Untitled

March 19, 2023
by Sara Baron

“God is Love” based on Psalm 136:1-16 and 1 John 4:7-12

There is an old story, one that may have been created by some preacher along the way, that is well worth telling anyway.

A young man left home against his parents’ wishes, feeling a need to fulfill his own dreams far from everything familiar. The disagreement over him leaving created a breech in the relationship and for many years there was no contact between them at all.

Some decades later the man’s journey was going to take him through his hometown, and he wrote a letter to his parents on their farm:

On March 26th I will be on the 3PM train, and I would like to stop and visit you, but I do not know if I am welcome. If you would welcome me home, please tie a red ribbon on the old oak the train passes by. If I see it, I will depart. If not, I will continue on my way. – Your Son

When the day came, he situated himself on the side of the train that would see the old oak, but closed his eyes as the train curved around the track bringing it into view. He was terrified to find it empty, aware that his parents might not even still be living, and if alive might not have forgiven him.

When he finally opened his eyes, the tree was covered in red ribbons, from the trunk to the tippy top, a beacon of red welcoming him home.

At the risk of abusing my privileges as preacher, I want to tell you that I think there are two equally important morals of this story. I think it is really obnoxious to tell people what to take from a story or another piece of art, but alas, here we are anyway. I also wonder which of these you took as the obvious point of the story! (Or if it was another entirely)

One, lovely, take is the reminder that God is like that man’s parents, always enthusiastically welcoming us home, even when we doubt our own welcome. This is an important point, and if you needed to hear it today, then thank God you did!

Another, lovely, take is the reminder to look around the world for love and notice when you see love that you are seeing God at work in the world. Imagine that son sharing his angst with a seatmate, and what the seat mate would have seen. The welcome wasn’t for them, but to be witness to such an outpouring of love is a powerful thing.

Furthermore, I think there are expressions of love like that around us all the time. Maybe not as visible as a oak tree covered in red ribbons, but no less potent. Our new house is rather close to Oneida Middle School, and that means I get to see a lot beautiful interactions between youngsters, and sometimes even have some with them. I see kids throwing snowballs, and clearly everyone is having a blast. I see kids clumped up talking and laughing, and I’ve also see them quickly make space when they see me pushing a stroller. I hear shouts of greeting, and just as enthusiastic goodbyes, and last week for no reason I could discern I was handed a snowball and encouraged to throw it at an inanimate object, at which point I was cheered on. Universally, the youngsters are kind to our toddler, and quite often coo at him in the sweetest of ways.

Now, I’m not sure what the middle school years were like for you, but they were a low point in my life. I didn’t fit in, I hadn’t found my grove, my friendships were particularity life giving, and the experience of being an outcast hurt to the very core of my being. These youngsters seem so much more poised and put together than I was, but I suspect plenty of them are experiencing similar angst anyway. I’m sure many are struggling in many ways, and I just can’t see it from my window or the sidewalk.

Yet, their poise, their presence, their companioning of each other, their kindness, and their quirkiness – I think – are actually healing some of those parts of me that are still aching from being their ages. And I’m inspired by them. I catch in them little glimpses of love and hope that remind me that God is good and that love is a potent force in the world.

I think we can find love if we are aiming to find it. I think we are more likely to notice it if we want to find it. And I think that when we seek it and when we notice it, the impact within us is HUGE. Paying attention to the impact of God’s love in the world magnifies its impact in us and in the world!

1 John 4 makes some really important points, it is a chapter of the Bible that I often think about, and guide people towards. “God no one has ever seen. Yet if we love one another, God lives in us, and God’s love is made complete in us.” That’s a BIG DEAL. Sometimes I get rather annoyed with those who want to debate God’s existence. This isn’t because I think the answer is obvious, indeed I think LOGIC gives us exactly as many reasons to think God exists as to think God doesn’t. Instead, it is because I think the question doesn’t matter. If God exists, but just created us and now lets us be – then how is that different from God not existing? If God exists, but God’s primary function is to judge us after we die, then what difference does that make in our lives (other than frightening us?)

I think the important question is: how do you understand God? And I LOVE 1 John’s answer. God is unknowable, invisible, maybe even largely abstract. Which is hard, BUT God is also love and we can know, see, and experience God in love. Love is from God. God guides us to love. We should be known by our love. It is in our loving that God is known. We can make God more knowable, more visible, more concrete by ACTING in love.

And, even, I appreciate the line, “whoever does not know love does not know God” because I think it is true and I also think it is a great litmus test for people, for preachers, and for teaching in general. Don’t trust what isn’t based in love.

It may be that love has too many bad connotations or too little clarity for you, I am reminded that Rev. Dr. Andrew Driecter says that the word “compassion” works better for him than love, and feel free to substitute that in if it is better for you too.

There are, of course, a multitude of ways to nurture love and compassion within us! John Wesley encouraged us to think about them along two axes – individual to communal, and connecting to others to connecting with the Divine. We now have committees in each quadrant of that model 🙂 since it makes sense that a church would be aiming at giving people experiences of love and the opportunities to share it.

Today, my request of you is pretty simple: pay attention to where you notice love this week! AND, if you want “bonus credit” on this assignment, share the answers with someone else.

May God help us notice what is already all around us!

Amen

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

March 19, 2023

Uncategorized

“Joy and Protest” based on Psalm 98:1-6, Isaiah 55:10-13

October 30, 2022
by Sara Baron

“You shall go out with joy, and be
led forth with peace, the mountains and the hills will break forth
before you, there will be shouts of joy, and all the tress of the
field shall clap (shall clap) their hands.” So goes our final hymn
today, and so has gone our stewardship campaign this year.

Isaiah 55 for the win.

Joy!

Peace!

Imaginatively imagery of pure delight!

So, I went to Walter Brueggemann to
understand better what is going on, and the great Prophetic Scholar
did not disappoint. He reminded me that Isaiah 40, the start of
second Isaiah, begins with
the words, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak
tenderly to Jerusalem.” The entirety of the passage is written to
the exiles, with affirmation that God is not done with them yet.

That while the worst has come, it will
not be their whole story. That when things get hard, God still wins.
That God’s love remained with them, and hope continued.

Our passage today is the very last part
of what scholars call 2^nd Isaiah – this part of the book
written to the exiles to PREPARE them for God’s work of restoration.
And today’s passage imagines the joy of their homecoming. The
passage ties together some of the work of the exodus with the work of
restoration. The rain and snow that can be counted on to produce
crops remind the people of the desert wandering, and God’s
provisions. The verb even “go out” is a verb of the exodus. But
here, in the “2^nd exodus” it is quite different. The
first exodus was hasty and fearful. But the restoration, this “new
exodus” is joy, peace, and well-being.

Bruggemann writes, “Before there can
be any geographical departure from the [Bablyonian] empire, there
must be a liturgical, emotional, and imaginative departure. Israel
in exile must be able to think and feel and imagine its life out
beyond Babylon’s administration. Israel must so trust the rhetoric
of assurance and victory that it can flex its muscles of faith and
sense that the cadences of faith are more compelling than the slogans
of the empire.”¹

And, this is that imaginative
departure. It imagines creatures and … well, mountains and hills
and trees gathered on the roadside to watch the spectacle of the
people returning. As if it is a parade and nature itself is
healed by the
restoration of the people to their homeland.

Instead of thorn and brier – symbols
of judgment and punishment – there are cypress and myrtle – signs
of growth and life and beauty. The restoration of ancient Israel is
envisioned to be the restoration of sustainable living, of the fair
distribution of goods, the return of the ban on interest, the care
for the vulnerable. And that means the restoration of God’s values,
which was very significant for people who had been living in the seat
of power of a large empire because empires ALWAYS involve domination,
hierarchies, debt, and oppression of the vulnerable. Brueggeman
suggests even creation itself would be healed by this restoration
because empire destroys nature, but sustainable equitable living
exists in harmony with nature.

If it takes dreaming of leaving the
exile in order to prepare the people to actually leave the exile,
this is some excellent writing getting them ready. This is writing
for life. This is writing to remind us that life is possible, that
loveliness exists, that hope is reasonable. As Brueggemann says, in
this writing, “All are now at home, safe, beloved, free, free at
last, Thank God Almighty, free at last.”

As rain and snow leave the sky, to
bring life on earth, and grow food so too is it with God’s word that
accomplishes what it aims at – and it aims at joy, peace, and
restoration.

In order to be ready to leave the
empire, to leave the exile, to return, to be restored, the people
needed first to dream God’s dreams. And God sent them dreams.

Before they could leave in fact, they
had work of letting go – I love his phrasing, “there must be a
liturgical, emotional, and imaginative departure. Israel in exile
must be able to think and feel and imagine its life out beyond
Babylon’s administration.”

I preached a few weeks ago about how
ready I am to NOT resonate with exile literature, and that does mean
that I’m pretty excited to hear “end of the exile, beginning of the
return literature.” But I keep noticing that leaving the exile
meant not only leaving the exile but ALSO leaving behind the
pre-exile-ancient-Israel.

Which is to say, I’m all for starting
to vision a post-pandemic life, but I have to keep reminding myself
that to leave the pandemic behind also means finishing the work of
letting go of the pre-pandemic life. It means seeing with clarity
what has changed, and not FIGHTING it anymore. It means accepting
this reality as it is, so that God can dream with me and with us HERE
AND NOW without my too-tight-grip on the past keeping me from
listening.

And, to be honest to these passages, it
also means making more space for joy.

Loosening my grip on what was helps me
make space for joy. Even, loosening my grip on what joy USED TO look
like makes space for how it looks now. And generally speaking,
loosening my grip helps with joy 😉

The thing I’ve noticed about joy, the
continuity of it, is that for me is about connection. I find joy in
connecting with others, in connecting with God, in connecting with
nature. That is, joy happens in togetherness – at least for me.

Which is probably why I’ve been so
moved by our stewardship campaign this year, “Together for joy.”
I simply adore the order of the words. For me, I know joy comes in
togetherness, but I love the INTENTION in being together FOR joy.

It is another wonderful take on the
Psalm:

Make a joyful
noise to the Lord, all the earth;
   break forth
into joyous song and sing praises.
Sing praises to the Lord with
the lyre,
   with the lyre and the sound of melody.

With trumpets and the sound of the horn
   make
a joyful noise before the King, the Lord.

The normal take is the wonder of making
music to praise God, but I love adding to that meaning by seeing each
of our lives as a piece of the music and our lives together as
creating that joyful noise!

In many churches, today is Reformation
Sunday, the day when they remember the initial act of Martin Luther
in nailing the 95 thesis on the church door and starting the
Reformation. We are, curiously enough, a part of Protestantism, but
direct descendants of the Reformation. Lutheran, Presbyterian,
Reformed, and even most Baptist churches descend from the
Reformation, but we split off of the Church of England, which itself
split from the Roman Catholic Church for rather different reasons.
(The king wanted a divorce, the pope didn’t grant one, so the king
nationalized the church.)

Our roots are not in the reformation,
but our identity is in Protestantism. That is, by nature, we PROTEST
the abuses of the church and the world and advocate for God’s people.
Thanks be to God! We are active in the face of injustice, and we are
actively seeking God’s kindom (although, to be fair, this is true of
more people than protestants, so we claim this but not exclusively.)

We are, together for justice, together
for joy, together for compassion. We witness the mountains and the
hills breaking forth before us, and the trees of the field clapping
their hands.

Dear ones, God leads us TO joy. God
leads us to PEACE. Not just for ourselves, for all people, but for
ourselves too. We are blessed with the joy of being together, and we
are together for joy. Thanks be to God! Amen

1Walter
Brueggemann, Isaiah 40-66, Louisville,
Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), p 162.

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

October 30, 2022

Uncategorized

Untitled

May 2, 2021
by Sara Baron

“On Being Pruned” based on 1 John 4:7-21 and John 15:1-8

While I was in college I lead a group of new freshman on an outdoor adventure trip. We were assigned to trail maintenance in a very remote part of Northern New Hampshire. It was a beautiful place and a wonderful trip, but it turns out that a lot of trail maintance is actually killing small trees so that they don’t grown on the trail and I really deeply hated that. No matter how many times I reminded myself that by maintaining the trail and giving people a chance to experience that pristine wilderness I was PROTECTING most of the trees, I still felt uncomfortable with each one I killed.

Similarly, I’m not particularly good at pruning. I’m so afraid of going too far that I don’t go far enough. It would be enjoyable to claim that this is related to the value, “don’t hurt living things unless you have to” but that fails to notice that things you prune are things that NEED pruning. Pruning is a source of abundant life.

According to Gospel commentaries, grapevines are things that need pruning. The Five Gospels says, “Vines do not have branches, contrary to popular usage, but ‘canes.’ Each year canes are snipped from the vines and piled in the vineyard to be burned. … The vines will not bear good fruit, or fruit in abundance, if they are not pruned annually.”1 The metaphor loving writer of the Gospel of John suggests this is true of the followers of the way of Jesus as well. We too need regular pruning to “bear fruit.”

I suspect many of us feel similarly about pruning ourselves as I do about pruning any other living thing. It is uncomfortable, it is done with caution, we don’t want to go to far. And that means that often we don’t prune quite far enough.

This may feel like an unfortunate time to come across this Gospel, because the impact of the pandemic has been a desire to return to “normal” and profound objections to the ways our lives have been “pruned” from the outside beyond our control. But here is the Gospel anyway, and when we’re honest we note that even this awful pruning has had SOME silver linings.

Now, in John’s metaphor, God is the gardener, and God is the one doing the pruning. We are fairly passive to the pruning. We are definitely NOT in charge of self-pruning. 🙂 Phew. Likewise, we are not in charge of fruit production. Fruit comes from being connected to Jesus, and well pruned by God, and we are mostly PASSIVE fruit bearers. Fruit or lack there of isn’t really our fault. We are tended, rooted, and pruned to be the best fruit bearers we can be, and we can simply BE and God’s goodness will work through us.

Nice.

While I think that idea is incomplete, I also think it is one worthy of consideration.

Many of us TRY REALLY HARD ALL THE TIME, and this suggests that we can let go and God’s goodness will keep flowing. That is an important truth, if incomplete.

So if God is the gardener and the pruner, then who are we when we resist pruning? I suspect that we are vine “canes” that are holding on for dear life to canes that have already been snipped and berating ourselves that we can’t bring them back to life. There are these dead, decaying branches and we’re holding them in place willing them to grow again, and in doing so, missing the new life springing up within us.

Several years ago I watched a TED talk by Dan Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard entitled “The Psychology of Your Future Self.” Gilbert’s ideas have stayed with me ever since. He opens his talk by saying:

At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we’re going to become, and then when we become those people, we’re not always thrilled with the decisions we made. So young people pay good money to get tattoos removed that teenagers paid good money to get. Middle-aged people rushed to divorce people who young adults rushed to marry. Older adults work hard to lose what middle-aged adults worked hard to gain. On and on and on. The question is, as a psychologist, that fascinates me is, why do we make decisions that our future selves so often regret?

I’m hoping you already see how this relates to letting God’s pruning without fighting it! He states his thesis directly (don’t you love that?), “What I want to convince you today is that all of us are walking around with an illusion, an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives. “ As you might hope, Gilbert proves this point along the way, and then goes on to conclude:

Most of us can remember who we were 10 years ago, but we find it hard to imagine who we’re going to be, and then we mistakenly think that because it’s hard to imagine, it’s not likely to happen. …when people say “I can’t imagine that,” they’re usually talking about their own lack of imagination, and not about the unlikelihood of the event that they’re describing.

The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. It transforms our preferences. It reshapes our values. It alters our personalities. We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect. Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade. It’s as if, for most of us, the present is a magic time. It’s a watershed on the timeline. It’s the moment at which we finally become ourselves. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been. The one constant in our life is change. 2

That is, pruning happens whether we want it to or not, and either we can make peace with it and let it be, or we can fight with it, but it won’t change the fact that things change.

While I prefer it when I can read it with some verses missing, 1 John 4 is a very important chapter in the Bible for most people I know because it says the thing they believe most, “God is love.” It says it strongly too, “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and God’s love is perfected in us. …Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their siblings, are liars; for those who do not love a sibling whom they have seen,

cannot love God whom they have not seen.” (11, 20). Perhaps this fits the idea that loving God and loving other people are two sides of the same coin, inseparable though they can appear to be different. These claims about God, that God is love, and that loving people is a way of loving God, are the lens through which I see the entirety of the Bible. I remain grateful that it is there, and available to be used.

John chapter 15 goes on to sound a whole lot like 1 John 4. The Vine and Branches metaphor morphs quickly to point out that the fruit that God is looking for is the practice of abiding in love. So both of them point the question: what impairs love and what encourages it? If we are being continually pruned by God, what helps us let go of what we’re done with, and what helps us connect with what God is up to next? Or, in the metaphor, how do we let go of the pruned and dead branches so there is space for new growth?

Perhaps the best thing we can do for now is notice. We can notice what has been pruned, so we can let it go and we can notice what is growing so we can watch it growing. Perhaps this passage is exactly right for right now. We aren’t the gardener, we aren’t in charge, but we can – at least – stop impeding the Gardener’s work and instead notice what it is.May it be so. Amen

1 Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), page 453.

2 Dan Gilbert, “The Psychology of Your Future Self” Ted Talk, found at https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_the_psychology_of_your_future_self/transcript?utm_campaign=social&utm_content=talk&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_term=soci al-science#t-308201 given on March 2014 accessed on April 29, 2021.

Sermons

“Wisdom, She Calls”based on Psalm 8 and Proverbs 8:1-4,…

June 23, 2019February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I’ve recently gotten
feedback that many people around here like it when I preach from the
heart, from authenticity, from … myself, and not JUST from context.
This is a bit of a challenge because the authentic me is sort of a
mystic, and I’ve never been entirely clear how comfortable that is
for all of you. However, I’m really grateful for feedback, so I’m
going to give it a try, and trust that you’ll continue giving
feedback if this is not what you were looking for at all.

Today is Trinity Sunday.
Thus, our lectionary readings have given us space to consider the
Spirit, who in Proverbs is the Spirit of God’s Wisdom, the firstborn
of creation. In its purest, most orthodox
forms, Trinity says that God IS Three Persons that are also One, and
the love between the 3 Persons is the foundational energy and
motivation of the universe, from which creation arose, and from which
God’s love for all humanity begins. I’ve never been able to commit
to an orthodox understanding of Trinity, although I did give it a
good faith effort for a decade or so. I adore this idea of love as
the foundation of the universe, but I’ve had to come to that
conclusion in other ways. I don’t hold a traditional view of
Trinity, although I think those views can be strikingly beautiful.

Instead, I’ve been most
formed by the thinking of Marjorie Suchocki, professor emerita of
theology at Claremont School of Theology, and the author of the book
“God, Christ, Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology.” In
it, she talks about the idea of Trinity as a symbol for the
complexity and unity of God. She says, “God
as trinity becomes a symbol to indicate the sense in which the unity
of God embraces a complexity of a magnitude grater than which none
other can exist.”¹
In more simple words, she says that God is one and God is infinite.
She doesn’t actually think the specific 3 of Trinity is the point,
but rather acknowledges that there is inherent value in thinking of
God as being transcendent, immanent, and relational. That is God is
beyond all that is, God is IN all that is, and God is in relationship
to all that is – and those are three things, so we think of God in
three ways.

Suchocki’s
idea that Trinity means many and yet one has resonated for me. God
is, of course, one. We’re monotheists!! And there is force of love
undergirding and infiltrating all parts of Creation, unifying us all.
At the same time, of course there are many facets to the Divine.
God is beyond our words, our metaphors, our understanding. God is
complicated. Any aspect of God we attempt to speak about or connect
to is both a part of God AND not the entirety of God. God is love,
unconditional all encompassing love!!! And, God is also one who
wants justice – so that good lives and good relationships can be
present for all people and not just for some. And that doesn’t
ALWAYS feel only like love. God is eternal, and yet God is also
present. God is for us, and for each of us, and for all of us, all
at once. In these ways, it makes sense to think of God as many, even
though God is also one.

In
some very similar ways, I think it makes sense to think of ourselves
as many and as one! I mean each of us, each person, is both many
and one. (Although, come to think of it, we are also one body of
Christ – one and many.) We’re now at the mystical point of this
sermon 😉 If mystical isn’t going to fly for you, you may want to
think of all of this as development of compassion, although I’ll
admit to you that those are not well differentiated for me.

Years
ago, my spirituality professor told me about a prayer form called
with an acroynm FLAG. In it you notice a strong emotion and
anthropomorphize that strong emotion as a young child.
Then you ask it:
Fear – what are you afraid of?
Longing –
what do you long for?
Ache – what is your ache/wound?
Gift –
what gift are you trying to offer that I’m not receiving?

This
prayer has been a great gift to me over the years, but in recent
years I’ve noticed that it relates to a whole bunch of other areas of
thought who are also looking at “self” in different ways.
Because this now comes from a lot of disciplines, to explain it I’m
going to glob them all together like we do when we work with all 4
gospel narratives at once. We’re going to call it “parts theory.”
Because of how useful it has been in my own prayer life, as well as
in conversations with people, it is one of the theories that I now
use to make sense of human beings- myself and others.

Parts
theory says that we are a conglomeration of parts. When this emerges
out of “non-violent communication” work, the parts are associated
with human needs. In “Focusing”, the parts are associated with
physical sensations in various parts of our body. In sensorimotor
psychology, parts relate to coping mechanisms necessary for survival,
particularly in childhood. Going back to the prayer form I first met
this idea in, the young children we imagine are often expressions of
our self and our past. I think it may even be true that in the Center
for Courage and Renewal Teaching, where we talk about the maps of our
souls and the various terrain within, that we are actually
approaching parts from another angle. Most places I’m looking for
understanding of how humans work seem to be moving to parts theory.

Now,
once we acknowledge that in our internal landscape there are various
parts doing their own things, then we think about how they relate to
each other and to our self as a whole. Parts theory suggests that
dealing with ourselves is a lot like presiding over an unruly Church
Council meeting (who, us?) or perhaps an Annual Conference committed
to nonconformity (who, us?). Parts tend to have their own points of
view, they remember the things that fit their narratives, they push
the things that fit their narratives, they ignore things that don’t
fit their narratives, and when they want things they ask. And when
they ask, and we ignore them, they get louder (and sometimes meaner)
and this cycle can continue until we have a LOT OF INTERNAL
screaming. Also, parts build connections with other parts, and parts
are antagonistic to other parts.

If
you think of parts as trying to meet needs, this can become clearer.
So a part that is seeking out peace
is likely to be well partnered with the parts that seek rest
and beauty
and maybe even acceptance.
However, the part seeking out peace
is
likely in some conflict with the parts seeking out spontaneity,
stimulation, or
even growth. And
when we’re talking about parts that have been harmed in the past,
this can be pretty strong. For example, when a person lived through
abuse as a child, and the abuser was the caregiver, then the natural
human instinct to draw close to caregiver for safety and the natural
human instinct to run away from harm are in constant conflict…. and
those parts are trained to be on constant alert.

There
is also a Part in Charge. I have tended towards calling this the
adult self. While
the adult self is the moderator/chair of the council, the truth is
that sometimes the adult self loses control of the body. In parts
language, that means that sometimes other parts hijack the adult
self, and the other parts are the ones running the show – by which
I mean the body, the facial expressions, the words, the tone, etc.
So if you think of a recent time when you said or did something that
you later regretted, and wondered “Why didn’t I have better
control?” the answer is likely that a part hijacked the adult
self
and “you” weren’t in control at that point.

Prayer
can be a time when we make space for our parts, listen to our parts,
create the capacity for empathy for our parts, and stop fighting them
in general. The FLAG method works for this, as do many others. It
can also be a time when we teach the parts meditative practice so we
can all have some much needed peace within. Building the capacity to
listen to ourselves also builds our capacity to listen to each other.
That’s one of the goals – if we are going to be part of building a
more peaceful and just world, we’re going to have to learn how to
find peace within, and that will likely require learning how to
listen to (rather than silence) parts.

Many
forms of contemplative prayer teach us how to be in the present, in
our bodies, and how to be connected to our breath. These are
wonderful practices on their own. They’re also the skills needed to
bring the adult self back from being hijacked. In the neuroscience
part of these theories, the parts are mostly in the amygdala part of
the brain and the adult self is in the prefrontal cortex. So
whatever we can do to THINK, and be PRESENT, helps move us back to
the prefrontal cortex.

Parts
theory both feels TRUE, and feels exciting to me. I appreciate how
inherently spiritual it is, to listen. Now, many parts that we are
familiar with speak in … less than constructive ways. Because of
that, we’re often a bit scared of them. However, there is some good
news. The horrid things that parts say are ALWAYS meant to be
helpful. If you actually listen to the things they say, then you can
sometimes figure out how to flip it around to the positive thing the
part wants for you. They’re shockingly transparent. “You aren’t
enough” can mean, “You were really hurt one time when someone
said you weren’t enough, and I don’t want to you be hurt again, so
I’m going to keep your ego small so you don’t experience a drop in
self-confidence again.” You know, stuff like that.

We’ve
talked about some of this before. Some of our parts communicate
through criticism, and they manage to tell us we’re wrong A LOT. My
parts have a lot they want to get done. No matter what I’m doing,
they have about 50 other things I should be doing, and they tell me
I’d get them done if I were a “good person” / “good pastor.”
None of the parts is able to notice that I can’t do 51 things at
once, so my adult self is always having to work at setting
priorities, at listening, and at soothing, so all the parts aren’t
screaming at once that their thing isn’t getting done. That said,
knowing about parts, thinking in terms of parts, and listening to
parts has quieted things within me significantly, and I experience a
lot less internal angst, and thus more peace. (On good days.)

Did
you hear the end of the Proverbs passage? In it, Wisdom talks about
delight – the delight in being with God, and the delight Wisdom and
God had in humanity. Delight is part of what we’re going for, and
there are many paths to it. Finding peace within is a form of making
space for delight. When we can see what’s happening, and remain
present and loving, there is a LOT of delight available to us. It
really is a bit like traditional Trinitarian doctrine: love spills
out. Thanks be for that. Amen

1Marjorie
Suchocki, 229.

–

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

June 16, 2019

Sermons

“Awe, Walk, Love, Serve”based on 1 Corinthians 12: 12-26…

February 25, 2018February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I
believe that God loves all people unconditionally, completely, and
uniquely. It might make sense, even, to say that I think God loves
all people unfathomably – that it is more love than any of us could
ever even begin to comprehend. A few times in my life I’ve had a
sense that scales have been lifted from my eyes so that I can catch a
tiny glimpse of how much God loves God’s people, and it has blown me
away.

My
friend the Rev. Dr. Barbara Thorington Green has theorized that
Jesus’s healings were simply this: that Jesus was able to see people
and love people as a reflection of God’s knowing and seeing them and
being loved like that healed. I still haven’t decided if I agree
with her, but I think she makes an excellent point. God’s love is
that big, that powerful, and that wonderful.

This
is the starting point for everything I believe about God. Is is the
thing I am most sure of, and everything else is secondary. However,
those secondary things flow pretty readily from the first. If God
loves all of us this much, then God wants us to live good, full,
abundant lives – with meaningful contributions, full of beauty, and
defined by deep connections. Then it means that God has a lot of
balancing to do between various people and peoples with various needs
at any given time, and that means that the particular work needing to
be done is wide, varied, and not all parts are equally obvious to all
of us. A final secondary point before we move on to tertiary ones 😉
– I believe that God’s PRIMARY way of working in the world is
through people who are aligned with God’s vision. That isn’t meant
to limit God or God’s actions, just that it is the primary way God
acts.

For
me, this moves quickly to another set of conclusions: then there are
things getting in the way of what God wants for God’s beloved people
(*everyone). Clearly God doesn’t want any of God’s people starving,
so anything that results in starvation is against God’s desires. I
can draw similar conclusions about slavery, about abuse, about rape
and murder, about war, and the list starts getting pretty long.

One
word that I know that seems to encompass the way I think God wants
the world to be so that all of God’s people can be thriving with
good, full, abundant lives is: justice. Or, at least, that’s what I
mean when I say justice. Justice is working toward good, full,
abundant lives for all of God’s people. It sometimes means
supporting great things that are happening; it sometimes means
learning about complicated realities in order to understand them; it
sometimes means slowing down and making sure we’re living those good,
full, abundant lives so that we are signs of hope and centered in God
to make a difference; it sometimes means slowing down to connect with
God or each other or beauty; and it sometimes means naming what isn’t
fair or right in the world so as to work towards what is fair and
right.

Nevertheless,
the work of justice is the work of living God’s love for God’s
people. Often, it involves trying to support and empower the most
vulnerable people. God’s energy seems like it is often focused on
transforming the lives most desperately in need of change.

Now,
this all fits in with today’s passage, which clearly states that God
cares about vulnerable people and that God expects those of us who
are in relationship with the Divine to care about vulnerable people
too. When this was first proposed though, it was radical rather than
obvious.

The
neighboring traditions of ancient Israel thought that the gods cared
about … well, themselves: about being sacrificed to, praised, and
cajoled. Moses really may have been the first one to figure out that
God cared about how we treat each other.

During
Lent we are examining God’s vision for justice, how we see it in the
Bible, how we can feel its urgings now, and what that means for our
lives. Last week we examined Genesis 1, the priestly creation story,
and heard within it faith statements of the priests. They believed
they served the God of Sabbath, who built into creation itself a
rhythm of rest and justice. They articulated that God’s rest on the
7^th
day of creation was meant to create a rhythm of rest for all of
creation, in particular rest for Israelites and those who served
them. The equal access to rest is the beginning of God’s intention of
distributive justice, and those priests thought it was built into
creation itself.

This
week we are examining the Torah’s vision for a just society in a
passage Walter Brueggemann subtitles “Imitations of a Caring God.”
It starts with a question familiar to us from Micah, but this one
asks in the communal, the plural: what does God require of US? The
answer is pretty similar to the know we know too. Micah answers, “to
do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
(Micah 6:8b NRSV). Deuteronomy answers, “to stand in awe
of YHWH; that you walk
in God’s ways, that you love
and serve
God…” and then goes on to say that it also involves keeping the
commandments. Those commandments are the ones that envision a just
society where all are cared for, thus they’re also about “doing
justice” and “loving kindness.” Deuteronomy also reminds the
people that the commandments and decrees are “for your own
well-being.” This God that they were serving was one who wanted
good for them, all of them.
God’s dream was for a society
that could show the world how to live together so all could thrive.

Walter
Brueggemann summarizes this passage as “is a summons
to be fully Torah people of YHWH, supported by a series of
motivations.”¹
The motivations are ALL descriptions of God, and the commandments
seem to be to follow in God’s ways. God is the God of heaven and
earth, the text says, but God chose to specially love you and work
with you!! Because of this, you can trust God and follow God’s ways.

God
is a God of power, might, and fairness! God doesn’t take bribes.
God “executes justice” for the orphan and widow, and loves the
stranger by providing food and clothing. Because of this, and
because God took care of you when you were strangers in Egypt, YOU
should LOVE the stranger!

Brueggemann
puts it this way, “YHWH cares about the specificities of justice
and the victims of injustice. This is a God who cannot be bribed by
the wealthy and powerful but who attends to the needs and wishes of
orphans and strangers, who cares about the concrete implementation of
justice that has to do with the elemental requirements of food and
clothing.”²
This moves onto a commandment for Israel, the one to love the
stranger. This, too, might sound obvious, but really isn’t.

He
says, “Israel
is not permitted to become a homogeneous, ethnic community turned in
on itself, but is mandated, as a part of its most elemental
responsibility, to reach beyond itself to those who do not quite
belong, who are unlike Israel, but who are committed to life in a
community of obedience.”³
He also notices that we usually hear about the Israelites being
SLAVES in Egypt, but this talks about strangers. He has an
explanation for it, “We are accustomed to think of Israelites as
slaves. It is important, however, to remember that their status as
slaves was an economic development from the vulnerable status as
aliens and outsiders, because unprotected sojourners are almost
certain to become economic slaves.”⁴
(131) So, God took care of them and thus, “Israel’s distinctive
covenantal work, in response, is the economic practice of hospitality
and justice that will prevent other vulnerable outsiders from sliding
into the wretchedness of slavery through indebtedness.” (132)

This
is a huge deal, although it might not appear to be at first. In most
societies, or tribes, or groups of people, there is a stronger
requirement to care for insiders than for outsiders. Strangers and
outsiders are allowed to be vulnerable, while the insiders say “we
have to take care of ourselves first.” Perhaps this is best seen by
looking at the concept of nations themselves, and how they treat
their own citizens vs. people who aren’t their citizens (at home or
abroad). This moral code in the Torah though, doesn’t allow for it.
This moral code requires that the people who follow this God of the
Stranger find ways to protect OUTSIDERS. They don’t get to do “us
first” policies. Their God, who is the God of all people, may have
special work for them to do, but that doesn’t mean that God allows
them to ignore the needs of others. They have to find the ways to
care for themselves and others at the same time, no matter how hard
it is. They don’t get to take advantage of anyone, because their
God isn’t a God who takes advantage.

The
widows and orphans are “brought justice” by God as well. Widows
and orphans were “insiders” but ones without resources or
recourse. They didn’t have an adult male with full status in society
to care for them, but according to this passage, God’s own self steps
in to execute the justice they need. God serves as the one who is
missing for them – but in reality, this is also what God is asking
of the people in the society they create:
may even those without an advocate have enough.

And
may that be true because of who your God is, and what your God has
done.

All
of this talk of who God is, and what God is working toward, seems to
me to raise some questions about our work. We know that we are about
building the kindom of God, or alternative language options: about
sharing God’s love in the world, or about taking care of God’s
vulnerable people, or about creating justice for God in the world.
(All the same thing, as far as I know.) But I wonder what our
particular part in it is.

1
Corinthians 12 draws a wonderful metaphor about the work of
individuals in the Body of Christ: that we are to do our part, and do
it well, and trust other parts to do their work also, without
assuming any part is more important than any other. It might also be
a way of saying: work to your strengths, and trust that God spread
the strengths around well. 😉 It works within this Body of Christ.

However,
I think the metaphor applies more broadly. If The United Methodist
Church, OR the Church Universal are all working together as The Body
of Christ towards building the kindom, what is this church
community’s role in it? (Btw, I could easily expand further to
mention people of other faith traditions, as I think we’re working
together there too, but I don’t want to force Body of Christ imagery
on them.)

It
seems to me there could be a lot of possible answers. We might be
the head – we’re good at thinking deeply. We might be the
conscious, we’re good at seeing what is right and calling for it. We
might be the feet, we’re good at showing up where we are needed. We
might be the hands, we work well at sharing God’s love by handing
people tangible gifts. My best guess (and I offer this with humility
as I’m really not certain) is that we might be the heart – filled
both with expansive love for God’s people AND broken by the ways
God’s people are harmed. (Just not the cheesy kind of heart, we’d
hate being the cheesy kind.)

In
any case, I wonder if it is time for us to work together to what our
role is. It is my suspicion that being as clear as it is possible to
be about what God calls us to together will help us do it more
effectively! (First step in this is to fill out the survey that was
emailed out and will be handed out later…) What is our role in
sharing God’s love and caring for God’s people? May God help us
listen well, and find clarity in our shared answer, so we can do it
and do it well! Amen

1Walter
Brueggemann, Deuteronomy
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), p. 129.

2Brueggemann,
130-131.

3Brueggemann,
131.

4Brueggemann,
131.

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

February 25. 2018