Untitled

March 17, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Hope for Just Justice" based on Ezekiel 22:23-29 and Deuteronomy 16:18-20

Our two scripture readings today clarify for me that I prefer to hear the dreams of God in the positive instead of the negative. Deuteronomy lays out how a just society should be ordered, in this case by clarifying what a just justice system looks like. Ezekiel points out that the justice of God has not been fulfilled and describes what things are like instead. And, boy, I like the Deuteronomy reading a lot better. But, it does seem fair to point that they’re making the same point in different ways.

The ways that the Bible, especially the Torah in the Hebrew Bible, obsesses over just justice, tends to surprise me a bit. It pushes back on some assumptions I have about how complicated the society of ancient Israel was – and makes it clear that ancient Israel was a complex and REAL human society. It wasn’t some dream state, or .. I don’t, a part of such early history that the hurts of society weren’t present yet. (My assumptions are really off and need some reflection.)

Part of the ancient Israelite narrative was that they were people who had been freed from slavery in Egypt. The scholarship I respect the most suggests that those who were actually in Egypt and freed may well have been a very small number, but their story resonated with others and was taken on as an identity narrative – first by nomadic people in the desert and later by some of the people in the land they would come to call the Promised Land and the culminating group of people who understood themselves to be ancient Israel were the people who identified with this story of God freeing them from slavery.

What feels important about that is that ancient Israel was thus a place that knew how worldly systems of domination worked. Right? Egypt was a monarchy with slavery and forced labor and money flowing from the bottom to the top. Those who were listening to God and dreaming a new society were wanting to prevent the same thing from happening again. Those same scholars also suggest that the hills of Judea were largely populated by people who had exited the early societies in both the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, which suggests they were the ones who weren’t successful in those systems, who left because they thought they could do better on their own than in a society that was pressing down on them. This may be why the “God freed us from slavery” narrative resonated so well.

The first 5 books of the Bible create shared identity and a shared dream, the idea of creating a society the way God wants it to be. We know that they were written down AFTER the destruction of the Temple in 587-586 BCE and the biases of those times impact what how things were written down, including a yearning to have listened better so as not to be in that situation. Ezekiel is a prophet OF the exile, he was called while in exile in Babylon, and spoke his prophetic words from Babylon. Which gives us the context that it is from another domination system – Babylon – that todays words came into being. (Although there were more edits later, of course.)

Anyway, Deuteronomy makes these points about what justice should look that feel so ON POINT that it is hard to remember they were written down 2.5 millennia ago. Judges need to be everywhere – an assumption there will always be disputes that need an impartial third party to help. Judges should render JUST decisions. Judges should not distort justice. Judges should not show partiality. Judges should not accept bribes ( ah. hem.) Bribes blind wisdom and prevent right judgement. Justice and only justice must be the work of those who judge – and their work is imperative to making it possible to live in the land in right relationship with God and each other.

So, apparently all groups of humans have disagreements and need trustworthy ways of finding just solutions AND being able to offer that justice to people WITHOUT BIAS based on power or wealth is one of the fundamental pieces to creating not only a functional society, but a society where people find it easiest to connect with God.

Well, Deuteronomy, no lies are found there.

Ezekiel goes a little further, condemning all the leaders for the lack of justices that the vulnerable experience: the upper class is violent towards the poor; the clergy enable the wealthy to skip the sabbath in order to seek more wealth; the officials destroy lives for their own gain; and the prophets claim it is all OK. The result, then is oppression of the poor and needy, and the immigrants being mistreated without having any capacity to seek justice.

Um. Wouldn’t it be super cool if the prophet of the exile who remembers the destruction his society and reflects on what issues might have brought down his beloved nation sounded like he was talking about a really, really different place than the one we live in??

Yep, I’d prefer for Ezekiel not to resonate and Deuteronomy to be self-evidently the way things already are.

And… here we are anyway.

I do not wish to make a comprehensive list of all the ways our justice system lacks justice, because I’m told people don’t like multi-day sermons (🤷🏻‍♀️), but one of the end results of our system is that we have 2.3 million people incarcerated in the USA, which is about 0.7% of our population. Therefore, While the United States represents about 4.2 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 20 percent of the world’s prisoners.1 And, as we know, the prison population is incredibly disproportionate by race, and those who are imprisoned are the people in the US who lack the right not to be in slavery, and many of the jails and prisons in the US are run by for-profit industries who are making money both on the labor of the inmates and on the fees they charge to offer sub-human care to the inmates.

Maybe I am more open to how Ezekiel expresses concerns than I thought I was! 😉

As is often the case, I think I’ve managed to preach us firmly into despair, and now we get to move together towards hope. Because of being part of the church, I was introduced early on to the concepts of restorative justice and how they differ from punitive justice. Even knowing this has been life-changing. Our current, imperfect, Social Principles say:

In the love of Christ, who came to save those who are lost and vulnerable, we urge the creation of a genuinely new system for the care and restoration of victims, offenders, criminal justice officials, and the community as a whole. Restorative justice grows out of biblical authority, which emphasizes a right relationship with God, self, and community. When such relationships are violated or broken through crime, opportunities are created to make things right.

Most criminal justice systems around the world are retributive. These retributive justice systems profess to hold the offender accountable to the state and use punishment as the equalizing tool for accountability. In contrast, restorative justice seeks to hold the offender accountable to the victimized person, and to the disrupted community. Through God’s transforming power, restorative justice seeks to repair the damage, right the wrong, and bring healing to all involved, including the victim, the offender, the families, and the community. The Church is transformed when it responds to the claims of discipleship by becoming an agent of healing and systemic change.

And this isn’t just TALK in the church. The United Methodist Church has standards for companies it will and will not invest in, including in our clergy pension programs, and companies that make profits from private prisons are on our DO NOT invest list. If you were wondering, this church holds the same policy. United Women in Faith have a specific focus on stopping the school to prison pipeline. The General Board of Church and Society advocates on our behalf in Washington for criminal justice reform. There is a program called “Strengthening the Black Church for the 21st Century” that aims at strengthening predominately Black congregations in mission and ministry, and one of their foci is on ending mass incarceration. More of my education on these concerns has happened here in this church, in the Intersectional Justice Book Club, and in conversations with you wise people. We also have in our midst a United Methodist Home Missioner whose job is to offer family law services to inmates in NYS prisons. Just by being part of the UMC our local church is part of changing what is into what should be. That’s a big part of why our connection matters.

I think a lot about being the tragic gap – the place where you see both how things are and how things should be and are vulnerable to the pain that results from the distance between them. I believe the tragic gap is a holy and important place to be, but NOT because we need to be left in despair. Rather because change can’t happen unless we see with clarity what is AND see with clarity what can be. Being vulnerably in the tragic gap is a way to be open to God’s creative work within us. For most of us, the work to make the justice system more just isn’t our primary work – but here is the amazing thing! By being in the church and doing our own primary work, we enable others TO DO that work. The goal of the Body of Christ is to work towards justice, but no one person is meant to do all the pieces. Thank God for all who are seeking restorative justice, criminal justice reform, working on behalf of those incarcerated, for those seeking the well-being of friends and family in prison, and thank God for those who are living in prison and finding ways to seek justice and live love despite it all.

Things aren’t as they should be, but that’s not a reason to lose hope. God and good people are working on change, and change will come. On this, and on many other ways justice is lacking. Thanks be to God. Amen

1 https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/prisoners-2022-statistical-tables

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 17, 2024

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Untitled

March 3, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Hoped for Dignity” based on Acts 6:1-6 and 1 Corinthians 11:17-26

When I was a child I thought that the church was a holy place and that meant that the people who were there did good things, and good decisions were made there.

Growing up wasn’t particularly fun. Shaking off all those illusions was a lot of work. Now I know that the church is a holy place and that means people try to do good things and make decisions and sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t.

These days I can read two passages about the early church bringing normal human dysfunction to shared meals and not even bat an eye. Of course normal human dysfunction happened in the early church! And the middle church! And the late church? Whatever we call ourselves now. Of course ways people didn’t see each other’s needs have always happened and of course that applied to people with enough resources not seeing those without enough resources well. People. That’s apparently how we work. Including in the church.

I’ve never been super fond of Paul’s “solution” in 1 Corinthians though. I’ve never understood why he recommended eating at home instead of sharing all the food that everyone brought. Luckily, we have our Acts reading too, one that feels so radical it seems like Jesus is sitting in the room making the recommendation himself.

So let’s focus on the Acts one. This is in the very early church when the followers of Jesus were functioning as one family in really practical ways. People sold everything they had and contributed the resources to the whole and were then utterly dependent on each other. Usually I read this part of Acts and just feel guilty that the modern church is such a weakened version of that commitment to community and shared livelihood.

But this passage shows that even in the VERY early church when people were radically committed to God, to following Jesus, and to each other there were still issues. And these issues were intersectional. The community of faith following Jesus in those days was still a part of Judaism, so all the followers of Jesus still knew themselves to be Jews. However, by the time of the early church, Judaism already had both a home base and a diaspora. Some Jewish people still lived in the land of their ancestors and spoke Hebrew and Aramaic, some came from families that had lived in other places and spoke primarily Greek. Maybe, even, most of them spoke each other’s languages but the “Hellenistic” and “”Hebrew” Jews refers mostly to where their families had settled.

In any case, while in the world at large being Hellenistic would have been a position of greater power, for the early church being Hebrew was a position of greater power and that meant that the Hellenistic Jews were LESS powerful. And, because humans … are kinda awful sometimes… that meant that the most vulnerable members of the Hellenistic Jews – the widows – suffered the most and weren’t getting enough FOOD.

Which is horrible, and infuriating, and also just so NORMAL.

The solution, I’d say, isn’t normal though. It isn’t normal in the world and it isn’t even normal for the church. Because the issue was brought to “the disciples” and they did something I’m not used to seeing church leaders do. They set a boundary and said “we aren’t capable of caring for this in addition to the things we’re already doing.” Which was incredibly healthy, especially when they said that AND came up with a plan to make sure it was cared for.

So then they told the community to find 7 people to care for the fair distribution of food. Which means that it was the whole community that did the really amazing next thing, not just the twelve disciples. The amazing thing they did was pick SEVEN men with HELLENISTIC names. One of whom we’re told was a convert to Judaism, so go diversity on that one.

And those seven men became the ones in charge of resources distribution. The words used as “wait tables” also have administrative connotations, and I suspect those are accurate.

In my years in the church I haven’t ever seen it happen that when a marginalized group reports structuralized mistreatment that they’re given all the power over the structure. Never. I’ve seen marginalized groups report structuralized mistreatment and they’ve been given space to speak, or they’ve been empowered to report on the problem, at times there are even spaces made for committees to be formed, and on occasion those committees are even mostly populated by those who have been marginalized.

But I’ve never seen the POWER HANDED OVER.

I’ve never seen the response, “This has been done poorly and the most vulnerable people aren’t being treated well? Then let’s fix it by making sure that those who are vulnerable have complete control over the resources people need, because they’ll be more attentive to distributing it fairly.”

Well, I’ve never seen it anywhere but right here. And this feels like a bigger miracle than those healing stories the gospels are full of. Did the early church really do this? Did they really trust God and follow Jesus this well? Did they actually invert the power structures of the world and trust the disempowered to fix the system?

Yes, yes, I know that it was 7 men and no women and definitely none of the widows. It is a miracle anyway. I’ve seen the church at large. Trust me.

Seriously, this gives me goosebumps.

Because I can imagine SO MANY objections to doing it this way. Right? “They’ll just keep all the food to themselves.” “Will the Hebrew widows be hungry now?” “What do those guys know about distributing resources anyway?” “This is hard work, it should be done by experts.” “What will we do if someday there isn’t enough food? Will they be able to handle it then?” “What kind of reporting are we expecting of these 7 to the 12 that it can be clear they’re being accountable?”

But that wasn’t what happened. 7 people were selected, they were blessed, they did the work, and Acts goes on to tell us some of the wonderful things these people did to build up the community and bring glory to God. The 12 went back to their important work, the 7 did their important work, everyone got the resources they needed, and more people were attracted to this radically equal Body of Christ.

And I think that means if it happened once, it could happen again!?!?!? It probably has, even if I haven’t heard about it. I suspect God is working on it happening RIGHT NOW in a whole bunch of places. This is a miracle of hope – that true dignity can be restored to God’s beloveds who are in this moment vulnerable and in need.

This amazing miracle is a part of the story we find at the table of God we extend at the communion table. So invite you to bring this miracle with us as move into sharing our resources with each other and sharing the bread and the cup. 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 3, 2024