“Growing Strong” based on Isaiah 40:21-31, Mark 1:29-39

February 4, 2018February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

A mentor once told me, “Every crisis is an identity crisis.” In case that isn’t an obvious platitude for you, I have taken it to mean that whenever a group or an individual is in crisis, they no longer know who they are. That is, the stories that explain them to themselves don’t make sense out of things any longer.

It does seem that we form identity in the stories we tell of ourselves. Our stories are sometimes called myths, and that reminds us that they’re both meaningful and inherently biased. They tell us where we came from, why we are here, what we are supposed to be doing, and how we most often mess it up! (Again, this is true both individually and collectively.)

The problem is, things keep changing on us! And that means we have to either tell different stories or change the ways we tell the same ones! In normal circumstances we change things in little ways as we go, and all is well. We add new stories that make sense of things, we tell some stories more, some less, and adapt details here and there. Normally we can keep up with ourselves. However, when radical change occurs and our stories haven’t caught up with our reality, we land in identity crisis.

Isaiah 40 speaks to a people in an identity crisis, and an epic one at that. The stories of the ancient Israelite people told of a trustworthy God who had chosen them, took care of them, who helped them overcome their adversaries, and who freed them from oppression. They WERE the people who were in relationship with that God. God was their identity, and God’s strength and steadfastness were the core of how they understood God.

And then … they lost. The Babylonian empire defeated them in battle, destroyed their city and society, and left them without leadership, hope, or defenses. (Interestingly, the Hebrew Bible was written down during the aftermath of this defeat, as if the people needed to work with the stories to try to make sense of their new reality. They may also have been afraid that their identity would be forever lost if they didn’t firm it up.) It was into this void of identity and meaning that the prophet Isaiah spoke in chapter 40.

The prophet reminded them of their stories, and of their God in whom their identity was formed. The prophet ALSO reflected on the stories and adapted them a bit to meet the circumstances, as was desperately needed. Isaiah connected the ancient to the present. “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning?” and then reminded the people of who God is. In doing so, Isaiah reminded the people that God is ETERNAL and POWERFUL, and the rules of the earth are NOT, “ Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when he blows upon them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble.” This served to acknowledge that a ruler of the earth HAS bested the people, but not God.

Isaiah acknowledges that the people feel abandoned by God, but then brings them back to their own stories. “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.” Then Isaiah adapts a bit more, reminding the people that God never runs out of energy, and that the people can pull from God’s energy and strength when theirs seems lacking. Sure, Isaiah says, humans get weary, “ but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

It was, even then, an old, old story, but it was also a story retold to fit the time frame, to give the people back their identity while acknowledging their reality. In many ways, the Gospels are doing the same work. The crisis when Isaiah wrote was the Babylonian defeat and the exile of the leaders. The crisis when Jesus started his ministry was the Roman Empire and its dominance over the territories that were the Jewish homeland. Ched Myers, whose outstanding book Binding the Strong Man offers GREAT insights on the Gospel of Mark, wrote:

“Economic and political deterioration, especially in the decade prior to the upheavals of the Roman-Jewish war, had dispossessed significant portions of the Palestinian population, especially in the densely populated rural areas of Galilee. Disease and physical disability were an inseparable part of the cycle of poverty (a phenomenon still true today despite the advent of modern medicine). For the day laborer, illness meant unemployment and instant impoverishment.”¹

Our gospel passage today includes the first healing in the Gospel of Mark. Healing passages can make some of us squirm uncomfortably, they remind us that the Bible is an ancient text from a very different worldview, and sometimes that leads us to reasonable questions about how useful the Bible is to our formative identity stories anyway! Meyers proposes a helpful perspective on Biblical healings.

He thinks they’re subversive! In Mark, this is the first one and it takes place on the Sabbath,so Jesus is starting trouble right from the get go. The last section of Mark 1, last week’s Gospel, included exclamations of Jesus’ authority. People were noticing that Jesus was wielding power usually held by the scribes. This is continuous in today’s passage. The scribes would have been part of the system of authority that called for the strict observance of the Sabbath, including refraining from healing. Jesus seems to care more about the people needing the healing than the authority of the scribes.

Meyer’s thesis is this: “Jesus healing ministry is thus portrayed as an essential part of his struggle to bring concrete liberation to the oppressed and marginal of Palestinian society.”² His insights are profound, but his language is often obscure so I’m going to try to summarize his perspective in my own words. This is an exercise that will result in a terrible lack of nuance and subtlety. I’ve footnoted his work so you can find it for yourself and regain that nuance.

After Simon Peter’s mother-in-law was healed and as soon as the sun went down, the masses arrived at the the door seeking healing. Jesus as healer was in high demand because many needed healing. Those many who needed healing were the poor and vulnerable. Often, those in need of healing had always been the poor and vulnerable, at times the need for healing itself had made people poor and vulnerable.

If we, as people of faith, try to focus on those needing healing from our 21^st century eyes, we will look at the symptoms and the disease, and get distracted by our theories of healing. In doing so we can miss the symbolism that brings the greatest meaning. Illness isn’t actually as simple as we moderns like to think of it. It is more than physical symptoms. Illness itself is perceived culturally and has cultural impacts. Of course, it impacts those around the one who is ill (family, friends, neighborhood, village) but it is also understood within the stories of the time and place. Stories form around particular illnesses, often quite potent ones. Worse yet, illness serves to distance the individual from their community!!

Understanding the stories of Jesus’ healing requires us to enter into the perspective of illness from that time, and what it meant then. In that time and in that place, when a person was healed, their capacity to rejoin society was healed, which means those around them were also healed. This also meant that those who had been considered “sick” or “impure” and thus on the bottom of the hierarchy of society were pulled up. The whole body of the community was healed and brought to wholeness, AND the hierarchy was disrupted when Jesus healed! In his healing, as in his teaching, the social order was ignored and messed with! 🙂

Furthermore, Meyers says that in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus’ healings are connected to the faith and action of the healed, the healing itself empowers and acknowledges the humanity of the healed! Healing empowers the disempowered, both culturally and through affirmation of their power.

Jesus healing is consistent with the rest of his ministry. It brings up the downtrodden, it diminishes the power of those who hold power, and it reverses the dominant social code!³

Thus, the stories of healings of Jesus served to reclaim God’s identity, to disrupt the narratives of the Empire, and thus to restore the identity of the Palestinian people!

This all leads me to think about our stories, particularly our collective ones. We have stories of our communal identity as part of the United States, and as New Yorkers (actually I’m not sure how strong those are), as part of the Capital Region, and as part of Schenectady. We also have collective stories as monotheists, as followers of Jesus, as United Methodists (gee, that one is certainly undergoing crisis), as a part of Upper New York, and as First UMC Schenectady.

I’m wondering which sets of these stories are in good shape, helping us make sense of who we are and why it matters, giving us direction and hope! I’m wondering which sets of these stories are a bit outdated, needing minor edits to make a bit more sense of things. I’m also wondering which sets of stories are wildly out of wack, reflecting a bygone era and not helping us at all anymore.

Certainly in the recent past I’ve realized that the myths I held to be true of the United States as a place that welcomes and celebrates many kinds of people, and cares about the vulnerable and marginalized have been shaken to the core! So to have the stories of The United Methodist church following John Wesley’s advice “if your heart is with my heart, give me your hand.” New stories are forming, even by their own power, to replace the ones that have lost their power.

We are in the midst of significant cultural and religious shifts, possibly seismic ones. Even the internet itself has changed reality so deeply that those of us who remember it coming into our lives are shocked! And that’s only one piece. Many of our social and religious institutions are in crisis, which means they’re in identity crisis. Their stories aren’t up to date, their myths don’t make sense of things anymore. It is time to let go of what isn’t working, and that can be REALLY hard. It is also unsettling to be between functional myths!

I invite us all into reflection: What stories do you still find yourself telling? What do they mean to you? What stories have you recently let go of? Why? What stories are we adapting? Are we adapting well?

Our stories not only tell us who we are, they tell us who we think God is. Like Isaiah’s brilliant work in chapter 40, we need to connect the stories to the past AND help them respond to our present. May we pay attention so that we might do so with grace. Amen

1Meyers, 144.

2Meyers, 144.

3Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man (Orbis Books: Maryknoll, NY, 1988, 2008), page 144-150.

–

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 4. 2018

Sermons

“Change Bearer” based on 1 Corinthians 8:1-13 and Mark 1:21-28

January 28, 2018February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

In the midst of all the news that swirled around this week, one little line caught my ear. A Congressman was accused of sexual harassment of a staff member, and within his reply was the idea that he didn’t think he had any power over her. He thought she could consent, or could reject his advances, because he ran an egalitarian office. In fact, he was quoted as describing his office saying, “There is no hierarchy.”¹

I’ve heard such malarkey before, and it infuriated me then too. Most significantly, at one point a District Superintendent informed me that he didn’t think of himself has having power “over” the clergy in his district. This came up in a conversation when I was indicating that I didn’t think he should date clergy he was supervising, and he was justifying his behavior. Simply denying the power one has isn’t the same thing as not having it.

To be fair, at almost the same time, I had an awakening that resulted in an ah-ha moment of my own. I was serving on the “Conference Leadership Team” for the Upper New York Annual Conference. I was regularly in meetings making big decisions, had regular time on stage during Annual Conference meetings, received subtle deference from colleagues because of my role, and had even shared in DRAFTING the structure of the Conference itself. AT THE SAME TIME, I was really unhappy with the way the conference existed in the world and felt helpless to make the changes I thought we needed. During an Annual Conference session, when I was on the floor with everyone else, someone mentioned feeling disempowered and uninformed in the Conference. I ALMOST empathized by saying “me too!” but JUST BARELY kept my mouth shut.

I realized that while I felt disempowered, uninformed, and generally cranky, I had about as much power in the system as ANYONE did. In particular, I had a heck of a lot more power than the person who was (rightfully) expressing his own concerns. And I realized that if I had spoken, and claimed to be as disempowered as he was, I’d have created a false equivalency. I simply wasn’t disempowered in that system at that time, even if I didn’t feel like I had the power to do what I wanted.

In that moment, I realized that I’d done a similar thing to the District Superintendent – I’d internally downplayed my own power. Downplaying, or ignoring, the power I held was dangerous because it made it much easier to abuse the power. Whenever a person ignores a power they hold, and pretends it doesn’t exist, that enables the person to wield it irresponsibility and ignore the consequences for those who don’t have as much power.

At that point I made a commitment to myself to ACKNOWLEDGE and NOTICE what power I do hold, and attend to holding it carefully, so that I wouldn’t do accidental harm with it. I wanted to operate differently than those I saw abusing their power, and I wanted to have more integrity than I started with, once I saw the error of my ways.

Sometimes it is uncomfortable to acknowledge power differentials. Actually, it is often uncomfortable. (Perhaps especially in progressive circles where hierarchy is less valued.) It is far easier to pretend away hierarchy and to claim that the limits on our power make it useless. However, it is irresponsible and hugely dangerous.

The District Superintendent was engaged in sexual harassment (at least), and his SELF-JUSTIFICATION for it was in pretending away his power. His power over those he supervised didn’t dissipate when he pretended it away though. It didn’t give those he supervised easy ways to ignore or dismiss his advances. It just meant he didn’t take that into account, and he got what he wanted without acknowledging to himself that he’d done so with the power he wielded. It meant he took away both others’ consent and his responsibility for having done so.

This congressman did exactly the same thing. It is hard to believe that anyone who has the power to hire and fire their staff could be under the impression that their office is egalitarian, but clearly this misconception benefited the congressman and in his head justified his actions.

I suspect that ignoring the power one has over another is a common part of justifying sexual harassment, and many other abuses of power.

There is, however, an even more sickening reality. There are also those among us who claim the fullness of their power and authority and use it to harm others. In this case I’m taking about the Larry Nassars of the world, who not only set himself up to be in a position over young girls, he ENJOYED the ways that he was able to harm and humiliate them.

Larry Nassar, the “medical doctor” who worked with USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University, who used his power to sexually assault more than 100 girls. Around Larry Nassar and those like him, are a set of people around them who functioned with their power in a third problematic way. Unlike that congressman who pretended away his power and thus allowed himself to use it inappropriately, AND unlike Larry who claimed his power fully to do harm, there are those who had the opportunity to use their power for good and didn’t. There are likely more reasons for this than individuals who didn’t act, but the results are all the same: more children traumatically abused.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”² There have been many, many people in the world who have passively accepted evil, and even used their power to silence those speaking of it.

One of the many gymnasts abused by Nassar was Rachael Denhollander. She was far from the first to speak out, but she was the first one to do so with her evidence and accusations prepared to force herself to be heard. Those defending him tried to silence her in many ways, but she kept talking anyway. She spoke with clarity and authority during his sentencing hearing saying, “I believed the adults at MSU surrounding Larry would do the right thing if they were aware of what Larry was doing, and I was terribly wrong. And discovering that I could not only not trust my abuser but I could not trust the people surrounding him has been devastating. It is part of the consequences of sexual assault, and it needs to be taken seriously.”³

That is, Larry Nassar’s actions were an atrocity. So was the enormous cover up, people who decided that maintaining the status quo, or getting the next win, or keeping the organization from liability, or not upsetting the apple cart was more important than the protection of CHILDREN from sexual assault. Many, many people had the power and authority to step in and stop his actions, and they did not do it.

Thus far, I’ve mentioned three ways power and authority is misused:

by being dismissed or ignored, and thus held irresponsibility.
by being used directly and intentionally to cause harm.
by being held passively, not being used to help those in need, which functions to support an abuser over the abused. (In some cases this crosses the line into intentional harm as well.)

This is all very interesting to consider when we have a Gospel passage that takes note that Jesus held power and authority very differently than the religious authorities of his day! Oye ve. “He taught as one who had authority, and not as the scribes.” This the thesis statement of or Gospel reading! His authority is said to be amazing to the people who heard it, it was one of the first things that drew a crowd to him.

The early Christian communities whose stories of Jesus formed the Gospels may well have thought that Jesus’ authority seemed different because it was different. They may have thought that his connect to God was different than everyone else’s, and this may have been their point. Or, it may be that the scribes taught as if they were a bit removed from the text, teaching what other people had taught them, raising the historical questions, doing everything other than speaking about God from their own experience and claiming authority from their experience. (I may also be projecting myself onto the scribes, as I often choose that path.)

Or, perhaps it was something else entirely. When I listen holistically to the stories of Jesus, it seems that one of the themes is his work of empowering the people. Apparently “authority” in Greek means more fully “the freedom to express one’s powers.”⁴Perhaps he was using his “authority” to build up those he was speaking to. In this case, I’m drawing on the line from 1 Corinthians, “Knowledge puffs up, love builds up.” Authority used well builds up people, in love. It isn’t used for the sake of the one who holds it, it is used for the well-being of the community that gives it.

Jesus speaking in the synagogue would have been speaking in his own voice, not just that of the tradition, but I suspect he was using his voice and his authority to encourage others to claim their voices and their authority in building the kindom of God. He was building them up so they could build others up and everyone together could build the kindom.

That’s what it looks like to change the world. Power and authority used in the ways of the world are used to PUFF up the one who holds them, and to push down those who don’t. We’ve talked about many ways they can be used to do harm. But our goal is not only to “do no harm” but ALSO then to “do all the good we can”. (The first two of John Wesley’s “Three Simple Rules” as rethought by Reuben Job.) That means that ALL power and authority we have should be used to BUILD up.

This is a rather high calling. And it can be difficult. There are pitfalls in many directions, and discomfort to go along with it all. But that doesn’t mean it should be attempted. We are, all of us, leaders in building up the kindom, and the first work of the kindom is building others UP.

So, dear ones, may we follow in the way of Jesus, and find the ways to use our power and authority to BUILD others up. Amen

1Chris Cillizza, “Oh, Pat Meehan. No, no, no, no.” on CNN politicshttps://www.cnn.com/2018/01/24/politics/meehan-analysis/index.html accessed on 1/25/18

2 https://paradoxologies.org/2010/08/28/martin-luther-king-jr-on-complacency-mlk/accessed on 1/25/18

3 Alanna Vagianos ”She Was The First Woman To Go Public About Nassar. Read Her Statement In Full” ttps://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/rachael-denhollander-nassar-impact-statement_us_5a690ef6e4b0e563007627aa 01/24/2018 08:46 pm ET accessed on 1/25/18

4The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 61.

–Rev. Sara E. Baron

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 15.0px 0.0px; line-height: 16.0px; font: 14.0px ‘Helvetica Neue’; color: #444444}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 16.0px; font: 14.0px ‘Helvetica Neue’; color: #444444}
span.s1 {font-kerning: none}

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

January 28, 2018