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Untitled

  • March 24, 2024
  • by Sara Baron

“Hosanna” based on Psalm 118:1-4, 19-24 and Matthew 21:1-11

Within Christianity, we use “Hosanna” to express joy, and praise, and adoration. Just one little issue with that – the actual meaning of the word. Hosanna is a Hebrew word meaning “Save us, we pray!” The people around Jesus weren’t shouting “Great is God” or “Jesus is good!” or “YAY, Jesus, YAY God!” Instead, they were shouting, “God, save us from our oppressor” which was clearly the Roman Empire, who – let’s be honest – didn’t appreciate that. “God, help us, the enemy is bigger than we can take on ourselves.” “God, we’re in over our heads, help us out here!”

And, of course, they were shouting, “Save us, we pray” during a PASSOVER celebration, when Passover celebrates God’s actions in saving the people from oppression in Egypt, which made the Roman Empire’s representatives a “little bit” antsy.

The Roman Empire’s representative Pontius Pilate was already coming to the city, like he did every year at Passover, with soldiers and fanfare meant to keep the Jewish people in check. The Roman Empire saw QUITE CLEARLY that getting a whole bunch of people together in the city to celebrate God’s acts of freeing them from oppression was a tinderbox for revolt, and they sought to tamp it down with displays of power and reminders of their violent capacity. In fact, they came in from Pilate’s normal abode on the Mediterranean – so from the West. With gleaming horses, and banners with the golden Eagle of Rome, with drums and the crowds shouting “Hail Caesar, son of God; Praise be to the Savior who brought the Roman Peace; Caesar is Lord….” the Empire sought to intimidate people out of revolt.

But.

Then there was Jesus. Jesus who seems to have let the crowd claim kingship of Ancient Israel on his behalf, which sometimes feels a little bit strange but is in the story nonetheless. The Palm branches were a flag of Israel- the opposite of the Golden Eagle. The donkey was expected to be ridden by the Messiah entering the city – but also is rather opposite a gleaming horse. The soldiers accompanied Pilate – while a large crowd of people impoverished by the Empire accompanied Jesus. And Instead of “Hail Caesar” the people shouted “God Save Us (from the empire).”

The Roman Empire took this Jesus parade as a significant threat.

I believe they were meant to. The protest made the violence of the Empire stand out. They crucified Jesus with the accusation “King of the Jews” above his head, as if this was the charge against him. And, after all, they shouldn’t have killed the leader of a PEACEFUL revolt, only a violent one. But sometimes the authorities have a hard time telling the difference between violence and what scares them. (Still true today.)

Then, of course, Jesus did another PEACEFUL demonstration – this time managing to make visible the ways the Empire had put in place Temple leaders who were aligned with Empire and not God’s people. That one many of us learned as the “Cleansing of the Temple.” John Dominic Crossan reflects on the “den of robbers” the Temple is said to be saying, “Notice, by the way, that a ‘den’ is not where robbers do their robbing but where they flee for safety with the spoils they have robbed elsewhere.” (God and Empire, 133.)

Jesus made clear the city of Jerusalem was where “conservative religion and imperial oppression – had become serenely complicit.” (131) And, he dies for it. Crossan says, “He did not go to get himself killed or to get himself martyred. Mark insists that Jesus knew in very specific detail what was going to happen to him – read Mark 10:33-34, for example – but that is simply Marks’ way of insisting that all was accepted by both God and Jesus. Accepted, be it noted, but not willed, wanted, needed or demanded.” (131)

Beloveds, this Palm Sunday parade is one of the most brilliant acts of non-violent direct action I’ve ever heard of, but it is part of the story of why the Empire responded with violence. I can’t hear the Palm Sunday story without knowing that it walks us to the Good Friday Crucifixion and the Holy Saturday grief and disillusion. They’re all a part of this one story – that when you make clear the ways people are oppressing others, there is a fierce lash-back and the power of violence is immense. Thank God, that isn’t the whole story – we get to Easter next week – but it is a real story, one that we can’t dismiss.

This year, the Palm Sunday parade that walks Jesus into Jerusalem sounds terrifyingly like Nex Benedict walking into school on their last day. I can’t separate out Jesus being faithful to God despite the consequences from gender-queer and non-binary people claiming their space in the world – despite the consequences. But, friends, it is sickening.

There is a story out there, one that says people are supposed to stay in tight little conformist boxes that help others make sense of the world and, heavens, the VIOLENCE that comes out when people speak up and say, “this box doesn’t fit me.” And it can be such small stuff:

I’m a woman, but the box “quiet and gentle” doesn’t fit me

or

I’m a man, but the box “stoic” doesn’t’ fit me

or

I’m a woman, but the box “looking for a man” doesn’t’ fit me

or

I’m a man, but the box “looking for a woman” doesn’t’ fit me

or

… the box “wants to have kids” doesn’t fit me

or

… the box “monogamy” doesn’t fit me

or

… the box “woman” doesn’t fit me

or

… the box “man” doesn’t fit me

or

… the box “gendered” doesn’t fit me.

And, I mean, you all know this but… WHO CARES? They’re all just silly little made up boxes that no one should be forced into and everyone should have the space to occupy, or adapt or not occupy as they see fit? Sure, some people want the world to be black and white without shades of gray – that everyone is cis-gendered, straight, sexual, and single raced 😉 But, too bad because that’s just not true.

And yet, the violence that comes when people try to force others back into the boxes they think they should live in – it reminds me of the violence of empire. There seem to be gleaming horses, loud drums, and shiny swords all over the place. And, worse, it isn’t just the external violence that attacks people – the very people who are brave enough to leave their ill-fitting boxes behind end up internalizing the violence. They’re courageous, they’re clear, they know who they are and they won’t go back to pretending to be otherwise – but that violence is so darn insidious, and it gets inside them. Those silly stories about how we’re supposed to be are so poisonous. That human need for connection gets twisted around and turned against people. And the beautiful ones who are brave and unique and wonderful end up dead.

Jesus could have stayed out of Jerusalem, except he couldn’t.

Nex could have pretend to have their gender assigned at birth, except they couldn’t.

They couldn’t. It would have been safer, easier, …. some would say wiser. But they couldn’t.

Friends, as you know, the trans and queer communities around the country and world are aching for Nex and Nex’s family and friends. Their death has reminded people of prior losses, of other brave and beautiful souls who also internalized the violence against them. The heartbreaks are everywhere.

This holy week, we will worship through the blessings of Jesus, the death of Jesus, the heartbreak of the disciples, and land on the wondrous reality that God’s work can’t be stopped by violence or death.

But how do we make sense of Nex? And the ones before them? And the ones after them? How do face the violence of the Empire today, and the ways it gets internalized?

There aren’t easy asnwers.

We grieve.

And we share the aches with God.

And we name the problems with each other.

And we keep on learning how to undercut the broken narrative, and break open little boxes, and keep people safe when they leave them.

We aren’t going to do it fast enough – we already haven’t, but just because we can’t do it immediately doesn’t mean we can stop. Jesus showed us the power of violence to stop people, and the ways religion can become complicit with violence. And he paid for it, paid to teach us those lessons. But we have them! So, we know that God and love are more powerful than violence, and love is the way we respond. And we know that religion that oppresses isn’t religion at all, and we shout it from the rooftops.

Hosanna.

God save us.

We pray.

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 24, 2024

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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

1https://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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  • March 10, 2024
  • by Sara Baron

“Hope for the Meek” based on Psalm 37:1-11 and James 5:1-6

I really love the book of James. When we worked our way through it in Bible Study years ago, I remember the shock that members of this church had that there was a book of the Bible that they could just receive without having to fight with it. That it was a book about God as we know God, and it didn’t even feel like there was a lot of contextual translating to do. Just… it was right. And that was a relief. And it is a great book.

Also, I did HEAR the passage this morning and it wasn’t particularly comfortable to sit through, particularly as a citizen of the wealthiest nation the world has ever known. And I know I am complicit.

I know I am complicit because I am a human who likes to eat food and while I do engage in some practices to make sure that the coffee we make at home results in neither deforestation of rain forests nor wage theft from growers… I don’t manage to do that with every purchase. For instance, I have no idea if the people who harvested and transported the broccoli I’m making this week are paid fairly – and in this society if I don’t know … they very well may not be.

And that’s just ONE component of life, right? The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the ways we travel, the things we purchase, the ways we deal with refuse, and if we have homes the ways we heat them, the places electricity comes from ….

I can’t keep up. And often, even if I wanted to, there aren’t good options! Or, the options that are good are so expensive that it seems like the money would be better used redistributing resources to those who are impoverished by our systems.

And, as you may already know if you’ve been listening to me preach for a while, I can then go down rabbit holes of guilt and frustration and be overwhelmed and just hang my head in shame for siding with the rich oppressors when it is SO CLEAR that the whole darn system is biased against God’s beloveds who live in poverty.

So it is kinda easy to weep and wail for how things are, even when I’m in many cases the oppressor and only sometimes the oppressed.

But then I stop, sometimes, and listen for God.

It is an occupational hazard, one that I strongly recommend to all people.

And what I hear feels like an interruption of my though process and spiraling about broccoli and solar power.

Instead, I hear a calling to a bigger picture, almost like the ways that the parables of Jesus were useful in bringing attention to the systems of oppression in his day and in breaking through the details to see the broad strokes. I hear God suggesting that I not obsess over the sourcing of broccoli, nor feel an obligation to perfect every purchase I make, and INSTEAD to focus on the big picture. Which then leads me to ask what the big picture is, and God laughs at me.

This is pretty much status quo for our relationship.

And then, suddenly, I remember what I did on Monday. On Monday I went to the Capitol with the “Invest in Our New York” campaign that was co-sponsored by many organizations – the ones I was connected to were the Labor and Religion Coalition and the New York State Poor People’s Campaign. It was a day for faith leaders to ask for a Moral New York State budget and it was a true delight to have two of this church’s laity in leadership present as well.

Anyway, we got to have conversations about what PROGRESSIVE tax laws, and how if we stop being so regressive in our tax laws we could have enough money in New York to transform the lives of the vulnerable among us. Because, remember, tax law can make a difference in HOW MANY HUMANS LIVE IN POVERTY and such important things like that, not to mention how much money is available to subsidize housing… and pretty much every other important function of government as well.

So, this week I’d bee in the Capitol advocating for

  1. A capital gains tax on income over $500,000 a year gained through investments – which is estimated to bring in $12 Billion (yes BILLION) a year.
  2. Raising corporation taxes on companies with more that $2.5 million a year in profits – which would raise $7billion annually
  3. Breaking up the income tax brackets differently, and adding a few at the top – which would raise $21 billion annually
  4. Taxing the WEALTH of billionaires – a sustainable annual income of $1.5B
  5. Creating an heir’s tax on inherited wealth over $250,000 – an annual income of $4B.

Now, you may note that these are not radical. They’re not impacting most New Yorkers. They’re asking the wealthy to pay their FAIR SHARE so that there is enough to provide resources for everyone.

This really seems like the stuff James was talking about – that when someone who has a wealth in the billions and objects to paying taxes at the same rates as those who are bringing home a paycheck makes those objections, James would respond, “weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you.” Because objecting to taking from obscene wealth to pay for food for the hungry is INHUMANE.

God isn’t asking me to be perfect in all I do, or all I purchase. But, I did hear that God would like SIGNIFICANT systemic change, particularly changes that pick up those who have been harmed the most.

I really like these asks we made on Monday, which I interpreted to mean that they’re pipe dreams. Because normally if I like something, other people think it is radical. However, we were assured that they are likely to be in the Joint House Budget proposal. Now, I think a lot of things go into that and then a lot of things end up getting negotiated out, so I’m not holding my breath or anything but — that’s good news.

It is seriously good news that our state, which has the greatest wealth disparity in the country, because we have an unusual percentage of the super wealthy, is giving serious consideration to how we can have tax laws that work for everyone and not just for the super wealthy.

We can’t win every battle, we can’t get every good resolution passed, and we can’t spend all of our money responsibility. There will always be ways that James calls us out, AND, at the same time, there is reason to hope.

The Psalm says, “the meek shall inherit the land, and delight in abundant prosperity.” When I first read it, I wondered if this was simply a device to keep people from losing hope. I thought about how trust in God to create justice “eventually” has been a means to maintain the status quo. But then I started to wonder what it would be like to trust in this dream of God’s. Maybe I won’t ever see it, but maybe my life can be a contribution towards getting to it.

What if those who wished to do harm didn’t have the power to do so, so people didn’t get hurt? Then the ones James calls out as taking the wages of laborers..,wouldn’t? What if we could live together with security and delight? What if those who are in need didn’t have to fight to get what they deserve, but we all lived in a society with just distribution of resources and the meek people who aren’t willing to lord over anyone else – what if they also get enough and had delight and ease?

The Psalm isn’t a pipe dream, it is yet another description of the kindom of God we’re working toward. A more moral state budget isn’t a pipe dream either. As Rev. Dr. Theoharis – oh, did I mention she was also there advocating with us on Monday??- as Rev. Dr. Theoharis says, change is possible INCLUDING when people who are seen as POWERLESS work together.

I love her story of migrant laborers taking on big farming and winning.

I love that requests for a more moral budget are in consideration. I love that I got to advocate with amazing people on Monday, and be heard by some great ones too. I love having a little hope. And I LOVE LOVE LOVE the idea that the meek get the benefits without having to fight for them. That’s an image I want to savor. That in the kindom of God it isn’t your birth place, or your connections, your skills, or even your capacity to be persistent that gets you a fair shake in life – but it is your EXISTENCE. The meek. The meek shall inherit the land and delight in abundant prosperity. That’s what I’m working on, and I’m sooooo very glad to be working on it with you, beloveds of God. 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 10, 2024

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  • 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

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  • February 25, 2024
  • by Sara Baron

“We Hope for What We Do Not See” based on Jonah 2 and Romans 8:18-25

Despite my enjoyment of the “Who Did” song1, I haven’t preached about Jonah often. I may even have groaned when I looked at the texts for this week – even though I was the one to pick the essay from “We Cry Justice” and the accompanying recommended scriptures. I fear, though, that my avoidance of this text is unjustified.

Because, the issues I have are really quite silly. Here we go:

  • Whales don’t eat people. Nor do large fish.
  • Stomachs have acid, but not a lot of air, making them uninhabitable

You know, stuff like that.

But it turns out that taking a story literally and objecting to the pragmatic details is a really great way to miss powerful symbolism and deeper meaning within a story. So dismissing this story has only had the impact of keeping me from attending to the wisdom it has.

Which I noticed when I actually read the 2nd chapter of the book of Jonah, which is rather surprising. You may recall that in the first chapter Jonah was asked to to to Nineveh and tries to run away instead, gets on a ship going in the other direction, a storm comes up, Jonah suggests that the storm is God’s way of saying he isn’t listening, he suggests he be thrown into the sea, the sailors try not to do so, but finally they throw him in hoping the rest of them will live, and the storm quiets and the sailors are converted…. and then the whale did swallow Jonah. Down. 😉

So, given that chapter 2 is a prayer of Jonah from inside the whale, I think there would be just cause to assume that the prayer is either a lament that God put him in this horrid situation OR a plea for help, a request for forgiveness that results in Jonah being released from said whale? Right?

But it isn’t. The prayer of chapter 2 is a prayer of THANKSGIVING, whereby Jonah seems to have already concluded that the whale is a means of salvation, and is thanking God for God’s gracious actions. And that’s a place where I noticed that there is something useful in this story, because … well, I’m not sure I’d have gotten there.

I think that if I had a sense of God asking me to do something I vehemently didn’t want to do, that resulted in my very near drowning, and then gasping for air inside an enormous beast I couldn’t talk to or control, I’d have missed the memo that said enormous beast was a gift from God. Really. I mean, maybe, 3 days in, hungry, thirsty, and still wet but shockingly alive I might have figured it out, but that’s even kind of doubtful.

But Jonah’s prayer starts with “I called to the Lord in my distress and [God] answered me.”(NRSV 2a) So, it seems like he got it immediately. (We’re working with symbolism here people, let go of any assumption of factuality and let a good story be a good story.) And, the prayer is even specific, “The waters closed over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head…yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O LORD my God.” (5,6d)

Wow. Jonah is sinking to the bottom of the sea, hopeless, and helpless, and then experiences God as lifting him up from the place of death, of bringing LIFE out of DEATH. And, I’m kinda familiar with THAT metaphor, right? But this is a different angle on it.

For me, the incongruities of life in the belly of the whale finally recede to make space for the questions of life and faith. When have we been floating down to the bottom of the sea, out of air, and out of hope? There are a lot of possible answers to that, right? And our lives are different, so our answers are different. Grief can feel like sinking to the bottom of the sea– anticipatory grief and the utter horror of waking up and realizing someone you love isn’t there Depression can feel like sinking to the bottom of the sea. Job loss and financial hardship can feel like sinking to the bottom of the sea. Loss of relationship. Abuse. Illness. Injury. Car accidents. Becoming unhoused. Failing. Flailing. A lot can feel like sinking to the bottom of the sea.

And what was the thing that picked you and kept you alive when you could no longer do so for yourself? Who or what was the whale? Was a phone call from a friend who cared? The arrival of flowers? The long, hard, careful work of a therapist? An unexpected welcome? An offer you couldn’t have anticipated? The life restoring work of first responded and medical professionals? Someone showing you the ropes you couldn’t figure out on your own? A good Samaritan?

How long did it take you to realize that you weren’t at the bottom of the sea anymore, and you could breath (if only a little bit), and there might be a hope for dry land again someday? Was it immediate? Did it take 3 days, 3 weeks, 3 years?

I wonder, if sometimes the darkness at the bottom of the sea is so scary that we block out the memory of it, but with it we then block the memory of being scooped up. Especially because being eaten by a whale does NOT immediately seem like rescue. Right!?! At the bottom of the sea, one condolence card can’t really make a difference – except sometimes it can. Sometimes knowing that someone else grieves with you, or sees you, or can share a memory that gives you a new story about a person you loved – sometimes that can be the whale.

Several years ago during a stewardship campaign, I was gifted the task of asking participants in some of our ministries what our ministries meant to them. As previously mentioned, I have a problematic tendency to be overly pragmatic, and while I delight in our breakfast program, I’m aware that it offers 1 meal out of an wished for 21 for a week. However, our guests assured me that the 1 meal matters.

Similarly, at that time we had Sustain Ministry, where we gave out soap and toilet paper, feminine hygiene products, and diapers to those who needed them. (Note: other organizations now do this work – thank God – and the need we were responding to then has changed.) I asked those waiting if they’d be willing to be interviewed, and I asked them why what we did mattered. One woman said that the resources we offered made the difference for her between being able to take care of her kids on her own and being financially forced back into an abusive relationship.

I loved Sustain ministry, but I thought it just made things a little easier for people whose lives were really hard. I didn’t know it was whale picking someone out of the bottom of the sea.

In the fall of 2021, after about a year and a half of ministry during a pandemic, while adjusting to being a new parent, and with a few other significant stressors in my work life, I was a hairsbreadth away from leaving ministry. Truthfully, I had been, on and off, for 2 years by that point. More so, I didn’t really know it. I knew I was really tired. I knew I felt like my ministry didn’t matter. I knew every day of work was a fight, and I didn’t want to fight anymore. But I actually didn’t know I was near the bottom of the sea in my work, until our District Superintendent looked at me and said, “what you’ve dealt with isn’t normal, you need a break. How long do you want? I’ll find coverage and money to pay for it.” She was the whale, or maybe the 8 weeks I took off were. Maybe both? Let’s go with both.

Sometimes I still meet people who know that I took that break – the announcement of it was shockingly popular on YouTube- and I watch them carefully dance around asking me if I’m still a pastor, or still a pastor here, or really what I do in the world now. They’re often shocked to learn I’m still in ministry and grateful for it. (That’s fair, a whole lot of people have exited ministry since then.) I continue to think I have a lot to learn to be in ministry in life-giving and sustainable ways, but the way I knew I still wanted to be a pastor and YOUR pastor was that once the day-to-day pressures were relieved, I found myself dreaming of what we could do together, and missing you. I’m been in those weeds at the bottom of the sea, pastorally, but I just needed some gulps of fresh air to be able to find the dry land. I’m really thankful there was a whale. And, yet, I didn’t know how important the whale was when it arrived.

Romans 8 speaks of hope particularly directly, reconsidering the struggles of people and the world as labor pains of the kindom of God being born. While I don’t want to sanctify the pains or struggles of the world, it would be really great if they were productive like that. If they mattered, and made new things possible. The essay from “We Cry Justice” today talks about the pain of ecological destruction, and the power of the people to stop horrible decisions, EVEN when money is on the other side. That people, together, have power. Which is a good example of the ways that the pain of the earth can become motivation for healing the earth. It is a way that pains can be labor pains.

Romans 8 also speaks famously about hope. “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” None of us can see the whale coming when we’re at the bottom of the sea. Nor, even, could we know it is a saving whale if we did. But hope involves knowing that God is with us, and God is creative, and there ARE whales sometimes, and we can BE whales sometimes, and no matter what happens, we know a God who brings life – again and again.

Dear ones, sometimes God sends whales when we are at the bottom of the sea. Thank God. Amen

1For the uninformed: https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/10499923/100+Singalong+Songs+for+Kids/Who+Did+%28Swallow+Jonah%29%3F

February 25, 2024

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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  • February 18, 2024
  • by Sara Baron

“Wailing as a Means to Hope” based on Amos 5:10-15 and Jeremiah 31:15-17

I’ve committed to a theme of hope in the midst of despair this Lent, because it is a topic I sense we all desperately need. You can be forgiven for thinking that thus far in worship readings we’ve done the despair part better than the hope part. Our “We Cry Justice” reading came from the section entitled “Struggle and Lament” and an essay entitled, “You Must Let Us Wail” and it was fabulously matched with Amos bemoaning the poor being trampled and Jeremiah offering us the famous words, “Rachel is weeping for her children.”

What excellent summaries of exactly the states of the world that result in a sense of being hopeless and overwhelmed. Dismay, lament, injustice, wailing, and despair.

Amos and Jeremiah are prophets, and that means they’re doing something different with the despair than we might expect. Truthfully, they’re USING it. They’re using it to motivate people, to create change. Amos looks around, sees the messes, points them out, and then calls people to live differently. We hear it within our passage today:

Seek good and not evil,
   that you may live;
and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you,
   just as you have said.
Hate evil and love good,
   and establish justice in the gate;
it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts,
   will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.

Those two verses show up in the midst of a looooooooong lament, but they’re also THE POINT. “Do life differently, don’t keep up this system of things being unjust.” And, indeed, Amos is lamenting the unjust ways society is siphoning wealth from the poor to the rich. Many modern prophet smake similar points in similar ways. But perhaps we’re not hearing the point within the lament – the POINT is to create change.

Jeremiah is doing a similar thing but on a larger scale. Jeremiah is the prophet of the exile: he saw where things would land if nothing changed, he saw destruction happening, he saw the depth of despair, and then afterwards he points out that not all hope is lost. His is a tough book, but the hope in it is real. We may also be trained to hear more easily, “Rachel is weeping for her children” than the lines that follow it, “They shall come back, there is hope for your future.” Jeremiah isn’t speaking an easy or light hope, he is speaking hope into the darkest of times – and that hope was just as real as his concerns about the exile had been.

In Jeremiah’s writing, despair is named, and met with hope, despite it all.

Interestingly, Stephen Pavey seems to be doing a similar thing. He is speaking clearly about the injustices of our day, but he isn’t doing it to bring hopelessness. He says, “Callie and Martin, like Amos, are speaking for God using the poetry and prophecy of lament. They are calling for justice to be worked out and lived out in order to build a different world, a beloved community.”1

There is a funny truth here: prophets don’t lament things being the way they are to induce hopelessness and lead people to shut down because they’re overwhelmed. Prophets name injustice because they believe JUSTICE is possible. Prophets name systemic greed because they believe an equitable distribution of resources is possible. Prophets name their concern about “how things are going” because they have hope it can get turned around.

Why isn’t this more obvious? Why does this seem worth mentioning, even?

I think dear ones, because we now live lives saturated in “news” that can sound a little bit like prophecy, but isn’t. Headlines lament poisoned water, but “the news” is an industry committed to turning a profit from exposing bad news. There may be plenty of people in the industry who do so hoping it will motivate change, but that isn’t the industry’s first concern. And, we’d probably be OK if there were just headlines about poisoned water. We can work on that! But there are also headlines about… wars, possible genocides, famines, coups, floods, fires, earthquakes, ELECTIONS, hospital mergers, lack of nursing home staffing, COVID learning declines, long COVID, increasing poverty rates, lack of housing for migrants, use of solitary confinement despite it being banned…

What else have you read THIS WEEK?

The news can sound like a prophet, but it isn’t one.

Because a prophet shares concerns about injustice to motivate changes towards God’s visions of justice. NOT to make money.

Now, I’m really not trying to pick on the news industry (it is having a hard enough time), nor discourage you from seeking to be informed (which sometimes can feel like a form of power in an otherwise powerless existence). Rather, I’m wanting to remind us all that a constant intake of bad news isn’t something we’re OBLIGATED to engage in, and knowing doesn’t ACTUALLY create change. Especially if we’re already overwhelmed, especially if we’re worried about our own lives of that of one of our loved ones. The world is vast and complicated and none of us are ever going to know everything, and it is definitely OK to fast from the news when it leads you to hopelessness. (Lenten Spiritual practice I’d recommend, even.)

Because the news isn’t doing the work of the prophets. It isn’t rooted in hope.

The prophets do that work and God still calls them to do it. Interestingly, the prophets sometimes get overwhelmed by despair too, but somehow they find their way through Somehow the urging of God to call for something BETTER than what is, motivates them to move beyond what’s wrong and into what could be. When we seek out information, maybe it matters a little bit why the story is being told – and why it is being listened to. None of us can respond to the hundreds of concerns we can read about every day, so it is worth paying attention to if in-taking them is live-giving or life-draining. I do not believe God needs us to know about one more justice issue we can’t tackle if knowing it drains us from hope.

There is, however, something fundamentally GOOD about injustice being named – by prophets and even by the news. The piece of hope is that people will respond “this isn’t as it should be.” Now, again, if that’s just a way to make some money, meh. But STILL, just naming that things being broken isn’t as God wants them to be MATTERS.

The act of lament is the act of seeing what is broken and wishing for it to be healed.

Sometimes, dear ones, when we feel hopeless, I think we’re really engaging in the sacred act of lament. And we need not berate ourselves for engaging in sacred actions, even if they’re hard.

What we may need to guard against though, is being so overwhelmed that we move into helplessness. And that, beloveds of God, I sometimes fear is one of the impacts of the 24 hour news cycle compounded by social media. They move us into learned helplessness. Because we hear about wars fought far away, and children being made into orphans, and we can’t actually DO anything about it – and we hear about … and we can’t do anything about it, and we hear about… and we can’t do anything about it, and we start to learn that we can’t do ANYTHING.

Which is simply not true.

We can’t create peace in the Middle East, but we can reach out to our neighbors in the Capital Region who are Muslim and Jewish and remind them with our words and actions they are seen and loved. That matters in the face of the hatred being slung around, and it matters in simply planting the seeds of peace and love in the world. We can’t eliminate hunger within the world or even our community, but we’ve learned we can serve one hot meal with a healthy dose of respect and that it can matter a whole lot. We can’t eliminate single use plastics, but we’ve learned to grocery shop with reusable bags, and carry reusable water bottles and those actions add up.

There is plenty we can do, actually, there is so much we can do we struggle to decide which ways to share our love in the world, right? GOOD!!

Dear ones, a yearning for the world to be different, a lament at how things are, a longing for more justice, even fear that things might continue without change – these are beautiful expressions of HOPE. Because something in you believes this brokenness isn’t enough, and shouldn’t be enough. It meant to motivate change.

Not despair, not being overwhelmed, not learned helplessness. Change.

Hate evil and love good,
   and establish justice in the gate.

It is possible. With God all things are possible. Love good dear ones, it isn’t time to give up yet. Amen

1 Stephen Pavey“12: You Must Let Us Wail” in We Cry Justice, ed. Liz Theoharis (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021) p. 57 used with permission.

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 18, 2024

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  • March 12, 2023
  • by Sara Baron

“What Can Separate Us from the Love of God?“ based on Romans 8:31-28

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor powers-that-be, nor things that are, nor things that will be, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Redeemer.” -Romans 8:38-39 1

“There is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”-Galatians 3:28 2

If I were picking the most central Bible verses from the Christian Testament, these two would be it. To be fair, I think the Gospels have the best stories, and stories are more important than verses, but nevertheless. With all the issues I have with Paul, I’ll give him these. They’re everything. I’m not preaching on Galatians today, but I figured if I told you I had 2 favorite Christian Testament passages and didn’t share them both, I’d lose you to wondering what the other was. And, anyway, they’re especially beautiful and whole together.

Today we’re on Romans, on nothing can separate us from the love of of God.

Nothing.

This is so core to faith that I don’t feel like it can ever be emphasized enough, and also I fear that most of you already know this and aren’t that interested in it. Except…

One of my dear ones, a mentor and friend, suggested that the reason we have to keep telling people that God loves them is that it is really hard to believe, and a lot of messages are out there which tell people they aren’t lovable. So we keep coming back to God’s love in hopes of convincing people it applies to them, and to everyone else too.

Paul does a good job talking about what doesn’t get in the way of God’s love. It goes without saying that God’s love is also not impacted by wealth or poverty, race or ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity, history of trauma, mental or physical health status, abilities or disabilities, guilt nor shame. God’s love isn’t dependent on us being good, or useful, or even kind. God’s love applies to all, even the ones we think are awful, even the ones we think are evil, even the ones who have done great harm.

Which is to say that God’s love isn’t the same as God’s approval, clearly. Rather we lack the power to stop God’s love, even when we are at our worst, even when we do great harm to others of God’s beloveds.

That is: God’s love is the foundation of the universe, the essence of life itself, and the ground of our being.

Love is at the center of it all.

Now, I can be honest. That’s a faith statement for me. I believe that love, God’s love in specific, is at the center of it all. Others… don’t. Even some of you may not, perhaps because the use of the word God may confuse things enough for some of you that you’d rather withhold judgement. (For the record, I love that this is a church with enough spaciousness for people to wonder about the meaning of the word God and how we should and shouldn’t be using the word.)

So, knowing that I am speaking as myself, with some hope it might be useful for others, let me share a little a bit about what that means for me. If love is at the center of all that is, then judgement is not. That’s pretty important to me, even though I think accountability, apology, and growth matter a lot. But I see in many theologies a premise that God is first and foremost out to judge us, and that punishment and reward are at the center of the all that is. I don’t agree.

Alongside this, I fear that a lot of what we are doing as human being is trying to prove ourselves worthy. Maybe that sounds like “worthy of the space we take up on the planet,” maybe like “worthy of the resources we consume,” often I fear it is simply “worthy of love.” It may be that this is prevalent right now because of the internalization of exploitative capitalism and its obsession with worth itself. It may be that this is simply a basic human fear. It may be that our society’s structure explicitly devalues and dehumanizes some, and that keeps the rest of us afraid of falling into that category… I don’t know WHY. But I know a whole lot of our energy is about trying to be worthy. And I know that if God’s love for each of us and all of us is at the center of all that is, then we are already worthy and can stop trying so hard to prove it. Which can be a relief for as long as we remember it.

Now this is a place that progressive Christianity can get a little bit confusing. Because I talk a lot about “building the kindom of God” and others about “being the beloved community” and quite often we analyze what isn’t working in hopes of motivating people to work towards a better system that does a better job of valuing all of God’s people.

But there is a nuance here that I want you to know about: the goal is not to be good enough of a person, or good enough of a Christian, or enough of a do-gooder to be worthy of God’s love. WE DO NOT HAVE TO EARN IT. Rather, if we are able to soak in any amount of God’s love for us, to soak up the abundance of goodwill God has for us and for all, (and if we are able to do that with any life energy still with us, which is questionable for many right now, so please take that seriously too)… then quite often we wish to respond to love with gratitude and hope, and when we wonder what that should look like, THEN we hear the suggestion that God would like us to love one another as a form of loving God back.

Do you hear the difference? IT ISN’T AN OBLIGATION!!!! You don’t have to work for the church’s committees (I say with trepidation), or volunteer with worthy causes, or give generous donations, or even smile when you are cranky. God loves you as you are, and you don’t have to earn it.

Instead, when you are able to be upheld by that love, and you have extra to share, you are invited – welcome – to use that energy, passion, power, and resources toward loving God’s others beloveds. But first, breath it in, soak it in, and let it change you from within. First, it penetrate the guilt, and the shame, let it have it’s time with your exhaustion.

FIRST, remember that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God, nothing, nothing, nothing. And then, maybe, then when you are ready, then when you WANT TO, then when it feels right, THEN you can see how you want to love in return. Amen

1 A Women’s Lectionary Translation

2Ibid

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 12, 2023

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  • March 5, 2023
  • by Sara Baron

“What is Good?“ based on Psalm 92:1-5, 12-15 and Matthew 7:15-20

Two weeks ago I preached a sermon entitled “There is No Single Way to Follow Jesus” where I talked about diverse understandings of God and Jesus, multitudes of prayer practices, and not writing people out of the Body of Christ because we disagree with them. It seemed pretty important to me, especially as we baptized a teenager who might have been told along the way that there is one right way to follow Jesus. Others told me that, and I was grateful my church gave me space to disagree.

Afterwards, one of the wise ones around here recommended that I preach a follow up sermon that continued to make space for the multitude of ways to follow Jesus, but helped us all see that is different from saying “everything goes.” I have taken that to be an invitation to talk about “discernment” which is the fancy word for “figuring out what God would have us do.” Or, as apple dictionary puts it (exceptionally well, wow!) “perception in the absence of judgment with a view to obtaining spiritual guidance and understanding.”1

So today we’re talking about discernment, following the warnings of Matthew 7 to beware of false prophets and pay attention to whether or not love is the outcome of teachings, decisions, and leadership. That means we are also talking about how we live our faith values, and how we making decisions while listening to God. But, as an entrance into this conversation I need to tell you about what I am now thinking about as “The Great Toilet Brush Dilemma of 2023.”

Several articles I’ve come across recently have stated that toilet brushes should be replaced every few months, which is faster than I had thought, and I decided perhaps it should be taken seriously (as it didn’t appear to be put out by the toilet brush industry.) However, the toilet brushes I have are made of plastic, and I try to minimize my use of plastic (with limited success), so I searched the internet for “eco toilet brush” and found there were a number of options. However, most of them seemed excessively expensive, which violated that old Wesleyan principle of “earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can” so I ignored those. One seemed reasonably priced and came with decent reviews, but a further look found that the brush didn’t work with chemicals (maybe OK), was hard to get dry (hmmm), and tended to mold (no!). So then I went back and looked at the suggested brushes from my preferred guide to such things and they offered two ideas, both made of plastic, but with REUSABLE brush heads. Which is better than non-reusable brush heads, right? But THEN I looked to make sure I could get the brush heads and I discovered one could, but then one had to decide between getting one brush at a time at nearly the price of the whole thing or getting 4 at a time for a much better rate, that even claimed to be “eco” and CLAIMED to be biodegradable but the number of asterisks around that led to that claim being less than believable, at which point I was needed to do something else and I made absolutely no decision. It is now nearly a week later and every time I think about finishing this decision I throw my hands up in the air and move on to something else while muttering to myself that this is a really trivial thing not worthy of so much of my attention.

Which is to say that in an attempt to balance some values I hold: care for creation (limit plastics!), financial responsibility (spend wisely!), and basic cleanliness (limit bathroom bacteria growth) – I got stumped. And I needed to tell you that so I could enter into this conversation about discernment with the appropriate levels of humility and no one would think I was offering expert opinions.

It really is true that not everything goes. There are better and worse decisions that can be made, sometimes even good versus evil. But those are the EASY choices. Choose good! The harder ones are where it is more difficult to see which is which, and while we are always going to struggle with those, God is here to help us, and to forgive us when we get it wrong. We’re talking about how to make those harder decisions today.

In this church we were given the gift of the phrase “optimize prime values” by a now departed member, Lee Tupper. Lee wrote, “there is a set of higher values (henceforth referred to as prime values in this discussion) that serve as the ultimate standard by which the relative ‘goodness’ of the consequences of human activities is to be judged. This relative ‘goodness’ is a measure of the degree to which the evolving human system tends towards a consistency with the relational type of God assumed. It is reasonably obvious that none of these concepts can be expected to be known or understood with real precision. It is also likely that we will not ever know whether the prime values are absolute and our knowledge of them is evolving, or the values themselves are evolving.”

However, other than suggesting “love” and “justice” as likely candidates, Lee didn’t tell us what the prime values ARE. As a church we’ve spent some time discussing it, and at the moment we lean towards naming that we think love, justice, compassion, inclusion and humility are prime values (although we have made no claim that this is a complete list).

So, if you are looking to figure out where God may be leading you in a decision, and you are needing some structure to use in thinking about things, considering love, justice, compassion, inclusion and humility might be of use. They at least put boundaries around what is important. That said, it doesn’t answer the Great Toilet Brush Dilemma of 2023, other than maybe affirming that the concerns I have are valid, which actually is a great help.

Within Methodist circles, one of the better known means of making decisions is to look at John Wesley’s three simple rules: 1. Do no harm, 2. Do all the good you can, 3. Stay in love with God.2 I have taught courses on Bishop Reuben Job’s short book on these rules, they’re quite lovely. However, my strongest memory of teaching it was the wise lay person who said, “These rules are great, but when I attempt to apply them to anything, I get no more clarity than when I started.” I had no counter. The rules are good, and sometimes they help, but sometimes they don’t.

The truth is that discernment is HARD WORK, and more of an art than a science. Most decisions are really complicated, and if they were simple they wouldn’t be the ones we were struggling with. There is very, very little in the world that is pure good or pure evil, and all decisions involve balancing various values while working with limited data. (Perhaps why the Tupper family motto is “We need more data!”)

I have two means of discernment that tend to work well for me, ones that help me get past the clutter of data and competing values. One I’ve mentioned a few times: the spiritual practice of daily examen. Truthfully, this is the BEST method I know for making big life decisions, and often small ones too. It combines spiritually and data in a way that brings me deep joy. The process is this: every day, take some time to ask for God’s help in reviewing the day and then ask two questions. One question should be along the lines of “what was the best part of my day?” or “where was I most connected to love today?” (I think those are two versions of the same question, you may not.) The second question should be along the lines of “what was the worst part of my day?” or “where was I most disconnected from love today?” After reviewing it all, thank God for the day as a whole – the good the bad and the stuff in the middle. Then, write down the answers. If you have a spiritual partner, it can be great to also share these answers every day. Over time, patterns will emerge in your answers. You will be able to see what is bringing life and what is draining life from you, and hopefully to adapt your life towards what brings life, and away from what drains life. When it comes to decisions about jobs, relationships, housing, or even faith communities, this sort of careful attention to where God’s life-giving energy emerges in you is amazing for guiding decision making.

The second method is one I learned from another church member. I would NOT recommend it for major life decisions, but it may in fact work for me when it comes to the Great Toilet Brush Dilemma of 2023. This one, like the last, involves trusting that God is with me, and that I thus have the wisdom I need to make the best possible decisions. In this case it involves trusting bodily wisdom. It goes like this: Sit on the edge of a stool or a hard chair. Set up two options in different places in front of you (say, to the right and to the left), close your eyes, and then notice if your body sways towards one or the other. That is, your subconscious will guide you to the decision you likely already made but hadn’t noticed yet, and the decision you already made is one that God helped you with.

Ok, there you have it: four methods to help with discernment, which is far fewer than I know, but maybe more than you needed. There is one last thing to say about this: we’re going to get things wrong, a lot. And that’s OK. God works with us where we are, and I think God works to multiply the good in the world, so whatever goodness we end up helping with ends up being far bigger than we might imagine. However, despite it all, I still have no clarity on toilet brushes. Alas. Amen

1Definition 2, accessed March 2, 2023.

2Particular phrasing adapted from Reuben Job. (He says 1 and 3 that way, but makes 2. “do good”).

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 5, 2023

Uncategorized

“Self-Denial and A Plague” based on Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16…

  • February 28, 2021
  • by Sara Baron

In
the book “Debt: The first 5000 Years,” David Graeber says
economic history as we know it is a falsehood.  Instead, he says,
currency came into being this way:  in order for empires to expand,
they needed armies at their ever expanding borders; in order to have
armies further from home there needed to be a way to feed them; in
order to convince people to feed armies, they gave the coins to the
army as pay and REQUIRED all the people have some of those coins to
give to the empire.  Thus the creation of taxes, coins, expanded
military might, and markets came into being together.  Furthermore,
coins made it much easier to calculate and charge interest, which
made it much easier to keep some people in poverty and make the rich
richer.

Graeber
also says that the time when “markets” were created in history
was ALSO the time that the world’s major religions were formed.  (It
was a LONG era.)  He proposes the religions were an oppositional
force to the value system of the markets. Instead of valuing coins,
interest, and violence, religions emphasized the inherent value of
people and our responsibility to care for each other.1

When
I read that conception of the history of religion, I was excited and
relieved.  First of all, it sounds like God.  God works in contexts,
and expansive religions weren’t needed until expansive markets needed
to be countered.  Smaller, tribal expressions of faith worked just
fine.  It also makes sense of our Bible, which if we’re honest,
bounces back and forth between utterly radical critique of the
systems of power and empire and — well, justifying systems of power
and empire, as if there is a tug of war about the empire trying to
appropriate religion.  Over all though, I found it a relieve to see
the 40,000 foot view of what we’re doing.

Both
of our passages today are about following God’s ways.  In Genesis we
God hear claiming Abraham and Sarah and making plans to work with
them in the future.  In Mark we hear reflections of the early church,
which was undergoing significant persecution, reflecting on the
powers of life and death.

So,
what does it mean to follow God’s ways?

This
was an open question in Genesis, and in Mark, and has been one in our
lives too.

This
is an open question in modern times too, and I hear people offer a
variety of answers.  For some following God includes and is expressed
by particular clothing or diets.   For some it includes and is
embodied in particular prayer types or times.  For some it is
reflected in personal choices – everything from what words are
said, to abstinence from drugs or alcohol or sex – or just dancing
to what is purchased and where and why.  For some this is reflected
in choices to join or be present with a faith community for worship –
or more.  For some this is related to particular ways of seeing unity
with the divine.  For yet others it is related to energy and effort
being used to build the kindom of God.  

John
Wesley broke things into 4 categories: personal acts of holiness
(prayer, Bible Study, healthy living), communal acts of holiness
(worship, study, group decision making, sacraments), personal acts of
mercy (doing good works), and communal acts of mercy (seeking
justice.)  Sometimes I hear people focus on only 1 of those 4, but
they work best as a whole.

To
break that down into really direct language – I sometimes hear
people think that speaking without swearing and abstaining from
caffeine are SUFFICIENT ways of being faithful to God.  More power to
those who find spiritual power in those choices, but I don’t think
they’re sufficient in following God.  Following God requires
connecting with others, as well as caring for others, not just
behaving “properly.”  (Whatever that means.)

And
all of that gets us to today – to what some of my friends call
“Coronatide.” (If you don’t get it, don’t worry, it isn’t funny
enough to explain.)  When reading a passage so emphatically about
self-denial as a means of following Jesus, how do we hear it TODAY?

It
seems to me that two mostly distinct forms of self-sacrifice have
been occurring over the past year:

There has been the sacrifice and
self-denial of those who have directly cared for others at risk to
themselves –which has included people who have gotten sick and
people who have died because of taking this risk.

There has also been a quieter
sacrifice and self-denial of those who have put life as they know it
aside for the well-being of others.  (Masks, distancing, not doing
things they love, not being with people they love).  To some degree
this sort of sacrifice comes with privilege – many would choose
this one and couldn’t.  That doesn’t meant that this sacrifice has
been easy (it hasn’t), nor unimportant.  These quiet sacrifices have
taken care of the whole, including those in the first group offering
care.

At
first glance, Mark’s passage seems to be about making a choice to
follow Jesus, and sticking with it.  Upon close examination, the Mark
passage is more radical than it first appears.  One scholar
summarizes, “The threat to punish by death is the bottom line of
the power of the state; fear of this threat keeps the dominant order
intact.  By resisting this fear and pursuing the kingdom’s practice
even at the cost of death, the disciple contributes to shattering the
powers’ reign of death in history.  To concede the state’s
sovereignty in death is to refuse its authority in life.”2

Religion
> market/empire indeed!

Mark
suggests here that to choose to follow Jesus is to deny and ignore
the threats of the state.  It is to pick a full and abundant life,
and not fear.

Does
that feel strange right now?  I don’t know if anyone feels like their
life has been full and abundant in the past year.  And there has been
LOTS of fear.

Unless…

Unless
we change out we think about it.  No, the past year has not been
“full and abundant,” but this past year we have picked LIFE for
ourselves and for others over and over again.  We have prioritized
the full and abundant life of the COMMUNITY over ease and delight in
our own lives. We have tried to maximize the number of people who
will have long, full, healthy lives – with each and every difficult
choice we make.

And
sometimes it is a really important thing to remember that the stuff
we do – masks, and social distancing, and zoom (eh) and lack of
hugs, we do for a reason.

For
life.

For
each other.

For
Jesus.

For
the kindom.

We
have been following the way of God in new, different, and difficult
ways.  We have been denying ourselves the joy of in person worship;
we have been carrying the crosses of wearing masks, forfeiting the
lives we know for … all for the sake of other people’s continued
lives.

We
have been trying to take care of all of God’s beloveds.  We have been
reminded that the way to care for one is to care for the whole.  It
has been hard, and it has mattered – and it still matters.  While
what we’ve done has largely been quiet and seemingly small, thanks be
to God for what we’re able to do for each other!

Amen

1David
Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years
(Brooklyn and London: Melville House, 2011).

2Ched
Myers, Binding the Strong Man
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998 and 2008, 274.  He is quoting
Taylor, 1963: 247.

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 28, 2021

Uncategorized

“Rainbows and Rain” based on Genesis 9:8-17 and Mark…

  • February 21, 2021
  • by Sara Baron

When
do you look for rainbows?  After it rains, right?  The Genesis story
connects the rainbow with God’s promise not to flood the earth –
again.  It is an oddly timed symbol for such a promise, because by
the time it stops raining and the rainbow shows up … it has stopped
raining and the fear of flooding is likely already relieved.

Or,
maybe that’s the beauty of it.  

Because
during a rainstorm we can anticipate it.  “When this is over, we
can look for a rainbow!”  So, even during the storm, we anticipate
it’s ending and the reminder that all will be well.

Of
course, in these days of climate changed by humans, rain can be
rather scary at times.  Floods come more often, and more destructive
than usual.  But that actually fits.  The ancient Israelites were
desert people and deserts have weird relationships with rain.  That
is, they need water for life, and have less of it than most, but
because the earth is so parched most of the time, and water tends to
come in deluges rather than sprinkles, heavy rainstorms quickly lead
to flash flooding.

The
ancient Israelites may have had some of our current misgivings about
torrential rain, and this story may have been a way to center in the
midst of their fears.  While it rains, you can anticipate God’s
promise.  When it is pouring, you start preparing for God’s sign of
hope.

While
I believe that the rainbow became a symbol for LGBTQIA pride because
of the diversity of colors representing celebrating the diverse ways
of being, I have always appreciated this anticipatory hope aspect of
it as well.  The choice of the rainbow symbol, to those aware of this
Genesis story, is a choice to say, “things aren’t good now, but
they’re gonna be.”

Or,
in the language of the African American church tradition, “God is
the one who makes a way out of no way.”  (I’m so thankful for the
creation of pride flags that intentionally include people of color as
well as the trans community in the beauty of human diversity.)  

Dear
ones, the rainbow feels like a good symbol in the midst of our
current “Rainstorm”, doesn’t it?  Or perhaps you want to call it
a monsoon.  Your choice.  😉

Which,
come to think of it, is also the Jesus narrative, and our gospel
lesson today. So much of what happens in the story assumes a greater
knowledge of the time of  Mark and Jesus than we generally have, so
let me retell the story with some context put in:

“In those days, Jesus came
from Nazareth (Nowhereville) of Galilee (sketchy!) – leaving behind
his family, friends, and village – everything he knew, everything
he was.  He was baptized by John – a rural Holy Man, in the River
Jordan, the traditional waters for the Ancient Jewish People.
Baptism marked Jesus as a student of John’s, it also symbolized his
choice to leave behind his society and culture and obligations, and
follow only the Divine.

As he was coming out of the
water, he had a God-experience, a rather beautiful one.  It was as if
the heavens were torn open and God was more accessible, and the
Spirit came right there to be with him.  Jesus heard a voice offering
a blessing, claiming him!   “You are my Son, the Beloved; with
you I am well pleased.”  In such a way, he who had left his kin
was adopted into God’s family.

After such a profound blessing
though, the Spirit of God send Jesus into the wilderness.  Jesus did
not choose it, the wilderness is the place where it is hard to
sustain life, and he was alone, and he struggled, and he was tempted,
and he had to figure out what it would  mean for his life to be a
Holy Man too.  He was there for 40 days, like Moses was awaiting an
audience with God.  With God’s help – again proving Jesus as God’s
kin – Jesus made it through.

When he came back out of the
wilderness, his teacher John had been arrested.  He was on his own as
a Holy Man.  He went back to Galilee, that suspicious place he was
from, and started speaking God’s ‘good news.’  Which didn’t sound
exactly like people expected it to.  He said, ‘The time is fulfilled,
and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good
news.’”1

That
“good news” seems to require a little bit more examination.  One
scholar points out, “’Gospel’ was most commonly used in antiquity
to announce benefits to the populace.”2
Another summarizes what Jesus says with, “He boldly announces that
the reign of God – with its dreams of justice and love, equality
and abundance, wholeness and unity- is dawning.”3

Jesus
is a rainbow.

He
is a sign of hope, in the midst of the storm.  He comes out of
nowhere, is claimed by God, and offers a message of hope and promise.
The world with its power hierarchies, the world that counts some
people as “disposable”, the world where economies exist to let
rich people get richer on the labor of the poor, the world that wants
to appropriate religion to support the powerful, the world that tells
the 99% to fight each other for the scraps left over after the 1%
have been fed, the world which says to take care of yourself and your
own first and let other’s fend for themselves – the WORLD’s powers
are at an end.  A new reign is coming, and it will look entirely
different.  

In
God’s kindom, there is no hierarchy, everyone is working toward for
the common good.  In God’s kindom there are no disposable people, all
are treated as beloved children of God.  In God’s kindom, there are
neither rich nor poor.  Instead, each person offers their gifts and
labor for the betterment of the whole, and resources are distributed
according to need.  In God’s kindom, we all treat each other as
“insiders” and work for each other’s well-being as well as our
own.

To
repent is to let go of the fear, the competitiveness, and the
judgements of the WORLD, and allow the love, the hope, and the
compassion of the kindom to take root.

This
isn’t easy.  It never has been.  Nor is it now.  Judgements are hard
to let go of, including judgements of ourselves.  They’re extra hard
in matters of life and death, like vaccines, and access to health
care, and decisions about masking and distancing and schooling and
childcare and caution vs. risk these days.  Right?  The issue is that
these judgments slip far too easily into shame, including self-shame
from people who have gotten COVID, which IS blaming victims.  

I
don’t claim the authority to know about the best vaccine distribution
plan, but I do think it is useful to take a kindom look at our
pandemic lives.  What does it look like when we look from love, hope,
and compassion?  

From
that angle, I see a lot of gratitude:  for the ways people have
adapted to make all of us healthier, for creativity and hard work in
trying to keep things going as they need to, for those offering care
or services even when there is risk to self involved.  

I
also see more clearly the injustices of the moment:  that not all
“frontline workers” have had a choice about if they want to be in
the frontlines at all, and that far too many people are forced by
economic circumstances to take risks they don’t want to take.  That
people of color have been impacted in a multiplicity of ways:  with
less access to adequate housing, with more people doing “essential
work”, with less access to protective gear, with higher poverty
rates that require taking greater risks, with less access to health
care, and with less responsive health care when it is accessed.  (To
name a few.)  Each of these systemic pieces of racism in our society
are highlighted by the higher infection rates and higher death rates
among people of color, and show us yet again the impact of disparity
on people’s very lives.  Lack of equity kills, and movements from the
world-as-it-is to the World-as-God-would-have-it-be are movements
from death to life.

Looking
at the pandemic from the kindom view, mostly, I’m overwhelmed with
compassion:  for the impossible decisions everyone is making to the
best of their ability;  for the dehumanizing isolation so many are
living with; to the life-draining balancing acts being asked of
mothers, fathers, and caregivers.  From this view, judgements
lighten, and love grows.  

Finally,
the kindom view reminds us that we are no stronger than our “weakest
link.”  That is, we are unable to be healthy in isolation.  Until
the WORLD is vaccinated, all of us are at risk.  And that’s always
been true, but now we can see it clearly.

We’re
all in this together.  We’re all in this storm together (although it
impacts us differently.)  And from the midst of this storm, we’re all
reminded that at the end of the storm, the rainbow comes.  God
doesn’t abandon us in the storm, hope doesn’t die, the kindom is at
hand, repent and believe.  Entering into the kindom’s values will
help kindom come.  Remembering the rainbow helps us live through the
storm.  Thanks be to God.  Amen

1Summary
influenced by:

Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998 and 2008, ~128.


Bruce J. Malina and Richard L.
Rohrbaugh Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) 146-7.

Debie
Thomas, “Beasts and Angels”
https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2924-beasts-and-angels
2-14-21, accessed 2-18-21.  

2Malina
and Rohrbaugh, 148.

3Myers,
91.

February 21, 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

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