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Sermons

“A Defiant Aunt” based on 2 Kings 11:1-3 or…

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

To explain this soap opera to all of you required a lot of remedial scholarship on my part. I think I have it now. The monarchy period lasted for just under 300 years in Israel and just over 400 in Judea, and I found a handy-dandy chart on Wikipedia that helps.

Let’s start with the so-called great King named David (you may have heard of him). His son Solomon became king after him. After the death of Solomon the kingdom divided into two parts: a Northern Part called Israel and a Southern Part called Judea. That is, there was a civil war and the North, which wanted to become a separate nation did so. The Southern succession was SUPER linear, passing directly from father to son with only two exceptions: the one we read about today and the very end of the dynasty. The Northern one is much less linear and way more confusing, and we’re going to ignore most of it today.

The story we read about today is SOUTHERN, it is about Judea, but to understand it we have to start in the North. There was a Northern/Israelite King named Omri, who had been a general of another King and ended up the victor after a coup. The Bible says he was the worst king yet. His son Ahab married Jezebel. You may have heard of her. She is in the running for being the worst woman in the Bible. Jezebel was a princess of the Phoenician Empire, from which you should take that she was not a follower of YHWH.

King Ahab was a selfish, petty, and mean man who tended to follow his wife’s lead. She went on an offensive against the prophets of YHWH and tried to kill them all off so the prophets of rival god Baal could be in power.

If you take nothing else from this introduction, take this: Ahab and Jezebel were rulers who cared only about themselves and power. The Bible calls them unfaithful to YHWH, but I want us to hear that with nuance. The Bible calls leaders unfaithful when they don’t follow the laws of the Torah, and the laws of the Torah were designed to protect the poor and the powerless from the unquenchable thirst for more power and more money of the rich and powerful. Thus, any ruler who cared more for their own power than for the well-being of the people was called unfaithful to YHWH, because being faithful to God MEANT following the rules that cared for the people. Ahab and Jezebel deviated further from God’s vision for a just society than any other rulers before them. Thus they are the standard bearers of evil rulers in Kings and Chronicles. It isn’t just about believing in YHWH or not, it is about being self-serving or caring for the people AS the standard of faith.

Ahab and Jezebel, the power couple of epic evilness, had at least a daughter and two sons. Those sons also became Kings of Israel after their father, and the second of them to take the Kingship was Jehoram (of Israel). Their daughter was named Athaliah. She was married to King Jeroham of Judea. Two men, same name; Athaliah had a brother King Jeroham AND a husband King Jeroham. Eventually Queen Athaliah also the mother of the successor King, Ahaziah.

Just before we get to this little story, King Ahaziah, like several Judean kings before him, was leading military campaigns alongside the Northern Israelite King. The two separate countries were pretty well tied in together at this time (including by marriages), and the Bible seems to think that the evil influence of Jezebel was spreading widely. While King Ahaziah of Judea and his uncle King Jehoram of Israel were off fighting to keep control over vassal states, King Jehoram of Israel was injured.

The great northern prophet Elisha stepped in and anointed the general Jehu as king, to take over for the injured king!! Meanwhile, King Jehoram (of Israel) has gone off to heal in another city and his nephew King Ahaziah (of Judea) comes to visit him. Then the newly minted King Jehu (of Israel) comes and kills them both, and proceeds to go on a killing rampage to ensure that none of Ahab’s 70 other male descendants can take over for him. He also has Jezebel killed, and all the Baal worshippers. I’m telling you, they don’t make soap operas as violent as Biblical history for a reason.

Now, the deceased Jezebel and Ahab have one remaining child in power, their daughter Athaliah who has been Queen Mother to her son Ahaziah. Their male decedents in the north and all of their allies have been murdered. In the grand tradition of seeking power at any cost, the Queen Mother Athaliah has all of the other male royal descendants killed off and claims the throne for herself. This action would have completely eliminated the rest of Ahab and Jezebel’s line as well as the Southern succession. It is unclear if this mass murder involved any of her other sons (there may not have been any), but it certainly includes HER OWN GRANDCHILDREN, the princes of the kingdom.

Now, originally my goal was to discuss the subversiveness of Jehosheba, a daughter of King Jehoham and sister of King Ahaziah, but at this point I’m having trouble with clarity over which woman is more subversive: is it the woman who claims the throne for herself for seven years and is the ONLY break in the Davidic dynasty in 438 years OR the woman who subversively hid her nephew away so he could restore the dynasty?? This leads me to wonder how much are we supposed to care about the dynasty, which I really think is propaganda more than it was God’s will? In their own ways, both of these women were exceptionally subversive, although one seems significantly more evil than the other. While I admit that subversiveness can come in good or evil forms, we are going to keep our attention on the defiant aunt.

Before I started the research for this sermon series, this little story was not one I’d noticed before. It does show up twice, 3 verses each in the standard history of Kings and nearly the same verses in the alternative history of Chronicles. They tell us that there was a ruling queen of Judea, and she was the only one to sit on the throne who was not a descendant of David! She was taken down by the subversive action of another woman, one who was either her daughter or her step-daughter. The historian Josephus claims that Jehosheba was a HALF sister to King Ahaziah which means she wasn’t Athaliah’s daughter, but the text seems to imply the opposite. Generally in these stories a woman is only called a sister that clearly if she is a full blooded sister. It doesn’t really matter, but it is curious.

The Bible struggles with Queen Athaliah’s rule MOSTLY because she was not a descendant of David, and it seems to call her reign illegitimate. The New Interpreter’s Bible puts it this way, “Although Athaliah rules for seven years, the typical regal summaries are omitted in the report, for the narrator does not consider her to have been a legitimate ruler.”1Apparently, questions of the legitimacy of rulers is not new in human history. Similarly, we can tell from this entire narrative that people in power using their power to do harm to the vulnerable is a long standing tradition and that the prophetic voice exists for the sake of calling power to accountability.

Anyway, to get back to the story, this sister Jehosheba of the newly dead King Ahaziah is ALSO married to the High Priest (which is sketchy in its own right, the power is clearly shared very tightly in that society). She hides her baby nephew and his wet-nurse away in a unused room in the palace to keep him from being murdered. Later she sneaks them both out of the palace and hides them in the Temple for SIX YEARS. For all of those years, his grandmother ruled the southern kingdom of Judea under the assumption that there was no one left with a more legitimate claim to power than the one she had.

Now, its hard to tell from story itself who the mastermind was: Jehosheba or her husband the high priest (we’re going to skip over his name so that no one gets more confused and just call him the high priest). They seem DEEPLY in cahoots. Jehosheba is the one who is said to have stolen away the prince and hidden him for years, but at the end of that time it is her husband who enacts a plan to overthrow Queen Athaliah’s rule by convincing the military that the rightful son of King Ahaziah still lived and should be king instead. Perhaps it was the high priest that asked his wife to protect the baby to begin with. Perhaps it was the Jehosheba who convinced her husband to overthrow the Queen for the sake of her nephew. Perhaps they had a really great relationship and shared in both the planning and the execution of the plan. The text doesn’t tell us. But within the royal family, a princess who was married to the high priest risked her own life and that of her husband and family as well for the sake of overthrowing the Queen.

The Biblical narrative claims that the baby nephew who became King, Joash, was a good king. It seems that his high priest uncle kept in line for as long as the high priest lived, and he even oversaw a restoration of the Temple. He had a 40 year reign of following the ways of YHWH, although in the end he decided to use the Temple’s treasury to pay off a foreign king who wanted to sack Jerusalem and his servants killed him off in response. You can’t make this stuff up. I do not find it clear to what degree Joash really was in charge and to what degree his uncle (and aunt?) pulled the strings after having saved his life, but the gist seems to be that Jehosheba did a good thing for the people of Judea and for the worship of YHWH by saving that baby. Of course, she maintained the royal lineage, but she also helped provide a ruler who cared for the people.

The real question, of course, is what we can draw from these ancient stories of long dead battles for seats of power that matters to us today? Of course there is the timely reminder that the Biblical standard for good leadership is the care given to the people, with particular attention to the poor, the powerless, and the marginalized. I think there is also in Jehosheba’s story the reality that standing up to power can require great personal risk.

The book “Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed” by Phillip Hallie tells the story of a little village in France, Le Chambon, full of Huguenots who truly believed in the Biblical call to take care of all of God’s children. Those French Protestants were responsible for saving the lives of thousand of Jewish children (and adults) during the German occupation of France. They did so while taking their own lives at risk, and indeed pastor’s son was killed for being part of the resistance.  The faith of the people propelled them to take care of all God’s people.

The acts of Jehosheba, like the acts of the people of Le Chambon, were extraordinarily courageous because the power structures above them were willing to kill people in order to maintain their power. To be in the resistance sometimes requires acts of great courage and personal risk. Loving God, if and when it becomes necessary for us to take risks to take care of your people, may we prove worthy like Jehosheba and the people of Le Chambon. Amen

1Choon-Leong Seow “The First and Second Book of Kings” in The New Interpreter’s Study Bible Volume III edited by Leander Kirk et al (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1999), 227

–

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 22, 2017

Sermons

“Claiming Her Life” based on Genesis 38:1-26

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

My favorite Genesis commentator, Gerhard Von Rad, was a German professor at the University of Heidelberg. Von Rad says it well when he says, “To understand Tamar’s act, the reader must resist comparing it with modern conditions and judging it accordingly, for the modern world has nothing that can be compared to it.”1 There is so much necessary context required to understand the story that it may seem like isn’t worth it, but I promise you that understanding what she was up against is necessary to show how hardcore Tamar was.

The first thing to understand about this story is levirate marriage. This was a custom practiced in many ancient societies with strong clan structure and significant inheritance laws. It worked like this: if a married man died before producing an heir, his brother was responsible for producing an heir on his behalf. In the ancient Near East it was normal for the eldest son to inherit a double portion of his father’s estate. Thus, if an eldest brother died, his younger brother would be producing the heir who would get the double portion INSTEAD of him. You may remember that Jesus was questioned about a widow who had been married to a series of brothers, in an attempt to stump Jesus.

The second thing to understand is widowhood culture. The practice would have been that a widow would return to her father’s house, and thereby be eligible for remarriage. Only a widow would return to her father’s house. A woman who has a levirate marriage or who was waiting to have a levirate marriage was not ENTIRELY a widow and remained a part of the family of her deceased husband. The question is: to whom does the widow belong? To her father’s family or to her in-laws? As long as there was someone available to produce that heir she belonged to her in-laws. To send her home to her father’s house was to imply otherwise.

The third important thing to know is that there is a significant debate about what sort of prostitution is being referenced in this text. Some commentators suggest that Tamar was acting as a sacred prostitute, within expected behavioral boundaries of her people. (She was a Canaanite.) This is because there are two words for prostitute used in the text, one used in reference to Tamar’s actual story and another – the more common word – used in the accusation against her. Von Rad explains it this way:

In the ancient Orient, it was customary in many places for married women to give themselves to strangers because of some oath. Such sacrifices of chastity in the service of the goddess of love, Astarte, were, of course, different form ordinary prostitution even though they were were repulsive to Israel. They were strictly forbidden by law, and the teachers of wisdom warned urgently against this immoral custom, which was apparently at times fashionable even in Israel. At the borders between Israel and Canaan, where our whole story takes place, the appearance on the road of a ‘devoted one’ was obviously nothing surprising. Tamar does not pretend to be a harlot as we think of it but rather a married woman who indulges in this practice, and Judah too thought of her in this way. It is characteristic that our narrative in vs. 21 and 22 also uses the expression ‘devoted one’ which recalls the sacred meaning of this practice.”2

In contrast, J. Maxwell Miler in the New Interpreter’s Bible, says, “Although her dress and action could imply prostitution (the veil both invites and conceals), the narrator does not mention it. Judah so interprets the veil and propositions her (vv. 15-16). In v. 21, his friend speaks of her as a ‘temple prostitute,’ probably only more discreet language for a prostitute (with no official cultic reference.)”3 In either case, Judah was very comfortable paying a woman to have sex with him and very uncomfortable with a woman he controlled having sex for money! Or as Miller puts it, “When Judah saw her as a prostitute, he used her; when he sees her in this capacity as his daughter-in-law, he condemns her. Clearly Judah applies a double standard.”4 Furthermore, the death he condemns her to is particularly harsh. As Von Rad says, “The punishment itself is certainly, in the narrator’s opinion, the severest possible. The later law recognized burning only in an extreme case of prostitution (Lev. 21.9). The custom was death by stoning for such offenses (Deut 22.23 ff; Lev. 20.16).”5 This likely relates to honor culture, and to have a woman in his family prostituting herself decreased his honor, while using a prostitute did not.

The issue is that by sending her back to her father’s house, he had functionally disowned her. Yet, the people brought her pregnancy to him as if he was still the person who owned her, and he had no issue judging her, as if he still owned her. Von Rad explains, “If one examines the legal aspect of the case, its difficulty becomes apparent. On the basis of what fact was the complaint made? Because of a widow’s prostitution or that of an engaged girl? Those who turn to Judah in this matter seem to assume the latter. Judah assumes competence as judge; he thus reckons Tamar as part of his family, though Tamar’s act proceeded from the assumption that Judah had released her permanently from the family and gave no further considerations to a marriage with his third son.”6

Finally, we need to remember that women had no legal standing in that time and place. As Walter Brueggemann pus it, “a striking contrast is established between this man who has standing and status in the community and this woman who stands outside the law and is without legal recourse.”7Tamar was being treated as if she was a widow by being sent back to her father, but also as if she was engaged to Shelah. She was in legal limbo and had no way to get out of it. Judah, by telling her it was a temporary solution was both dishonest with her and kept her from having any sort of life in the future. Von Rad says, “Judah’s wrong lay in considering this solution as really final for himself but in presenting to Tamar as an interim solution.”8

So, now that we have all the context down, I’m guessing we’ve all forgotten the actual story, right? Judah has gone off away from his brothers to live among the Canaanites. He marries a Canaanite woman, has three sons, and he finds a wife, Tamar, for the eldest son whose name is Er. Er dies, and Judah seems generally afraid of women and is a bit afraid Er died because Tamar was… scary or something. The story seems to believe God killed Er for being bad. Then Er’s younger brother Onan WAS bad. As Miller puts it, “Onan sabotages the intent of the relationship in order to gain Er’s inheritance for himself upon Judah’s death – the firstborn would receive a doubleshare. He regularly uses Tamar for sex, but makes sure she does not become pregnant by not letting his semen enter her (coitus interruptus, not masturbation). He therefore formally fulfills his duty, lest the role be passed on to his other brother and he lose Er’s inheritance in this way. This willful deception would be observable to Tamar, but God’s observation leads to Onan’s death (again, by unspecified means).”9 Tamar knew what was happening the whole time but no one cared, and she had no legal standing. As is true in Genesis, when a man sexually mistreats a woman, God does harm to the man. So Onan dies.

Judah is now completely freaked out that Tamar is powerful and killing off his sons. So he tells her that he wants her to go home to her father’s house to wait for his youngest son, Shelah, to grow up but he is lying! He intends for her to die in limbo as a widow/engaged woman who no one else can touch, while not taking care of her and not letting anyone else be responsible for her either. Years later, after Judah’s wife has died, Tamar becomes certain that Judah never intended to do right by her.

So she dresses herself in a way that suggests she’s available, which includes a veil so he doesn’t know who she is, and her father-in-law propositions her. She says yes, sleeps with him, gains two identifying possessions, and then he leaves. She takes her veil back off and reclaim the role of widow, so that when Judah sends her the agreed upon goat, she can’t be found. Thus she keeps the identifiers. She is eventually found to be pregnant and Judah is told. He judges her harshly and decrees she should be burned to death – for adultery, that is for being unfaithful to his son Shelah who he never intended to let marry her anyway. AS SHE WAS BEING BROUGHT OUT she sent word to Judah saying “the guy who owns these is the father” and with them sends his identifying possessions.

Then, suddenly, Judah sees the light, admits all his wrong doings, takes back the condemnation, takes care of her again, AND doesn’t sleep with her again. Actually, I don’t entirely believe that last part. Since the text doesn’t say whose wife she becomes, and since she had children by him, I suspect he did keep sleeping with her and the text itself protests too much – but who knows?

More to the point, Tamar existed in a time when she was seen as possession more than as person. She existed in between cultures, neither of which respected her, and she had no legal voice with which to articulate her concerns. We know nothing about her relationship to Er, but we know that both Onan and Judah used her to fulfill their own ends. She was left in limbo, unable to find a life that would support her over the long run, and she was lied to about it. She came up with a plan to inverse her circumstances, and it was radical, revolutionary, risky, and difficult. I doubt she particularly wanted to sleep with Judah, but she used her sexuality and his openness to fulfilling his sexual needs to get what she needed. Tamar is one of the most hardcore human beings I’ve heard about. Ever.

Tamar refused to be ignored, denied, pretended away. She refused a life that would be most likely to end with her homeless and starving. She refused a life without the opportunity to mother (which she would have been told was her her reason for existing). She outsmarted the man who had all the power over her, and he acknowledged her righteousness in the end – EVEN though many would still prefer to condemn her.

The thing is, I suspect Tamar was not the only woman around who was stuck in legal limbo. She is, however, the only woman whose story is being told because she found her way out. She was the extraordinary one who overcame overwhelming circumstances. She was the exception. Her courage and intelligence worked for her when she existed in a system that was designed to see her as property rather than as a human. Tamar blew up the rules in order to get a chance at her life. And she gets acknowledged for it throughout history.

The children that Tamar would bear would be ancestors of King David and as such ancestors of Jesus. She is one of three women listed in Matthews genealogy of Jesus. Interestingly Judah (and not Er) is listed as the father in that genealogy.

We have a story of an exceptional human here, one who beat a multitude of odds. Yet I think the value of the story is that it points out to us just how broken that system was. It didn’t take care of all the people and it took an exceptional person breaking all the rules to navigate it. I think if we are to learn anything from the courage of Tamar and from her choice to claim her life it is this: may we fight with people who are as stuck as Tamar was so that no one is required to be the exceptional hero in order to claim a life worth living. That is, may there be fewer people who need to go to such extremes, because people in desperation have allies like us.  Amen

Sermon Talkback

  1. What other stories can you think of: exceptional humans overcoming overwhelming odds that no one should ever have to face?
  2. Why do you think Tamar is included in the genealogical list for Jesus?
    1. And why with Judah as father, not Er?
  3. This story doesn’t fit in at all. It is essentially stand alone. Why do you think it kept getting told?
  4. Was Tamar more in the right? Why?
  5. Where are we successful in being allies to those in extenuating circumstances?
  6. Where are not successful?
  7. What do you think motivated Tamar?
  8. God isn’t spoken of much in this story, moreso God is implied. This is an OLD story. Within its constructs, God who is quite active in killing off the immoral lets Tamar’s actions stand. What does that mean???

—-

1Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis: a commentary in The Old Testament Library series (The Westminster Press: Philadelphia, 1972) 359.

2Von Rad, 359-360.

3J. Maxwell Miller “Genesis” in The New Interpreter’s Study Bible Volume 1edited by Leander Kirk et al (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1994), 605

4Miller, 606.

5Von Rad, 360-1.

6Von Rad, 360.

7Walter Brueggemann, Genesis in Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching series (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, Kentucky, 1982) 310.

8Von Rad, 358.

9Miller, 605.

–

Rev. Sara E. BaronFirst United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

January 15, 2017

Sermons

“What Do the Wise Men Mean?” based on Isaiah 60:1-6…

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

In April of 2002 I was studying abroad at Oxford University in England when my dearly beloved grandfather died. He passed away late on a Saturday morning, which meant I heard about it around nightfall. With the help of friends and housemates I figured out what to eat for dinner (seriously, this involved asking a friend what I liked to eat, I was beyond knowing), found a chapel to pray in (a housemate walked with me, seemingly I wasn’t trustworthy to walk a few blocks by myself), and got a plane ticket home (a friend found it for me). By the end of the night things were set: I was scheduled to leave early the next morning a bus to Heathrow airport and would get to Newark by that evening.

In those frugal college days I didn’t keep much cash on hand, and even by those standards I happened to be running low on pounds. I had dollars, but I didn’t have have pounds. For reasons that now escape me, I exchanged currency was in the back of a department store, and I certainly wasn’t thinking about the need for cash the night my grandfather died. I didn’t realize I needed money that night, and even if I had, by the time I could have pulled myself together enough to notice – the store would have been closed.

By morning I realized my error, but it was Sunday, and EARLY morning, and there was no way to solve it. (In retrospect I could easily have asked my housemates, but my deeply independent nature didn’t come up with that idea!) I got to the bus on time, with a plan. I had enough money in American dollars to pay TWICE the bus fare. I figured that would work.

It didn’t.

The bus driver was sympathetic, but unable to let me on the bus without paying the fare – in pounds. I had no pounds. I had no way to get pounds. And I had to get on THAT bus to make my flight home. Getting home to my family felt like a need. The grief for my grandfather was deep seated, and raw.

I don’t remember how it happened exactly, someone must have overheard my offer of paying twice the fare and why I had to get home, but the people on that bus paid my fare for me. Many people offered one pound each and then it was paid and I was on my way home. My independent nature was so embarrassed by that at the time that I blocked the story for years and it has only recently re-emerged.

Now, with a bit more perspective, I’m less ashamed that I wasn’t able to do everything perfectly without notice and in the midst of grief. Now, with the wisdom of another decade and a half I’m not embarrassed to have needed help anymore. Instead I am grateful for the gifts of strangers when I needed it most

I am so grateful for the chance to read Shirley Readdean’s excellent sermon from last week, and she motivated me to be playful with the text as well. The story of the magi was told to make sense of the world and of Jesus, it is intentionally metaphorical and rich in meaning, making easy space for us to explore our own lives within it.

It struck me this week that accepting gifts from strangers isn’t particularly easy – at least it hasn’t been for me. I’m told Simone Weil once said, “It is only by the grace of God that the poor can forgive the rich for the bread they give them,” which has to do with both the challenge or receiving gifts AND the issues of income inequality. This story of Matthew’s gets into all of that!

What would this experience have been like for Mary and Joseph? They were relatively young, or at least she was and he might have been! Mary certainly hadn’t known much of the world, and there is no reason to think Joseph had either. They were likely quiet provincial. By the best guesses of scholars they were poor. If Joseph made his living as a carpenter that would mean that there was no longer access to the family lands – they’d been lost to debt. Peasants living without land were worse off than those still living on it. Likely they worked very, very hard and had little time to travel. If they were from Nazareth (which seems more likely than anything else), then they knew about the Roman destruction of Sepphoris 4 miles away and about 8 years earlier. They knew oppression, poverty, and hard living. They also knew a deep faith in a God who cared about the people, and who did not want them dying of complications of poverty. I suspect it was their Jewish faith that helped them get through the day, every day. I suspect it was much easier to trust fellow Jewish residents of Nazareth than it was to trust outsiders or non-Jews, the world had taught them to be wary.

Or, if we want to take Matthew’s story at face value and put the Holy Family in residence in Bethlehem, then they were in a small village 6 miles from Jerusalem. There, too, they would learn to be cautious of outsiders, particularly the Roman Empire and their regional authorities: the religious leaders of the day. Mary and Joseph would have found it much easier to trust the Jews in their own village than outsiders, the Temple priests, or non Jews.

Wherever they originated from, as Jewish peasants Mary and Joseph would have had good reason to be hesitant about outsiders and non-Jews. Furthermore, the primarily stories of the faith included the stories of exile and return – that is, of domination from Eastern empires and their strange gods. The gospel of Matthew tells us that the the magi were from the East, and that they stopped in Jerusalem on their way to Bethlehem. That would be reminiscent of the eastern empires that had previously dominated the Jews AND a connection to the empire that currently dominated them. These magi had the power to gain an audience with King Herod, who was known to be crazy and cruel. Can you see what I’m getting at? It is possible that the magi would have been terrifying to Mary and Joseph, and for good reason. Then, to add to all the complications of their existence, these strange and powerful strangers came into their home bearing VERY expensive gifts.

How would Mary and Joseph felt? Would they have been afraid? Were they overwhelmed? If so, what bothered them the most? The non-Jewishness? The connection with their history of exile? The connection the Magi had to the power-players of the Roman Empire? The power they themselves had? The foreign language? The expensive gifts? The expectations placed on their baby son? Or was it simply the danger the strangers brought with them by declaring Jesus to be a threat to Herod’s power? Whichever of these bothered them MOST, I’m thinking that if I was in their sandals, I might not want those magi around very much.

The magi are VERY different, VERY powerful, and thus VERY dangerous.  They don’t know Jewish traditions or laws, and they are connected to the power structure of oppression. Furthermore, in basic human nature, it is especially uncomfortable to receive gifts that can never be repaid. Jewish peasants would never EVER be able to repay the gifts of the kind that the magi bought, Jewish peasants were living just BELOW subsistence level and gold, and frankincense and myrrh are EXPENSIVE. In fact, those are the kinds of gifts that aren’t given in normal human exchange – they are the kind of gifts only given to people in power (like kings) in hope of recognizing the king and winning favor. The gifts of the magi communicate that Jesus was perceived as a king, of a standard order human kingdom. Likely that’s one of the reasons the story is told, to prefigure Jesus’ kingship. However in real life, that would be AWKWARD.

The presence of the magi in the story Matthew tells helps develop the story in other ways too: it gives a reason for King Herod to know of the threat of Jesus, thereby making the journey to Egypt seem more plausible (really it exists in order to present Jesus as the new Moses); it indicates that the life of Jesus would be significant beyond the realm of Judaism; and it foreshadows the ways that the adult Jesus would threaten the power of Rome and the authority of its appointed leaders. The magi themselves, coming from East to Jerusalem, fulfill dreams dating back to the exile, as we can see in Isaiah. That dream is not just of a restoration, but of restored power to the Jewish people and international recognition. The coming of the magi in Matthew is meant to indicate that Jesus is bringing the fulfillment of the desires of centuries. Even so I still think the men themselves would be terrifying to actual Jewish peasants.

On top of it all, I still wonder what it would have been like to such receive gifts from strange and powerful men. It can be hard to receive gifts anyway, they require a certain openness and vulnerability. It is harder when the gift is one-sided and cannot be reciprocated. I think, at least for me, it is also difficult to receive gifts from strangers. I take this from the fact it has taken me nearly 15 years to tell the story I started with! Furthermore, the acts of giving and receiving a gift is a connection between people, and would be hard to build a connection with people who are frightening, strange, and powerful. Finally, and this I’ve been worried about since childhood, if these expensive gifts were given to the Holy Family before a significant journey HOW ON EARTH would they keep them safe without a caravan to protect them?

The story doesn’t go into these details at all. It just says the magi offered Jesus the gifts and then left by another road, thereby short-changing Herod. Metaphorically this suggests that being present to Jesus would change how people used their power in the world and who they trusted. That suggests that the giving of the magi’s gifts to Jesus was helpful to the magi! That’s easy enough to believe – it is a wonderful and transformational thing to be able to give a generous gift. (This may be why they’re hard to receive!)

It is with humble gratitude that I think of the people who paid for my bus fare, people whose names I didn’t know and who I have thus been unable to pay back. They have left me with gratitude for the opportunities I have to help others along the way, and gave me a more clear sense that we as humans are all in this together. That moment in time was one when I truly didn’t have what I needed, and others provided it. I am thankful to have known that need, and even more thankful to have had it cared for.

The graciousness of Mary and Joseph who let strange and powerful foreigners into their home to greet their baby and give expensive gifts is mesmerizing, even after hearing it every year. Those strange men whose very lives seem designed to frighten were actually intending to extend grace. They were the ones most changed by the experience. Part of the grace of receiving gifts is allowing the gift-giver to be transformed. Thus, may we find the grace to be open to the gifts that strangers have to offer, and receive them with openness and gratitude! Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

January 8, 2017

Sermons

“Wanting Knowledge”based on  Genesis 2:15-3:7

  • November 30, 2016February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Here
we are.  Again.  It is the beginning of the church year.  Again.  We
start anew with the stories.  Again.  For those among us who have not
attended to the church’s liturgical calendar before, I apologize.  It
is a wonderful rhythm of life, and I hope you will be enriched by
living into it.  Personally, I’ve been attending to the church’s
liturgical calendar for decades, and been leading worship in the
liturgical seasons for more than a decade and this is a year where
starting over again takes some energy.

The
last year hasn’t been easy AND there is fear of what will come in
this coming year.  Often I’m frustrated with the rather depressing
texts that accompany Advent, I don’t want to start in the darkness.
This year I’m ready and willing to admit that there is much darkness
in the world and that I, too, yearn for the light of God to break in.
Ironic, isn’t it?  This is the year I’m forgoing those depressing
Advent texts to continue the Subversive Women sermon series?

The
Subversive Women chosen for Advent are intentional though.  I’ve
always loved the idea that we start the Christian year in unity with
our shared history with Jewish people, reliving the period in our
shared history when we waited for God’s messiah to change the course
of human history.  I also love that we do this in a season of
darkness (for the Northern Hemisphere – I’m quite sad about how
poorly all the metaphors of the liturgical year work in the Southern
Hemisphere and struck that this is yet another experience we have of
privilege).  Anyway, I love that we start the year in darkness, and
in the waiting, and in our shared history.  I love that the quietness
of Advent contrasts with the frenetic pace of consumer culture around
us; creating a pause, a pregnant pause.  Along with waiting with the
Jews, we also wait with Mary in the last month of her pregnancy.

That
is, I really love Advent.  And it is with delight that I offer you
this text for us to play with today.  What better way to start the
Christian year and re-start the telling of our faith story than to go
back to one of the stories of creation?  And, what  better place to
start than the woman called “life” itself, Eve?  (Yes.  Eve means
“life.”  Subtle, huh?)  After all, she has been accused of
ruining human life on this planet in multiple ways, so she MUST be at
least a little subversive.

This
is an old, old story.  It is in the voice of the Yahwehist, the
oldest of the four voices found in the Torah.  It is a story trying
to make sense of the world as it is, and there are a lot of
explanations going on.  It is trying to make sense of the human need
for interpersonal relationships.  It is trying to make sense of human
capabilities exceeding that of other creatures.  It is trying to make
sense of the labor necessary to stay alive.  It is trying to make
sense of the experience of separation from God.  It is trying to make
sense of the power of love.  It is trying to make sense of the human
desire for knowledge.

I’m
not sure it succeeds at any of these tasks, but I appreciate noticing
that these huge questions of why things are the way they are was
already bugging people thousands of years ago, and they were
struggling to find answers just as we are today.  The existence of
the questions they were trying to answer makes me feel more united
with the tellers of this story than the story itself does.  Which
isn’t the story’s fault.  It could be a perfectly adorable myth if it
hadn’t been used to support the subjugation of women and the
Christian obsession with “sin.”  However, it has been, which
makes me squirm all over again when I read it.

Two
and a half years ago I preached on this text and explained in detail
a theory of it that had changed everything for me.  To my delight,
when we got to this text in our Bible Study, people remembered that
theory – it changed everything for them too!  Some of you were here
then to hear it, and some weren’t, so I’m going to split the
difference and briefly share the theory again.1

In
the Ancient Near Eastern people believed that you could either be
immortal or reproductive.  Furthermore, sexuality was linked to
reproduction, THUS it was linked to mortality.  If you are going to
live forever, you don’t need to have children as your legacy, and you
don’t need to be a sexual being.  If you are mortal, and you are
going to die, you get to have children.  This was a common motif in
Ancient Near East stories (this is the area that the ancient Jews
were from).  None of the garden narratives in the Ancient Near East
have any children in them.  Gardens are places for IMMORTAL, ASEXUAL
beings.  Eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil
transformed Adam and Eve from being immortal, asexual beings into
mortal, sexual beings.  

You
might notice that the text says directly, they were naked but “not
ashamed,” which indicates they didn’t have sexual awareness of
their own bodies to begin with.  As the wise Catholic priest who
pointed this out said, before eating, Eve and Adam seem to be “zero
on the passion meter.”  Sexuality is activated ONLY when they ate
of the tree.  The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is really
the center of it all.  What do we know of it?

  1. Forbidden
    for some reason
  2. It
    makes one like God (3:5) “like one of us” (3:22)
  3. Eyes
    are opened and see nakedness (sexual awareness)
  4. makes
    one wise (3:6)
  5. connects
    with punishment
  6. It
    produces a concern that the one possessing it not live forever.

What
else do we know about the phrase “knowledge of good and evil”
from the Bible?   Deuteronomy 1:39 teaches us it is something that
children lack, Isaiah 7 calls it a sign of maturity.  From 1 Q
Samuel 1:9-11 (Dead Sea Scrolls) “He will not approach a woman to
have intercourse with her until he has attained the age of twenty
when he knows good and evil.”  Hmm, this is clearly about sex.  In
2 Samuel 19:36  An old man is being invited in for wine, women, and
song.  He responds “I’m 80…. and no longer potent, deaf, and not
experiencing the joy of food.” …. also “knowledge of good and
evil” as something an old man loses.

So,
sexual potency, sexual maturity, sexual appetite seem to be implied
here!  Then, the tree is an aphrodisiac.  The premier aphrodisiac in
fact, as it brought the humans from zero sexual appetite to “normal”
rather than from weak appetite to stronger appetite.  This is a story
of awakening to normal sexuality.  In that case,  the serpent is a
fertility symbol offering this knowledge.  After this story, Eve
called mother of all things!  It is because of the eating of the
fruit of the tree that all other humans exist, within the framework
of this story.  And all hearers of the story in all times should be
grateful to her for eating it!  So, then, why was the tree forbidden?
Because immortals do not beget.  

Given
this new understanding of the tree, the
punishments about pain in childbirth, and man lording over woman,
FIT.  There is no fall, as much as Paul and others have made of it,
and there is no original sin.  The couple is making a journey UPWARD:
they become aware, wise, and mature in full adult human stature.  

They
started off like children and come into full adult status.
Isn’t
that an interesting creation story?  It is a story that tells how we
became reproductively capable, sexually aware, adult humans.  This
creation story includes the creation of future generations of humans.
It is a much more interesting story than it initially appears,
right?  Personally, I’m rather grateful that they ate of the fruit
and gained sexual maturity because within the constructs of the
story, NO OTHER HUMANS would otherwise exist, and I rather like
existing.

A
few other notes on this story, particularly for those who have heard
it used in other ways.  Adam (whose name means both “human” and
“dirt”) and Eve (whose name means “life” and “life-bearer”)
were in the garden together and the serpent speaks to Eve while
Adam is also present.
Only Adam is told NOT to eat of the tree, and yet when Eve responds
to the serpent she assumes that it applies to her as well AND she
strengthens the command.  The first version was “of
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in
the day that you eat of it you shall die”.  Eve tells it like this,
“God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in
the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’”
She adds the touch.  Isn’t that how humans work?  When we really
want to keep a rule, we make rules around the rule in order to make
keeping the rule easier.

Eve
is aware of the risk, but the serpent tells her, “You will not die;
for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and
you will be like God, knowing good and evil,” AND she looks with
her own eyes.  She sees that “the tree was good for food, and that
it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to
make one wise.”  She listens to the serpent AND she takes in
awareness from her surroundings, and she decides that risking death
is worth having knowledge (and sexual maturity, let’s be clear). It
is almost as if she is a prepubescent girl choosing to become a
woman: there are big trade offs in that choice, but there is goodness
in being an adult.

In
this week that we celebrated Thanksgiving, taking days apart to be
grateful, and remembering a shared meal between generous native
people and overwhelmed frightened immigrants, it is worth remembering
this ancient story being grateful to Eve who is said to have chosen
knowing, and growing up, so we all can exist.  We can also be
grateful to Eve and her choice throughout Advent as we wait for
Mary’s baby to come.  All of the babies who have been born, within
the constructs of this story, exist because Eve chose knowledge and
maturity over staying in the dark.  We take her light into these dark
days.  Amen

Sermon
Talkback Questions

How
else do you think about Advent?

Where
else do you notice the contrasts of light and darkness, and what
meaning do you make out of them?

What
do you do to avoid being pulled into the frenetic pace of consumer
Christmas, and back into the quiet reflection of Advent?

Whether
you heard this theory before or not, how does it change your
relationship to this story – and to Adam and Eve?

Personally
I like the idea of Eve considering the serpents ideas, taking in
awareness of her surroundings, and deciding for herself that
knowledge was worth it.  How does her thoughtful consideration
change the story?

What
does it mean to be grateful for sexual maturity, and to consider our
creation myth to be about that?

How
does God’s love get reflected in this story?

—

1 What
follows is reworked from “The Garden: We Have it ALL Wrong”
preached on 3/9/2014.  That knowledge came from Father Addison
Wright during a lecture series at “Ecumenical Scripture Institute”
at Sky Lake in 2011 on the first 11 Chapters of Genesis.  

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305Pronouns: she/her/hers

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

November 27, 2016

Sermons

“Pure Courage” based on Esther 4

  • November 21, 2016February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

In the beginning of the book of Esther we get the story of Vashti, Queen of Persia, who simply refused. She’d been told to show up in the midst of a drunken party wearing only her crown, and she didn’t. The king and his advisors recoiled in horror that a woman could use her power to say no, thus she was banished and a decree went out to the entire empire letting them know that men were in charge. She scared them, a lot.

The story continues, and at some point after that, the king got lonely and regretted over-reacting. His advisors then suggested that he’d be less sad if he rounded up all of the beautiful women in his empire, put them into a harem, and enjoyed them while deciding who the next queen should be. Wow. Aren’t those great advisors? It really is terrifying what ideas advisors can come up with that weak-minded kings decided to implement.

So, within the story of the book of Esther, they did. This serves as your reminder that the book of Esther was written as historical fiction for the sake of building up the Jews living in exile, and it was never meant to be taken as real history. We can mine this story for metaphor and hope, but not for historical facts.

In this story, Esther is one of the beautiful maidens chosen for the king’s harem. She is a Jewish woman, an orphan, who has been raised by her cousin Mordecai. At Mordecai’s suggestion, she does not reveal her Jewishness within the harem. After a year of beauty treatments, she gets her night with the king and he happens to like her best. She becomes the new queen! It is a precarious position: she is queen to a king who disposed her predecessor on a whim, who also has a back-up harem for both sexual pleasure and a queen “bull pen.” (<–Intentional decision not to gender-neutralize made here.)

Meanwhile, her cousin Mordecai has been spending most of his time standing outside the palace gates, trying to glean information about Esther and determine if she is being treated well. In his station there, he overhears a plot to murder the king. He lets the authorities know, they investigate, it is founded, and the king is pleased (to be alive). During this time, the king also appoints a man named Haman to be his right-hand guy, and Haman is given so much authority that others are expected to bow down to him whenever they see him.

Mordecai does not bow down. For a story that doesn’t mention God, the book of Esther has a lot of implied Jewish theology. Jews through the ages have refused to bow down to foreign rulers, claiming God alone is their king. Haman, the king’s favored advisor, is just as much of a narcissistic, ill-tempered, short-sighted xenophobe as his king. He FREAKS OUT when Mordecai refuses to bow down, and he decides to execute all the Jews in the empire because of it.

Haman brings up his plan to the king, nuancing it just so – pointing out that there are a bunch of people in their country who aren’t fully assimilated. They have different customs, values, and rituals. They did not follow (only) the laws of the empire. Therefore, he said, let’s kill them. He even offers the king money for the honor of killing all the Jews. The king, being presented as a weak leader, immediately agrees, but declines the money. A decree goes out that on one particular day all the people of the empire are to kill any Jews in their midst.

That’s what it took to get us to this chapter. Mordecai knows about this plan, as do the Jews around the empire, but Esther does not. Mordecai has moved into mourning, perhaps in the tradition of the Ninevahites trying to change God’s mind, perhaps in mourning for a country where they believed themselves to be safe, perhaps in mourning for himself and his people at their imminent death with fear that no one would be left to mourn them. His mourning is sort of a problem though, because it means he can’t enter the palace and that means he can’t easily get word to Esther.

Her servants know that he is her family though, even if the palace doesn’t know the connection nor her heritage. They see him in mourning and tell her. She sends him clothes, presumably so that he’d wear them and come tell her what’s wrong. He refuses them, which means they have to have their whole conversation via messenger, and with Mordecai at the gate for lots of people to overhear!

Mordecai has a plan, and he sends it to Esther through her eunuch: she should go before the king and beg him for mercy for her people. Esther’s first response is… less than enthusiastic. She is queen, but she is in a precarious position as queen, there is a harem waiting to take her position, her predecessor got deposed, and the king hasn’t called for her for a month, meaning she’s not particularly in favor. She doesn’t think she’s likely to be able to change his mind, and anyway, even showing up before him without being called held an automatic death sentence – unless he absolved it. That is, Esther appears to like being alive, and suggests they work on another plan. She isn’t suicidal.

Many a preacher and scholar have condemned her for this response. They’ve called her weak and self-serving. They’ve called her privileged and prissy. I think she’s wise. If there had been another way, it would have been wiser to go with it. The likelihood of success in this plan was LOW. Mordecai thinks Esther is their best chance, and he pushes her – HARD- to go forward with it. He points out that if this law is followed they’ll both die. He says the now-famous words, “Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.” Those words have haunted anyone with any power or privilege since this story was written. They refuse any excuse we throw at them, and make real the importance of using power for good.

With that, Esther decides. She wasn’t suicidal, but she was courageous and willing to act. She wasn’t impetuous either though! She asked for prayer support, for the community to fast and pray on her behalf for 3 days and she offers that she and her servants will too. She wants to be prepared, to have a plan, to do it right, to give it her best shot. And she says words as famous as Mordecai’s in response to him. Her final words to him are, “If I perish, I perish.” I’m not clear how anyone could accuse Esther of lacking courage.

Now, I particularly love something about Esther’s courage. Esther got to the position she was in because she was PRETTY and PLEASING, which likely means that she was compliant. Her access to power came through traditionally feminine means. However, her use of her power came through her pure courage – which hasn’t always been attributed to the feminine. I love this because often women are told that either they can pretty or they can be smart and courageous. Esther is all of the above, and no one can take any of it away from her.

If you aren’t familiar with the story, after this chapter Esther goes before the king, and he does ofter her the pardon of the golden scepter. She uses his good will to invite him to a banquet in his honor, along with Haman. He comes. He has a great time. She uses his good will to invite him to ANOTHER banquet, just the three of them again. In the meantime the king OUT OF THE BLUE remembers that Mordecai had saved his life and decides to honor him, and does so. This manages to infuriate Haman all the more, which is fun. The second night the king asks Esther what she wants again, and she finally tells him. She says that someone has been trying to kill her people, and she’s terribly sad. The king is horrified, she accuses Haman, and the tide turns. The people are saved, Haman and their oppressors are not, and the Jews survive.

In The Interpreter’s Bible, White Crawford says, “Lacking public power, women have historically been able to gain individual or private strength only by successfully exploiting the male power structure around them, as Esther does so well, ”1 and “Esther is a human heroine for a human situation and, as such, speaks powerfully to all oppressed people through the centuries.”2 Esther’s power, and her subversiveness are profoundly different from Vashti’s. Esther shows up to gain power, Vashti refuses to show up for the same reason. Vashti’s powerful “no, I won’t” stands in contrast to Esther’s powerful “yes, I will.” Esther is, perhaps, not a traditional feminist heroine in that her beauty gains her access to power. Yet, she is a perfect subversive heroine in that she uses WHATEVER SHE HAS for the sake of what is necessary. What she needs is justice for her people.

Esther’s story exists to motivate people: to stand up for what is right, no matter the cost; to have courage; to use what we have for the sake of good; and to call each other to account. It reminds us that the work of building God’s kin-dom requires courage, and sometimes risk – and I appreciate that it doesn’t celebrate risk for risk’s own sake nor call on us to be suicidal. Esther doesn’t JUMP at the chance to risk her life for the sake of her people, she only does it when she is convinced it is strictly necessary. Sacrifice isn’t celebrated for its own sake, only for its strategic usefulness in achieving worthwhile ends.

It is not terribly common to face a situation like Esther’s, where the needs of the world require putting our own lives directly on the line. It is much more common to face little tiny decisions where our instincts for peace and being well-liked compete with our desires to speak truths and protect people in vulnerable situations. Courage isn’t just about facing external oppressors and those who can do us bodily harm, first and foremost it is about facing our innermost fears of who we “should” be and how we “should” act. It is often as much about being who we are as anything else!  “For such a time as this” indicates using all that we are, all that we have become, and the fullness of our experiences to face the present. It speaks to becoming our fullest selfs, as an exercise in developing our “courage muscles.”

Or, as the author Marianne Williams puts it,

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”3

Esther walked into that throne room beautiful, courageous, centered, and as a beloved child of God. She knew who she was, what she was about, and what she cared about enough to risk herself. She became liberated from fear, and in doing so has liberated others from fear into courage as long as the story has been told. May we follow in her footsteps. Amen

1Sidnie White Crawford “The Book of Esther,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. 3 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999): p. 872

2Ibid, 872.

3Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles.”

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 20, 2016

Sermons

“A Powerful No” based on  Esther 1:1-20

  • November 13, 2016February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

In 1802 a heterosexual, white, protestant couple got married – and the church freaked out. You want to know why, I promise. They freaked out because she…wore….a red coat! The couple was Abigail and Daniel Harkness, and Daniel was a part of the Society of Friends. They officially censured him for marrying her, both because she wasn’t a part of the Society of Friends and because of her coat (which they said made her a “worldly woman”). She refused to give up her coat. He refused to apologize for her coat. So they became Methodists.

Thank goodness they did. I sometimes have some feelings of envy for the peace-loving Quakers, but that one action they did all those years ago was really good for Methodists. Abigail and Daniel’s great-granddaughter was fond of telling that story, and made it a part of her story of formation. Their great-granddaughter was Georgia Harkness, the first woman to be a full professor at a theological school in the United States of America, a feat she accomplished as an active Methodist theologian. She was, truth be told, the first RECOGNIZED female theologian, and she was a member of the Troy Annual Conference. She had local ordination, but fought for women’s full ordination rights in the Methodist Church.

I do not have enough time to tell you Georgia Harkness’s full story today (I’m still learning it), but there are a few other details you need to know. She graduated from Cornell in 1912, after which she taught high school in Schyllerville and Scotia for 6 years (yes, OUR Scotia), but she got restless. After reading an advertisement in The Christian Advocate she went to Boston University (also a Methodist school) for her masters degree and then a PhD in the philosophy of religion. She then taught at Elmira College for 15 years. In 1939 she was hired by Garrett, breaking the stained glass ceiling. She was part of the movement toward full ordination rights for women in the Methodist Church, the social gospel, the creation of the World Council of Churches, and was eventually a General Conference delegate from the Troy Annual Conference (although Junice tells me this happened while she was a professor at Pacific School of Religion in CA and not everyone was thrilled about it.)

While she was teaching in Scotia, she was very active in her “local church” teaching Sunday School and working with youth groups. We haven’t yet verified which church was that was. Most likely, Scotia UMC, right? Given our history though, maybe it was us. (We’re looking!) In any case, a Methodist Church in the Albany District and Schenectady County sent Georgia Harkness off to her graduate education and to change the face of Methodism, academia, and the world.

Dr. Georgia Harkness attributed her courage to her great-grandmother, Abigail. When women graduate from Garrett-Evangelical Theological school, a United Methodist Seminary north of Chicago, they wear red shoes. They do it to remind themselves of their place in the world as courageous, outrageous women and to celebrate the rich tradition of female scholarship at Garrett-Evangelical.”1 They do it because of Abigail Harkness.

Abigail Harkness refused to do what was asked of her, and in doing so she inspired great change. Her courage laid the foundation for Georgia’s. I think Abigail Harkness was to Georgia Harkness what Vashti was to Esther. Now, let me be clear. The book of Esther is a work of fiction. It was written down (no oral tradition) as a work of fiction, for the purpose of encouraging Jews living in the Persian empire to have hope and stay faithful. This story did not happen. History knows too much about the era. This is intentional historical fiction! As Sidnie White Crawford (professor of Classics and Religious Studies at University of Nebraka Lincoln) puts it in The New Interpreter’s Bible, “This is also a hopeful message to Jews living in diaspora; the status quo is never such and things can always change.”2

John Dominic Crossan likes to help people understand the Bible by saying, “Emmaus never happened, Emmaus always happens,” by which he means that he doesn’t think that there was an actual embodied living Christ who walked with the disciples to Emmaus and explained the Jesus movement to them and then disappeared as he became known in the breaking of the bread at dinner. Rather, he believes that it is in reflecting on history that we come to understand our present, and it is in the communion table that Christ is known. The literal pales beside the metaphorical. Similarly, the book of Esther didn’t happen, and yet Esther tells truths of humanity that keep happening.

White Crawford says, “The book, which was written for Jews living in exile, consistently lampoons their Gentile overlords. Ahasuerus is less an awe-inspiring ruler than an easily manipulated buffoon.”3 Obviously the Jews living in ancient Persia were the only people in the history of the world who need to make fun of their ruler to feel safe in the world, so we can’t understand it, but we can try ;).

The story starts out describing the excessive opulence of the King’s palace and grounds and his outrageous 6-month party for all of his officials. Granted, travel was harder in those days and he was king over a really big empire so you might want to take advantage of opportunites to be together, but who can really afford to both stop their government for 6 months AND have a ridiculous party at the same time? Clearly, he could! And he thought it was worth it. He was clearly very excited to show off his power and wealth.

Now, the author is very wise and quite intentional. The attention to detail wasn’t an accident. White Crawford says, “Through the description we get a glimpse of the Persian character: ostentatious, showy, unbridled. This is in direct contrast to the usual Jewish values of modesty and self-restraint (see Prov 11:2-4). Although disapproval is never directly voiced, the message is clear: Such opulence, while immediately awe-inspiring, hides an empty and probably corrupt core.”4 So, after this showy 6 month party, the King decides that he needs a new audience to show off to, and he invites everyone in the city to come to a 7 day party.

It is very clearly stated that at this party people were allowed to drink how they wanted, because usually the expectation was that everyone drank when the king drank. “The author is letting the reader now that everything in this court, including drinking, proceeds according to the whim of the king,” including allowing people to drink as much (or as little) as they wished!5

So, 187 days in to a drunken stupor, the king calls for his wife who is throwing a party of her own with the women. This isn’t particularly historical, but it does work for historical fiction! We’re told that, “Historically Persian women and men could eat together, but the women left when the drinking began. It suits the purposes of the author to have the men and women separate when the story begins.”6 It fits the story, because then the king can call for Vashti.

She is told to show up in her crown. She isn’t told what else to wear. Assumptions have long been that she’s not supposed to wear anything but her crown. So, the story sets it up: the king has has been having a six month long drinking party to show off all his wealth, his wife is with her female companions, and he beckons her to come out naked to be shown off before all of the officials of the land and every man in her city.

Now, we don’t know a darn thing about Vashti (mostly because she never existed) but I want to play with this idea a little bit. I have, at times in my life, been in the exclusive company of women. During those times, if a particularly inappropriate “request” were to come to one of those women from a man, a certain amount of shared indignation would erupt. The woman who received the “request,” who might have simply hung her head in shame and complied if she were alone, would be motivated to respond differently in the presence of other women. The atrocity of the “request” would be named. Other options would be raised. An assessment of the risk involved in refusing vs. the risk involved in responding would be done. Perhaps, if there were some, particularly powerful women in the group might offer their own resources as protection.

That is to say, that when oppressors make horrible demands of members of oppressed groups, they’re less likely to have their dictates followed when the demand comes to the individual while the individual is supported by other members of the oppressed group. Um. Duh. But, the king is presented as an idiot. So, he doesn’t know that. And I’m not trying to be subtle here. I’m encouraging all of us to act like the women that Vashti was with – naming injustice when we see it, assessing damage, coming up with alternative plans, using our resources for the vulnerable, and supporting whoever needs the support. I’m reminding us all that there is power in being together, and not in allowing anyone to be isolated. I’m particularly encouraging stand together in the face of unreasonable decrees by unjust rulers.

Vashti says “no.” The story doesn’t REALLY tell us what happens to her. She’s said to be banished. For most of history that’s thought to include being killed. However, I’ve had a hard week and I’m going to claim that some of those women she was with in her banquet took her in and she lived a lovely life of freedom and access to great books in her exile. It IS a work of fiction after all, and this is my fan-fiction addition for the sake of having some darn hope. 😉

However, before she gets banished a few things happen. First of all, her husband who just spent 187 days showing off his power and wealth can’t figure out how to respond her “no” and convenes a war council to try to figure out how to respond. The king’s councilors are also freaked out and horrified that once the story gets out (which it WILL when all the women were present to hear her “no” and all the men were present to see her not show up) all the other women in the empire won’t obey their husbands either. (May. It. Be. So.) The scholar reminds us, “the character’s reactions to events lead the reader to laugh. For example, Vashti’s refusal to obey one order is thought to threaten the stability of the empire and leads to a decree declaring, of all things, that husbands should rule in their own houses and speak their own languages.”7 Which happens. The greatest mail service ever known on the face of the earth to that time was put to the task of telling men to be the masters of their houses – in a society that was already a patriarchy – because the men were so freaked out that one woman would say “no.”

That’s a powerful no.

It also set up Esther to replace Vashti as queen and save her people from genocide. Vashti and Esther didn’t know each other, but we can guess that Esther knew Vashti’s story, and learned from it. She did her subversiveness in different ways, but she learned from the one who came before her. Vashti set up Esther to succeed. Abigail Harkness set up Georgia to succeed. Even the failures of one woman who seeks power can inspire the next woman to succeed.

And, beloved people of God, like Vashti and Abigail, we are not powerless. We have the power to say “no” to things that are wrong, and “yes” to opportunities for justice. Furthermore, we can act like the women at the banquet in counseling each other toward courageous acts and outrageous refusals of unjust demands. We are powerful. God is powerful. We can, and we will continue to move the world toward good. NOTHING and NO ONE, not even a narcissistic power-hungry “king” can stop us. Thanks be to God. Amen

1“Red Shoes” by “preacher mom” http://preacherparents.blogspot.com/2010/05/red-shoes.html, accessed 11/10/2016

2Sidnie White Crawford “The Book of Esther,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. 3 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999): p. 858.

3Ibid, 858

4Ibid, 880.

5Ibid, 879.

6Ibid, 880.

7Ibid, 858.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 13, 2016

Sermons

“Making a Way Forward”based on Genesis 16:1-6

  • November 1, 2016February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Have you heard that old conundrum about God’s omnipotence? It asks, “Can God make a boulder so big that God can’t move it?” If you ever need it, the correct response to that is, “I don’t care, that has nothing to do with helping us be more loving.” Today’s story raises a similar concern: are we humans capable of screwing up so badly that God can’t bring good out of it? Please hear that question with caution. I fully believe we humans are capable of screwing up BADLY and ruining each other’s lives. The question is, once the damage is done, is there anything that God can’t make better?

Sarai, is the matriarch of both Judaism and Christianity. You may remember her as Sarah. She is the matriarch of ONLY Judaism and Christianity while her husband Abram/Abraham is the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Neither of them do good in the this story.

Let’s go over the name thing to get confusion out of the way. In the next chapter of Genesis (17), God changes their names to Abraham and Sarah – which is how most people remember their names. The name changed signified God’s promise changing their lives. However, at this point in the story they are still called Abram and Sarai, so that’s what we’re going to call them today.

Abram was one of three sons born in land now called Iraq, whose family had moved to land now called Syria, and continued to reside there until he was quite elderly. The book of Genesis says that when he was 75, God spoke to Abram and said, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:1-3) The book of Genesis rarely seems to understand how numbers work or what a reasonable human lifespan is, but it is clear that it is saying Abram and Sarai were old.

Phyllis Trible has done great work with these stories. She writes about this first promise made to Abram, pointing out that:

“The Divine imperative requires Abram to break with all that identifies a man in his ancient world, from the large category of native land through clan to the small unit of ‘father’s house.’ In effect, Abram must relinquish his past and present and go forth to an unknown future in an unspecified land. Although the command does not require him to give up Sarai, his wife, of what value for life, family, and future is barren property?”1 (35)

So that you don’t think Trible is actually supporting the Biblical assumption about people unable to procreate, let me also quote her saying, “However we may view barrenness, within the biblical narrative it is a tragic flaw. It robs a woman of her labor and her status.  It undercuts patriarchy, upsets family values, and negates life.2” Sarai is introduced to the Bible as a barren woman, it is her defining characteristic, and her barrenness is the central issue of their story for 9 chapters.

Abram goes as he is told to go in that first encounter with the Divine. He goes to the land of Canaan and he lives there for a while until there is a famine and he and Sarai go to Egypt. On their way, Abram decides that Sarai is too beautiful and if he admits that she’s his wife they will try to kill him to get to her. So, while the Bible is messed up about the inherent value of women whether or not they can procreate, at least it recognizes the attractiveness of women in their 70s. Score one for Genesis.

Abram is self-protective and thereby lets his wife Sarai be taken into the Pharoah’s harem. He is paid VERY well for Sarai. Eventually the Pharaoh learns what Abram has done and both Abram and Sarai are kicked out of Egypt for it. When they get kicked out, Abram left a wealthy man with all his possessions. That is, his lie and use of his wife made him wealthy. Likely Hagar, Sarai’s slave, was part of the wealth they left with.

They went back to Canaan and lived peaceably there for 10 years. It has been a long time since God’s promise came… 15 years? 20? The Biblical chronology is messy, conflicting, and obviously untrustworthy, but suffice to say, according to the internal logic of the story it has been more than a generation’s time since God promised Abram offspring and nothing has happened. Sarai is just as barren as ever and nothing seems to be changing. The promise was reliant on a 2nd generation, and wouldn’t work without one.

So Sarai decides to take this into her own hands. Clearly the 2nd generation wasn’t going to happen through her, and yet she didn’t want to give up on the promise. Abram had to have descendants. She wasn’t to bear them. They’d waited years and years…. so she found a way. This passage contains the first words Sarai speaks in the Bible. Sarai speaks to Abram and makes the action happen. She uses her voice to change their reality.

Now, Sarai has been condemned through the ages for this action – but I don’t think she’s been condemned for the right things. Usually, she’s condemned for lack of faith. People suggest that if God said it would happen then God would make it happen and Sarai taking it into her own hands showed that she didn’t truly trust God.

That perspective implies that God’s ways make human action irrelevant. It fails to acknowledge that we work to be a part of building the kindom. It ignores free will. It depends on the supernatural. It suggests that humans have no responsibility for creating the world into a place of justice and peace, and that any action we take would be trying to take over God’s exclusive work of changing the world. That is to say, I think condemning Sarai for taking actions into her own hands is theologically unsound and STUPID.

On the other hand, this story says that Sarai is culpable of getting Hagar raped, and that seems worth condemnation. Sarai was likely raped by the Pharaoh herself, but that doesn’t excuse her. I would hope it would have brought her to a place of compassion rather than condemnation of another woman. Trible explains it this way:

“As Abram schemed to save himself by manipulating Sarai and Pharaoh, so Sarai schemes to promote herself by manipulating Abram and Hagar. As Abram tricked Pharaoh into manhandling Sarai, so Sarai would persuade Abram to manhandle Hagar. Like husband, like wife. Altogether, Sarai would treat Hagar in Canaan much as she herself was treated in Egypt; the object of use for the desires of others. Like oppressor, like oppressed.”3

Now, according to custom, Sarai was in her rights to do this. Her slave belonged to her, including her reproductive function, and the baby born would be understood to be hers. It is a projection of 21st century morality to object, and yet I’m doing so. Thus, it IS morally reprehensible AND it didn’t work out. Something fundamental changes when Hagar gets pregnant. The dynamic has been, according to Trible that, “Sarai the Hebrew is married, rich, and free but also old and barren. Hagar the Egyptian is singe, poor, and a slave, but also young and fertile. Power belongs to Sarai; powerlessness marks Hagar.”4But Sarai’s greatest weakness is being barren when child-bearing was the single most important factor in a woman’s life, and the power dynamics switch when her otherwise powerless slave is carrying her husband’s child.

Trible continues:

“As the story moves into a crowded marriage of three, the focus rests on Hagar. ‘She conceived’ (Gen 16:4) The news is precisely what Sarai wants, but it leads to an insight on Hagar’s part that her mistress has not anticipated. ‘And [when] she [Hagar] saw that she had conceived, her mistress became slight in her eyes’ (Gen 16:4*). In the Hebrew syntax, words of sight, connoting understanding, begin and end this sentence: the verb ‘see’ and the phrase ‘in her eyes.’ Structurally and substantively, new understanding encircles Hagar’s view of herself and her mistress. Hierarchical blinders drop. The exulted mistress decreases, the lowly slave increases. Not hatred or contempt but a reordering of the relationship emerges.”5

But Sarai’s view of Hagar does NOT change, and she feels slighted by the move toward equality. She wants to return them to their previous, hierarchical relationship. She wants to regain her power.

Sarai does not talk directly to Hagar, she doesn’t attempt to fix the relationship, and she surely doesn’t try to understand Hagar. Instead she turns to the biggest source of power: Abram. She brings her problem to him and demands that he fixes it. Abram refuses responsibility, and gives her back the power she needs to do harm to Hagar. Hagar HAD BEEN Sarai’s slave, but when she became a secondary wife to Abram, she was no longer a slave. Yet, Abram returns her to the status of slave, permitting Sarai to do her harm, and Sarai does. After demanding that Abram rape Hagar, Sarai “treats her harshly” – which is the same phrasing as how the Hebrew people were treated as slaves in Egypt.

Sarai is an undeniably strong woman who charts the course of Biblical history. She got the ball rolling. She took the power into her own hands. She did it. And she did an enormous amount of damage in doing so. Her actions are HORRIFYING and yet it was a subversive choice to claim her own power and use it to make sure that Abram got an heir. Her choice not to claim Ishmael as her own is also HORRIFYING and yet again subversive by claiming her own power.

In the metaphors of the world, the child Hagar bears, Ishmael, becomes the father of the Muslims. Hagar is their matriarch. In the continued narrative of Genesis, Sarai bears her own child, Issac, and through him becomes the matriarch of the Jews and Christians. Three world’s major religions emerge from this set of messed up people in broken relationships. I’ve often wondered why the Bible is comfortable as presenting them as so HUMAN, but the Bible doesn’t seem to be under the impression that God is looking for perfect humans in order to act.

More so, out of these atrocities: the barrenness of Sarai, the willingness of Abram to sell his wife, slavery, the willingness of Sarai and Abram to use Hagar as an un-consenting wife and surrogate mother, and Sarai’s harsh treatment of Hagar comes GOOD. Doesn’t make any sense, does it? I think that’s one of the mysteries of God. We can mess up, but God doesn’t just leave things be and allow brokenness to stand. God works through the realities of life, the horrendous brokenness in lives, and the pain we cause each other and finds a way to transform it all. My answer? There is nothing we can do that God can’t bring good out of. The net result may still be harm, but God is creative, powerful, and good. We can’t stop that. Thanks be to God! Amen

1Phyllis Trible, “Ominous Beginnings for a Promise of Blessing” in Phyllis Trible and Letty M. Russell, editors, Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Muslim, and Christian PerspectivesTrible, (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, Kentucky, 2006) p. 35.

2Trible, 34.

3Trible, 38.

4Trible, 37.

5Trible, 39.

–

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 30, 2016

Sermons

“How Not to Treat the Family Idols” based on Genesis…

  • October 16, 2016February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

The
characters in this story don’t emerge from a vacuum.  Their story has
been going on for quite a while by the time we get to this part of
Genesis.  Jacob, you may remember, was the second born of a set of
twins who infuriated his brother by stealing both his brother’s
birthright and their father’s final blessing.  In order to avoid
being murdered by his twin brother, and at their mother’s advice, he
went to live with her family.

The
first person he encountered when he arrived was a beautiful woman at
a well (which is Biblical foreshadowing for …. marriage) who
happened to be his cousin Rachel.  Her father Laban was his mother’s
brother.  This is not presented as an issue.  Jacob wants to marry
Rachel, and Laban says he has to work for him for 7 years in order to
pay off her bride-price.  So, besotted, Jacob does.  After seven
years there is a wedding and a wedding night, and when he wakes up in
the morning Jacob discovers that it is Rachel’s sister Leah in his
bed.  He objects – rather strongly.  Laban comes up with some weak
explanation about not being able to marry off the younger sister
first and then suggests that Jacob can marry Rachel too, if he’ll
simply spend one week with Leah first and agree to work for him for
another 7 years.

It
turns out, in case you couldn’t figure this out yourself, that
sisters make super terrible sister wives.  I bet you were able to
figure that out on your own though.  Leah and Rachel spent years
trying to fight with each other for Jacob’s attention, and that
included a fairly elongated “baby war” in which each tried to
outdo the other in producing offspring for Jacob.  If you wanted to
know, Leah won, although Rachel remained Jacob’s favorite.  After the
next 7 years of labor had been completed, Jacob made a deal with
Laban to stay on for a while longer in order to leave with some herds
of his own.  At that point both Laban and Jacob did everything they
could to trick each other into getting the worst possible deal.
Jacob was a trickster, Laban was a trickster, and neither of them
treated each other well.  On the whole, Laban treated Jacob more
roughly than Jacob treated him.  

Finally,
about 21 years after arriving on his uncle’s doorstep – and
apparently while his uncle was as far from home as possible, Jacob
packed up his wives, his children, his herds, and his possessions and
headed back home (uncertain about if his brother still wanted to kill
him).  

So
now we’re caught up – as long as we remember that when they packed
everything up to leave, Rachel took the family idols with them and
Jacob didn’t know about it.   What were the family idols?  Well,
they’re also called the family gods.  They were physical
representations of gods used in some sort of ritual worship, usually
at an at-home altar.  In addition to being items to which one
directed one’s prayers, they were also thought to protect the family
and its good fortune.  That is, if they were lost or stolen, it was
assumed that the LUCK of the family went with them.  While the Bible
suggests that Jacob and Laban prospered because God was with Jacob,
Rachel may not have shared that assumption.

In
the story that precedes this one in Genesis, Leah and Rachel discuss
how their father cheated them by not giving them their portion of
their bride prices, and it is also possible that Rachel just took the
idols to counteract that, or to bother her father, or because she was
scared and wanted their protection, or maybe she was just greedy.  I
do think, on the basis of the stories of Genesis and what they say
and what they don’t say, that Laban was probably an abusive parent
and employer.  Furthermore, by the story Genesis tells, Jacob himself
isn’t really converted to YHWH worship yet.  That will happen on this
journey back into the land, on the night when he is said to have
“wrestled with an angel” and gets renamed Israel.  It thus seems
unlikely that Jacob’s wives would be monotheistic at this point, and
whatever other reasons Rachel had for taking the household idols,
likely she thought they’d be a source of protection for their family.

Laban
was furious when he found out and he brought a war party with him to
go after the family.  It isn’t clear if he would have gone if it were
not for the family idols, but it sort of sounds like he is most upset
about the idols and not the loss of his children and grandchildren.

The
story gives us just enough geography to know that the place Jacob,
Leah, and Rachel were staying was INSIDE the boundaries of what would
one day be ancient Israel. It was just far enough inside that the
place Laban slept the night before he caught up with them was inside
too.  This is significant because it tells us this is both an OLD OLD
story and one that got edited as they years went by.  In the early
development of understanding YHWH, there was a time when it was
assumed that YHWH’s powers only existed within the boundaries of the
Promised Land.  Genesis tells us that Jacob had a dream involving a
message from God on his way out of the land, and Laban has one right
after he crosses into it.  It is as if God is limited by those
boundaries.  The understanding of where the boundaries would BE
however was defined by political boundaries that existed centuries
later, and the clues the text gives us imply those boundaries.  Isn’t
the Bible fun?

OK.
So Laban has a dream in which he is warned not to speak harshly to
Jacob which is most significant because it reminds us that people
used to think that God had boundaries.  Although, let’s be honest.
People still think that.  It is remarkable how people think about
churches and other places of worship as more “holy” or more
“filled with God” than other places.  When he does catch up with
the next generation of his family, Jacob is HORRIFIED as his
accusations and responds with surety that no one has done what he is
accusing them of.  That is, Jacob thinks Laban is falsely accusing
them – with good reason based on their history – and grandiosely
offers a death penalty for the one who has the idols because he is SO
SURE they don’t have them.

This
is a problem for Rachel.  Nothing of her motivation is explained in
the text but it seems clear that she decided she didn’t want to die.
She thinks fast and she comes up with a plan,  she enacts it, and it
works.  She lives, her father goes home, and all is well, except
maybe for the idols.  The plan itself, however, is proof of how
little power she otherwise had.  She used what she had – her
femininity and how it was treated in her culture – to save her own
hide.

The
plan was super simple: she put the idols underneath her and she told
her father she was menstruating.  Was she?  That’s completely unclear
and likely irrelevant.  However, she SAID she was.  By the customs of
the time, no man shouldn’t have been in her tent while she was
menstruating, and he violated that cultural expectation by examining
the rest of her tent.  He wasn’t going to push any further though,
and he left.  By putting the idols underneath her AND coming up with
a valid reason not to get up, Rachel saved her own life and got to
keep the idols she’d wanted to begin with.  She used what she had –
fear of menstruating women and an assurance that no one would check
her on that – to subvert the power of her father.

However,
she also desecrated the idols.  It sort of doesn’t matter if she
actually was menstruating on them or not, the implication is enough.
It may be that this story has multiple intentions and denigrating the
power of idols is one of them.  By the time this story was written
down the people knew the Ten Commandments, including the one about
not making idols.  It was clear that YHWH was not to be represented
in physical form, and Walter Brueggemann says that this is so that
people can’t pick up the idol, move it around, put it where they want
it, and have the sense that they control YHWH.  YHWH is not a God who
is controlled by humans.  This story, which discusses menstruating on
idols seems like a very effective reminder to those who weren’t YHWH
worshippers about the relative weakness of their gods.

The
story also functions as a story about the formation of the national
boundaries.  It claims that the Eastern boundary of Israel was first
created by a covenant between Laban and Jacob, and that as such it is
almost inherent.  

It
is also a good story – it keeps our attention pretty well.  Sadly
though, this is the last interaction that Leah and Rachel have with
their father.  Rachel is left sitting alone in her tent while the
covenant is formed and her father leaves again.  While Jacob and his
family are safe, and while Laban was likely an awful father, there is
some lingering sadness at the end.

The
biggest clue in this story that something is WRONG isn’t that Jacob
decides to leave while Laban is far away, and no one in the household
tells Laban for THREE DAYS.  That would indicate they thought they
were protecting the vulnerable from the one who was doing them harm.
Jacob got Rachel and Leah, as well as his family, out of an unsafe
home for them.

Rachel
tried to take something with her for protection along the way, and it
became the excuse by which her father almost killed them all.  In
that moment Laban sounds like an abusive partner who will kill their
partner rather than let them leave, and Laban’s dream is the only
thing that held him back.  Rachel survived, and likely they ALL
survived, because of her quick thinking and willingness to use what
she had.

Many
women throughout history have been used and abused by powerful men.
Furthermore, many PEOPLE throughout history have been used and abused
by those with more power than they had.  Some, like Rachel, use
everything they have, everything in their power, every subversive
action in the world to get out.  Sometimes they succeed.  May God
continue to guide those who seek safety, and may those who need
safety keep Rachel’s wits about them!  Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hershttp://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

October 16. 2016

Sermons

“Allowing the Boys to Live” based on Exodus 1:8-22

  • October 9, 2016February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the people are reminded that they were once slaves in Egypt. It is used to explain the Sabbath, or maybe just to explain why servants get to have Sabbath too in Ancient Israelite society. It is used in the commandments to take care of the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner as well. Basically, the people are reminded time and time again to have compassion for the vulnerable because they were once a vulnerable population.

However, there aren’t many stories about the people being enslaved in Egypt, this is one of the few. The ones that exist all revolve around Moses, and this story is the prelude to the story of Moses’ birth. It is very difficult to tell if there is any authentic memory underneath this story, because it is an old enough story that there really shouldn’t be and yet there are such epically profound truths in it about what it means to be an oppressed people and what subversiveness looks like from within oppression that it feels more true than most stories in the Bible. This story may not be a factual accounting of a particular incident in history, but because it contains so many larger truths, I’m going to treat it as if it is, and let it speak for itself.

According to the end of Genesis, the descendants of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob had all moved down to Egypt during a famine after Joseph had become the right hand person to the Pharaoh. Joseph had urged them to come down, where he could ensure that they would have sufficient food and land to be safe. The story explained that Joseph had interpreted the Pharaoh’s dream and predicted 7 years of excellent harvests followed by 7 years of famine. Pharaoh was so pleased that he elevated Joseph to the 2nd highest office in the land, and while there Joseph reigned over an agricultural policy that completely impoverished the entire nation and brought their wealth into the Pharaoh’s hands. The people ended up selling their livestock, their land, and then themselves for access to Joseph’s grain stores.

So the same guy who “saved” his family did so while utterly destroying the people of the nation he was – supposedly – serving. The new Pharaoh “didn’t know Joseph” (the Bible suggests this story happened 400 years later, so that would be reasonable). However, it is a bit ironic that the Hebrews were enslaved by the people who one of their forefathers had masterminded enslaving.

Perhaps that suggests that oppression breeds oppression, and oppressors should be careful. In any case, by the premises of this story, by this time the Egyptians were in full fledge oppressor roles and the Hebrews were enslaved by them and oppressed by them.

In our Bible Study we were struck by the similarities between the story in Exodus and the experiences of slaves here in the United States. There is something universal about this story, and it strikes cords through the eons.

Puah and Shiphrah are midwives who are given an immoral order. They are to kill all the baby boys of their people. The names Puah and Shiphrah are classically Hebrew names, and the text reminds us that they’re Hebrew as well as mentioning twice that they are in awe of God. (The “awe” is often translated “fear” but “awe” is a much better translation.) We are not supposed to miss that they’re Hebrew, or that they’re being ordered to kill the boys of their own ethnic group.

It took me entirely too long to figure out why the boys were to be killed. I was thinking of males as especially strong laborers in the fields, and wondered why you’d want to have fewer of them. If you wanted fewer descendants, I thought, why not kill the girls who have the babies and leave the workers? Our Bible Study participants responded that the death of the male babies meant that the females would be sexually available to the Egyptians, and they’d presume that as half-Egyptian – the next generation would be more pliable and “better.” The participants in the Bible Study figured this out by considering American slave history.

We also noticed the language of fear created around the oppressed group, and the dehumanization of them. The Hebrews are called “powerful” and “numerous” and the myth is that they would do harm for the Egyptians, a myth used to justify enslaving them. It is suggested that they could be spies, or fight against Egypt in a war, or abandon their posts of much needed labor. Therefore, the myth of the oppressors says, we must enslave them and double down on the harm we do to them to keep them below us.

Oppression is very powerful, and human oppressors are capable of extensive harm, but there is a resiliency to life itself, and it fights back when life is oppressed. This story says that the more the Hebrews were oppressed the more they multiplied. I think we’re supposed to believe this was God’s hand at work; I think it is more the myth of the Egyptians continuing to justify evil. In any case, both the Hebrews of this story and the African American slaves oppressed in the United States suffered great losses as a community – losses of life and identity, language and culture, dignity and hope. Yet, the communities found ways to fight back, reform, and try again and again. This story suggests that the power to do so came from God, as do many of the songs and stories that remain from the American slave era. God supports the experience of the oppressed in overcoming oppression.

The midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, were unusual women. It doesn’t seem reasonable that only two midwives could have been sufficient for all the births of the Hebrew women, so more likely they were the LEADERS of the midwives. It may even be that they were also midwives to the Egyptian women, as they imply they know the difference between each set of women giving birth. They are BRILLIANT, DEFIANT, and seemingly FEARLESS (although I’d stake a bet that they were terrified even while they kept their cool.)

They are given a direct order by the most powerful man in their country to kill the baby boys of their community and they don’t! If it is true that they were the leaders of the midwives, they give counter instructions. In any case, the voices of all the midwives are united in the shared voices of Puah and Shiphrah, and their voices respond to this immoral command with “no.” They just don’t! It makes me wonder how they had been formed as humans, and what empowered them to know better. The text says it was that they knew God, and I hope it is true for all who know God that our relationship with God empowers us to refuse to follow unjust orders, but I’ve seen it go other ways. How is it that knowing the Holy One can form us into people who more deeply believe in the sacredness of life? How is that being present to God helps us overcome our fears of the powers of the world? How were the midwives able to be so brave? I wish I knew, but for now I’ll accept the premise that God can help us overcome our fears and resist the power of oppression.

Did the midwives refuse the Pharaoh because he was Egyptian? Because the order was so atrocious? Because someone had already been training them on resisting oppression? Was it about who gave it, how terrible it was, or about who they were? How were they strong enough to simply refuse? And how were they wise enough NOT to say “no” to the Pharaoh (who would have killed them and replaced them with someone who would do what he said) but instead to simply not to it? I’d love to know, but for now I’ll accept the premise that God helped them overcome the power of the oppressor.

When they get called back to account for the live baby Israelite boys, they have a crafty answer in hand. They give a compliment to the femininity of the Egyptian women while using the fear of the Hebrews and assumptions about them to their benefit. They respond along the lines of “your women are more feminine and fragile while ours are more like animals.” To be precise, they say, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” You see? The answer they give manipulates the Pharaoh by complimenting his ethnic group and denigrating theirs, and it is believable to him. They save their boys. To do it they have to imply terrible things about the lack of humanity of the women they were related to, and they did because it was totally worth it.

Puah and Shiphrah aren’t the only ones in history who have played the assumptions of oppressors against the oppressors to gain freedom for the oppressed, but they did it as well as anyone.

Now, the incredible actions of these subversive women to save the lives of Israelite boys ended with things worse off than they started – sort of. The midwives had been told to kill the babies, the tactics then were supposed to be somewhat hidden and covert. Their actions forced his hand to make the death sentence to baby boys OVERT and visible. He continues to order the death of the baby boys, and he makes everyone responsible for it, since he hadn’t been able to control the midwives. In the short term, that meant more babies died.

But in the long term, it meant that the Hebrews lived. The overt action of the Pharaoh led to more subversive actions – by Moses’ mother and sister – and by Pharaoh’s own daughter. The fear of Pharaoh that led to his orders for murder resulted in Moses being raised in his own house – an Israelite boy who he had ordered killed. When Pharaoh raised the stakes it ended up backfiring on him and he eventually lost all his slaves.

It seems important to take note of how it must have felt to be Puah and Shiphrah in the moment when Pharaoh ordered the Hebrew babies to be thrown into the Nile. It would have felt like failure, right? They took risks with their own lives and likely the lives of those who worked with them to save the babies. They took morality and the love of God more seriously than the power of the Pharaoh/King. They fought with their wits about them for the well-being of their people and they won…

Until the Pharaoh made it worse and raised the stakes. They tried to save those baby boys and allow them to live, and then Pharaoh orders everyone to kill the baby boys and the organizational methods of the midwives can’t protect the babies anymore. Puah and Shiphrah must have been dismayed. Yet, the tactics they used ended up in one generation with the freedom of their people – instead of the death of the males of a generation and the rape of that generation’s women. Yes, things got worse. That’s what happens when you fight back against oppression. The oppressors make things worse first. Which means that when women – and men – are forced to use subversive tactics they have to be prepared for things to get much worse before they get better.

In The United Methodist Church right now, things are getting worse. The many brave people who have refused to follow unjust rules in the church have upset the status quo. Those who are committed to excluding LGBTQ people from full participation in the Body of Christ are furious that they can’t make people follow the rules. As they double-down on exclusion and tightening rules and punishments, they push the UMC toward schism. This weekend in Chicago a group of 1700 people deeply committed to exclusion gathered, and formally launched a para-Church structure they are calling the Wesleyan Covenant Association. Their first demand is that the Church end the resistance to exclusion once and for all. Since we all know that the progressives fighting for inclusion will not be silenced that is not possible. They suggest, that if resistance can’t be silenced that a plan needs to be developed to divide the denomination. Things are getting worse.

That means we are on the road to ending oppression. Thanks be to God for the midwives and all those willing and able to follow their lead. What a joy it is, in God’s holy name, to be part of ending oppression in any form. 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

October 9, 2016

Sermons

“Persistent” based on Luke 18:2-5

  • October 2, 2016February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

I recently heard a story,
it was the story of the person who told it to me, but it struck me
that it was also  many peoples’ story.  There was much to celebrate
in the story, and also a lot to be frustrated by.  The person who
told me the story was someone who lacks access to sufficient
financial resources.  That is, in the colloquial – he is poor –
although I think poverty is more complicated than that!  The man is a
father, and his daughter got into a VERY good college, despite the
challenges the family faced and the challenges their school district
faced.  As you might hope, the very good college offered this young
woman a financial aid package to make it possible for her to attend
the school.  However, when the young woman got the financial aid
package and read it over carefully, she realized that the loans she
was being offered were predatory loans that would be verging on
impossible to ever be able to pay back!  She contacted the school.
They ignored her.  She kept pestering.  They kept ignoring her.  Her
father started calling, and he started calling up the chain of
command.  He was told to stop calling.  When I heard the story,
that’s where it ended – they were unsure if the young woman would
attend the very good college because she was WAY too smart to do so
at risk to her financial future.

She sounds like the
persistent widow.  I’ve been told that the persistent widow is a very
strange character with which to start a sermon series on subversive
women – and not just because the Bible presents her as fictional.
The bigger issue is that her subversiveness isn’t very obvious.  To
the naked eye, she just looks like an annoying nag!  Actually, even
that may be projection.  This is a SHORT story, there isn’t that much
to it!  

In our study of the text
though, we found a lot to discuss about this short-storied,
fictional, persistent widow.  It is helpful to remember that the
Torah, the laws of community life that the Jewish people understood
to have come from God, were very clear about the care for widows,
orphans, and foreigners.  That would be, people who did not have the
protection of an adult male who was a member of society and were thus
vulnerable.  The system was designed so that even the vulnerable
could find ways to survive.  The Torah was also very clear about the
threat to society created by an unjust justice system, and
articulated frequently, in no uncertain terms, the need to have
judges who made rulings based on JUSTICE and not on who had more
money or influence.  

That is, the persistent
widow is stuck in a situation she shouldn’t be in.  She should be
cared for.  She isn’t!  It is likely that her “opponent” is the
person who should have been taking care of her and providing for her
livelihood, and wasn’t!  The justice system was supposed to help her
find a way to justice.  It didn’t.   She was stuck in a situation
which was untenable for her survival without a means of recourse
because of the immorality of the judge.  There was no other means by
which she could get justice.  The system was closed to her, and the
only option left to her was to agitate the system.

The judge is presented
very simplistically.  He doesn’t care about justice, people, or
God… and it sounds like he just does what he wants to do.  He is a
negative caricature of a person abusing power or authority, someone
who isn’t easy to move toward justice.

The persistent widow won
though!  I suspect that she could have taught the courses I took this
spring on non-violent direct action!  Jesus says that the judge
thought to himself,
“because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice,
so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” (v. 5) The
persistent widow didn’t have much power to use in the world, and she
didn’t have ANY power that could be used without being annoying.  So
she used what she had.  She was annoying.  She didn’t give up.  And
she annoyed him into doing what was right!  

That’s
what I think is so subversive about the persistent widow.  She can’t
have been the only widow in that city who was impoverished by a lack
of justice, she likely wasn’t even the only one to bring it to the
judge’s attention.  MANY of the widows might have been in similar
situations.  However, in cases like that, most people give up.
That’s what people are counting on, and that’s part of why injustices
sometimes win out.

I
think about that young college bound woman, and how carefully she
read the details of her financial aid package to determine that the
offer wasn’t fair.  How many other people in the same situation come
with some trust that the college they want to go to won’t do them
harm, don’t read the package, or don’t yet have the math skills to
interpret the implications?  How many people would decide to take the
package and hope for the best?  How many people would try to call and
ask if there was another loan, but give up easily?  I don’t know how
many people would get as far as the young woman I heard about, and
consider giving up their dream school, but I do know that her
persistence is NOT what the predatory loan company is counting on.

The
predatory loan company is expecting people not to pay attention, to
trust, to take a leap of faith, not to run the numbers, and to sign
on the dotted line – no matter how high the interest rate turns out
to be.  The predatory loan company is able to get away with their
loans because few people are as persistent as that young woman. The
college, as well, choose to work with that predatory loan company,
and in doing so to keep this young woman and those in similar
situations IN poverty, while pretending to help them out of it.  It
makes me wonder what they might be getting out of it.

Keeping
our eyes open to see
the injustices of the wold and REFUSING to be quiet about them once
we do is wildly subversive.  I’m claiming the persistent widow was
subversive because she was a nag, and she didn’t stop nagging until
justice was found.  It isn’t the wildest story in the Bible by any
means, but it may represent the most frequently successful mechanism
of accessing justice: refusing to give up!

One
of the challenges of acting like the persistent widow, though, is
that there are a lot of injustices in the world and none of us can
give attentiveness to all of them.  That level of nagging can’t be
multi-tasked!  This is one of the reasons I am so grateful for the
image of the Body of Christ.  I come back to it time and time again,
reminded that if I do my part faithfully, and trust the rest of the
Body to do their part (and God to do God’s part), the whole world
gets better.  Most often justice comes through collective action
(think Montgomery Bus Boycott, Women’s Suffrage, blocking the
Keystone XL pipeline), but sometimes they’re smaller or individual as
well.  On occasion we can successfully seek justice alone, but no one
of us can seek ALL justice.  If any of us try to
all the work of the Body of Christ, nothing gets done
at all!  

My
college thesis was on John Conway’s “Game of Life,” which is a
set of rules governing a grid.  On the grid, at any given moment,
each cell is “alive” or “dead” and then, from there, things
change.  The status “alive” or “dead” is represented visually
by two different colors, and those statuses are able to change with
time, based on the relationships they have with other cells who are
also “alive” or “dead.”  

One
night, deep in the trenches of trying to write up my thesis and
struggling with a decision about where to go to seminary, I went down
to the river to pray.  I sat on a dock and watched the water flow by.
As might make sense if you’d spent as many hours and months staring
at colored boxes on a graph as I had, I started imagining the river
as the graph – and imagining the graph spreading out to cover all
the water of the world.  I’d stared at colored boxes for a LONG time,
and I was tired 😉  Then, as I continued to pray, ponder, and be
overwhelmed, I started imagining one of those boxes as representing
MY life.  To my horror, the box that represented my life was
blinking!  I took this to mean that sometimes my life was
contributing to the well-being of others, but sometimes it WASN’T!  I
found myself sitting on that dock on the Connecticut River, aware
that sometimes I wasn’t benefiting the kin-dom of God and wishing
with all that I was that I could ALWAYS be good.

It
was at that point that another thought entered my mind, one that was
outside of the particular ways my thoughts tend to cycle around.
That process has been one I’ve associated with the Divine, and I have
since thought of that prayer time by the river as a vision of sorts
-but I’m also giving you the details to consider it so that you can
assess how you’d like to think about it.  The thought that entered my
mind, seemingly from beyond me, was that if I could manage to be a
blessing that contributed to the well-being of the kindom 51% of the
time, that was ENOUGH for God to be able to expand the goodness out
into the world and to be a net gain to the kin-dom.  

It
was certainly a new thought to me then, I’d leaned more towards
perfectionism than toward an idea that offering more good than bad
was a net gain!  It is a thought I’ve gone back to in the years
since, particularly when I’ve found myself being extra rough on
myself.  It helps me to consider that God is able to make things work
with what we’re able to offer.

If
we do our best, and especially if we are able to offer a bit more
good into the world than harm, then God can use what we offer in
combination with the rest of the Body of Christ.  The world becomes a
safer, fuller, more just place.  The kin-dom becomes.  We don’t have
to do all the work!  We can’t!  We’d burn out.  That means that
sometimes we have to work through the process of figuring out which
things are ours to do and which things we leave for the rest of the
Body of Christ.  Together, each of us offering the love, compassion,
and persistence that are our gifts from God, we can follow the
widow’s course and create the world that the Torah dreams and God
wants – the kin-dom of God!  And it doesn’t even require perfection
😉  Just persistence.  Thanks be to God.  Amen

  • Rev. Sara E. Baron

    First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

    603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

    Pronouns: she/her/hershttp://fumcschenectady.org/

    https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

    October 2, 2016

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