“Expansive” based on Luke 23:32-43

March 18, 2018February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I started really struggling with “atonement theory” at the end of high school, well before I knew what “atonement theory” was. For the record “atonement theory” relates to how it was that Jesus’ death on the cross united God and humanity, the way to remember it is that is about how “at-one-ment” happened.

At that time in my life, I’d only heard of one atonement theory, “sacrificial atonement” sometimes called “blood atonement” which says that Jesus died on the cross to forgive our sins. I was trying very hard to be a “good Christian” in those days, and to comply with what I thought I was supposed to believe, but this didn’t make sense to me. I couldn’t figure out to whom was the payment made. As time went on I learned that there are various schools of thought about this. The answers can be: God, humanity, or justice.

Some say that Jesus died on the cross to forgive our sins and the payment was made to God’s own self. But, if Jesus is God, then God required God’s self as a payment to God’s self, then…. why? Worse yet if we think of the God-Jesus relationship as Parent-Child in which case this becomes an obscenity of parental abuse and child sacrifice.

Some say that Jesus died on the cross to forgive our sins and the payment was made to humanity. Frankly, I was always able to believe that God loved me and was willing to forgive me, so the idea that we needed this act to believe that God loves us and forgives us just didn’t hold water.

Some say that Jesus died on the cross to forgive our sins and the payment was made to a need for balance the scales of justice in the universe. This one made less than no sense to me because if God’s actions are bound by a power that is greater than God, then God isn’t God. (To be fair, some said the payment needed to be made to the Devil, but that also implies the Devil is more powerful than God; and even as a teenager I’d foregone the assumption I had to believe in the Devil.)

Twenty years after I started asking this question, no one has convinced me that an answer I can accept exists. However, my initial desire to believe in sacrificial atonement theory, because I thought I was supposed to, was based in reality!! Most Christians today believe this. Once, as a pastor, I taught a course during Lent based on a video series by Marcus Borg. In the first week’s video Borg explained many ways of understanding Easter, explaining that the metaphors of “life” and “new life” and “hope to the hopeless” can be understood in many ways, but in all of them the metaphor is powerful. The course participants thought that made a lot of sense. The following week Borg outlined many different theories of Good Friday, and “atonement”, explaining that “sacrificial atonement theory” is one among many and was not particularly evident for the first 800 years or so of Christianity. The course participants balked. The centerpiece of their faith felt under attack.

Thus, I come into this sermon with some trepidation. What I intend to share is, I think, important. Yet, for some it will be inherently threatening. I speak truth as I know it, trusting that all of you are strong enough to disagree with me and to discount what you don’t find useful.

When I got to college I did a research paper on atonement theory and learned that there are a LOT of them, and that they’re rich and varied, and most of them are older than the one I’d thought was “normal.” I say this in case you want to know more about them, but I’m going to focus now on just one other one.

During Lent we’ve been talking about God’s desire for Justice, as found in the Bible. We looked at the first creation story to see the priest’s enthusiasm for Sabbath rest for ALL of creation built into creation itself. We examined the Torah vision for a just society, one that calls upon the people to care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger as expressions of God’s own caring. We looked together at the role of the prophet in speaking truth to power so that kings didn’t start believing God allowed them to pick on the weak. We looked, as well, at one of Jesus’ parables to find that in it Jesus told a story of how oppression works so that those victimized by it could be freed from it.

Throughout these sermons we’ve been comparing and contrasting “domination systems” with God’s vision for the kin-dom of God. As a reminder, “Domination systems are humanly contrived legal, social, political, economic, military, and religious systems deliberately designed and built to create and maintain power by a few at the top over the many below them. They exist to perpetuate the power of dominators over those dominated, explain why it is necessary, and to transfer wealth from workers up the ladder to the few obscenely wealthy persons at the top of the pyramid.”¹ God’s vision is for justice is a reflection of God’s love and care for all. This means God seeks a world that cares for ALL people, which involves access to adequate food, clothing, shelter, rest, education, and meaning, for starters – we call this the reign of God, or the kindom of God .

Domination systems are supported in part by ideology, usually in the form of religion. One of the most dominate of the ideological myths that supports the violence of domination systems is the myth of redemptive violence. Walter Wink was a professor at Auburn Theological Seminary and he wrote the seminal book Engaging the Powers that I finally got around to opening this week. He says regarding the myth of redemptive violence, “The distinctive feature of this myth is the victory of order over chaos by means of violence. This myth is the original religion of the status quo, the first articulation of ‘might makes right.’ It is the basic ideology of the Domination System. The gods favor those who conquer.”² Christianity is often used to support the ideology of domination systems. Wink again:

“The myth of redemptive violence thus uses the traditions, rites, customs, and symbols of Christianity in order to enhance the power of a wealthy elite and the goals of the nation narrowly defined. It has no interest in compassion for the poor, or for more equitable economic arrangements, or for the love of the enemies. It merely uses the shell of religion – a shell that can be filled with the blasphemous doctrine of the national security state. Emptied of their prophetic vitality, these outer forms are then manipulated to legitimate a power system intent on the preservation of privilege at all costs.”³

I think sacrificial atonement theory is one of these ways that “Christian” theology can be used as an ideology of redemptive violence to support Domination Systems. After all, in sacrificial atonement theory, there is a demand for a VIOLENT DEATH in order to bring resolution and peace. I think the ancient myth of redemptive violence has taken deep root in Christianity this way, and it is destructive of good living as well as good theology.

So, let’s look at another option! Wink uses “Powers” to describe the Powers in the world that support domination systems, through violence or the threat of violence. He thinks THEY killed Jesus, and that the work of God and Jesus was in resisting and exposing them. He writes:

“The cross also exposes the Powers as unable to make Jesus become what they wanted him to be, or to stop being who he was. Here was a person able to live out to the fullest what he felt was God’s will. He chose to die rather than compromise with violence. The Powers threw at him every weapon in their arsenal. But they could not deflect him from the trail that he and God were blazing. Because he lived thus, we too can find our path. Because they could not kill what was alive in him, the cross also revealed the impotence of death. Death is the Powers’ final sanction. Jesus at his crucifixion neither fights the darkness nor flees under cover of it, but goes with it, goes into it. He enters the darkness freely, voluntarily. The darkness is not dispelled or illuminated. It remains vast, untamed, void. But he somehow encompasses it. It becomes the darkness of God. It is now possible to enter any darkness and trust God to wrest from it meaning, coherence, resurrection. Jesus’ truth could not be killed.”⁴

Jesus died without being complicit in violence at all, he didn’t participate in it, sanction it, or fight it.

Now, I’m going to share a very long quote from Wink about what he thinks the death of Jesus does and doesn’t mean, because I’ve thought about it, and I can’t say it better.

“Jesus’ own view of his inevitable death at the hands of the Powers seems to have been that God’s nonviolent reign could only come in the teeth of desperate opposition and the violent recoil of the Domination System: ‘from the days of John the Baptist until now, the reign of God has suffered violence….Now, however, Christian theology argued that God is the one who provides Jesus as a Lamb sacrificed in our stead; that God is the angry and aggrieved party who must be placated by blood sacrifice; that God is, finally both sacrificer and sacrificed.” … But what is wrong with this God, that the legal ledgers can be balanced only by means of the death of an innocent victim? Jesus simply declared people forgiven, confident that he spoke the mind of God. Why then is a sacrificial victim necessary to make forgiveness possible? Does not the death of Jesus reveal that all such sacrifices are unnecessary?

The God whom Jesus revealed as no longer our rival, no longer threatening and vengeful, but unconditionally loving and forgiving, who needed no satisfaction by blood – this God of infinite mercy was metamorphosed by the church into the image of a wrathful God whose demand for blood atonement leads to God’s requiring of his own Son a death on behalf of all of us. The nonviolent God of Jesus comes to be depicted as a God of unequaled violence, since God not only allegedly demands the blood of the victim who is closest and most precious to him, but also holds the whole of humanity accountable for a death that God both anticipated and required. Against such an image of God the revolt of atheism is an act of pure religion.”⁵

Wink then summarizes what this means for us, “To be this God’s offspring requires the unconditional and unilateral renunciation of violence. The reign of God means the complete and definitive elimination of every form of violence between individuals and nations. This is a realm and a possibility of which those imprisoned by their own espousal of violence cannot even conceive.”⁶ John Dominic Crossan comes to a very similar conclusion, “Christians choose between the violent God of human normalcy and the nonviolent God of divine radicality, between peace through violence and peace through justice, according to which one they find incarnate in the historical Jesus”.⁷

The question is, “is our God violent?” Despite very good evidence from the Bible, from humanity, and from Christianity otherwise, I don’t believe so. I believe God is nonviolent, and calls all of us to nonviolence as well. I hope the chance to consider various understandings of Jesus’ death on the cross makes space within you to consider the question, and frees you to answer it in ways that are life giving. Amen

Questions for Sermon Talkback

What other atonement theories have you heard? (Or other nuances of the ones mentioned)

What sense can you make of the “Myth of redemptive violence”?

Does it make sense that sacrificial atonement is part of the myth of redemptive violence?

Is anything missing from our faith if we don’t accept sacrificial atonement?

Does Wink’s theory of Jesus’ death make sense?

How have you made sense of Jesus’ death?

How do you connect Jesus’ death to Jesus’ life?

For you, is there anything inherent about forgiveness in Jesus’ death? If not, do you find this in another place in your story of God/Jesus? If not, is it important to you?

1Jim Jordal, “What is a Domination System” found on 2/10/2017 athttp://www.windsofjustice.org/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=356 written on March 14, 2013.

2Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Fortress Press: 1993 it seems), 15.

3Wink, 28.

4Wink, 141.

5Wink, 148-9.

6Wink, 149.

7John Dominic Crossan God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (USA: HarperOne, 2007), 141.

–

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 18, 2018

Sermons

“What is Fair?” based on Matthew 20:1-16

March 11, 2018February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I have preached on this parable before, in this church. It was in September of 2014, and I laid out in that sermon that I was seriously confused by the parable and couldn’t figure out some basic problems. I had noticed that a denarius was not actually enough, and I couldn’t figure out why Jesus would tell a story about a landowner (and stand in for God) who “generously” paid all the workers “not quite enough.” I offered multiple options to try to explain how this could happen, but left the sermon without any certainty.

I have since come across a far better explanation of the parable Jesus told, which does explain why Jesus told a story about a landowner paying the workers “not enough.” It seems that I got pulled in by the first few words of the story “for the kingdom of heaven is like” as do most preachers and scholars. When you do that, then it leads to thinking that the landowner represents a generous God, and the day laborers God’s people. Then the problem in the parable is that the first-hired day laborers resent the equal payment others receive. It is a lot like the prodigal son, and the elder brother struggling with the (F)father’s generosity.

The problem with that interpretation is that the landowner is NOT generous. A denarius was enough money for a day laborer to feed HIMSELF, poorly, THAT DAY. But they didn’t work every day so they didn’t get to eat every day. Generally they were unmarried men, because they couldn’t even support themselves much less anyone else. So, even paying people who’d only labored an hour this “daily wage” doesn’t make the landowner generous because none of the laborers made enough to fill their bellies WELL that night.

William Herzog wrote Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed in 1994 when he was a professor at Colgate Rochester Divinity School. His take on this passage finally makes sense of it. Everything else I say is informed by him.

Instead of assuming that this is about the goodness and generosity of God (which doesn’t fit the parable itself), it is possible to consider that this parable might have illuminated the systems of oppression that God so vehemently stood against. To see it, we’re going to delve deeply into the advanced agrarian (agricultural) society of Jesus’ day. All agrarian societies worked like this, it isn’t particular to the Roman Empire, although it does also apply to the Roman Empire. Jesus’ ministry happened in the backwaters of the oppressive agrarian society of the Roman Empire, in the midst of a people who believed in a God who had freed them from oppression, repeatedly.

The system worked like this: “the economy was still based on redistribution of wealth through tribute and other forms of enforced obligations, whose effect was to leave rural peasants near destitution while urban elites lived in inordinate luxury.”¹ The ruler got about 25% of everything, and the ruling classes, which constituted 1-2% of the population got the same or more. Thus, Herzog says, “the top 2 percent of the population controlled between 50 and 67 percent of the annual wealth of their societies.”² The ruling class was supported by 3 other groups: the military which used force and the threat of force to keep order; the bureaucrats who created and maintained the systems to bring the wealth up the ladder; and the religious leaders, “whose priests justified the emergent order and tended the temples that embodied that order’s traditional legitimation. The role of the priestly retainers was to produce an ideology that either could motivate cultivators to turn over their surplus to the rulers or, failing that, would justify the coercion of those cultivators and their subsequent oppression by the ruling class.”³

All together, those three supportive classes were 5-7 percent of populations. Meanwhile, “The vast majority of the population, about 70 percent, were peasants who worked the land and lived in towns and villages that dotted the countryside. Peasants provided the labor that generated the wealth on which agrarian societies were based.”⁴ The purpose of society was to glean that wealth for the ruling class, who needed it, in part, to gain power over each other. Herzog says, “the goal of the aristocracy was to push exploitation to the limit in order to maximize their yield. Because the limit beyond which they could not go was the extinction of the peasants themselves, urban elites learned how to extract everything but the ‘barest minimum needed for subsistence”⁵

There were two groups of people UNDER the peasants in this hierarchy of society: the “unclean and degraded” who did despised trades, and “the expendables.” The so-called expendables (thought as such by society, but not by God) were usually “the excess children of peasant farmers who could not afford to divide their small patrimony”⁶, or the ones whose land had been ripped out from under them. The expendables comprised 5-10 percent of the population, or 15% if things were going badly. Herzog says, “The presence of expendables was the inevitable outcome of a system driven by unbridled greed. … For the expendables, life was brutal and brief; characteristically they lasted no more than five to seven years after entering this class, but the size of the expendable class remained more or less stable because its ranks were being constantly replenished”.⁷

Now, that we know how the system worked, remember those day laborers in the parable? They’re the so-called expendables. In real life, the landowner wouldn’t REALLY have hired his own day laborers. That was a job for his steward, his steward’s servant perhaps. The parable works better, and the exploitation becomes clearer, when it is him directly. Herzog thinks Jesus puts the landowner directly in this role for the sake of clarity of who is really gaining the benefit. After all, vineyards tended to be owned by the wealthy, and “The owners of great estates increased their holdings through foreclosures on loans, leading to hostile takeovers of peasant farms.”⁸ Those foreclosures also created more so-called expendables. Often the land take overs would change crops from wheat and legumes that fed the people to vineyards that provided their owners with greater wealth. The way the parable is told, the wealthy landowner is doing very well, “his imminent harvest is so great that he cannot even calculate accurately the amount of help needed.”⁹ The labor market is over-saturated with day laborers, so they all take him up on his offer for work, and after the first round they all agree to “whatever” pay the landowner claims is fair. They don’t argue about pay, because they can’t afford to lose the work.

Once the laborers have all been hired, the parable switches immediately to the payment cycle. This is where discussions of parable are usually focused. So, what does Herzog think the first hired were complaining about?

“What is their complaint? They have been shamed. The landowner has aimed a deliberate insult at them, … he has told them in effect that he values their day long effort in the scorching heat no more than the brief labor of the eleventh hour workers. He has shamed their labor, and as day laborers who have nothing left to offer but their animal energy, they must respond to the provocation. If they consent to his judgment, namely that their labor is worthless, then they have nothing at all left to offer.”¹⁰

The landowner would have been intentionally humiliating them as a part of maintaining differentiated social order. Then he goes on to particularly shame the one who spoke out. “The spokesperson has been banned, shunned, blackballed, or blacklisted; he will not likely find work in that neighborhood again.”¹¹ The landowner’s final point is that he is entitled to give what he wants to give, as it is all his. He is the one who says he is generous! There are a few inherent issues in this. He might as well have said, “’I choose to give [dounai] to this last the same as I give to you.” (20:14b) Here there is no question of paying (apodos) laborers for their work done. It is all the gift of the landowner, his charity robs the laborers of any sense of honor.”¹² Furthermore, he claims that he pays out of “what belongs to him.” By Jewish faith and law, that wasn’t true at all. All land belonged to God, and those who lived on it and worked it were God’s stewards. The Torah even makes clear the expectation of redistribution of land on a regular basis so that all have enough. The landowner is operating under those principles at all.

Overall, “Jesus’ parables codify systems of oppression in order to unveil them and make them visible to those victimized them.”¹³ Herzog thinks that, “the landowner’s final remarks likely would have met with initial approval from the peasants and villagers who had, after all, internalized the oppressor’s world.”¹⁴ However, he says Jesus would have talked it over with them, drawing them into further questions, deeper discovery, and new insights. They might even have noticed that this parable is placed “at one of the few moments in the economic cycle in which the elites were dependent on the lowliest of laborers. … [the landowner] smothered the truth that he was dependent on them, and as a result, that they could have power but only a power that grew out of their solidarity. Divided they would fall one by one before the withering hostility and judgment of the elite.”¹⁵

That is, Jesus seems to be telling this story because he sees the plight of the so-called expendables. He doesn’t find it acceptable. In fact, I think Jesus wanted to change the whole system of oppression and of wealth flow to the top. Jesus articulates again and again that God cares about those that society is willing to marginalize, ignore, or exploit. The parables of Jesus are yet another expression of God’s yearning for a just society and world. God isn’t like that landowner, God is truly generous, never an oppression, and always worried about the exploited. God yearns for distributive justice, for societies that care for all people, and God acts by urging prophetic language and creative story telling to expose and eliminate oppression.

Now, here is where this parable gets really scary. Thanks be to God, you may have been thinking, that we don’t live in that agrarian society. Except that we don’t talk much about the wealth of the top 2% in our society, because the wealth if far more concentrated than that. The top 1% own 40% of our country, and really the top .1% owns the vast majority of that.¹⁶ We still have systems where bureaucrats, the military, and religious organizations function to support, empower, and legitimize the systems of oppression. And, while we might want to claim we don’t have “expendables”, in our country as of 2016, 12.7% of the US population currently lives under the poverty line, and nearly all of them people are food insecure.¹⁷ ¹⁸ “In the U.S., the richest 1 percent of men lives 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest 1 percent of men, while among women in those wealth percentiles, the difference is 10.1 years on average.”¹⁹ It seems that many of the things said about society back then add up to talk about society today.

The idea of Jesus telling this story to the ones who were most exploited really strikes me. Even the exploited would have tended to buy into the system, that’s just how the systems work. It means that part of what we need to do today is SEE how the system works. We need to take off whatever blinders we’ve been given by society and notice how oppression and exploitation harm the lives of God’s beloveds today. In order to see, just to see, not even to do, I think there are two parts: (1) study, including words by those who have lived the oppression and (2) prayer and spiritual practice that remind us holistically that there is more to life than consumerism, hierarchy, competition, or violence. It isn’t easy or comfortable to see how this stuff works, but whether or not we want to “know how the sausage is made” it IS made, and I think God calls us to see, to know, and to loosen the grips of the system on our own lives and thought processes. This is necessary before we can do anything to change it. May God help us, even with this part. Amen

1William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech, (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994), p. 58.

2Herzog, 61.

3Herzog, 58.

4Herzog, 63.

5Herzog, 64.

6Herzog, 65.

7Herzog, 66.

8Herzog, 85.

9Herzog, 85.

10Herzog, 91.

11Herzog, 93.

12Herzog, 93.

13Herzog, 87.

14Herzog, 95.

15Herzog, 96.

16 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/06/the-richest-1-percent-now-owns-more-of-the-countrys-wealth-than-at-any-time-in-the-past-50-years/?utm_term=.4dc91658ec90

17 https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-united-states

18 https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics.aspx

19Peter Dizkes, “New study shows rich, poor have huge mortality gap in U.S.”http://news.mit.edu/2016/study-rich-poor-huge-mortality-gap-us-0411

–

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 11, 2018

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

Sermons

“Distributive Justice”based on Genesis 1:1-2:4a

February 18, 2018February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

In the early days of Christianity, new Christians were baptized on Easter and spend 40 days in preparation for that baptism, much like Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness preparing for his ministry after his baptism. (I don’t know why the order was reversed.) This included time included fasting, prayer, and teaching.

Eventually, the 40 days before Easter became a time that baptized Christians used to reconsider their lives, their faith, and the next sets of commitments they were ready to make to make space for God to sanctify their lives. The math oriented among us may have noticed that there are more than 40 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday, our tradition says that Lent does not include Sundays because all Sundays are celebrations of the resurrection, and as such are not fasting days but feasting days! Lent is 40 days, not including Sundays.

My intention during this Lent is to reconnect to those roots, in a different way. John Dominic Crossan theorizes that the primary difference between the way of Jesus and the ways of human empires is how they hold power. Namely, Jesus lived and taught nonviolent resistance, whereas human empires inherently engage in violence. If I were to come down to one difference between the ways of God and the ways of the world, I’d have to agree: God is nonviolent and the world is violent.

I’d give you examples, but I doubt a single one of you needs me to. 🙁

Nonviolence is way to create a world of justice, a world without anyone dominating anyone else, a world of fair distribution of good, a world where the people can thrive. You’ve likely noticed that this isn’t the world we live in right now. It wasn’t the world Jesus lived in either. Nor was it the world that the ancient Jews occupied.

Last week in my sermon I mentioned domination systems, “Domination systems are humanly contrived legal, social, political, economic, military, and religious systems deliberately designed and built to create and maintain power by a few at the top over the many below them. They exist to perpetuate the power of dominators over those dominated, explain why it is necessary, and to transfer wealth from workers up the ladder to the few obscenely wealthy persons at the top of the pyramid. Domination systems of various types have existed since the beginning of recorded history.”^¹ I proposed that one of God’s primary aims is to disrupt systems of domination and oppression by building cooperation and connection, to bring justice and wholeness.

This Lent, I intend to focus on 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. In other words, I think God wants wholeness for all people, and the only way to get that is by creating a just world. This seems to me to be one of the strongest overarching themes of the Bible, and I’ve chosen 5 passages as examples of how it plays out.

As you probably noticed, the first passage starts at the beginning of the Bible. Our Biblical scholars think that this story is the creation of the Southern priests of Judah. The priests were not intending to claim that they knew how the world had really started, but they were intending to make meaning out of existence itself. (Since the priests were likely also some of the most significant editors of Genesis, if they really thought they had “the answer” to creation, then they wouldn’t have included another answer immediately after this one.)

John Dominic Crossan presented some great ideas about this text during is Carl Lecture this fall. Thanks be to God, they are also written down in the 2^nd chapter of his book God and Empire, which has made it much easier for me to recreate his brilliance for you. Dom, as he invited us to call him, points out that the priests present God as first “building a house” and then “furnishing it.” Each of these takes 4 steps, so you might expect creation to take 8 days, or 9 to add a Sabbath. Yet, there are double actions taken on days 3 and 6 to force it all to fit into 6 days of action and a 7 day week. He thinks the 8 parts fitting into 6 days is actually intentional, it draws our attention to the work done to make it fit, it emphasizes getting to 7 at the right time! Dom concludes that this is intended to mean, “in creating the universe, not even God could skip the Sabbath. Put another way: in creating the universe, God crowned it with the Sabbath.”^²

He also notices that in day 7 there is a repetition of “rested from all the work he had done”, namely, “And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.” (Genesis 2:2-3) Dom explains the repetition this way, “It is not humanity on the sixth day, but the Sabbath on the seventh day that is the climax of creation. And therefore our ‘dominion’ over the world is not ownership but stewardship under the God of the Sabbath.”^³ Those priests really were thinking theologically (like they do). This creation story tells us again and again that God sees creation as good and tells us that God is the God of the Sabbath.

Now, the sabbath is one of the ten commandments, likely the one we take the least seriously. Perhaps because our understanding of it has been limited! I want you hear how it is put in Exodus, where the commandment reflects back to this creation story:

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it. (Exodus 20:8-11)

Dom says, “The Sabbath Day was not rest for worship but rest as worship. It was a day of equal rest for all – animals, slaves, children, and adults – a pause that reduced all to equality both symbolically and regularly.”^⁴ In some texts it even says that the Israelite males should rest SO THAT their slaves and animals could also rest. (Exodus 23:12 and Deut 5:14). This wasn’t something I’d noticed before Dom pointed it out, but he adds even more meaning into this, it gets even juicier! Dom suggests that because the Sabbath was the crown of creation, and one of the first things we know about God is that God is the God of the Sabbath AND because the Sabbath is about equal rest for everyone THEN the Sabbath is about DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE of rest, AND our God is a God who built distributive justice into the fabric of creation.

This creation story then suggests that everyone, all of creation, has a right to rest built into the rhythm of time itself! Furthermore, time itself beats to the rhythm of justice, with the rest as the centerpiece of time keeping. Dom concludes that the sabbath tradition itself is a distributive justice, one that starts by distributing rest equally, and then seeks to distribute food, education, and health. The desire for these to be well distributed is inherent in both God and in creation.

However, distributive justice is not inherent in most human societies. Domination systems are the opposite of this proposed rhythm of creation. Domination systems aren’t about rest OR justice. Sabbath tells us of God’s own need for rest that makes space for our shared rest. Sabbath is a gift, and one we are to share.

Today, we desperately need Sabbath. We need time away from the 24 hour news cycle. We need time for in person relationships. We need time for play! We need time to let our attention wander and not need to pull it back. We need time without pressure to be producers or consumers. We need a break from our “normal” to be more fully humanized. We need time for prayer and contemplation, for laughter and celebration. We, like all other humans in all other times, need rest.

But God doesn’t force us to take it, we have to let ourselves have it. Our tradition says that while God does set things up to be good for us, God does not force us nor dominate us to make us do it. Domination systems are bad for humanity, but God doesn’t force us out of them either. God works against them, and God’s people are asked to work against them, but no one is forced to do so.

Furthermore, the work against them can only be nonviolent and in love, or else we become a part of what we’re trying to dismantle.

This Lent, I invite you to Sabbath. Find rest, hold it dearly, and do whatever you can to enable rest for others as well. Remember the rhythm of creation, take note of the God of Sabbath, sense the yearning for justice in the world – and rest. It is the first step towards justice. It is an imperative step towards living nonviolently, as it is living nonviolently with ourselves, and thus modeling it for others. Thanks be to God for being the God of Sabbath. Amen

1Jim Jordal, “What is a Domination System” found on 2/10/2017 athttp://www.windsofjustice.org/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=356 written on March 14, 2013.

2John Dominic Crossan God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (USA: HarperOne, 2007), page 51

3Crossan, 51.

4Crossan, 54.

–

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