate and no one is sure which one is more
accurate.  That’s only the beginning of the complications.  There is
also the issue of determining when it was written, and time ranges
are especially wide on this.  Scholars claim anything from 960 to 200
BCE.  That’s 760 years of difference.  It is possible that the ways
that women’s voices were heard, the expectations of beauty, the
sexual norms of the day, and how much humility a woman was expected
to express might well have varied wildly over 760 years.  For
instance, it might be worth considering that many of those things
have drastically changed since 1257, and even since 1957.

This level of unknowing makes it
hard to determine anything about how subversive this woman’s words
and actions really were.  I think that there have been cultures in
world history where it would not have been particularly radical for a
woman to claim her own beauty nor her own sexual desire.   As a
whole, Judaism has been more sex-positive than Christianity,
including in having an understanding that part of the role of the
Sabbath was for love-making.  That may suggest that ancient Judaism
may also have been more openminded than (say) medieval Christianity
and that, in particular, a woman’s expression of sexual desire would
not have been all that surprising.

On
the contrary, though, if this were so normal we might expect to hear
it in other parts of the Bible.  Also, we do know a lot about
patriarchal cultures and we know ancient Israel was one of those for
all of those 760 years.  In those cultures, women’s voices aren’t
often heard, nor free.  Finally, if a woman expressing her desire
were so normal, it would be reasonable to expect that interpreters
through the ages might have commonly interpreted the text literally
and not allegorically, and that’s FAR from true.  Most historical
interpretations of this book have been allegorical and or
metaphorical, taking the male character as God or Christ and the
female as the church, Israel, or Israelites.  

It
is only relatively recently that this erotic text has been
interpreted as being primarily about eroticism.  In the nineteenth
century, a German scholar named Johann
Gottfried Heder
analyzed the Song and
found it to be, “a collection of pleasingly erotic love-poetry.”2
 Further research in the early twentieth century connected the Song
to similar Egyptian and Canaanite poetry.  In 1990, Roland Murphy (an
American Catholic scholar who taught Biblical Studies at Duke) wrote,
“Any broad agreement among contemporary critical scholars that the
literal text of the Song marvelously portrays the passions and
yearnings of human lovers is a recent phenomenon.”3

Roland Murphy himself says it is notable that Song of Songs is not
only about sex, but it’s erotic and nonjudgmental about sex. (You
might be amazed to note that the text does not say that the lovers
are married, and in fact rather suggests that they aren’t!)

I
suspect that interpretations of the book Song
of Songs
are more reflective of the culture reading the text than they are of
the book itself!  Since we don’t know how it was understood in its
first few centuries, so we lack the capacity to know how radical it
was then!  It is POSSIBLE that the original meanings of the book were
lost along the way to allegory and metaphor.  Additionally, the book
Song of Songs is exceptionally difficult to interpret.  

“The
vocabulary of the Song of Songs is also unusual in the proportion of
words unique or rare elsewhere in Scripture… In the brief span of a
little more than a hundred verses there are almost fifty hapax rarely
found elsewhere in Scripture.”4
(A hapax is a word found only once in Scripture, making them harder
to translate.) Many commentators identify frequent double entendre
within the Hebrew as well, making it very difficult to render in
English.  Furthermore, the love poetry of other parts of the Near
East and the mythology of the Near East offer deepened understandings
of many parts of the text.  All of this serves to allow interpreters
and commentators a lot of leeway in their claims, and adds to the
variety of understandings of the text.

If
the text is a drama, the number of speakers in the Song of Songs is
debated. Claims range from man and woman; man, woman, and lecher;
even to man, women, and some eight other characters plus choruses.
Others claim it isn’t even a drama.  It is clear the Song of Songs is
written in poetic language as opposed to prose. It is also clear that
the poetry speaks about love.  However, claims have been made that it
is constituted by as many as 30 separate poems, yet editorial work
allows for the poems to form an ambiguously meaningful whole.  The
Song is not the only love poetry from the Ancient Near East, although
it does have unique elements. Murphy explains,

“As our earlier survey of
Egyptian and Sumerian sources indicated, there is no reason to doubt
that the biblical Song is indebted, at least indirectly, to older
traditions of Near Eastern love poetry.  Nor need one quarrel with
the likelihood that some of these antecedent traditions had
specifically sacral significance or that they otherwise witness to
the reciprocity of imagery depicting divine and human love.”5

Thus,
although the Song of Songs is very distinctive in the Bible, it does
fit somewhat into the genre of Ancient Love poetry.

You
may wonder why I’ve had to spend SO MUCH time explaining all of this
to you, especially given that I think you are very intelligent people
with a strong grasp on the Bible and history.  In the suggested
readings of the church, the three year cycle of “lectionary”
readings, only 6 verses of the book Song of Songs show up.  Then,
they’re most often skipped over by clergy who find it easier to
preach on the Gospel (or any other part of the Bible) than on the
Song, despite the fact that they’re among the mildest verses one
could pick from the text!  So, I don’t think most people, including
those who have been attending church regularly for their whole lives,
have had much exposure to this book and I’ve had to start with the
basics.

All
of this brings me back to the beginning: there is very little that
can be said for certain about the Song of Songs and that makes it
very hard to make firm claims about it.  I would really LIKE to say
that it was radical and subversive to have a heroine who speaks of
herself as beautiful, because it would be in our culture and I think
that’s a a great thing to strive for, but I’m not CERTAIN that it
really was radical then.  Perhaps in the time of the writing the
culture she lived in was so body-positive that most people thought
they were beautiful??  Isn’t that nice to ponder? Similarly I think
it is radical that she named her own desire, but I don’t KNOW.

The
projection onto this book of the Bible is non-trivial.  I’ve found
that most commentators speaking of the line “I am black and
beautiful” find it necessary to explain how such a line is
possible.  They seem to forget that Western Culture’s obsession with
light skin is relatively new and thus doesn’t appropriately fit into
Biblical history.  Many, many commentators believe that the black and
beautiful woman is apologetic about her skin tone. Renita Weems, a
womanist theologian and author of the Song of Songs section of the
New Interpreter’s Bible, responds to those assumptions with 3 pieces
of context:

“(1) The word ‘black’ appears
five times in the emphatic position suggesting that the woman’s tone
is confident and her posture assertive – not apologetic. (2)
Throughout the poem the woman’s physical beauty is both praised and
celebrated, not only by her lover but also by the maidens of the
city, which means that others regard her as indisputably attractive.
(3) Although the Song of Songs and Lamentations (and other portions
of Scripture) suggest that a ruddy complexion was prized in men, the
same does not automatically apply to women, since women were commonly
judged by a different standard of beauty.”6

If
you are like me, you might appreciate knowing that “ruddy” means
“having a healthy reddish color.”  Since the text does not say
who her parents or clan are, Weems points out “We are left to take
heart in her bold act of self-assertion and description: She speaks
up for herself; she is the object of her own gaze; she is, by her own
estimation, black and
beautiful.”7
For many cultures in many places and in many times, such a statement
is radical in its positivity and self-affirmation.  I wish there were
more space made for people to make such comments in our time, space,
and culture now.

Instead,
we live in a society in which women are barraged with messages about
how inadequate their bodies are in order for corporations and their
shareholders to profit off of those feelings of inadequacy.  In
everything from the immediately obvious clothes, shoes, make up, and
diet industries to the also insidious tanning salons, self-help
books, beauty magazines, and even the wedding industry; wealth is
extracted from women by making them  feel inadequate and not
beautiful enough.  In
such a society, it
seems truly subversive to LIKE yourself.  

Throughout
the Song of Songs, both lovers celebrate each other.  The woman’s
capacity to find herself beautiful and her capacity to celebrate her
lover’s beauty are correlated.  Instead of struggling under a pile of
self-hatred, she was able to live freely in love.  Her ability to
like and love herself enabled her to live and love another, and I
choose to believe also enabled each of them to expand their circles
of love into the world.  Consumer culture teaches us to find
ourselves INADEQUATE, but
this ancient, dark-skinned, beautiful woman teaches us to savor the
goodness of life.  In
the use of her voice, in the way she describes herself, and even in
her willingness to name her own desire, she offers us an alternative
way of life.  She offers us the freedom to ENJOY rather than wallow
in life.  May we follow in her lead, each of us as we are able, and
find the freedom of God in beauty itself (even our own!)  Amen

1 Renita J. Weems “The Song of Songs: Introduction, Commentary and Reflections” as found in the New Interpreter’s Bible Vol V (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), 383.

2
Roland
Murphy, The
Song of Songs: A Commentary on the Book of Canticles or The Song of
Songs
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990) 39  .

3
Murphy,
40.

4
Marvin A. Pope “Song of Songs” in The Anchor
Yale Bible Commentaries (Doubleday: New York, etc, 1995), 34.

5
Murphy,
97.

6 Weems, 382-383.

7 Weems,
383.

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

February 26, 2017

Sermons

“A good man and an earnest question” based on…

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

I
don’t know about you, but I have always been haunted by this
scripture passage. It’s on the short list of texts where I hope
Jesus didn’t mean exactly what he said, but I’m never quite sure.
I do know that the story of the Rich Young Ruler is impossible to
dismiss: It appears in all three synoptic Gospels and it ranks among
the most famous of biblical stories. 

The
words “rich young ruler” don’t actually appear in the text. I
don’t know when this story acquired that name, but it does us a
disservice in some ways. We hear “rich young ruler” and we think,
“that’s not me.” We might think, “I’m not rich,” or “I’m
not that rich.” Many of us think, “I’m not young” (I know my
knees think I’m not young and that I should act my age and stop
climbing mountains already). And probably none of us here identify as
a “ruler” – though if you changed that to “manager” a few
of us, myself included, would identify with it. 
  
But
those words, rich young ruler, aren’t in the text, and if we put
that familiar label aside and listen to the man’s story, and
imagine who he might be in our own time, he starts to sound a lot
more like many of us. 
  
Allow
me to update the story for you. 

Imagine
the scene: The teacher is leaving. His lecture is done, the Q&A
is over, he’s in the parking lot packing up his car, getting ready
to head home. And a man comes running up to him, out of breath. He
has a burning question on his mind and he didn’t get called on
during the discussion but he just knows he must catch the teacher
before he leaves town. 

He
kneels down – he’s a huge fan, he has tremendous respect for the
teacher, he’s read all of his books – and he asks: “Good
teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 

He’s
a good man, and it’s an earnest question. 

Now,
we need to step back for a moment from our 21st-century
parking lot to 1st-century
Palestine to understand the words in this question. When we hear the
words “eternal life” many of us think of an afterlife, going to
heaven after we die, something separate from this life. But that is
not at all what it meant in Jesus’s time. Rather than being a
temporal idea, something about some future time, eternal life as
Jesus spoke about it was about a quality
of life – about knowing God, a life lived connected to God, a
richer life of purpose. It isn’t separate from this life. 

The
phrase “eternal life” is used interchangeably with “kingdom of
God” and “kingdom of heaven” throughout the synoptic Gospels.
It is about living into, establishing the kingdom – the reign –
the dominion – of God and doing it now.
In
that way, it is about living into and working for God’s vision for
the world. This is most explicit in the Lord’s prayer: “Thy
kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” 

So
the man’s question, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
is a question about what it takes to be part of the kingdom, what it
takes to do the work of the kingdom, to have that richer, purposeful
life, to work for God’s vision in the world. 

He’s
a good man, and it’s an earnest question. 

  

And
Jesus says to him, “you know the commandments: ‘you shall not
murder.’”

  
And
the man thinks, “OK, I’ve got that one. Check.” 

“You
shall not commit adultery.” 

“Well,
I’m no Donald Trump. So, check.” 
“You
shall not steal.” 

“There
was that time I really wanted to steal my little brother’s baseball
mitt. 
But I didn’t. Check.” 

“You
shall not bear false witness.” 

“Not
always easy, but at the end of the day it’s just not right
denigrate anyone else’s reputation, no matter what you think of
them. Yeah, check.” 

“You
shall not defraud.” 

“I’ve
always been an honest businessman. Main Street, not Wall Street. I’ve paid my employees fairly, never cheated my customers or sold those
cheaper widgets that break too quickly. Check.”

“Honor
your father and mother.” 

“Always.
When Dad got sick, I was in the hospital every day, and when he
passed away, we had Mom move in with us, even though we didn’t have
a lot of extra room. Yes, check.” 
  
And
then he thinks, “phew!” and says to Jesus, “I have kept all
these since my youth.” 
  
It’s
not a cocky response. He’s not saying, “Hey, look how great I
am.” After all, the very fact that he’s there in the parking lot
with that question, “what must I do…” indicates that he has
doubts that he’s doing enough. 
  
But
he’s good man. He’s lived an upright life; he’s done right by
his family, his neighbors, friends, his employees, his customers. He
coaches Little League, he organizes the annual charity dinner for the
local hospital, he goes to church every Sunday. 

  
He’s
serious about his faith. That’s why he’s there with that
question. It’s an earnest question. 
  
And
Jesus sees all of that. Mark says “Jesus, looking at him, loved
him.” Jesus doesn’t discount any of what the man has done when he
says this next thing to him: 

“You
lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor
and you will have treasure in heaven; then, come, follow me.” 

It’s
not that what the man has done is bad, it’s just that Jesus is
saying there’s more. If you truly want to experience eternal life,
if you want to be part of the kingdom, to build the kingdom, to do
God’s work in the world, there is more; and this is what it is. 

Our
good man is shocked. He’s devastated. And he goes away, the story
says, “grieving, for he had many possessions.” 

Can
you imagine? 

Give
up everything?
I could increase my pledge, he thinks, maybe even tithe. But
everything?
And if I give everything away, how will I live? What about my family? 

And
what does it mean, “follow me?” I thought that’s what I was
doing. 
This
story is about many things, including the undisputable bias against
economic wealth that runs throughout the Bible. 

But
it’s about other things, too. 

Now
I don’t know if we are all supposed to literally sell everything.

I
do know how the Rich Young Ruler feels when he hears that, though.
Because I have many possessions, too, and as much as I want to follow
Jesus, I know right now I am not giving away everything I own. I
can’t bring myself to do it. Or at least not yet, I won’t say
never. 

But
I want to sidestep the question this morning of how literally to take
this directive and focus instead on another dimension of the message
in the story. 
This
scripture is about reflection and self-assessment, and then about
encountering judgment from a higher power that leads to deeper
reflection and self-assessment. 

The
man asks how he’s doing spiritually. He takes stock as he reviews
how he’s lived up to the commandments Jesus lists. And then he is
issued a deeper challenge; and through that he comes to recognize how
much more he has than he realized, how much more he could give, and
how very hard it would be to do it. 

At
its heart, this is a story about recognizing privilege in our lives. 

And
in this Trumpian moment, when the oppressors pretend that they are
the oppressed, when the vulnerable are scapegoated, I cannot think of
a more relevant lesson for our times. 

I
want to suggest to you that the most useful way to understand and
apply this story in our lives today is not to focus only on literal
economic wealth, but to think about currencies of power and privilege
throughout our lives – whether that be economic privilege we have
because of our income or family background, institutional power or
status that we have through a position we hold at work or in the
community, or social privilege that we have because of our race or
sex, religion or immigration status, our ethnicity or sexuality. 
What
Jesus is calling us to do in this story is to look deeper at
everything we have, at how exactly we fit into the many social
structures we each are a part of, to recognize where we have
privilege and power in our lives—and to understand that following
him means putting all of it into play. 

Being
a part of the kingdom of God, doing the work of the kingdom means
holding nothing back. If it is God’s intent and desire that no one
be excluded; that no one is inside or outside or better than or worse
than; that the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed of this world
are to be welcomed and defended, then we cannot be a part of that if
we insist on holding onto our own privilege and power. We must be
willing to risk our privilege if we are serious about seeking eternal
life and working in the service of God’s vision for the world. 

To
say that this is difficult is an understatement. And the Rich Young
Ruler, our good man, has plenty of company among those who are
unwilling or unable to give up what they have, to use their privilege
or risk their privilege, in the service of God’s kingdom. 

The
white person who remains silent when her neighbors are talking about
“those illegals” at the block party, and how glad they are that
we’re going to build that wall – even though she knows her
silence means they will think she agrees. 

The
up-and-coming manager who crosses the picket line because the CEO
sent a memo saying all non-union workers were to report to duty as
normal – even though he knows that crossing that line means the
strike will be broken and the workers won’t get the healthcare
their families so desperately need. 
The
senators who say they are opposed to Trump’s bigotry, his nominees,
his unconstitutional executive orders, but enable business as usual
to proceed – even though that business puts in harm’s way
millions of  undocumented immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQI people, and
people covered by the Affordable Care Act. 

Clergy
people, and especially bishops and other high-ranking clergy people,
who do not use their status as moral authority figures to denounce
the rising tide of white nationalism because they are afraid of
backlash from some in their congregations or from other church
officials. Silence, as the gay community reminded the world during
the early AIDS crisis, IS complicity. 

Jesus
is speaking to all of these people, and to all of us, in this story.
Speaking up, using your privilege, disrupting the harm, risking your
security to protect the vulnerable – that is the work of the
kingdom.   

In
Luke’s story, after the man goes away grieving, Jesus piles on with
one of the Bible’s most famous one-liners: “It is easier for a
camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich
to enter the kingdom of God.” As if we weren’t already feeling
like what Jesus is asking is impossible. Indeed, the disciples had
the same reaction. “Then who can be saved?” they ask one another. 

If
the story ended here, it would be a bitter tale about our inability
to give up power and privilege for the pursuit of justice. And most
of human history confirms this dark narrative. 

But
it’s not
the end of the story. 

Jesus
says to his disciples, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for
God; for God all things are possible.” 

Do
you believe that? Do you believe that God can inspire mortals to
great acts of daring and personal sacrifice for human freedom?

I
do. 

Because
that dark narrative of history is interrupted time and again, in big
ways and small, by another narrative, one about the irrepressible
struggle for truth, for justice, for freedom. 

Martin
Luther: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” All things are
possible for God. 

Harriet
Tubman: She risked her own life over and over to free others from
slavery. All things are possible for God. 

The
Freedom Riders:  Black and white women and men together defying
segregation laws in the face of violence, jail, and constant danger.
Yes, all things are possible for God. 

The
U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s is, to me, the finest
chapter of our nation’s history precisely because it is such
eloquent testimony to how God moves in the world inspiring people to
majestic heights of courage and sacrifice and love. 

God
is there, too, making all things possible, with every conscientious
objector, with every whistleblower who risks her job to expose unsafe
work conditions or government crimes. 

And
God is here, now, in the incredible stand indigenous people have
taken to protect native lands and water against the Dakota Access
Pipeline, in which they have faced down attack dogs, concussion
grenades, water cannons in sub-freezing weather, and arrests, among
other things, and yet remain standing at Standing Rock, in prayer and
witness for the earth itself.

God
is here in the thousands of federal employees who have gone rogue,
risking their jobs by copying data to make sure it’s not destroyed,
filing dissent memos, leaking information to the media and sharing
information directly with the public.

God
is here in the resistance to the Muslim ban and the deportation
orders, in the activists who laid their bodies down in front of an
ICE van last week to prevent the deportation of Guadalupe García and
in the rabbis who were arrested blockading a Manhattan street in
defense of their Muslim sisters and brothers and siblings. In the
thousands upon thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets
every day of the Trump presidency, shoulder to shoulder with people
they had heretofore avoided, chanting “no prisons, no pipelines, no
ban, no wall.” 

Yes,
all things are possible for God. 

The
question for all of us is, What
things will we let God make possible in our lives? Where
are the places we are called to recognize and risk the power and
privilege we have to do the work of God’s kingdom? 

The
answers to these questions are as unique as each of us and our
relationship with God. But if we want to inherit eternal life and do
the work of God’s kingdom, we cannot stay silent and safe on the
sidelines while civil rights are rolled back, Muslims are
scapegoated, immigrants are deported, queer and trans people are
bullied, and dissidents are silenced. We cannot. 

What
will you risk? How can you use your privilege? If you’re a U.S.
citizen, will you risk arrest when others cannot? If you’re white,
will you be part of a buffer zone at demonstrations between police
and people of color in order to minimize the danger of police
violence against black and brown bodies? If you’re a Christian,
will you speak up every time you hear an islamophobic remark, whether
it’s your brother-in-law or your boss who makes it? 

Imagine
you are at a protest like the one outside the ICE office where
Guadalupe García was held last week. She came to this country when
she was 14, 21 years ago. She’s married and has two kids, 14 and
16, and has worked hard her whole life. Imagine someone like
Guadalupe is about to be deported. She is in the van. Then comes word
that there is a safe house that will offer her sanctuary, they just
need 20 minutes to get someone there to pick her up. The van is about
to leave. 

Would
you lay down in front of that van? Would you tie yourself to the
tires? Would you slash those tires, to buy that 20 minutes? 

“Go,
sell what you own, and give the money to the poor and you will have
treasure in heaven; then, come, follow me.” 


“For
God all things are possible.”


Amen. 
 February 12, 2017   

Sermons

“Subversive Grace” based on  Job 2:7-10

  • February 5, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

This
week a clergy friend reached out with a concern about our United
Methodist Bookstore and recourse center, Cokesbury.  In the most
recent Cokesbury catalog, on page 21, listed under “Women’s
Studies” was a book entitled “Zip It” with a cover image of
women’s lips zipped closed.  He asked us to join him in expressing
displeasure.  I did.  I got a response from Cokesbury that attempted
to reassure me by informing me that I was ignorant of their intent.
The email informed me that the author, “offers
practical how-to’s meant to inspire her readers to use their words
‘to build, not to break; to bless, not to badger; to encourage, not
to embitter; to praise, not to pounce’.  Her work is very
specific to women’s group Bible study and personal devotion and
reflection.”1
Clearly the author of the book along with the author of the email
perceive this to be EMPOWERMENT of women.  You might stake a guess
that I disagree.  You’d be right.

Now,
this particular exchange was fairly trivial this week.  It was almost
nothing, except that it served as a reminder of the inherent sexism
in The Church and the resiliency of the patriarchy in the
institution.  It was just another
piece of frustration and sadness.  In the language of Parker Palmer,
it was another expression of the “tragic gap.”  He explains it
this way, “Of
all the tensions we must hold in personal and political life, perhaps
the most fundamental and most challenging is standing and acting with
hope in the “tragic gap.” On one side of that gap, we see the
hard realities of the world, realities that can crush our spirits and
defeat our hopes. On the other side of that gap, we see real-world
possibilities, life as we know it could be because we have seen it
that way.”2

Palmer teaches that much of what we struggle with in life is the
reality of the tragic gap and how to be authentic in response to it.

The
tragic gap ALWAYS exists.  For the past few weeks though it has felt
like every piece of news, as well as every time I’ve accessed social
media, I’ve been bombarded with reminders of the tragic gap.  At
times it has felt like I’ve been drowning in them.  My natural
emotional disposition tends toward happiness and playfulness (along
with overthinking 😉 ), but recently I’ve been feeling tired,
overwhelmed, and bogged down.  

Now,
it feels imperative to mention that I do not think that a publishing
foible by Cokesbury is a tragedy, it did not send me into a
depression, and it is not even OVERLY significant.  In the face of
the scope of issues today, it barely registers.   I have to say this
because the last time I acknowledged being personally harmed by the
existence sexism in the church at large I was told by Annual
Conference Leadership that I was a hysterical woman and sent to
Emotional Intelligence training.  So, now that’s cleared up.

Truth
be told though, there are so very many reminders of the tragic gap
right now that they are piled on top of each other.  There are all
the normal ones and all the exceptionally new ones.  I think it is
creating a phenomenon similar to grief: when a new grief occurs it
also serves to reawaken all the grief we have experienced before it.
No one attack on the world as it should be is the problem: they all
add on to each other and start to snow ball.  For many in my life,
I’m hearing that they are now avalanching.  Dear friends (please
note: friends, none of you, I wouldn’t share your struggles from this
pulpit) have told me this week that they are experiencing physical
symptoms of the anxiety they experience given the current depth of
the tragic gap.  I’m also hearing people are having trouble sleeping,
as well as turning to junk food and alcohol to make it through the
days.

image

As
for myself, this week I noticed that EVERYTHING I try to do is an
uphill battle.  It all just feels harder, sort of like how it does
when I haven’t taken vacation in entirely too many months.  My
yearning has been to sit on the couch, drink tea, pet my cat, and
watch West Wing and anything more than that requires steeling myself
to do what needs to be done.

I
don’t know how all of you are doing.  I hope some of you are fine and
dandy, with either sufficient coping mechanisms, sufficient hope, or
sufficient joy to counterbalance the world’s problems.  I know some
of you are really struggling, and that those struggles are often a
combination of the world around us and the personal issues that keep
coming.  Perhaps some are also in the middle: aware of the struggles
and making it.  After last week’s sermon, and the Biblical book from
which we read, many of you may be feeling anxious that I’m about to
make it worse.

I
don’t think I am.  Ironically enough, Job feels like a friendly
figure right now, and his story seems to give us reason for hope.
For those of you who aren’t inherently familiar with the story, let
me summarize quickly:  Job is presented as a truly good human.
Everyone agrees that he is “blameless and upright,” faithful to
God, and even overly observant.  He made sacrifices to God JUST IN
CASE one of his sons accidentally sinned.  He was also wealthy in the
form of enormous flocks.  He and his wife and had 10 children, 7 sons
and 3 daughters.  God is said to be proud of Job’s good heart and
faithfulness.

Suddenly
things changed: all of his wealth was either killed or stolen.  At
the same time, all of his children, who had been feasting together,
were killed when a wind knocked down the tent.  Job turned to grief
and turned his heart to God in prayer.  Then, in our text,  his
health deteriorated, with painful sores opening all over his entire
body.  He is already sitting on an ash heap and appears to simply,
calmly, pick up a piece of a broken pot to use to scratch himself.
It seems that he is already so heartbroken that the physical symptoms
barely register.  

That
seems right.  The deepest grief I have seen in my life has been the
grief of parents mourning for their children.  In the face of losing
10 children, I don’t think anything else would even register.  Job’s
wife is convinced that his death is imminent, and even in the midst
of her shared grief, she manages to register the degree of his pain.

The
meaning of her words is not entirely clear.  She says, “Do you
still persist in your integrity?  Curse God, and die.” The big
question is: does she assume he is dying already and wish to ease his
death by helping him speak words of truth on the way out; OR does she
believe his suffering is too great for anyone to handle and believe
that if he curses God, God will finally let him die?  That is, it
isn’t clear if she thinks he is dying anyway which then also makes it
unclear if she thinks cursing God will kill him.  Since this is a
book especially designed to argue against the idea that a difficult
life indicates that God is punishing you, I’m going to suggest that
the more likely meaning is the first:  she wishes for him speak out
loud of his pain to ease the suffering on his way to death.

Truly,
Job’s wife speaks with outstanding grace, especially for a woman who
is also grieving the loss of all of her children.  The capacity to
attend to anyone else’s pain in the midst of that grief is unusual –
humans are built that way.  She wants his pain to be eased, both
physically and emotionally.  She thinks he is being too stoic, and
should let go of his pride in order to find some relief.  In Bible
Study we found ourselves telling stories of the end of people’s
lives, and the grace-filled ways we had known loved ones to ease the
end of the dying person’s life.  This woman’s words reminded us of
how difficult it can be to let go of a loved one, and at the same
time how much of a relief it is when someone we love is no longer
suffering.  

Job’s
wife encouraged him to do what he could do to be at peace at the end
of his life.  He refused her, responding that his faith required him
to deal with the pain as it came.  In case you haven’t read Job, it
is interesting to note that for chapters upon chapters after this he
expresses his pain with great intensity.  However, the prelude seems
to forget those speeches.

Now,
the grace-filled response of Job’s wife has not been heard as such
throughout history.  “Chrysostom asked why the Devil left Job his
wife and answered with the suggestion that he considered her a
scourge by which to plague him more acutely than by any other
means.”3
Yep.  And he wasn’t alone, “The ancient tradition, reflected in
Augustine, Chrysostom, Calvin, and many others, that she is an aide
to the satan
underestimates the complexity of her role.”4
Most male commentators throughout history have condemned Job’s wife
for her words, seeing her as a part of the problem.  I wonder how
much of culture’s assumptions about females fed into that
perspective.  It was difficult for those of us who studies this
together to hear anything but gentleness, love, and grace in Job’s
wife’s words.  They’re subversive grace, for sure, not at all
reflecting the most common ways of showing love, but they’re grace
nonetheless.

The
book of Job explores human suffering, and asks the big questions
about how human suffering and God’s will are related.  God’s answers
to Job’s questions are in chapters 38-40 if you want to read them
yourselves.  The book of Job gives us a space to reflect on suffering
itself, and it gives us words to name the suffering.  We don’t have
to be in Job’s particularly awful position to be suffering, there are
many kinds of suffering in the world.

This
week we had a Gathering of (The) Connection where we talked about
finding peace.  We were gifted with wonderful questions: what is
peace?  What helps you find peace?  What keeps you from peace?  We
discussed the balance of righteousness anger and peace, and we
wondered about it.  As we discussed a thought started to form in me:
I think I’ve been doing it wrong.  (Or if not “wrong” than in a
less than optimal way.)

In
recent weeks, I have allowed my fears and angers to motivate and lead
me, and I am not at my best when I do that.  Certainly there is
plenty worth protesting, there are great organizations to donate to,
and imperative conversations to have.  However, if I want to be as
useful as I can be in building the kin-dom of God, then I need to
start those actions from the best motivation.  Now I’m wondering if I
can attend to centering myself in the unconditional love of God and
wonder of life and Creation – even now, ESPECIALLY now?  Can I
allow myself to slow down enough to consider where my energy belongs
and where my gifts are most useful?  Can I show up, wherever I show
up, grace-filled and at peace so that the love I have to share can be
part of what I offer in changing the world?  Can I learn how to hold
peace in such a deep way that it allows me to hold anger differently?

Please
be aware that I think grace-filled and at peace can be a reasonable
way to protest, chant, and resist!!  I’m talking about the inner
motivation and way of responding to the rest of God’s people.  When
it comes down to it, I think that the energy we bring into the world
changes it more than the words we use.  The world is desperately in
need of love and peace – and listening as well as many many forms
of resistance.  Furthermore, in the past few weeks people’s hearts
haven’t stopped breaking in the normal and awful ways human hearts
break.  There is still a lot of need around us for patience and
compassion.

So,
I’m hoping that in the face of great suffering I might be able (on
good days) to share subversive grace: to share God’s love from a
place of peace and gratitude WHILE calling the world out of the
tragic gap and into the kin-dom.  This will take times of quiet,
intentional reflection, deep conversation, and attending to hope,
gratitude and goodness.  This will take paying attention to what
brings me energy – and doing those things.  This will take a
regular practice of Sabbath, in particular Sabbath from the news
cycle.  I got one of those this week and it made all the difference.

Finally,
I hope that my journey is of use to you as well.  In the midst of her
own suffering, Job’s wife found the way to hear her husband’s pain
and respond to it with love, grace, and compassion.  That’s
especially hard work right now.  But, may God help us to treat
ourselves,  and those we love, with similar love, grace, and
compassion.  May we find our energy sources, good spiritual
practices, and  the freedom to breath outside of the news cycle.
And, with God’s help, may it lower our anxiety and fill us with some
much needed peace.  Amen

1Personal
Email, February 1, 2016.  

2Parker
Palmer, Healing
the Heart of Democracy,
p. 191.  Accessed at
http://www.couragerenewal.org/democracyguide/v36/
on February 2, 2017.

3Marvin
H. Pope, Job.  
In
the Anchor Bible Series, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co, 1965)
page 22.

4Carol
A. Newsom “The Book of Job” in The New Interpreter’s Study
Bible Vol IV (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1996), page 355.

image

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

“Speaking the Truth No One Wants to Hear” based…

  • January 29, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

I can think of no way to begin this sermon other than by apologizing: to any who have survived a sexual assault, for whom discussion of sexual assault escalates the remaining pain, I am sorry. Also, for those who have been yearning for a clergy person to acknowledge the harm done by sexual violence who have been harmed by the conversation not happening, I am sorry.

In the United States, 1 in 6 women and 1 in 33 men will experience an attempted or completed rape in their lifetimes. (Most attempts are completed.) To save you the math, 90% of rapes happen to women and 10% happen to men.1 In terms of gender that means we need to remember that women are more likely to be living with the internal scars of sexual assault than men are AND that a substantial number of men are also living with internal scars of sexual assault. We also want to remember that members of the transgender community experience sexual assault at MUCH higher rates than cisgender people. More important than the statistics however, is to remember that one rape is one rape too many.

This should never happen.

And it happens a lot. Many people sexually assault others.

The story of King David’s daughter, the Princess Tamar, is a story of sexual assault. Unlike most such stories, Tamar’s story is told. Her story reflects and shines light on many stories that never got told, as well as on the experiences of those who told their stories but were not believed. Instead of having been insulated and protected by her royalty, the story of the princess reflects the experiences of many unnamed men and women throughout history.

Phyllis Trible, a matriarch of feminist biblical criticism, has a chapter on Tamar in her book Texts of Terror. She opens the chapter with these words, “From the book of Samuel comes the story of a family enmeshed in royal rape. Brother violates sister. He is a prince to whom belong power, prestige, and unrestrained lust. She is a princess to whom belong wisdom, courage, and unrelieved suffering. Children of one father, they have not the same care of each other. Indeed, the brother cares not at all.”2

This story comes soon after the one about King David’s adultery, his use of Bathsheba without her consent, and the prophet Nathan calling him on it. David’s shame is very present in the story, including in how he responds to it. Amnon, the lust-filled rapist, is his oldest son and heir. Absalom, Tamar’s full brother, is David’s third son.

The story SAYS that Amnon “fell in love with” Tamar but I think we can easily conclude that Amnon fell in lust with Tamar. This is not what love looks like. As a virgin daughter of the king, Tamar was highly valuable property, useful to be given away to other countries and brokering deals. That meant that she was “protected property, inaccessible to males, including her brother.”3 Amnon, the princely heir, doesn’t seem to like having anything stand in his way. He finds the person who gives him the advice he wants – that he should manipulate his father into giving him access to Tamar to fulfill his lust.

I must say, Trible points out that when Amnon feigns illness and worries his father, in his request that she be sent to him, Amnon refers to Tamar as his sister. She says, “To claim kinship with Tamar at this time averts suspicion.”4 I say, UGH.

Tamar does as she’s told. She doesn’t have many degrees of freedom, and the king had ordered her to go. The servants leave, she prepares the food, she brings it to Amnon, and then he grabs her. He demands that she sleep with him, again calling her his sister. Trible goes on, “Through a series of orders, all of them obeyed, Amnon has manipulated the occasion to feed his lust. This time, however, the royal command meets objection. In the presence of a rapist, Tamar panics not. In fact, she claims her voice. Unlike Amnon’s brisk commands, her deliberations slow the movement of the plot, though they are unable to divert it. If Amnon uses the vocative to seduce her, she returns it to summon him to sense.”5

Tamar has an unusually cool head. She didn’t panic nor beg. She spoke in reasonable terms and tried to talk him out of it. She pointed out that their country is above such things, which is a great argument to make in a royal family where the country would be valued especially highly. She points out that it would shame her, seemingly thinking he was capable of empathy. He does not seem to be. She names that it would ruin him, making him appear as a fool and a scoundrel. Finally, seeming to become clear that he wanted what he wanted and wouldn’t stop until he got it, she suggests an alternative. She points out that if he asked to marry her, he’d be allowed to, thus avoiding all the other disastrous consequences. Trible says, “Her words are honest and poignant; they acknowledge female servitude. Tamar knows Amnon can have her but pleads that he do it properly.”6

That she needs to make such an offer is heart-breaking. However, even the offer to wed the man bent on raping her is ignored. He doesn’t want to hear her speak– he wants to have her subservient and as he fantasized. The text simply says, “but he would not listen to her” and then goes on to say, “and being stronger than she was, he forced her and lay with her.”(13:14) Trible says the text is worse than it first appears in English, “the Hebrew omits the preposition to stress his brutality. ‘He laid her.’”7

And then it got worse.

The violence of the rape transformed the lust into hatred, and he ordered her to “Get out.” However, even in this moment of utter vulnerability and violation, Tamar held her own. Trible says, “This abused woman will no more heed Amnon’s order of dismissal than she consented to his demand for rape.”8 She responds with “NO.” And she stops calling him her brother. Trible continues, “’No,’ she said to him, ‘because sending me away is a greater evil than the other which you have done to me.’ (13:16a) If the narrator interprets that the hatred is greater than the desire, Tamar understands that the expulsion is greater than the rape. In sending her away, Amnon increases the violence he has inflicted on her. He condemns her to a lifelong sentence of desolation. Tamar knows that rape dismissed is crime exacerbated.”9 Again he doesn’t listen. She stops speaking.

Now, this seems to be worth taking a moment to acknowledge that Tamar’s story is not entirely universal and timeless. In her day, if an unmarried woman was raped, it was expected that the man would marry her. That was the least bad option for the woman, since otherwise she was seen as damaged goods which would prevent the possibility of a future marriage and thus the possibility of a financially stable future. Tamar, like other biblical women, was taught that her value was in her capacity to wed and bear male children. This rape AND expulsion violated her body and any hope she had of a future. It was a different time. Today we hope women don’t get stuck marrying their rapists. In any case, she kept her head, her reason, and her voice. But he doesn’t listen.

After she is kicked out and the door is barred to keep her from re-entering, she tears her robe. The robe proclaims her a virgin daughter of the King, and she isn’t anymore. Trible says, “tearing her robe symbolizes the violence done to a virgin princess. Rape has torn her.”10 She also puts ashes on her head and weeps publicly. She VISIBLY proclaims that wrong has been done to her. She doesn’t hide it. She doesn’t protect her “brother.” She lets her entire body scream for her, and she makes sure it gets listened to this time.

Her brother, her full brother Absalom, speaks to her. When the words are examined deeply, they are quite powerful. He is his sister’s advocate and he offers her a safe place. In this story Absalom is the one we can look to as a moral compass and seek to emulate. (I actually think Tamar is too high of a standard, being that strong, clear-minded and articulate in the face of that violence is not something to compare ourselves to.) Trible explains, “Absalom explicitly introduces this speech with the adverb ‘attāh, ‘now’ or ‘for the time being.’ As Amnon’s pretense deceived David, so Tamar’s pretense will deceive Amnon. Further, rather than minimizing the crime, euphemisms such as ‘with you’ or ‘this deed’ underscore its horror.”11

Absalom starts by asking her if Amnon had raped her. He knows it is possible, and he acknowledges it. He also speaks the words, which means she doesn’t have to, in this case another means of grace. He is tender to her, he reminds her that they are still connected, and he comes up with a plan. He takes the harm done to his sister as real, significant, and relevant to him. She is his sister, that hasn’t changed. The text tells us he brought her into his house, since she was no longer a virgin princess living in the palace. He listened, he cared, and he made a space for her.

From the moments after the rape on Absalom takes charge. Trible suggests that it is in this moment that he supplants King David himself in the story.12 David is said to be angry – but it is not clear if he is mad at Amnon or at “what happened to Amnon”? Trible says, “David’s anger signifies complete sympathy for Amnon and total disregard for Tamar. How appropriate that the story never refers to David and Tamar as father and daughter.”13 David does nothing, which leaves Absalom alone to respond to the harm done to his sister.

In the end of the story, Tamar is “desolate.” Trible explains, “When used of people elsewhere in scripture, the verb be desolate (šmm) connotes being destroyed by an animal (Lam. 3:11) Raped, despised, and rejected by a man, Tamar is a woman of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”14 And, in response to Amnon not listening to Tamar, Absalom stops speaking to Amnon as well. (Also, eventually, Absalom kills Amnon and then after that he leads a revolt against his father. David’s failure to respond destabilizes his throne. But this is Tamar’s story and we are going to stick with her.)

Her story, such as it is, is concluded in the following chapter. Trible explains again, starting with the Biblical quote, “’There were born to Absalom three sons and one daughter; her name was Tamar.’ (14:27. RSV). Strikingly the anonymity of the sons highlights the name of the lone female child. In her Absalom has created a living memorial for his sister. A further note enhances the poignancy of his act. Tamar, the daughter of Absalom, ‘became a beautiful woman to behold.’ From aunt to niece have passed name and beauty so that rape and desolation have not the final word in the story of Tamar.”15 Tamar, who would never have a child of her own did have a namesake so that her memory lived on.

One final thought from Trible about Tamar before we end, “she was never his temptation. His evil was his own lust, and from it others needed protection.”16

Dear ones, this story tells a truth we rarely hear, and it forces us to acknowledge the all too common reality of sexual assault. The Bible holds firmly that God abhors sexual violence, and this story adds that silence from leaders in the face of sexual violence only makes it worse.  Yet, in the midst of the honest portrayal of horrific violence, the story also leaves us with hope. Absalom was an advocate for his sister and he gave her a safe-place to be. Because of those like Absalom, healing and life are possible, and violence need not have the last word.  Absalom is the brother we hope to emulate when we seek to be brothers and sisters in Christ to one another. So, as we are able, may God help us to be safe places for survivors as Absalom was for Tamar.  Amen

1RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) website, https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem, quote statistics from National Institute of Justice & Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, Prevalence, Incidence and Consequences of Violence Against Women Survey (1998). Accessed January 26, 2017.

2Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), page 37.

3Trible, 39

4Trible, 41.

5Trible, 45.

6Trible, 45-46.

7Trible, 46.

8Trible, 47.

9Trible, 48.

10Trible, 50.

11Trible, 51.

12Trible, 52.

13Trible, 53.

14Trible, 52.

15Trible, 55.

16Trible, 56.

–

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

January 29, 2017

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