“Strive for Gratitude” based on Matthew 6:25-33

November 22, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Jesus was a Middle Eastern refugee, according to the Gospel of Matthew. Abraham was a Middle Eastern refugee – specifically a Syrian one- according to the Torah. The entire Exodus narrative is the story of the people who would become ancient Israel as refugees wandering in the desert. And the entirety of the Bible obsesses over welcoming foreigners and offering hospitality to strangers.

According to the UN Refugee Agency, “Globally, one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. If this were the population of a country, it would be the world’s 24th biggest. ‘We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before,’ said UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres.”¹ And, sadly, it appears that many US politicians are responding to terrorist attacks around the world with fear of refugees themselves – instead of with a desire to adapt to the needs of the displaced and to change the realities of our broken world.

It is hard, initially, to talk about “don’t worry about what you’ll eat or drink or wear” when the world has never seen so many displaced people who don’t have access to food or water or clothing. It is ALSO hard to talk about it after having been at our Community Breakfast, and seen the beautiful faces of our guests, who don’t have adequate access to food or water or clothing either.

This is a hard text to preach while acknowledging the realities of the world, but I think it started out that way. The Jesus Seminar, who are pretty picky about what they think Jesus did and didn’t say, wrote this about the passage, “Among the more important things Jesus said are a series of pronouncements on anxieties and fretting. It is possible that we have before us the longest connected discourse that can be directly attributed to Jesus, with the exception of some of the longer narrative parables.”²They also aknowledge the assumed audience, “The string of sayings is addressed to those who are preoccupied with day-to-day existence rather than with political or apocalyptic crises.”³

That is, Jesus was talking to people who were struggling to have enough to eat and telling them not to worry about food. (But he wasn’t talking to refugees.) The aspects of this passage that make it difficult to preach are inherent to it, not a modern challenge of it. Furthermore, it is consistent with how Jesus spoke and what he taught. To go back to the Jesus seminar, and their reasoning for believing in the authenticity of this passage, “these formulations betray the stamp of Jesus’ speech and connect with other sayings stemming from him: congratulations to the hungry (Luke 6:21), petitions for the day’s bread (Matt 6:11), and the certainty that those who ask will receive (Luke 11:10), to cite but a few examples.”⁴ This SOUNDS LIKE Jesus.

Jesus tells hungry people not to worry about bread.

What the heck, Jesus?

I figure there are a few ways to understand this:

We could assume that Jesus doesn’t care about human life and thinks the whole purpose of everything is the spiritual realm and/or access to heaven.
We could assume that God does take care of God’s people, that Jesus’ teaching is true, and that if people are dying of starvation it indicates that God actually doesn’t like them. (Or that they sinned or some other justification for God’s lack of affection.)
We could explain it all away with a conversation about the lack of human capacity to understand Divine Will.

(Please note that I don’t find these options valid enough to bother refuting them. If you need help with that though, let me know, and we can go through them.)

Personally, I’m going to go with the fourth option.

4. Maybe Jesus means it. Maybe paying attention to what you don’t have and worrying over how you’ll get it is a waste of life. Maybe worrying is more of a problem than even hunger and maybe this applies to a lot of aspects of life. Maybe, even, focusing on what you do have and being grateful for it will make more of a difference than having more. (Not to say I’m not still at “What the heck Jesus?” but MAYBE…)

Studies say that we gain more from giving than we do from keeping. In one of my favorites, researchers gave college students $5 and either instructed them to spend it on themselves or on others. They nearly universally went to Starbucks, which would make an interesting study in itself. In any case, in spending the money on themselves, there was a burst of happiness that lasted for a few minutes. The burst of joy that came from spending a gift on others lasted several days.

In concentration camps the power of that phenomenon showed up more powerfully. The people in concentration camps were given starvation level meals. They didn’t have enough to live, and yet the people who choose to share their INSUFFICIENT food with others (usually ones who needed it more) ended up living LONGER. Food, it turns out, is not the most important thing. It may be that hope is. It may be that connection is. It may be that making a contribution to someone else’s well being is. It may be that caring enough to try is. I don’t know. I don’t know how it works, but it does.

And I’m pretty sure that Jesus’ ministry, which happened among people who didn’t have enough to eat anyway, was mostly about freeing people from fear so that they could share and work together and although it doesn’t really make sense if you look at it economically: when a whole group of people who don’t have enough combine their resources, there is MORE than enough. That seems to prove economics wrong.

But I think that may have been the truth that Jesus was getting at. There really is more to life than food and clothing. And, obviously, worrying doesn’t help ONE LITTLE BIT. And, clearly, God wishes for us all to have enough. Yet we know that not everyone does – not every close. And yet, there are also many people in the world who have enough food, water, and clothing and live entirely meaningless lives. I think building a just society and a just world is the responsibility of us as the followers of Jesus (and as people of faith more broadly.) I think we have failed in many ways, just as we have succeeded in many ways. I don’t think everyone is going to have enough to eat – this year. But maybe the year will come when we all will.

In the any case, life IS more than food, and the body IS more than clothing. And there are many, many things to be grateful for. This week I read a book by Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams entitled Uncommon Gratitude: Alleluia For All That Is. One of the chapters is on gratitude and singing alleluia for poverty, which is not something I’d spend a lot of time thinking about. Apparently, Socrates said that the richest person is the one who is content with the least and Epicurus said “Wealth consists in not having great possessions but in having few wants.”⁵ Joan Chittester says:

Poverty brings with it a spiritual vision the lack of which may in the end underlie the final corrosion of this wealthy society in which we live. Poverty stretches us to a vision of life that extends beyond the countinghouse, beyond the glutting of our lives with things. Poverty enables a person to see life in all its dimensions, to taste it in all its sweetness, and to recognize its vacuousness. It enables a person to choose between what is real and what is not about a life lived in midst of plastic and sparkles, of the lasting and the ephemeral, of the dehumanizing and the excessive. It reminds us of what is necessary and what is nothing but fluff, nothing but indulgence, nothing but consumption for the sake of show. Poverty keeps us real.

I do not applaud poverty or recommend it or justify it or minimize its struggles and its cruelty. I do not glorify the “happy poor.” But I do see that a bit less engorgement and a bit more sufficiency in a society long ago surfeited and satiated by the unnecessary could, would, make the whole world richer. ⁶

It isn’t all about feeding physical hunger, because physical satiation isn’t enough for us as humans. We are more. A lack of food is a problem – a justice issue – a thing to try to change. But food isn’t enough. Food, water, and clothes aren’t enough. Maybe Jesus was just telling the truth.

So even now, when the world sometimes feels like it is falling apart at the seams, when so many are hungry, when so little justice is to be found, we still hear Jesus saying, “don’t worry about it!”. What do we do?

We can notice what we have – whatever it is and be grateful. It will multiply the effect of whatever we have – both in our lives and in the lives around us. Gratitude is an antithesis of fear and worry, it is a sister of hospitality and care, it is a way of following Jesus’ commands:

Strive to respond with gratitude; pay attention to the goodness. It all matters. It changes you! Thanks be to God. Amen

___

1“Worldwide displacement hits all-time high as war and persecution increase”http://www.unhcr.org/558193896.html accessed on November 21, 2015.

2Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Autthentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), page 152.

3Funk et al, page 153.

4Funk et al, page 153.

5For the first, I got rid of male language, it is thus not a true quote.

6 Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams entitled Uncommon Gratitude: Alleluia For All That Is(Liturgical Press: Collegeveille, MN, 2010.) page 28.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 22, 2015

Sermons

“NOT Worthless”based on 1 Samuel 1:4-20 and 1 Samuel 2:1-10

November 15, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I spent a lot of time thinking about what to say about the terrorist attacks in Paris, before I realized that there were also terrorist attacks made by the same group in Baghdad and Beirut which the news cycle had not taken quite so seriously. Then I realized that there were also deadly natural disasters in Japan and Mexico on Friday. Then I worried that there were likely other tragedies that I didn’t know about. Then I thought of the 200,000 deaths in Syria that have motivated 4 million refugees to leave their homes. Then I remembered that there are lots of refugees NOT from Syria. On Facebook I kept seeing these words, written by a poet named Warsan Shire from Nairobi, Kenya:

“later that night

i held an atlas in my lap

ran my fingers across the whole world

and whispered

where does it hurt?

it answered

everywhere

everywhere.”1

I asked Drew Vickery, who was here this weekend for the CCCYM (Conference Council on Youth Ministries) event what he thought I should say about the attacks on Paris, and after a few hours he got back to be and said, “Nothing. I think you should focus on hope.” #fromthemouthsofteens. I don’t have words to take away the pain of the world, I don’t have words that will stop or transform extremist militants, and I surely don’t have words that will bring any of the lives tragically lost.

The hours I spent reading up on the terrorist group last night brought one imperative sentence to light, “For certain true believers—the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil battles—visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a deep psychological need.”2 This clarified my role for today: to offer a form of faith that is not about defining “good” or “evil” but rather about seeking wholeness for ourselves that can encourage others into wholeness. So, here we go…

Hannah is surprisingly resilient. It isn’t that painful things don’t seem to hurt her – they do – a lot! They don’t overcome her. We see it twice in her story. The first thing that we know about her is that she’s barren. Now, people in the ancient world did not think that barrenness COULD be a male problem, but even if they had, Hannah’s husband’s OTHER wife was distinctly not barren. A woman’s value came in her childbearing capacity, and to be barren was to be worthless. To be barren was to be ashamed. Hannah was barren.

And yet…her husband loved her. This is not particularly normal, nor expected for marital relationships at the time. In fact, it looks like it was true in only one of Elkanah’s marriages. He loved Hannah, and he gave her preferential treatment because of it. His words indicate that he doesn’t even care that she’s barren, which I think supports the case that he really loves her and not just her “value” in his life.

This was not sufficient for Hannah. She wanted to have a child. We are completely incapable of determining if this is about her maternal instincts or if it is about a desire not to be in shame, but let’s assume it is some of both. Her husband’s love did not take away her shame, although it may have helped her have resilience to it.

Every year when she had the chance, she went to the house of God and prayed there. We’re told that she asked God to open her womb, and even tried to strike a deal with God about it. This is imperative to her story, she eventually gave birth to the prophet who would anoint the first kings, and it better be clear how faithful his mother was in order to establish his faith.

This is the first place that I see Hannah’s unusual resilience. By most accounting, if a woman’s womb was barren, it was barren because of divine punishment. Yet, as one scholar put it,

“Hannah at once embodies both the patriarchal constructions of her worth and a deep assumption that God is concerned about her. … When Hannah seeks out God’s presence in this state of anguish, her prayer signals that she is aware of a divine concern for those who are questionable worth. She does not come to God with formal petition. She does not come with traditional sacrifice. She comes in loneliness, isolation, and despair. She lays bare all the emotion and pain.”3

She believes that God cares about her, despite her barrenness, despite her shame. She is resilient to her own shame. It doesn’t stop her from seeking the Holy One AND making requests of God and EVEN bargaining with God (which is a dangerous idea). She doesn’t let it stop her, and that indicates that she thinks God might listen to her.

That’s some GOOD theology for a mostly powerless, shamed woman 3000 years ago.

There is a repetition of her resiliency as well. Eli, the priest, is often presented as not knowing a whole lot about God. He isn’t a bad guy, he just hasn’t had much contact with the Divine. So, when Hannah was praying with all her heart, Eli confused this with a drunken stupor, and decided to come up and shame her about that.

She might have slinked away.

But not Hannah. She, a lowly, barren woman corrected him. She is such a delight! She wasn’t mean about it, she correct his assumption. She has NOT been drinking. She explains that she was PRAYING (we don’t know if she gets this out with or without sarcasm in her voice), and she makes a request of him, “Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time.” She not only asks favors of God, she asks one of the high priest.

And we should know something is going on by now, because Eli receives her correction and grants her request. Then God does too, and she gives birth to a child and names him Sam-u-el, “God has heard.”

I wish more people were like Hannah, refusing to be put in their place, denying the capacity of anyone else to define their value to the divine. I wish more people took the mantle of shame that other people tried to put on them and simply refused to wear it because they KNOW that they are worthwhile to God.

The Magnificat of Mary which celebrates God’s mighty acts is song that fell from Mary’s lips when she was pregnant with Jesus. It is based strongly on Hannah’s song that she sang to celebrate God’s mighty acts when Hannah was pregnant with Samuel. Hannah’s song, just like Mary’s, focuses on God’s power to care for the poor, the broken, and the vulnerable. It also emphasizes God’s capacity and willingness to bring down the high, the mighty, and the rich. They are songs of celebration of God’s work for the disenfranchised. They are RADICAL claims about God that anyone with a vested interest in the status quo should worry about.

Hannah is the Biblical predecessor to Mary. She’s a big deal, in large part because she knows that God cares about the people that the people don’t care about – including her.

Hannah is a model of shame resilience on the basis of God’s grace, a model we desperately need in modern day Christianity. This week I read Karen McClintock’s book Shame-Less Lives, Grace-Full Congregations, and she had a lot of wisdom to share about shame and grace. Early on in the book she points out that, “We are encouraged by the dominant culture to self-improve rather than self-affirm and to strive for more rather than to be content with what is and satisfied with ourselves. The pervasive and soul-defeating presence of cultural shame leads to perfectionism, addition, and self-hatred.”4 Later, she clarifies that, “Shame is not a course-correcting emotion. While guilt says, “I made a mistake,” shame says, “I am a mistake.‘”5

At two point she offers the words that make SO MUCH sense of the world, “Shame is often the first tool grabbed off the workbench by those entrusted to maintain the status quo,”6 and, “Because shame feels so terrible, we avoid it through the use of blame.”7 But it wasn’t until she said, “You can never be satisfied with yourself if you are constantly striving to be as wise, good, kind, or as generous as God,”8 that I knew she was preaching to me. She continued that point with a quote from Barbara Brown Taylor who said, “I thought that being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was, and it was not until this project failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.”9

Finally, since this is a quick run through of an excellent book, I want to offer one of her stories:

“I had the opportunity to mentor a clergyperson I’ll call Sam during his first few years as a parish pastor. … To help him integrate his adult self and his ashamed little boy, I had him spend a few weeks between our conversations thinking of himself as ordinary. I encouraged him to ask himself, ‘What would an ordinary person feel right now? What would an ordinary person want, do, say? The exercise provided him with a reflective distance between his idealized self and his ordinary self. Once he accepted his ordinariness, he could balance service with replenishment and encouragement with separation."10

I think Hannah knew how to do that. She was just an ordinary woman, so was Mary, and they knew God to care for ordinary people.

With the possible exception of Jesus, every character in the Bible is visibly and deeply flawed. This clarifies that God works with and through real people, not perfect ones. They called on their actions sometimes, but God doesn’t ask them to “shape up or ship out” when it comes to their flaws. They’re just accepted as they are.

Dear ones, God created you as you are and loves you are as you are. You need not be perfect, you need not be particularly GOOD, you need not be extraordinary. You are enough.

May that knowledge fill the world.

I suspect it will help. Thanks be to God and may God help us ALL. Amen

____

1 Accessed at http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/812310-later-that-night-i-held-an-atlas-in-my-lapon 11-14-15.

2 Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants” in The Atlantic March 2015 Issue. Accessed athttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/ on Nov. 14, 2015.

3 Marcia Mount Shoop “Theological Perspective of 1 Samuel 1:4-20” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009) page 292.

4 Karen A. McClintock, Shame-Less Lives, Grace-Full Congregations (Herndon, VA: The Alban Intitute, 2012) p. 4.

5 McClintock, 22.

6 McClintock, 52.

7 McClintock, 67.

8 McClintock, 95.

9 McClintock, 101, quoting Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), 218-219.

10 McClintock, 107-109.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

November 15, 2015

Sermons

“Visibly Invisible”based on Mark 10:42

November 11, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I’m going to mention two important dates in my life. The first is Tuesday, January 28, 1986. That is the date of my first class in a course I took during my first year in seminary called “Religion and the Social Process.” It is the ONLY course I ever took where I still remember the introductory comments of one of the three professors who were team teaching the course. Professor Joanna Gillespie looked at us and said, very emphatically, “In this course we are going to give you a lens which will enable you to see structures of oppression.”

That stuck with me. It kind of hit. I had never heard that kind of talk before. Structures of oppression. I had not really thought much about oppression up to that point in my life and I kind of had the vague impression that oppression was what bad people did to the helpless. Oppressors were villains. And of course, I wasn’t an oppressor. I wasn’t racist. I wasn’t sexist. Let me tell you, was I ever in for a wild ride that semester.

In reflecting on this I went back to my notebook from that course. Still have all my notebooks. I was reminded of the phrases and concepts that, as I look back, shaped my thinking and the way I look at the world. Simple things such as an operative definition of oppression:

The use of coercion, force or violence by any holder of power – individual or institution -to constrain others or deny their rights.
Or the idea that social relationships can not be seen except as they are given meaning by the culture.
That there are ways that structure mediates meaning
And that institutions create their own value system

Here is one that I found very powerful.

Social structure operates in three realms; discrimination, segregation and stereotype.

Discrimination – denial of the right to have.

Segregation – denial of the right to belong

Stereotype – denial of the right to be

And all of this organized around a system of in groups and out groups.

Now as the course unfolded through the lectures, readings, group and written assignments it became very clear, to me at least, that my own personal beliefs, attitudes and view of the world came out of this whole structural social-political realm. My belief system was

formed in the context of being a white, middle class, protestant heterosexual.

Fast forward thirteen years. Thursday, May 20, 1999.

That is the day I walked into the administration building of Bare Hill Correctional Facility in Malone, New York, to begin my new job as that prison’s Protestant Chaplain. As I walked into that august institution I very quickly discovered that I might as well have landed on

another planet. It was a different world. And yet it is a world that, in many respects, is a microcosm of the outside world. It is a world where everything is intensified and where the lines of demarcation a brutally sharp.

Talk about a structure that has in groups and out groups! I mean, you can see it as soon as you walk in. Officers in blue, inmates in green, civilians in civilian attire. It’s right there before you. The lines of demarcation were so sharp that as a civilian staff member I was not permitted to wear green or red. Only inmates. The security staff, the guards, in fact all staff, had to be able to visually discriminate population – that is, the incarcerated ones – from non-population. There are many things a prisoner is not permitted to have. And there are groups to which a prisoner is not permitted to belong, namely gangs. And it is the Department that determines what a gang is.

It is a world of organized discrimination, segregation and stereotyping.

Now to be sure, there are sound security reasons for this in most, but by no means all, cases. It wouldn’t be good for prisoners to have guns, knives, drugs, certain metal objects or escape paraphernalia, of course. And gang activities in prison are never good. But the point is all these restrictions are imposed from above.

However, all too often a line gets crossed. And it gets crossed because staff in that setting are cloaked with power. While at Bare Hill I had two clerks who were inmates. One day I called out for one to come into my office for a moment and in about one second he was in front of my desk with a ‘yes sir?’ Boom! There!

Now, in eleven years of teaching prior to that I NEVER had any student respond that way. In 23 years of parenting up to that point I NEVER had a response like that. In 25 years of marriage….well, never mind.

But I call out the clerk’s name and in one second he’s there.

Now this had absolutely nothing to do with me. It is no reflection on how my clerks viewed me. You see, there was something else controlling the situation. It was in the form of something called rule 106.10. Rule 106.10 is in a little booklet that is issued to anyone entering a New York State prison to serve a sentence. It is called Standards of Inmate Behavior. Rule 106.10 is the only rule printed in bold faced upper case letters. Rule 106.10 states AN INMATE SHALL OBEY ALL ORDERS OF DEPARTMENT PERSONNEL PROMPTLY AND WITHOUT ARGUMENT.

It doesn’t say ‘follow,’ doesn’t say ‘comply,’ it says OBEY. Absolutely no wiggle room is given in that rule. And WE, staff, were expected to follow a principle that has a name I’ve always hated, called ‘zero tolerance.’

That simple phrase is a manifestation of immense power. So much so that it gets invoked almost as a religious talisman. I would see signs posted that said such things as “Inmates can not enter without permission of staff.” and the numbers 106.10 would be printed underneath.

Power.

We see the manifestation of it. But there is an invisible component to it. It is visibly invisible.

“You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them.” So Jesus told the disciples in our Gospel reading. I’m only going to deal with that statement.

The phrases ‘lord it over’ and ‘exercise authority over’ are each rendered as a single word in the Greek. ‘Lord it over’ has as its root ‘kyrie’ meaning lord and the ‘exercise authority over’ has the word exousia, meaning authority. And the word ‘archein’ or ruler is in that sentence.

Ruler. Lord. Authority.

I’m going to use those three words as a jumping off point into the work of a remarkable scholar who has given me deeper insight into what I began learning thirty years ago in that wonderful course, my experience as a prison chaplain of fifteen years, and an awful lot of what has been going on in our country, world and yes, in our denomination.

Walter Wink, a New Testament scholar and teacher at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York and who died in 2012, produced a five volume work known collectively as “The Powers” in which he explores the language of power as used in New Testament writings; how the language is used, how the biblical writers conceived of power and the powers and the very real implications that has for us now. Like all good scholars he was not without his critics but I have found his work remarkable.

Those three words, ruler, lord, authority, are power words, part of a language of power that, according to Wink, pervades the New Testament. Other words are kings, rulers, principalities, power, name, wisdom, commission, throne, dominion, lordship. He also observes that the language of power is imprecise, liquid, changeable, and unsystematic. His words. But in spite of this there are clear patterns of usage that can be seen. He also finds that, because they are interchangeable, one word can be used to represent them all.

Now here is one of several kickers. And I’ll quote him directly: “These Powers are both heavenly and earthly, divine and human, spiritual and political, invisible and structured.” That is, invisibly visible.

Now here’s the other kicker; the Powers are both good AND evil.

The processes, definitions and categories that were identified in that course all those years ago could easily be dismissed as mere sociological and psychological reductionism. Explained, or explained away by our modern mindset and world view.

What I have always found remarkable and invigorating is that this work that Wink had done gives us a way to see all of this theologically and biblically. He shows us a way to have a theological and biblical understanding of these processes and categories.

Yes, on one level we can think of kings, rulers, principalities, power, name, wisdom, commission, throne, dominion, lordship, as political structures, social systems and institutions. But he found that there was always something that could not entirely be reduced to those

categories, something immaterial, invisible, spiritual and real.

He argues that the principalities and powers are the inner and outer aspects of any manifestation of power.

The inner aspects are the spirituality of institutions, the inner essence of outer organizations. The outer aspect is seen as political systems, appointed officials, the chair of an organization, laws, all the tangible manifestations which power takes.

Police and law enforcement. Prison guards and prison systems. Chaplains and Administrators in those systems. Governors and governments. Churches and pastors. Bishops. Annual Conferences. Boards of Ordained Ministry.

There is a visible pole, an outer form – be it church, nation, economy – and an invisible pole, the inner spirit, the driving force that animates, legitimates, regulates its physical manifestation in the world. Neither pole is the cause of the other. Both come into existence together and cease to exist together. And the way the inner and outer aspects of a power work, the relationship they have to each other can be complex and is largely unseen. Unless we look for it. I feel it is legitimate for us to think of the spirit of an institution as having a mind of its own that, collectively, may be fundamentally different from the minds of the individuals within that institution, and that the spiritual aspect can influence in unseen ways those who are a part of that institution.

When a particular Power becomes idolatrous, placing itself above God’s purposes for the good of the whole, then that Power becomes demonic.

The church’s task is to unmask this idolatry.

One example that comes to mind is the long, complex and convoluted legal history of corporate personhood. The Citizens United Supreme Court case was but the latest occurrence in a history that goes back centuries. The whole question of what rights are to be afforded a corporate entity has a long, long history. Of course corporations have long had the right to enter into contractual agreements and individuals have long had the right to file suit against corporations, both of which are aspects of personhood. The longstanding question, though, seems to have been just what rights are to be afforded a corporation. ALL the rights of an individual or just some of the rights? To my mind the simple fact that this question has been seriously considered for so many years is an indication that there is an immense and largely unseen power at work here.

When a corporate entity gets to the point that IT’s existence and life is it’s only reason for being and is to be considered of more importance than actual individuals and if it’s life is to be fostered at the expense of individuals – THEN THAT POWER HAS BECOME DEMONIC.

And this is true whether that inner spiritual dimension is that of a corporation, or a law enforcement agency, prison system…

even ideas and ideologies…

And yes, even a religion and it’s concomitant organizations, such denominations.

As I’ve already stated, the church’s task is to unmask this idolatry. Bring it into the light of day. Make it visible. Allow people to see it for what it is.

A warning. You know how you can tell if a person or group is successfully doing this? The more successful anyone is in unmasking a power and shining a light on it, the more angrily and even violently that power will respond.

We’ve seen it in the Occupy Wall Street movement in which the violent response was, at least to me, horrifying. We’ve seen it in Ferguson when the racist basis of law enforcement was called into question.

And yes, we see it in our own denomination – now I’m goin’ from preachin’ to meddlin’ here – we’ve seen it in our own denomination in the recent spate of church trials over the issue of marriage equality. Violence doesn’t have to be physical.

So, that’s it. Our task as part of the Body of Christ is to unmask that which is hidden. To see the invisible in that which is visible. To shine a light and be a light. And to do so without fear. And to do it with love not anger. And yes, to bear the response when it comes.

For are we not the Body of Christ, and do we not have a task to do?

Amen.

Appendix and notes

The references to the course Religion and the Social Process, a course that was taught during the spring semester of my first year at Drew Theological School in Madison, New Jersey, are based on my own recollections and the notes I took during that course.

Our required texts were

The Predicament of the Prosperous, Bruce C. Birch and Larry L. Rasmussen

Beyond Liberation, Carl Ellis

Sexual Violence, Marie Fortune

Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?, Letha Scanzoni and Virginia R. Mollenkott

Hunger for Justice, Jack A. Nelson

Habits of the Heart, Robert N. Bellah, et al.

My very brief discussion of the work of Walter Wink is taken from his three volume work collectively entitled “The Powers.”

Naming the Powers: the Language of Power in the New Testament Fortress Press, 1984

Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence Fortress Press, 1986

Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination Fortress Press, 1992

My comments are primarily from the first volume. For those who are interested, but are hesitant about tackling a fairly monumental three volume work I recommend his 1998 book The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium, originally published by Augsburg and now available in paperback. It is a digest of the third volume with elements of the previous two and at 200 pages considerably shorter than the 784 page total of the three volume work. He also omits almost all the secondary literature references from the larger work.

One important element in Wink’s work, which I did not address, is his coining the term ‘the myth of redemptive violence.’ It is a powerful concept very pertinent to our own time.

This sermon was primarily descriptive as opposed to prescriptive. In addressing any kind of prescriptive approach to the issue we need to be aware of some issues regarding the nature of the Powers, for the Powers are ignorant of God’s plan. I conclude these notes with a fairly extensive quote from Naming the Powers. All emphases are mine.

“The Powers did not know”: seen from the perspective provided by our hypothesis,evangelism and social action are the inner and outer approaches to the same phenomenon of power. I have already described the subversive character of the early church’s refusal to worship the imperial genius and its recourse instead to prayer. Many modern Christians have unfortunately understood injustice in simply materialistic terms and have not recognized the need to “convert” people from the spirituality that binds them to a particular material expression of power. It is not enough merely to change social structures. People are not simply determined by the material forces that impinge on them. They are also the victims of the very spirituality that the material means of production and socialization have fostered, even as these material means are themselves the spin-off of a particular spirituality. In a new structure people will continue to behave on the basis of the old spirituality, as they have to varying degrees in every communist regime, unless not only the structure but also their own psyches are reorganized.

Evangelism is always (Wink’s emphasis) a form of social action. It is an indispensable component of any new “world” Unfortunately, Christian evangelism has all too often been wedded to a politics of the status quo and merely serves to relieve distress by displacing hope to an afterlife and ignoring the causes of oppression. The repugnance with which most liberal Christians regard evangelism betrays their own failure to discern that all liberation involves conversion. Whenever evangelism is carried out in full awareness of the Powers, whether in confronting those in power or liberating those crushed by it, proclaiming the sovereignty of Christ is by that very act a critique of injustice and idolatry. And as the churches of South Korea and Brazil and Chile and around the world have learned, such evangelism will inevitably spark persecution. In sum structural change is not enough; the heart and soul must also be freed, forgiven, energized, given focus, reunited with their Source.

Walter Wink

Naming the Powers

Pages 116-117

___

–

Rev. James Sprenger

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

October 18, 2015

Sermons

“Generous Gifts of Poor Women” based on Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17…

November 8, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Usually, the educated elite of a society receive more praise an attention than society’s impoverished widows, but usually doesn’t apply to the Bible. The scribes were religious scholars, but they were also more. By Jesus’ day, the Temple high priest was appointed by Rome and the priests and scribes were benefiting from the Empire’s system of taking the wealth of the poor and giving it to the already wealthy. Many of them, I suspect, meant well. They thought they were keeping the peace. They were doing the best they could with what they had. But they were participating in a system of oppression.

Rodger Nishioka is a contributor to Feasting on the Word, and a professor of Christian Education at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA. He writes regarding the gospel:

Together, these two sections read as a lament for and an indictment upon any religious system that results in a poor widow giving all she has so the system’s leaders may continue to live lives of wealth and comfort. The attack is not on Jewish religious practice. The attack is on any religious practice that masks egotism and greed. The scribes are like leeches on the faithful, benefiting from a religious system that allows poor widows to sacrifice what little they have.¹

The little narrative is ripe for interpretation, despite its brevity. As a child I always imagined this widow to be an old woman, a connotation associated with widowhood that often makes life very hard for young women who are widows. But many artists have portrayed this scene, and more often then not they show her as young, sometimes even holding a baby. Then, instead of an older woman sacrificing her own food, that suggests a young mother sacrificing her family’s food.

We don’t know her age, we do know that the “collection plates” of the temple were metal. Since all money was coins, and the bigger coins were worth more, this particular set up insured that people could HEAR how large the donations were. This meant that the big givers got big praise, and the small givers – got shamed.

Jesus upset that system. He didn’t sit there praising the big givers for their big gifts. He noticed the woman giving small gift, a shameful gift, a gift so small it would be tempting not to show up and give it, and he noticed. He noticed that her gift was big IN COMPARISON to what she had, and that the other gifts had been small IN COMPARISION. He took the person most likely to be ignored, disregarded, unimportant, and shamed (because, after all, the MAN of the family should have been giving the gift), and he praised HER. He saw.

Poverty can make people feel invisible. Being a woman in a patriarchy can feel invisible. Being a widow without support can easily feel invisible. But Jesus saw her in the midst of all that was going on in the temple. And he used her as an example of abundant giving.

The Torah sets up a system that is meant to care for widows, orphans and foreigners AND for the Levites who cared for the religious well being of the community. The Levites didn’t get a portion of the land allotted to them. Instead, one of the purposes of tithes was to feed them. They took care of the cultic rituals, and the rest of the tribes took care of them. They didn’t get all of the tithes though, because some of them went back to people’s hometowns to throw feasts for EVERYONE, which was one of the ways of feeding widows, orphans, and foreigners. Widows, orphans, and foreigners were cared for in other ways as well: there were laws about leaving the edges of fields and the second pickings for those who had no land, there was an expectation of levirate marriage which tried to keep family lines alive and widows cared for, and there were laws against the sale of family property and against interest which meant that poverty could exist but didn’t become an inherently downward spiral.

The Torah set up a system to care for the vulnerable AND to allow a set aside group of people to be able to devote themselves to religious practice by being given gifts by the rest. The issue in this passage is that those devoted to religious practice are not simply surviving, they’re thriving, and they’re doing it by taking away the livelihoods of the vulnerable. And Jesus was NOT happy.

The widow may have been paying her expected tithe to the Temple, or she may have been giving of her own expectations of herself. We aren’t told that, but we are told that she has given all that she has to the Temple. What sort of religious organization takes the last money of a poor widow?

Is this story told to praise the widow or to condemn the Temple? The widow’s generous gift is an indictment of the Temple system, and an even bigger one in the context of the scribe’s greed and egotism. Perhaps it is OK to take a poor widow’s last coins, because there is a human need to GIVE, and because contributing to something larger than ourselves matters, and because a person has a right to give whether they have a lot or a little. But it isn’t OK to take a poor widow’s last coins if the system in place isn’t going to take care of the widow. The system is making the clergy wealthy at the expense of the already poor. Or, to make it more simple, the Temple was functioning to take the meager wealth of the poor and redistribute it to the rich. No wonder Jesus was angry.

The widow gives an extraordinary gift that the Temple is not worthy to receive. A friend of mine asked a great question this week: what would it take to make the Temple worthy of such a gift, and what would it take to make our churches worthy of such gifts? That is worth pondering.

The poor widow, however, is not the only generous widow in our scriptures today. We also have Ruth and Naomi. This is a story worth knowing, here is a brief summary of the first two chapters:

Naomi and her husband and two sons left the holy land of Israel to live in in the hated neighboring country of Moab because of a famine. The famine lasted a long time, and both sons grew up and married Moabite women. Then both sons and Naomi’s husband died. She decided it was time to go back to Israel, to live as poor widow on other people’s generosity. As was expected at the time, her daughters in law went with her, but before they had gone far she turned to them and freed them from their bond to her. Custom said they were to stay with the family they married into. She urged them back to their own mothers to start their lives anew. One went, the other was Ruth, who pledged her life in a vow of commitment to Naomi’s. When they get back to Naomi’s village Ruth goes to glean the leftovers of the harvest and the owner of the fields instructs her to be treated with kindness.

That brings us up to the part of the story we read today, which is HIGHLY suggestive in a sexual way. As one scholar put it, “The word for ‘lie down’ in Hebrew often implies sexual intercourse. Moreover, feet are used as euphemism for genitalia in the Bible. Though the word translated as ‘feet’ in this passage is not the usual term, Naomi’s instruction to ‘uncover’ the lower extremities of Boaz is provocative. That this encounter happens at night makes the meeting even more suggestive.”² I generally enjoy it when I’m in on the joke, and I know it when the Bible is making sexual innuendos.

This, however, is not one of those times. The story is thought to end well. Ruth and Naomi are cared for by Boaz, Naomi’s line continues, and eventually King David well be born. Theologically it is magnificent, since the Israelites and Moabites were historic enemies and the Israelites were often vehemently anti-marriage with foreigners. The mere existence of this story is pretty remarkable. You’d think they wouldn’t want to say that their most beloved (no, I don’t know why) king was the great-grandson of Moabite woman, but they DO. And it seems to suggest that God’s ways are bigger than human ways, and God’s inclusion extends to even one’s enemies.

AND YET, I’m a really enormously big fan of the concept of sexual consent, and I’m not sure that Ruth had any of that in this story. I grant that she is said to have gone willingly to Boaz, but her economic circumstances called for desperate measures and she was willing to take them in order to ensure that both she and Naomi would survive. Is it consent when you and your loved one(s) would die if you didn’t? Was Naomi appropriate and wise in finding a way forward, or did she use Ruth’s young and sensually pleasing body for their gain? Who actually had power in this situation and why?

In some ways, and I don’t like of the the ways, holding the Bible up to the standard of sexual consent is unreasonable. Women didn’t often have the power to say “no,” and if you can’t say “no,” then your “yes” doesn’t count. But when a whole society fails to give women the right to say “no” then it becomes odd to call out the lack of consent in any particular story. But I’m doing it anyway, because I think it is wrong every single time.

At best, in this story, Ruth and Naomi choose to use Ruth’s sexual capacity to gain the means of survival. It is a gift much like the widow’s mite – one that is generous in the extreme and an indictment when it is necessary that it be given. Ruth is not alone, by any means, in the history of women, in becoming so poor that they only thing they have left to use towards survival is their own bodies. This is a story with nearly universal undertones, at least in market economies. It is proof yet again that the Bible is not naive about humanity, including the struggles of very poor women. At the same time, every retelling of this story should be a condemnation the society in which it happens.

The story provides evidence that Boaz was a very honorable man, likely even a good man. I like to think that despite all that happened out of necessity that Ruth may even have been quite happy with him, but that’s likely just wishful thinking. Ruth gave what she had, both for herself and for the woman dependent on her and unable to provide anything for herself.

Some generosity is too much.

One poor widow gave her last coins to the Temple.

Another poor widow gave her sexual capacity for the sake of male protection and therefore survival.

May these stop being common stories.

May we build a religious system that is worthy of the widow’s mite.

May we build a world where sex is ONLY mutual, consensual, and NEVER necessary for survival.

May we hear the stories of women and men who have given such gifts, and honor them.

And when we receive gifts of excessive generosity (of any size or type) may our receiving honor the givers. May God help us. Amen

____

1 Rodger Y Nishioka “Pastoral Perspective on Mark 12:38-44” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009), page 286.

2 Frank M. Yamada “Exegetical Perspective on Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009), page 269.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 8, 2015

Uncategorized

Untitled

November 8, 2015February 11, 2020
by Administrator

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23YnJkH0CZs)

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Sermons

“Jesus Wept” based on Revelation 21:1-6a and John 11:32-44

November 1, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

It has been a while since I’ve stood in the pulpit to preach. Over the past three weeks, this space has been filled by profound and interesting men, whose willingness to share of themselves gave me space to focus myself elsewhere. I went on vacation. I soaked up the goodness of people I love, who make me whole, and it was grand.

Over the course of my adulthood I’ve used my vacation time to do two things: to see people I love, and to ski. The skiing has always happened with people I love, which makes winter vacation trips all the sweeter. I’m told that there are people who go vacations to do other things – like sit on a beach, or meet a new city, or hike an amazing part of the world that they’ve never hiked before. Those options have always seemed wonderful to me, but they have never become a priority because I have too many people I love and want to see, and they are always a bigger draw than anything else could be. There are a lot of people I love that I wish I had more time with – and they’re all over!

This week I came across an article that substantiated my vacationing choices. It is entitled, “How Our Housing Choices Make Adult Friendships More Difficult”¹ and it was a response piece to an article in the Atlantic entitled, “How Friendships Change in Adulthood.”² Both pieces were both interesting, discussing the importance of friendship to happiness and the challenges of making and maintaining friendships during adulthood. The Atlantic article discussed the challenges related to work and family – the demands of life that take away the time for friendship.

The housing article added some important perspective on American society, and what we think is normal. It points out that making close friends comes down to “ proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other.”³ Or to put it more succinctly, “The key ingredient for the formation of friendships is repeated spontaneous contact.”⁴ For many of us, the way we life doesn’t make a lot of space for that. Cars don’t help. Walkable neighborhoods do help, but not everyone lives in them. Houses don’t necessarily help! People are more likely to run into each other in apartments or in intentional co-housing. (The articles points out that this explains why so many people make such important friendships in college.) That is, we don’t just run into all that many people!

Interestingly, whenever I am walking around in Schenectady, I do run into people I know. Because of poverty levels in Schenectady, many people are not isolated by cars (they don’t have them) or housing (it is intermingled). It strikes me as strange that as people move up the socio-economic ladder in our society, they end up being more isolated from others. This seems to support the article’s argument that what we think of as normal in the USA isn’t normal and likely isn’t good! Why can’t we build a society where people interact AND have food security? The truth is we can, but we have to dream it.

The article, which was really advocating for thinking about housing life differently, much like my college friends and I always dreamed, with extended community in co-housing, running into each other in shared spaces, had one passing line that I couldn’t let go of. It was arguing about how isolated people are and said, “Say you’re a family with children and you don’t regularly attend church (as is increasingly common). There are basically two ways to have regular, spontaneous encounters with people. Both are rare in America.” (The two ways are “walkshed” neighborhoods and intentional co-housing.)

But did you hear it? If you don’t regularly attend church, then you don’t have the opportunity to meet people, run into them spontaneously, get to to know them slowly over time, and become friends. But, if you do attend church, that’s one of the benefits. I sort of love it when the value of church IS seen in society, and that is in fact one of the greatest values.

Today is All Saints Day. While we use it as a ritual of remembrance for all of our loved ones, and that is beautiful and important, there is a nuance to it that we often ignore. All Saints started as a way to remember the martyrs of church, and is formally a way to remember all Christians both past and present. Most specifically, today is the day to remember the members of our church family who have passed away in the past year and add them to the collective cloud of witnesses who came before us. The great cloud of witnesses dreamed and shaped our community and entrusted it to us, hoping that we will one day pass it on again. In a celebration of life, we thank God for the life of an individual person. On All Saints day we thank God for all the saints, and the collective gifts they’ve given us.

And THAT is why I’m waxing poetic about friendship today. We are formed by each other, in community, and sometimes the lines of connection and intersection are invisible to us. In my time here I’ve heard stories of people I’ve never met, and yet their lives have shaped mine. Friendships are most important to our happiness and our wholeness, they shape our lives. Most church relationships are friendships.

The honored dead whose names we will read today are people who shaped our lives, whether they were part of this church or not. And by shaping us, they’ve guided us not only into who we are but also in how we understand God and Love. In the Gospel lesson today, Jesus weeps. Trivia fans be aware, in the KJV, this was the shortest verse in the Bible. Theologians have argued since this story stated getting told about why he wept, but I think most of them have been wrong. They have messed up theories about him weeping is just a ploy, or annoyance at the crowd.

I think Jesus wept because his friend was dead.

This is not a particularly difficult interpretation for me to come to. Jesus cared about Lazarus. He was sad that he was dead, and he was also sad that Mary and Martha were hurting, and being present to his own grief and theirs led to tears. Over the centuries this interpretation has been avoided like the plague because it implies that Jesus may not have been: all-knowing, stoic, or immune to emotion. I’m cool with all those issues. I’d rather understand Jesus to be a man who cried when terribly sad things happened.

In our Revelation passage, the acts of creation which start the Bible and continue thematically through it, come to their narrative conclusion. God acts in creation again, this time a creation that exists without chaos, without death, without grief, and WITH the fullness of the Divine presence in all places and at all times. It is a vision of comfort and consolation that has held up to the passing of the ages. As one scholar put it, “It is a vision of the church at the end of time, and, because it partakes of the eternal, it is present and available to us now.”⁵

That is, in our relationships of love – in our families, in our friendships, in our church family- we get a glimpse of what it is to have the fullness of God among us. The vision of Revelation is one where we’d not only be intimately connected to God, but we also wouldn’t lose each other anymore.

Somehow, and we all understand the how differently, God keeps us connected to each other, even beyond the seemingly firm lines of death. God is the connector, we are connected, and connection is what makes life so wonderful. So thanks be to God – for those we love and have lost, for those we love and have not lost, and for God’s own self. Thanks be to God for friendships – past, present and future. May we continue to learn to give them energy so they can give us life. Amen

____

1 http://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friendship
2 http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/how-friendships-change-over-time-in-adulthood/411466/
3 David Roberts “How Housing Choices Make Adult Friendships More Difficult” published in Vox Policy and Politics accessed athttp://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/how-friendships-change-over-time-in-adulthood/411466/ on Oct. 31, 2015.
4 Ibid.
5 Ginger Grab, “Homiletical Perspective of Revelation 22:1-6a” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009) page 233.
–

Rev. Sara E. BaronFirst United Methodist Church of Schenectady603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 1, 2015 – All Saints

Sermons

Lover’s Quarrel by Rev. Dr. Art Suggs

October 28, 2015February 15, 2020
by Administrator

Lover’s Quarrel

First United Methodist Church, Schenectady, NY, October 25, 2015

Arthur M. Suggs

When I was about five or six years old, a kindergarten kid, my dad had a 20-gallon fish tank, or what you would call a community tank, with lots of different kinds of fish in it. One morning we both got up unusually early, before dawn. I went to the tank, which had a roller-type thumb switch for the lights, and turned them on while it was still dark outside. I remember the fluorescent tubes flickered for a moment, and then bam, they came on bright.

As I was looking at the fish, they were jerking around and some of them swam hard into the glass. In a sort of formative moment for me a long time ago, I turned to my dad and asked, “Why’d they do that?” He answered, “Because you scared the bejesus out of them.” He liked the word bejesus.

What do you mean? Then he explained, “Pretend that you’re lying in your bed, and somebody comes in and turns on the light. Would you like that?” It had never before dawned on me. It was one of those early moments of feeling empathy for creation. I wanted to apologize to the fish. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare the bejesus out of you, and I won’t do it again. I will wait for dawn to come before I turn on the light from now on.” A formative moment for me as a kid.

I’m going to try to preach this morning about science and religion and about God. Bit of a tall order, and I’ll do my best. But to begin I’d like to convey a short story that is very meaningful to me. It’s by John Barrow, a Cambridge professor of math and physics, a superbrainiac kind of guy. He received the Templeton prize for progress in religion in 2006, and so at his awards dinner in March, he began his acceptance speech with this story:

“A little over a year ago, I [Barrow] was in a great church, the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice. Its predecessor was raised in the year 832 to house the mortal remains of St. Mark the Evangelist, which had supposedly been brought to Venice from Alexandria four years earlier by two merchants. They are alleged to have hidden the remains of the martyred saint under layers of pork to avoid the attentions of the Muslim customs officials. The present Byzantine Basilica, a distinctive cluster of low domes, was begun in the year 1063 and consecrated in 1089. I arrived at the church in the early evening with a small group of other scientists for a guided tour after it had closed to the visitors for the day. When we entered, it was almost in total darkness. There are few windows, and those are small and far from transparent. We were asked to sit in the center, allowing just a few faint floor lights and electric candles to guide us to our seats. Above us, only darkness. And then, very slowly, the light levels rose. Above us, around us, the interior began to be illuminated by a discreet system of hidden sodium lights. The darkness around us gave way to this spectacular golden light. The arching ceilings above us were covered in a spectacular, gleaming mosaic of glass and gold. Between the 11th and the 15th Centuries, nearly 11,000 square feet of gold mosaic was made, square by square. On reflection what was more striking to me was the realization that the hundreds of master craftsmen who had worked for four centuries to create this fabulous site had never seen it in its full glory. They worked in the gloomy interior by candlelight and oil lamps to illuminate the small area on which they worked, but not one of them had ever seen the full glory of the golden ceiling. For them, like us 500 years later, appearances can be deceptive. The universe is a bit like that too.”

Turning up the Lights. The advantage in turning up the lights is that one can see more and can see more clearly. But an issue arises with better illumination upon one’s path: The issue is that one needs to integrate what is now seen that wasn’t seen before. Let me speak plainly.

I feel that the lights have been coming on especially brightly in this last century. Here are some of the incredible developments that have come to light –I use that phrase intentionally – in this century:

It was about a century ago that Einstein published the four papers that made him famous, on the subjects of relativism; relativity, general and specific; and quantum mechanics, the insights of which have been filtering down into the population of the world over this last century. The process is not complete, but it’s still happening.

In addition, even though Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in the 1850’s, it was mostly during the last century that the ideas of deep time; evolution; and natural selection, “red in tooth and claw”, have found their way into the imagination of the average person on the street.

In the last couple of decades alone, the incredible insight born of string theory is that basically it seems as though there are eleven dimensions in which we exist. The mathematics behind this theory are well beyond the scope of the sermon. But eleven dimensions! We live in four of them, three spatial and one time, and there are a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, and so on. One thing that is known by virtually everybody about dimensions is that each is infinitely more in scope than the preceding one. So a plane is infinitely more than a line, and a volume is infinitely more than a plane. People get that. But there are yet an eighth, a ninth, a tenth, and even an eleventh in the magnificence of this world in which we live.

As if that weren’t enough, in the 1940’s the Nag Hammadi texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. And the religious world got rocked by an 8.0 earthquake. We realized that the Bible is what it is pretty much because so much was taken out as a result of really petty politics. What God had said – never mind what God is still saying – what God had said in holy writs of all kinds were also discovered in the last century.

We now have a telescope, twenty-five years old, that has taken images of the universe that we had no idea about, including what is named the Hubble Deep Field, which has now led astronomers to estimate the number of galaxies at 1013 (give or take a dozen or so). It was in the 1920’s, between the two World Wars, when we first realized that we live in a galaxy. We haven’t known that for even a century yet. And it was only about four years later that the very first galaxy, Andromeda, named after a beautiful Ethiopian princess of Greek mythology, was discovered. And now it’s 10^13 galaxies of which we’re aware. A billion is 10^9 , so now we have at least ten thousand billion galaxies. (I feel like Carl Sagan.) (Also a galaxy typically has in the neighborhood of 10^11 stars, for an overall total of 10^24 stars!)

And how about the Internet? Ours is the first generation ever to be almost universally connected, such that I could e-mail somebody in China or Moscow or sub-Saharan Africa. And the news of the death of a famous person goes across the globe in about a second.

(Big Bang, DNA, could be mentioned as well.)

The dimmer switch has been cranked – hard and fast. Think about this list of incredible insights, which is by no means all-inclusive: relativism; relativity, general and specific; quantum mechanics; evolution; eleven dimensions; Nag Hammadi and the Dead Sea Scrolls; the Internet; and the Hubble Deep Field. I challenge you to compare that list with any other century in the history of humanity. God apparently took the dimmer switch and cranked it hard and fast. And we’re like little guppies banging into the glass, having the bejesus scared out of us.

Does any of this impact our understanding of God? Our conception of divinity?

Now compare all that scientific, intellectual stuff to a more common, even childish, understanding of God. Teachers asked kindergarteners to write God a question, put it on a Post it note, and then they put all the Post-its up for everyone to see. Here are a few of them. As you listen to these questions or statements about God, dig beneath the surface and imagine the responders’ conceptions of what divinity is:

Dear God, I bet it’s very hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world. There’s only four in our family, and I can’t do it.

Dear God, Please send Dennis Clark to a different camp this year.

Dear God, Thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.

Dear God, I went to this wedding, and they kissed right in church. Is that okay?

Dear God, You don’t have to worry about me. I always look both ways.

Concepts of Divinity! It’s time to for an upgrade. When you get a feeling for kindergarteners’ perceptions of God like a superparent, and considering the vast number of achievements that have come to pass in the last century, from Einstein all the way to the Hubble Deep Field, maybe it’s time for us to upgrade our conception of God.

So what is God? Not exactly sure anymore. I used to think I knew, but now I know that I don’t.

I’m not an atheist…not just because I believe in divinity, but I’m also repulsed by the arrogance of atheists, not to mention the chronic bad attitude.

I’m not agnostic either. It’s too lukewarm and milk toast for my taste. It’s too easy. It poses as respectable, but strikes me as just being lazy.

And perhaps most surprising for a clergyperson, I’m not a theist. What??? I no longer can conceive of God being a separate entity “out there” somewhere, perhaps in heaven. And it most certainly wasn’t the type of divinity Jesus talked about.

I am a spiritualist. I believe that spirit, the non-physical realm, exists at a deeper level of reality than matter does.

I’m also a monist. I believe in the oneness, the interconnectedness of all reality. When Jesus prayed that “they might all be one, even as the Father and I are one” I try to take that to the limit of what my mind can conceive.

And please excuse the jargon, I’m also a panentheist. All, the whole shebang, what the Greeks called the pleuroma, all things physical and spiritual, exists within God.

But it doesn’t matter what I think. What I believe. What do you think? Believe? Hopefully what I’ve said so far might motivate you to at least see if you want an upgrade, need a revision. And toward that end, I want to offer four verses from the Bible, chronically overlooked, that actually can be very helpful as we bring our theology into conversation with science.

Deut 33, Very often awkwardly translated. I originally came across it in the protestant funeral liturgy. “The eternal God is thy dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

Hebrew: olam, eternal, everlasting, cosmos, universe, the world, infinite. Not easily translated into English for it means all these things. It is the ancient Hebrew concept of what we now call Einsteinian space-time. So the verse, more literally is: The Olam God (or God of Olam) is thy house, and underneath (foundation, referring to the house) is the Olam – Strength. One of the great promises, hidden gems, in the Bible. The God of it All is where you live, and foundational to your dwelling is the strength of the universe!

Ecc 3:11 “He has made everything beautiful it its time; also he has put eternity into man’s mind, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” He has put Olam into our nephish, translated as mind or heart is some versions, but more literally is a person’s soul. Olam placed into our soul! Such that yes, it would be difficult to wrap our minds around such a concept.

Luke 17:21 “…for behold, the Kingdom of God is in the midst of you” This is almost exactly the same thing that Ecclesiastes is saying. But here Jesus is using emphasis. “Entos” is the Greek word for an emphatic “in”. English doesn’t have such a word. But imagine, taking the word “in” only with emphasis. The Kingdom of God is in you! Don’t look for it over there, or over here, it’s in you! Olam in you soul.

Acts 17:21 This one is great. Epimenides (Philosopher, Crete, 6^th or 7^th C BCE) was upset with his fellow Cretans in that their belief in and worshipful attitude toward Zeus was waning. Part of his poem: “They fashioned a tomb for you (Zeus), holy and high one, Cretans, always liars, evil hearts, idle bellies. But you are not dead; you live and abide forever, for in you we live and move and have our being.” Paul then used that same line as part of his explanation of divinity to the Greeks.

But note one thing. It seems to be saying the opposite of the two preceding verses. Which is it? God (Kingdom, Olam) in us? Or are we in God? I would suggest to you that it is the interplay of both. It is the interplay, interbeing, of God, humanity, creation that both science and theology is discerning.

In preparation for today, I’ve been reading some of Sara’s sermons on the internet.

There was one from a few weeks back. The context was addressing the question of Jesus, “Who do people say that I am?” And she quotes:

“Rev. Monty Brown, a United Methodist from West Virginia has answered the most important of the questions for all of us, Jesus included I’d say. Who does God think that I am? God thinks that I am a “beloved child of God, precious and beautiful to behold.” Who does God think that you are? God thinks that you are “beloved child of God, precious and beautiful to behold.”

Yes, emphatic yes.

What I would ask of you is to expand your notion of child, for the entire creation is the offspring of God. And one thing that can be said with assurance is that the parent and child are of the same species.

I feel like a guppy that just banged its head really hard. It sort of smarts. But give me a minute, and I’ll acclimate to the light. Amen.

–

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Events and Celebrations

“First, Last, and In-Between” based on Mark 10:17-31

October 13, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

“First,
Last, and In-Between”

Mark
10:17-31

First
United Methodist Church, Schenectady, NY

Chett
Pritchett, Executive Director, Methodist Federation for Social Action

Good
morning,

I
bring greetings today from the board of directors of the Methodist
Federation for Social Action and from our staff and interns in our
Washington, DC office. I’m so thankful for the witness of this
congregation, for those who have been part of the Troy, and now Upper
New York Chapter, and for giving us your former pastor to lead our
coalitional work toward General Conference.

I
also bring greetings from my home congregation, Dumbarton United
Methodist Church in Washington, DC. For 27 years, Dumbarton has been
a reconciling congregation, welcoming persons of all sexual
orientations and gender identities into the life and leadership of
the church.

I
am blessed to be in this sanctuary today. In a lot of way, I think of
First Church and Dumbarton as kindred spirits. Over the past three
years as the executive director of the Methodist Federation for
Social Action, I have come to know many such congregations. Although
it may seem like it, I am here to say, “You are not alone!”

“You
are not alone” seems to be a good place to start from today’s
Gospel lesson. As found in the Gospel attributed to Mark, this
passage of Scripture is part of a larger story. Jesus and Peter and
James and John had left the glory of the transfiguration on the top
of the mountain and found their way, with the other disciples, in the
valley, with their faces turned toward Jerusalem.

Here
is where Jesus began his teaching ministry. Those who had heard of
Jesus’ ability to perform miracles gathered around him and asked
him questions. Some asked him trick questions and Jesus replied with
trick answers…I mean parables. And so today, we find Jesus asked
by a rich young man, “What Must I Do To Inherit Eternal Life?”

Jesus
replied, telling the man, “you know the commandments,” and then,
as a good rabbi would do, added instruction: “you lack one thing:
go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will
have treasure in heaven, then come and follow me.”

Wow.

Jesus
must not have had his coffee that morning.

“It
is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for
someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

This
Jesus guy pulls no punches.

Then
the disciples got scared: “Then who can be saved?” they asked.

The
disciples and the rich man were asking the same question. They were
concerned with what they needed to do – how must we behave, what
can we do. Peter even says it with a little snippiness: “Look, we
have left everything and followed you.”

We’re
the good guys. We’re the ones who left our families and belongings.
We’re the ones facing ridicule for your sake. Surely, we’re going
to be blessed! We have to be blessed! We’re going to be blessed,
right?

Jesus
assured them that now and it the age to come their goodness would be
noted. But then he threw in a zinger:

“The
first will be last…and the last will be first.”

I
mean, come on – is it any wonder Judas betrayed him and Peter
denied him?

Before
coming to the Methodist Federation for Social Action, I spent more
than 7 years as a manager for Cokesbury, the United Methodist
bookstore. While there, I got to meet seminarians and clergy and lay
people who were hungry to share their faith with others. One of the
most curious books I came across during those years was a children’s
book with plastic relief faces on the cover. The title was “Jesus
and the 12 Dudes Who Did.” I can’t remember what the book
actually said, but I remember the cover and the title with great
clarity. “Jesus and the 12 Dudes Who Did.” Placed alongside
today’s Gospel reading, I think the author got the title exactly
right. The Disciples saw themselves as do-ers, part of the in-crowd,
doing stuff, doing things, because they were going to be front and
center on the right side of history.

But
when Jesus says “the first will be last…and the last will be
first” – he’s making a bold theological statement.

When
Jesus says “the first will be last…and the last will be first”
he’s saying that good works are fine, but they aren’t the be-all
and end-all of God’s message.

When
Jesus says “the first will be last and the last will be first,”
he’s stating that it’s not about the ACT of selling your
possessions and leaving all you have that will help you gain eternal
life. It’s about the transformation, the re-orientation, the
newness that comes when your life is turned toward God more fully.
It’s about loving God with all your heart and mind and soul.

When
Jesus says “the first will be last and the last will be first,”
he’s making the most basic theological statement: “God’s grace
is available to all.”

This
is an interesting conundrum for those of us progressive,
socially-aware, engaged United Methodists.

The
Protestant work ethic did a number on most of us. We work hard to
make the world a better place and provide for those who go without
and challenge the powers that be. We put in hundreds of volunteer
hours, we give money to organizations working to change the world
(thank you). And if Jesus came back, he’d say, that’s all well
and good – BUT…

*You
are already good enough.

That’s
all well and good – BUT…

*God
already loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

And
here’s the scandalous part of Jesus’ parable. God loves everyone
else, too.

*Your
annoying colleague at work. God loves them.

*Your
oblivious, unaware neighbor who always parks too close to your
driveway. God loves them.

*Your
racist, homophobic cousin. God loves them.

And
there’s nothing you can do about it, except welcome them as they
are. And show a little love.

Because
the reality, friends, is that we are, as Martin Luther once wrote,
simul Justus
et Peccator.

Always,
at all times, we are somewhere in-between saints and sinners– in
the same body, at the same time. We never fully embody godliness,
and sometimes – OK, a lot of times – we are as oblivious as those
twelve disciples.

You
see, the human condition, is not, as pure Calvinists would say, one
of total depravity.

Instead
it is one of always being in-between.

Scripture
reminds us of this again and again.

We’re
in-between birth and death.

We’re
in-between fear and safety.

We’re
in-between chaos and community.

We’re
in-between joy and sorrow.

We’re
in-between what has been and what could be.

For
many of us, we know that it means to live in-between.

Some
of us live in-between as exiles – either forced upon or chosen.

Some
of us live in-between because the culture that formed us is different
from the culture in which we reside.

Some
of us live in-between because it’s how we must balance our
overlapping and multiple identities.

I
grew up along the Ohio River in a town that was in-between
Pittsburgh, PA and Columbus,OH and Charleston, WV. In Appalachia, we
always seemed to be in-between one place or another.

In-between
a mountain and valley.

In-between
jobs.

In-between
a pay day.

In-between
illness, or a mining accident, or a chemical spill.

When
I came out of the closet as a gay man in 1995, no one would have
expected a United Methodist-related college in the middle of small
town West Virginia to be a place of acceptance and welcome. For many
of my friends who grew up as good Methodists, my coming out forced
them to think about sexual orientation in a new way. And for my
friends who are LGBTQ, my faith has forced them to think about
religion in a new way. Being queer and Christian is an in-between
place I have learned to inhabit – and could only do so, not by any
acts of good works, but by God’s grace. Grace, which on this
National Coming Out Day, allows me to say boldly to those struggling
to reconcile their faith with their sexual orientation or gender
identity, “You are not alone!”

And
that’s what I do every day at the Methodist Federation for Social
Action. But not just for the LGBTQ communities, but for United
Methodists across our connection who are seeking ways to live into
their baptismal vows “to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in
whatever forms they present themselves.”

One
way we do this is through our involvement with the Love Your Neighbor
Coalition, the work of 12 United Methodist caucuses spanning
racial/ethnic, progressive, and LGBTQ caucuses within The United
Methodist Church. I’ll be talking a little bit more about our work
after this service, but I want to encourage everyone here to go to
www.lyncoalition.org –
I’ll give you time to write it down and repeat slowly. Check out
our vision for The United Methodist Church and add your name as a
supporter.

Because
this work isn’t done for extra jewels in our crown, it’s not done
to show Jesus how much we love him. We do this work because we know
the importance of lifting up the voices of those who find themselves
in-between: in-between the powers that be and loving our neighbors;
in-between justice and injustice; in-between hope (and fear) for the
future.

The
work of the Church must be to continue sharing the message of God’s
love and grace for all people.

It’s
that simple. And yet, you and I know, it’s that difficult, too. I
call it “Living in the Land of Maybe.”

Because,
just like the rich young man, and just like the disciples, and just
like the faithful saints and sinners who have composed the Church for
almost two thousand years. Sometimes we get it wrong. And sometimes,
just sometimes, we get it right and we get a glimpse of the world as
it is and can be. A world that is chaotic, and messy, and downright
beautiful, and loved by God, not because of what you or I have done,
but because we have decided to participate in God’s world.

Brazillian
feminist theologian, Ivona Gebara, imagines God’s hope for the
world in this way:

“Men
and women will dwell in their houses; men and women will eat the same
bread, drink the same wine, and dance together in the brightly lit
square, celebrating the bonds uniting all humanity.”¹

This
is no works righteousness folks, but this is to say that we can
partake in the presence of grace and love in the world.

And
every now and then, we get to join in the dance where we can proclaim
together “you are not alone,” to a world in-between injustice and
righteousness, in-between fear and hope, in-between saints and
sinners.

Won’t
you join me in the dance?

1
Gebara, Ivone. “Women Doing Theology in Latin America,” in
Feminist Theology from the Third World, Ursula King, editor,
Orbis Books: Maryknoll, NY, 1994, 59.

Sermons

“Let the Children In” based on Psalm 8 and Mark…

October 4, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Artistically, in Europe, babies and small children were painted as small grown ups for many centuries. Their faces don’t look like baby faces or children’s faces. The proportions of their bodies don’t like right either. It was apparently quite a revolution when someone ACTUALLY looked at a child and painted the child to look like they do. While some of this was about artistic development, a lot of it was about how children were seen. The most relevant thing about kids was that they might grow up to be adults, so that’s how people saw them.

The artistic transition happened around 1500 (give or take.) The concept of childhood itself is newer than that historically. The concept of children as valuable is even newer. Child labor laws weren’t consistent in this country until the Great Depression.

Not all children today are treated as if they are precious, but children as a whole are seen as having great value. Some of this is related to the availability of effective birth control. As much as I believe that parents of very large families are able to love all their children because they just DO, human beings are finite. The amount of attention and expressions of affection that can be given to a small number of children is more per child than the amount that can be shared among many. As people were able to control the number of children they had, many people decided to use their resources to give their children the best chance the could at life – and had less children so they had more to give each child.

As children have become less prevalent, they have become more precious. But that was NOT the case in Jesus’ time. Life expectancy was low, very low among the 97% of people who comprised the lower class. Survival to age 10 was about 50%, which led to a lack of investment in a person until it was proven they’d live for a while.¹ As an agricultural society, children were of use as workers in the field, and as a society that also valued bodily pleasure between spouses, there were plenty of reasons to have children. There were many children in Jesus’ day, but they were not understood to be fully human. They were JUST children. As it is put in the Jewish Annotated New Testament, in the time of Jesus, “The child did not represent innocence but a secondary status, a lesser human.”²

The pope stopped his caravan to receive a child during his visit to the US, in a nearly perfect living example of Jesus’ words in this passage. It was different primarily in how children are seen. Pope Francis’ actions were consistent with his universal value on human life, and society’s understanding of children as people. Jesus’ words were an expansion of his value on human life. As the Jesus Seminar said in their conversation about this text, some think it is authentic because of“Jesus’ dramatic reversal of the child’s traditional status in ancient societies as a silent non-participant.”³ This fits with his “sympathy for those who were marginal to society or outcasts.”⁴

People knew Jesus was important, important enough to keep him from being bothered with “pesky” kids. Yet Jesus says, “let the children come to me.” And then he keeps going. He tells them that the kindom of God belongs to the children. Then he says something rather obscure, and it appears to be just as obscure in Greek as it is English: “Whoever does not welcome the kindom of God as a little child will never enter it.” So, what does that mean? Does it mean that you have to welcome the kindom of God as a child would welcome the kindom of God? Or does it mean that you have to welcome the kindom of God the way you would welcome a child?

We don’t know.

I always thought it was the first (the question frankly didn’t occur to me until a colleague pointed it out this week), but I never could quite figure out how a child would receive the kin-dom. Most commentators suggest that a child would welcome the kin-dom without reserve or judgment, but I’m pretty sure they’ve just never met kids. Others say that this reflects the lack of hierarchy among kids, I still think that perspective comes from an innocence about children. More likely, from having known a few children, I’m going to guess that they’d receive the kin-dom with a boatload of curiosity, exploration, and questions. Which, as far as I can tell, is a great way to do it.

On the other hand, if the goal is to welcome the kin-dom like one welcomes a child, it implies that we’re supposed to welcome children. It even implies that this is a moral imperative for following Jesus and seeking God. (Not at all subtle hint at the US government as well as all countries in the world who are limiting the number of Syrian refugees they’ll receive.) It implies that the people seen as irrelevant and replaceable in Jesus’ time are still of value to him, to God, and therefore to us.

This extends to imply that there is a moral imperative to welcoming all people whose humanity is in question. To take it a step further, this implies that we should extend protection and life-saving measures to all of God’s people. That is, we might want to take steps to prevent the ~30,000 gun related deaths in our country every year, about 60% of of which are suicide. This is a significant issue because suicides are often decisions made impulsively, and the presence of a gun makes it easier and A LOT more effective. (Threat of death from suicide goes up by 4.8 times when a gun is in a home.⁵)

We have a lot of guns in the United States, although the percentage of gun owners has been in decline the number of guns owned per gun owner has been on the rise. According to the Washington Post, gun sales in the United States are $11.7 billion, with $993 million in profits.⁶ I think it is interesting to note that gun companies make about as much money on ammunition over as they do on guns. More significantly than having a lot of guns, we have a lot of gun related deaths. These are correlated of course, but not perfectly, and it is worth looking at the impact of gun violence directly. According to the New York Times, “Since 1970, more Americans have died from guns than died in all U.S. wars going back to the American Revolution.”⁷ To be direct about children, “In America, more preschoolers are shot dead each year (82 in 2013) than police officers are in the line of duty (27 in 2013).”⁸ The majority of these are accidental, related to having firearms within the reach of children.

Yet if we look at our society, there is not political will to change our access to guns. In fact, over the past decade, the most significant increases in gun sales have happened around the election of President Obama and each mass shooting. The mass shootings seem to bifurcate us as a country, with some people thinking more guns would help and others thinking the opposite. Furthermore, many people believe they are safer with a gun than without one. (If you have a gun in your house, you are 2.7 times more likely to be murdered than if you don’t have one, after controlling for potentially confounding variables.⁹) Given all of these factors, it seems like it is time, as a country, to try a third way. Making guns safer is certainly better than just letting them run rampant, and I am grateful for those engaging the conversation by trying to find a way forward.

Since it doesn’t seem possible to decrease gun access in the United States, as determined by how votes in Congress have been going, other choices are necessary. An op-ed piece in the New York Times made some great suggestions, ones that could actually happen in our politically divisive political system:

Public health experts cite many ways we could live more safely with guns, and many of them have broad popular support.

A poll this year found that majorities even of gun-owners favor universal background checks; tighter regulation of gun dealers; safe storage requirements in homes; and a 10-year prohibition on possessing guns for anyone convicted of domestic violence, assault or similar offenses.

We should also be investing in “smart gun” technology, such as weapons that fire only with a PIN or fingerprint. We should adopt microstamping that allows a bullet casing to be traced back to a particular gun. We can require liability insurance for guns, as we do for cars.

It’s not clear that these steps would have prevented the Oregon shooting. But Professor Webster argues that smarter gun policies could reduce murder rates by up to 50 percent — and that’s thousands of lives a year. Right now, the passivity of politicians is simply enabling shooters.¹⁰

I don’t say this all that often, to my own detriment, but if the only way forward is compromise, then lets do it. If we can decrease gun violence by 50%, that’s a lot.

The text of the Psalm offers a perspective that seems to be almost 180 degrees removed from that of the news. It celebrates God, and God’s goodness. It suggests that safety itself comes from the “mouths of babes” and reminds us of the majesty and wonder of creation. Looking up at the night sky, filled with moon and starts, the Psalmist is amazed that God bothers to care for humans. (I had some of those thoughts as I watched the lunar eclipse.) Yet, the Psalms goes on to point out that God not only cares for us, God trusts us and asks us to be representatives of holiness itself in the world.

What a different view than the one we have when we look at violent deaths and the horrid debates that emerge from them. To be reminded of wonder in the midst of horror can put us in tension, but it is a healthy tension. The world is often a violent and unjust. The world is also a place of unparalleled beauty and wonder. As far as I know, it has been this complicated for quite some time. It never really stops being awful, and it never really stops being wonderful. Paying attention to the world can feel like a roller coaster ride.

And this world is what we are passing on to our children. Jesus said, “Let the children come to me” and he gathered them around him, pulled them into his arms, and blessed them. Dr. Seuss said, “Unless someone like you cares an awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”¹¹ It isn’t always just about trying, it is about trying together. I hope and pray that we, as a society, care enough to work together to create change, so that world our children grow into has less fear and violence. May we be at work creating a world with more wonder than horror. May God help us. Amen

– – – –

1 Warren Carter, The Roman Empire and the New Testament: An Essential Guide (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 2006) page 10.

2 The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 79-80.

3 Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), page 89.

4 Funk et al, 89.

5 Linda L. Dahlberg, Robin M. Ikeda and Marcie-jo Kresnow “Guns in the Home and Risk of a Violent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study” published in the American Journal of Epidemeology (2004) 160(10): 929-936. http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.full#ref-2 Accessed October 3, 2015.

6 Brad Plumer “How the U.S. gun industry became so lucrative” in the Washington Post December 19, 2012 http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/19/seven-facts-about-the-u-s-gun-industry/ Accessed Oct. 3, 2015

7 Nicholas Kristof “A New Way to Tackle Gun Deaths” in the New York TimesOctober 3, 2015. Found at: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-a-new-way-to-tackle-gun-deaths.html?referer= on October 3, 2015.

8 Kristof

9 Dahlberg et al

10Kristof

11Theodore Geisel writing as Dr. Seuss in The Lorax (Random House: New York, 1971).

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

October 4, 2015

Sermons

“Gold and Honey, Meat and Bread” based on Numbers 11:4-6,…

September 27, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

We have completed two weeks of the Young Adult study on Genesis, which by our process means we’ve gotten through 4 chapters, and I have learned a lot. We have Study Bibles and we have commentaries, and there is a lot to be gleaned from all of them. Rather excitingly, they rarely agree.

Last week, the Jewish Study Bible made a fantastic contribution to our study. It pointed out that in Jewish culture, salvation is understood to come from the study of the Torah. The Torah is the first five books of the Bible, shared in both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. They are the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The study of the Torah is the goodness of life in Judaism. Historically this was what adult men did, if they could, every day. In Judaism the study of the Torah is much more about the questions than the answers, and all the cumulative study has lead to truly great questions.

The Jewish Study Bible suggested that the Jews aren’t looking for a Messiah to save them because they have the study of the Torah to making meaning in life, and they didn’t need saving. I have some reasons to argue with that premise historically, but I’m going to refrain from it because I think it has value and deserves to be heard. Furthermore, if their claim had been “some Jews” or “most Jews” I wouldn’t even have an argument, so let’s go with that. Most Jews are not and have not been looking for Messiah to save them, because they have the study of the Torah and that’s enough!!

It certainly makes sense out of the Psalm, which is praising the Torah. It may be helpful to remember that what is called in Judaism the Torah has usually been called in Christianity “the law.” Hear again the beginning of our reading from Psalm 19:

The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; the decrees of the LORD are sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the LORD is clear, enlightening the eyes; the fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever; the ordinances of the LORD are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb. (Psalm 19:7-10)

That text is SERIOUSLY in favor of the Torah, isn’t it? It even sounds like an understanding of the Torah as a source of salvation, if you think of salvation as being about life, wisdom, joy, enlightenment, truth, righteousness and goodness. That would fit most people’s idea of salvation.

I once taught a Bible Study on Deuteronomy, mostly because no one I knew had studied it before. With the guidance of Walter Brueggemann’s commentary, we discovered that we loved the book! It set out a vision for humanity that was attainable and yet remarkable. The vision wanted to keep everyone out of poverty, and did so by preventing the acquisition of wealth. The vision wanted to eliminate harm done to widows, orphans, and foreigners, (cumulatively “the vulnerable”) and set up systems to care for them. The vision wanted to ensure that people were attending to good living, and set up a way to support a priesthood so some people’s job could be working out how life could be lived well. It is an enthralling vision. Fair warning though, if you go to read it, don’t try that without Brueggemann’s commentary, and preferably a group. The Bible can be convoluted at times and horrifying at others, without the right resources to guide the conversation.

Deuteronomy is a part of the Torah, and in some ways it is a summary of the other 4 books. I’m with the Psalmist about the wonder of the Torah, and I love the Jewish idea of salvation via engagement with these profound texts, but there are some rather surprising things that would happen if one took that idea seriously. For instance, you’d be taking stories like the one we read from Numbers as salvific. And the Numbers reading isn’t exactly about perfect human living.

In fact, the Numbers reading is an example of how awful people can be. The people have been brought out of slavery into freedom and they are being cared for by God’s own self. (Sometimes you have to just go with the story to hear what it has to say on its own terms, before you fight with it.) They’re whining. They’re whining about how great they had it back in the day when they were slaves. They’re whining about how great the food was. “We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.” For nothing!?!?! They were slaves. While they likely didn’t pay for food, they also didn’t get paid for their labor, and they were given food in order to keep them alive so they’d keep working.

So, the people who have been brought out of slavery and are being given manna to eat in the desert are whining about the lack of diversity of food. Moses and God find this annoying, which seems rather reasonable. But before God can get too upset it, Moses takes his anger out to God in prayer, and starts whining about what a heavy burden it is to deal with this annoying people. This puts God in the place of having to be the fixer, instead of getting upset. In this narrative, whining, complaining, and nagging work on God. Just saying. It hasn’t ever worked for me, but it works in this narrative.

Some of the text gets skipped in our reading, but it basically says that God responds “You want meat? I’ll give you meat until it comes out of your noses.” God is very personified, huh? In the meantime the authority of Moses got shared with 70 others (which was really significant as a leadership number in the ancient priesthood), who have a funny one-time prophesy experience. And the prophesying includes the 2 guys who were picked to be part of the 70 but played hooky. Then Joshua gets upset with them because they’re stepping on Moses’ toes by doing his thing among the people. But Moses assures him that he’s happy to share.

If you were going to pick a piece of scripture for the purpose of guiding people toward life, wisdom, joy, enlightenment, truth, righteousness and goodness, would this be it?

I’ve been pondering that all week, and I can’t decide. On the one hand, this text is incredibly honest about humans beings and how we operate. It points out how easy it can be to idealize the past. It gives Biblical precedence for the 21^st centuary word “hangry” which is about being cranky/angry when we’re hungry. It examines the challenges of leadership, and it even does a great job with presenting the value of shared leadership and joint responsibility. And it is interesting. There is a lot that can be gleamed from this passage. There are a lot of truths in it. Whether or not it happened, it is really real.

Yet, on the other hand, this is a weird text. God and Moses are in a fight over who has it worse, nagging works on God, the people are simply awful, and the man who is about to take over from Moses is an idiot. There are not suggestions about how to live a good and meaningful life, and the lessons that could be derived from the text would be equally likely to be problematic as to be helpful.

And that, as far as I’ve experienced it, IS the beauty of the Torah. While there are parts of it that are long lists of laws and rules, most of the Torah is made up of stories that tell deep and profound truths about humanity (and our relationship to God) but require a lot of work and mining to get there. The Torah isn’t linear. Even the rules and laws require digging, mining, and contemplation in order to bring meaning out of them. Often there are conflicting versions of the same story, or of the same event, or of the same law! And the conflicts get to just sit there next to each other begging for some examination. Collectively, over millennia, conversations about the stories and nuances have enlightened the generations. They have provided life, wisdom, joy, enlightenment, truth, righteousness and goodness. They have made meaning out of life and therefore made life worth living.

The idea that the study of the Torah might be salvific excites me in two ways. The first is obvious. I’ve spent a lot of my life doing that sort of examination in Bible Study and it has consistently enlightened me and improved my life. The second is a bit more exciting though. It opens up the door to consider other possibilities for salvation.

A few weeks ago I preached about salvation, and I made a very strong claim about how wonderful communal salvation is and how dumb I think the mainstream Christian view of personal salvation is. I ended up, presenting alternative routes to full and abundant living. I was not explicit about these being means to God, and therefore means of individual salvation.

Two of you took the time to present alternative viewpoints to me, which – in the vein of great Bible Study – were great guidance to me. I had claimed that I didn’t know where the idea of personal salvation came from anyway, and one of you said “Um, Jesus?” He was right. The gospels do present the idea of individual salvation.

Secondly, someone offered me another alternative way to think about individual salvation. She said that for her, individual salvation is knowing that God loves her, as she is, and she’s not alone. That was super helpful to me, because I think that’s the starting point for everything in faith. I just forgot that it wasn’t obvious, and I loved using that idea as the concept of what salvation means for individuals. That’s the starting point for both healing and for abundant living within this Jesus-following way of life.

Then, if individual salvation is about knowing God loves you, what gets you there? For some people, it comes rather directly through Jesus, and for many through his willingness to face death in order to share God’s love. For some people, it comes from the utter miracle of a sunset. For some people it comes through the wonder of worship and the beauty of music. For some people it comes from the study of Torah (or the Gospels.) For some people it comes from the wonder of being able to contribute to the lives of others. For some people, it comes from having loved ones gathered in one’s home. Likely, for must of us, it comes through many factors that intersect and interplay during our lifetimes.

So, what helps you know that God loves you? That is, what fills you up so that you are able to share love in the world? Do you need more filling up? How can you receive it? Do you have enough love to share? How else can you give it away? The door is open for consideration, examination, and further questions. Have fun!

For wonderful questions, we give you thanks O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen

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Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

September 27, 2015