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March 31, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Resurrecting Joy” based on Isaiah 41:4b-10 and Luke 24:1-11

I have a question I’d like you to contemplate: Which do you like more – daffodils or tulips?

OK, assuming you are now ready – daffodil fans can you raise hands and cheer? Tulips fans?

Believe it or not, I’m going to take this a step further. (I know, I know, not the Easter sermon you were expecting.) Tulip fans – can you shout out things you love about them? Daffodil fans?

Thank you.

Amen

😉

Just kidding. This Lent we’ve done a Bible Study on the Resurrection Narratives. We read the stories of Easter from each of the Gospels, and asked a few questions about each one:

What does resurrection seem to mean here?
Why describe it this way?
How does it feel?
How does this connect today?

As we read and discussed, we started to notice something about the empty tomb stories: they feel incomplete. The empty tomb isn’t the POINT, instead it feels like the introduction to the point. The tomb is empty… ok. That could mean a lot of things, including grave robbers. But each of the gospels ends the story of the empty tomb with something to nudge us towards its meaning. Luke ends with the rest of the disciples believing the empty tomb to be an “idle tale” but Peter going to see for himself and being amazed. In Luke in particular, the empty tomb is the start of sharing stories of the post-resurrection Jesus experiences. Those experiences are the ways the followers of Jesus end up claiming that he is alive, and the work of God in him isn’t completed yet. It isn’t, actually, the women sharing the story (though maybe it should be) or the dazzling clothes of the angels (black? white?). It isn’t the early dawn on the first day of the week or the prepared spices. It isn’t even the angels saying “he is not here.”

The empty tomb points to the continued life of Jesus, but it is in fact JUST an empty tomb. The early followers of Jesus were transformed in those early days by whatever experiences they had that led them to call it resurrection, and eventually they came to understand THEMSELVES to be the shared Body of Christ, and understanding that has been passed down the ages, right to this moment, when we are together the Body of Christ alive and doing ministry in the world. The empty tomb points to LIFE.

I’m going to take this even a step further. When we say “Christ is alive” I believe that it implies “and calls us to life abundant.” Life itself, just life, isn’t the point. Especially today when medical science allows life to continue far after abundant life has ended, it is easy to see that this isn’t just about being alive, but about being ALIVE – about life abundant.

Christ is alive and calls us to abundant life.

Christ is alive and calls us to full, beautiful, connected, joyful LIFE.

But, it is possible that for some of us, that sounds… I don’t know, really hard?

Am I off? I don’t think I’m off. Our lives are fulled with innumerable stressors, real ones. We’ve learned that about half of our society doesn’t have enough money to “make it,” and another big chunk of society lives in fear of falling under that line. So monetary stress is real, regular, and abundant. Job stress. Health concerns. Traumatic experiences of the past. Worries about our loved ones. And then, heavens, all the things in the news. ALLLLLLLL THE THINGS. There is this constant stream of information about things we should worry about, or fix, or grief, or understand, or… care about.

And the stressors and the worries and the news add up, day after day, after day, after day and maybe full, beautiful, connected, joyful LIFE feels kinda unlikely? I read an article1 recently that discussed the ways life has improved over the past four years, and that somehow people don’t seem to have NOTICED. The authors, psychiatrists, suggested that the malaise of the American public today is due to unprocessed pandemic grief, “But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger—exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.” I know we all want to be over it, but between continued illnesses and deaths and long COVID, we aren’t. And, further, we haven’t processed it. So, there are good reasons aplenty that we aren’t all feeling like we’re all in on that full, beautiful, connected, joyful LIFE that we’re called to.

And yet, beloveds of God, we are called to full, beautiful, connected, joyful LIFE. Even now. So, how do we do it? I came across an idea that I believe MATTERS in reading I thought I was doing for the sake of becoming a better premarital counselor. I was sitting there reading Emily Nagoski’s book “Come Together: The Science (and Art) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections” (highly recommend) and in the final chapter her teaching about sexuality and sensuality became even more spiritual. At one point she says, “Our only certainty is that one day, we won’t get any more days.”2 Which is pretty much the whole point of Ash Wednesday and part of what we’re meant to hold as we travel through Lent AND Holy Week.

She explains in her book the phenomenon of “savoring” which she defines as people’s “capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance positive feelings in their lives.”3 She says that there is a Savoring Checklist, and it includes: sharing joy with others – talking about what is happening and why it is good; reminding ourselves that time is passing as a way to cherish a moment before it passes away, which could sound like saying to yourself, ‘”Time is short and I choose to do this with my time.”; expressing the joy in our bodies – laughing, and jumping, clapping and whooping; and finally slowing down to pay attention to the experience of joy or pleasure itself – in many of the ways we’ve been taught through mindfulness.4 She goes on to say that every time we chose pleasure and joy we enable ourselves to pick it again in the future and remember the pleasure and joy of the past. Then she says, “when we savor pleasure and thus highlight it in our memory, we can remember our lives as more worth living. We look back on our day, our year, even our entire lifetime, and we see less of the struggle and more of the countless moments of pleasure.”5 The memories “glitter across our memory, brighter and more numerous, when we take time to savor them.”6

OK, so the gist: to live life abundantly there is a trick: take the wonderful moments and savor them – share the joy by talking with others, notice the wonder while it happens, and let your body be full of joy. When you do that – when you savor this wonderful life that God gave you, it will bring your attention to the good, the wonderful, the pleasurable, the joy-filled parts of life, both now and over all.

It will, it turns out, move us to full, beautiful, connected, joyful LIFE. Just, enjoy the good stuff!! Savor it, let yourself be delighted when you are. And of course, this can be some of the big stuff of life. Every year I savor singing Easter hymns with brass accompaniment, and when I think back to my wedding I remember a moment in the midst of the worship service when I wished it could last forever because it was such a delight. But pleasure and joy are easily abundant everywhere too. Food tastes good (if you are lucky.) Stretching your body feels good. Laying down to rest is a wonder. Your favorite song is worthy of savoring.

And, to bring it full circle, there are pretty flowers in the world. Ones that you have now brought attention to, embodied the joy of, talked about the joy of, and … savored. Daffodils and tulips, they’re pretty amazing, huh? And they are just one of the many wonders around us, gifts given by God and others to calls us to full, beautiful, connected, joyful LIFE.

Thanks be to God!

Amen

1 https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/03/covid-grief-trauma-memory-biden-trump/677828/

2Emily Nagoski, Come Together: The Science (and Art) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections (New York: Ballantine Books, 2024), 292.

3Nagoski, 270.

4Nagoski, 272.

5Nagoski 273.

6Nagoski, 273.

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 31, 2024

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April 9, 2023
by Sara Baron

“Yes to Hope” Isaiah 49:1-13, John 20:1-18 Easter, April 9, 2023

I have heard it said that no one under 40 expects anything good to happen ever again. The traumas of the pandemic, the realities of climate change, the exploitative nature of how we practice capitalism, and the big money interests preventing our government from functioning have led people to conclude we’re just doomed.

You might have gotten lost in my depressing list, so I’m going to remind you of the start of that idea. “No one under 40 expects anything good to happen ever again.” Here is the thing. I’m 41. So, I’m not under 40!! But I’m also not in a particularly distinct group from those under 40.

It is a little bit too easy for me to get pulled into “everything is broken and also impossible to fix.” Here is the really yucky part – being a preacher who focuses on the life and teaching of Jesus often makes this worse. I know it isn’t supposed to work that way, and I really appreciate the chance to spend my life wrestling meaning out of parables and getting challenged out of complacency with the teachings by and of Jesus.

And yet, as you may have noticed if you’ve heard me preach before, I think it is important to understand Jesus and his teaching in the context of first century Galilee and Judah, in the realities of empire and exploitation, in the disenfranchisement of the masses, and the ways that power was used and abused. The problem is that there are differences in specifics between then and now, but not so many in overall structure. John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg refer to the economic and political system of the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus as a pre-industrial, agricultural domination system. They contrast that with the post-industrial, non-agricultural domination system of today and I find that they’re horrifying similar.

Now, I love the Bible, I love the visions of God for a good society, and I am in love with the ways that Jesus cast God’s vision in terms of non-violence, distributive justice, collaboration, and shared care for each other. I love it enough to devote my life to it.

But there is a little problem with the fact that there have been nearly 2000 years since Jesus, and there have been “followers of Jesus” in an extraordinary number of positions in of power and influence, and for a long time it was even fair to say a few continents were “Christian” and yet the only thing that changed was the DESCRIPTIONS of the domination systems.

This being Easter, I could feed you sweet stories of moments I see the kindom of God at hand, metaphors about flower bulbs that bring life, or even experiences of utter awe that might communicate how very good God is. But if it is true that no one under 40 expects anything good to ever happen again, and if it is true that people have been following Jesus for 2000 years and the overriding economic and political systems are largely the same, it seems to me that this moment calls for a larger response to what is actually a very large scale problem.

By the grace of God, I have one.

You see, I sat with God in prayer this week and raised up the concerns already mentioned, and laid out my angst about preaching Easter into those realities. As I sat in my own discomfort, I also slowed down enough to become attentive to the Divine Presence. And then I started to think about the book “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Because of my massive respect for David Graeber, I’d read “The Dawn of Everything” as soon as it came out, but it is now nearly 18 months later and I’m still processing it.

The book starts with sharing critiques of the European way of life from the perspective of Native Americans who’d were first exposed to it. There is universal horror at the idea of a society that allows anyone to be hungry, cold, or unhoused. A member of the Wendat Confederacy, Kandiaronick, offers a critique that could almost fit into the mouth of Jesus:

I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine.” I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity, – of all the world’s worst behavior. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as look at silver?1

The authors preserve those critiques as a way of clarifying that the way of life that seems “normal” isn’t the only option. Indeed, that is the point of the book! That there have been many, many ways that people have organized themselves into societies. The authors aimed to disrupt the common historical myth about the origins of agriculture and social inequality. Many of their examples feel downright weird, the decisions on what people valued as society and how they made decisions. Humans are quite quirky. They establish, that having an abundance of grain doesn’t necessarily lead to being at peace with some people having warehouses of it and others having none.

For me, the overarching narrative of the book was: IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. I suppose that’s supposed to be obvious. There are examples of it! There were hundreds of years before King Saul when the Ancient Proto-Israelites lived an equalitarian communal existence. The very people quoted critiquing Europeans for letting people struggle lived in societies that took care of everyone!

However, being born and raised in the United States starting in the 1980s, I’ve only ever seen exploitative capitalism as the way society functions. Additionally, I’ve been taught to look at socialism and see the pragmatic ways it is also exploitative. And then I look at the life of Jesus and his critiques of the exploitative domination systems of his day, and at the prophets pointing the exploitative domination systems of their day, and the last 3000 years or so just seems pretty bad and maybe we’re stuck.

But we aren’t.

The exploitative domination system of Jesus’ day wanted to silence him and his movement so they wouldn’t be threatened. And so they killed him. And whatever happened on that first Easter, the impact was that the movement of Jesus simply continued without him. Jesus could be killed. God’s work in Jesus could not.

And, fine, here we are 2000 years later and it hasn’t all worked out yet. That IS depressing, no kidding. But, it DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY, and God is at work in the world to bring change, and I tend to think God has laid a whole lot of invisible groundwork to bring change that will one day break free.

It is POSSIBLE to be people who take care of each other. It is possible to have great healthcare available to all people without burning out the care-givers or sacrificing the care receivers. It is possible to have healthy, delicious food available to all the people of the earth, without poisoning the food with chemicals, copyrighting the seeds, impoverishing the local farmers, or pricing the poor out of food. It is possible to house all people, in safe housing without mold or other dangers, without making people choose between housing and medicine. It is possible.

It is POSSIBLE to take care of each other. It is possible to allow parents to care for and savor their babies, and to have well-educated and loving caregivers take over when it is time, and to care for the ill and aging with humanity without undercutting the needs of caregivers OR care receivers.

Isn’t it funny? What simple things I’m saying are POSSIBLE? And how far away they seem? And how it takes faith in a God who can bring life out of death to even consider these possibilities?

Now, dear ones, you may want me to lay out the road map from here to there. I can’t. I don’t see it. But I am reminded that I am a PART of the Body of Christ, and I am called to do my work and no one else’s. My job, today, is to remind you that things don’t have to be like this. Because until we remember that God dreams of justice, and joy, and abundant live for EVERYONE, we can’t even start to move towards it. Because the story of Easter is the story that life can emerge even when it seems it can’t. And today is Easter. Things look pretty rough out there. But God isn’t done with us yet.

I believe in the LIVING Body of Christ. If I can name it, and you can dream it, and God is with us, we’re gonna get from oppressive domination systems into life abundant for everyone. I fear it may yet take some time. The powers that are, are pretty significant. But, it is worth working towards anyway. Especially with God.

We work with a God who brings life out of death. God isn’t done with us yet, and God isn’t about to make peace with domination, or exploitation. God is a God of life abundant!

There is plenty of death around us, Holy One. We are willing to work with you on life. Guide the way! Amen

1David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Picador | Farrar, Straus, and Girouz, 2021), p. 55.

April 9, 2023

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

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“Quiet Resurrections” based on Jeremiah 31:1-6 and Matthew 28:1-10

April 4, 2021
by Sara Baron

It is really easy to
miss the point of Easter by focusing too much on what happened ~2000
years ago. There is extensive debate among people who debate such
things about what FORM Jesus’s body took after resurrection, which is
a clear indication that a lot of people miss the point. However it
was that Jesus’s disciples transformed from the frightened men who
ran away from the cross to the leaders of the developing church who
faced their own persecution with courage, and continued Jesus’s
ministry in their own lives – that thing that happened was
resurrection. They talked about it as Jesus returning to them,
meeting with them, guiding them, explaining things to them. I have
no idea where the line between metaphor and reality, memory and
presence was in that, nor do I think it matters.

I think it matters
that they became convinced that not even the Empire’s power of death
– they greatest power the Empire had – held any sway over them.
I think it matters they moved from self-protection to courage. I
think it matters they moved from scattering to consolidating their
relationships. I think it matters they moved from the amygdala
response of “danger! Protect self!” to the pre-frontal cortex
questions of “how do we tell the stories of Jesus so others can
hear them?” and “how do we distribute food fairly despite
cultural differences?” and “how much do we take on and how much
do we train other people to do?” They, themselves, moved from the
fear of death to the fullness of life. That’s resurrection.

And the key to all
of it, is that the power of resurrection that moves us from the fear
of death to the fullness of life is a CONTINUAL gift from God that
enriches ALL of our lives, and empowers us in our darkest moments.

Truth be told
though, given the rather hugeness of the original story, everything
else can pale in comparison. And because of that, I think we
sometimes miss the power of resurrection in our lives, because we’re
looking for things that are bigger and flashier than how God mostly
ends up working. So, I offer this example from my own life, of what
I’d like to call a “quiet resurrection.”

When I was a kid, in
gym class, we were expected to test for the “Presidential Fitness
Test” every year, and every year I failed the running portions.
Alas, I told myself, “I’m no good at running.” As I got older, I
continued to fail every running test my physical education teachers
put in front of me. Eventually my narrative switched to, “I’m just
not in good shape.” Sure, I did lots of physical activity all the
time, but CLEARLY I was failing, and CLEARLY that was an indication
that I was “not in good shape.”

That story stuck
with me. By seminary I jogged regularly, but since it was slowly,
and since I still got winded, I told myself “I’m just not in good
shape.” Later, as I’d climb mountains with friends, I’d be
noticeably the most winded and make jokes about “being in bad
shape.” It had become part of my identity.

Five years ago,
after Easter, I got a cold. Truthfully, this is common enough for
pastors and church workers. The intense work of trying to make Holy
Week and Easter meaningful experiences for our churches means a drop
in adrenaline at the end of it, and then people get sick. That time,
the cold became a cough. Normal enough. A month later I went to the
doctor because the cough just wouldn’t subside. Sure enough, I had
bronchitis. But that wasn’t the whole story. When the PA was
listening to my lungs, “something sounded wrong, more wrong than
just bronchitis.” After a serious of tests, my doctor named what I
experienced as “exercised induced asthma” and gave me an inhaler
to use before cardio exercise.

At first, this just
felt like a new way of saying I was broken, because I was so deeply
in that frame. But, what followed was, for me, miraculous. Suddenly
my workouts were… productive. I got BETTER. Also, I could
breathe! And ever so slowly it occurred to me that the issue hadn’t
been my own failure, a lack of exercise, or not trying hard enough –
even though I’d been telling myself that for decades. It was simply
physiological. In fact, it hadn’t even been that I’d been “out of
shape” for all those years. Rather, I had an undiagnosed condition
that impaired me.

It has taken a
shockingly long time for all of this to penetrate my self talk. I’d
gotten so used to thinking of myself as an utter athletic failure,
that I’d failed to notice that the goal of adult fitness is to have
ways to move your body that are FUN and also promote health. When it
comes to that standard, I’m pretty good at being athletic. (Huh,
never said THAT before.)

I’ve heard from many
other people over the years about the impact of diagnosis that feel
similar to this, including in mental health. Varieties on the theme
of “oh, it isn’t just because I wasn’t trying hard enough” or
“there is a NAME for what I’m struggling with” or “other people
find this hard too, I’m not alone.” (Of course, not all diagnoses
feel this way, of course. But some do, and that’s what I’m talking
about.)

So, maybe for some
of you, it will make sense when I say that for me, having a little
inhaler open my lungs so I can exercise, and having that experience
free me from a hurtful narrative about myself, was a significant
experience of resurrection. It freed me to be try more things, be
more playful, enjoy life more! Those things matter.

The stories we
tell ourselves about ourselves can be impediments to the rich full
lives that God wants us to live, and they can be impediments to our
responses to God’s calls on us to build the kindom. Easter is
the story of resurrection, the story of God’s power of LIFE over
death. We’re so busy telling ourselves and God that “I can’t”
based on stories that aren’t true, that we miss God responding, “Oh
honey, you CAN.” (God may use different endearments with you.)

Many times in life a
skill or story is important to getting us through a moment – but
the SAME skill or story becomes an impediment to growth later on.
Switching around the way we see something can change our whole
experience of it. Reframing an experience, or a story can make space
for God’s transforming work in our lives.

The challenge quite
often is that we don’t see our own framing, which makes it hard to
notice it and consider adapting it. This is one of the reasons that
therapists are so useful, they’re particularly trained to noticing
and pointing out dated framing. This is also a reason why we talk to
friends and family – because outside perspective can make a huge
difference in helping us see! And, I think this is a reason why
contemplative prayer is such a gift in people’s lives. As we develop
the skills to be quietly present to God and ourselves, as we
disengage from the frantic pace of life, as we allow our thoughts to
slow down – we are MAKING SPACE for grace to move and show us new
ways.

These little, quiet
resurrections may not seem like enough, but that’s only from a human
perspective. When God is part of one small thing, and another small
thing, those two small things together add up to more than their
parts. (Aka, God is willing to override the rules of math in God’s
commitment to grace and the kindom.) When many little resurrections
are added together, lives become more whole, and as lives become more
whole there is more and more space for that abundant life to expand
to more and more people, and more and more of the kindom is built.
What God is up to is definitely enough.

After all, it was
only one resurrection 2000 or so years ago, and we’re still seeing
the rippling effects. Thanks be to God. Amen

April 4, 2021

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

Sermons

“A New Thing” based on Isaiah 65:17-25 and Luke 24:1-12

April 21, 2019February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Years ago I asked my boss for a computer password. He responded, “You should know this. Its is the most obvious answer. We are a ____ people.” Now, I’ve had a lot of church related jobs, but I didn’t think this was obvious. I thought there were a lot of possible answers. We are a loving people. We are a Jesus-following people. We are a gracious people. We are a beloved people. After a while, I tried “We are a resurrection people” and that got me close enough that I was informed the password was “Easter.”

I’ve thought about that every since. For my boss, it was SO obvious that “Easter” was the sort of people we are. For me, there are a lot of questions about what that means, and how we live it out. I yearn for the sort of certainty he had in thinking I could guess the password.

Every month I ask a question of the Church Council as a start to our meeting. I’m known for asking difficult questions, and this church is full of thoughtful, intentional, … strong-willed…. opinionated people. (I wouldn’t have it any other way.) Thus, I ask a difficult question, people offer a variety of different answers, I have a better sense of what people are thinking and we move on.

For the first time, after nearly 6 years, this month the Church Council found an ANSWER to my question. It started like normal. I asked, “Where are you seeing resurrection?,” and people offered many and varied answers. But then a pattern emerged, and was named. The most profound way people are seeing resurrection is in the restoration of relationships, and as a corollary, in the miracle of life-giving relationships themselves.

I thought this was a profound answer, a good way of knowing what it is to be Easter people, so I ran it by the Confirmation class. You would be delighted to know that our Confirmation class is very reflective of this church. The students are thoughtful, intentional, strong-willed, …. opinionated people. They have no patience for irrationality, and even less for exclusion in any form. Last week I ran this idea by them. We talked about resurrection, what it does and does not mean, and how we make sense of the metaphor for our lives today. I wasn’t sure that “restored relationships” would be as meaningful for teens as for those who had experienced brokenness in relationships for decades. It turns out, I was wrong.

They thought that “restored relationships” and “hope where it seems there is no hope” sounded both meaningful and valid as ways of understanding Easter.

Thus, I’m trusting the Church Council and the Confirmation class to be good tests of the pulse of this community, and I’m going to keep on preaching about restored relationships AS resurrection.

For those who aren’t quite with me yet though, I want to play with that wonderful line from Luke’s first Easter Story, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” (v. 5) Within the story it functions to emphasize the empty grave, but it also seems well phrased for metaphorical contemplation. When else have we given up something “for dead” when there is still life in it? When have we discounted a possibility, including of a restored relationship, when God wasn’t done with it yet? What does it mean to be people looking for the living among the living, rather than among the dead?

Last week I quoted John Dominic Crossan’s assessment of Jesus’ teaching, namely that Jesus taught “that God has given all human beings the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God’s power, rule, and domination are evidently present to all observers.”^¹That left us questioning how to live our lives being guided by that wisdom. Parker Palmer is a wisdom teacher, who teaches people how to find the power of life within themselves. It seems to me that his book his book “A Hidden Wholeness: A Journey Toward an Undivided Life” takes off where John Dominic Crossan off.

Parker Palmer believes in the power and wisdom of the soul, and since the word soul isn’t one I find easy to explain either, I’ll let him say what he means by that:

“Philosophers haggle about what to call this core of our humanity, but I’m not stickler for precision. Thomas Merton called it the true self. Buddhists call it original nature or big self. Quakers call it the inner teacher or the inner light. Hasidic Jews call it a spark of the divine. Humanists call it identity and integrity. In popular parlance, people often call it soul. … it is the objective, ontological reality of selfhood that keeps us form reducing ourselves, or each other, to biological mechanisms, psychological projections, sociological constructs, or raw material to be manufactured into whatever society needs – diminishments of our humanity that constantly threaten the quality of our lives.”²

I’m going to take it a step further and say that the soul is the source of the wisdom that Dom was talking about, “the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God’s power, rule, and domination are evidently present to all observers.” Our souls KNOW, we know, but to know we have to listen to our souls.

Throughout Lent we’ve been talking about spiritual practices. One might also say we’ve been talking about practices of listening to the Divine, to our own souls, and to each other’s souls. None of this is particularly easy, but Parker Palmer is the teacher who is focused on exactly that. He thinks most of the time we’re led by ego and by fear, which leads us to be divided from the wisdom of our own souls, “Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the ‘integrity that comes from being who you are.’”³ He calls us to wholeness, but cautions us that, “Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.”⁴

Isn’t THAT an interesting idea to consider on Easter? On this day when we think about resurrection, about restoration, about new hope and the power of life; what does it mean to think about wholeness as requiring acceptance of brokenness? Do we tend to think of resurrection as … perfection? I suspect we do. But that misses the point. God’s work in the world towards restoration doesn’t require nor create perfection. Perfection isn’t a part of life, and resurrection is about restoring LIFE. HOWEVER, God’s work in the world is always towards wholeness, and wholeness requires seeing, accepting, and making peace with brokenness.

Parker goes on to explain how we TEND to deal with this, “A divided life is a wounded life, and the soul keeps calling us to heal the wound. Ignore that call, and we find ourselves trying to numb our pain with an anesthetic of choice, be it substance abuse, overwork, consumerism, or mindless media noise. Such anesthetics are easy to come by in a society that wants to keep us divided and unaware of our pain – for the divided life that is pathological for individuals can serve social systems well, especially when it comes to those functions that are morally dubious.”⁵ Then he explains how to get OUT of that cycle, and the answer is both individual and communal. Palmer is a Quaker, and he believes there is a lot of power in silence, in quiet, and in listening. He encourages people to make space for silence in their lives, but he also says, “But we cannot embrace that challenge all alone, at least not for long; if we are to sustain the journey toward an undivided life. The journey has solitary passages, to be sure, and yet it is simply too arduous to take without the assistance of others. And because we we have such a vast capacity for self-delusion, we will inevitably get lost en route without correctives from outside of ourselves.”⁶

A few years ago I did an intensive training in the teachings of Parker Palmer. Much of what Palmer offers is based in the Quaker tradition. In living out these ideals in community, I discovered there was A LOT of power in them. We were taught to ask open, honest questions of each other, and to sit in silence especially when it was uncomfortable. We were invited to play with poetry and art, journaling, and conversation. We were taught that the soul is wise as all get out, but also shy and needing time, space, and metaphor to share its wisdom. We were taught to hold space for each other’s souls, both because souls are inherently precious, but also because every time a glimpse of a soul is seen, we learn about our own soul too. It is an unspoken part of Palmer’s worldview that souls are unique reflections of the Divine.

I have one more of his insights I want to share today: “All of the great spiritual traditions want to awaken us to the fact that we cocreate the reality in which we live. And all of them ask two questions intended to keep us awake: What are we sending form within ourselves out into the world, and what impact is it having ‘out there’? What is the world sending back at us, and what impact is it having ‘in here’? We are continually engaged in the evolution of self and world – and we have the power to choose, moment by moment, between that which gives life and that which deals death.”⁷ Isn’t that the question of Easter? How do we choose life? How do we work with God who chooses life in choosing life?

How do we live lives that REALLY show “that God has given all human beings the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God’s power, rule, and domination are evidently present to all observers.”^⁸How do we participate in and build community that loves people, and their souls, into a fuller wholeness; under the premise that whole people are a gift to the world? How do we build communities that reflect God’s goodness, wholeness, hope, and the power of God’s commitment to LIFE rather than death?

How do we allow God’s love, life, and wholeness into our lives so that we, and our relationships, can be restored? John Dominic Crossan believes that Jesus taught us we already know what we need to know, we already have the wisdom. Parker Palmer says that wisdom is in our souls, and to access the wisdom we need some quiet, and we need others who also trust in the wisdom of our souls.

This is what we know: God is a God of LIVE, not death; the wisdom you need to lead a transformed life is already with you; there are people who trust in your wisdom and are willing to help you find it; silence is a valuable asset in listening to the soul; metaphor, art, and open-honest questions matter too; AND… this is a community that has been and will continue to love people AS THEY ARE. That love then means that people can safely let their souls out to play, and grow further and further into who God calls us to be. We are a safe place for souls, and that means we are a safe place for LIFE. Maybe, after all, we are an Easter people. May it ALWAYS be so. Amen

1 John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Stories of The Death of Jesus (USA: HarperSanFrancisco: 1995) 47.

2 Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward the Undivided Self(USA: Josey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint, 2004), 33.

3 Palmer, 4.

4 Palmer, 5.

5 Palmer, 20.

6 Palmer, 10.

7 Palmer, 48.

8 John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Stories of The Death of Jesus (USA: HarperSanFrancisco: 1995) 47.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

April 21, 2019