“How to Love God” based on Acts 17:22-31 and John…

May 15, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

One
of the squeal worthy moments of my life was being asked to serve on
the Board of Directors for the Methodist Federation for Social Action
(MFSA). When the official request came in I was surrounded by young,
United Methodist clergy people, and the announcement led to an
immediate toast. The Methodist Federation for Social Action has been
a justice leader in both the The United Methodist Church and the
United States for more than 100 years, starting with worker’s rights.
Calls for justice expanded, as they do, because any justice work
always intersects with other justice work. By 1940 Mary
McLeod Bethune joined the board to help focus the work on combating
racism in the denomination.¹

Our
“spring” board meeting, in March, was outside of Philadelphia.
(So, it was our winter board meeting.) Trainers came from
“Crossroads Antiracism Organizing and Training” to work with the
board for two days. It was very different training than I have done
before. Almost all of the anti-racism training I’ve done has been
focused on the personal. That is, I’ve often looked at my own
behaviors and biases with hope of becoming more aware and less
biased. Those trainings have all been a blessing. Some educational
opportunities I’ve had have been important in educating me about the
history of race and racism in our country. Those have also been very
important.

However,
the training we did at the MFSA board meeting was different than any
of those. We looked at institutional and structural racism. In
fact, our training was really “anti-white supremacy” training,
and we looked at the ways that white supremacy lives in our society
and its institutions. One of the most useful ideas I brought home
from the training was the idea of the “center” of power and
privilege in our society and its contrast, the “borderlands”
outside of power and outside of privilege.

I’m
going to offer here a very extended quote because I don’t trust
myself to find the language to summarize these ideas quite yet:

“There
is a center in US society that is considered normal:
white, male, heterosexual, married, Protestant (Christian),
Anglo-American, English speaking, upper middle class, able-bodied,
educated, middle-aged and embodying a particular standard of beauty.
It is the standard by which all are measured.

Around
this center exist the rest of us – at varying distances from the
center. Some of us are closer and some further apart. The borderlands
surround this “center of normalcy.” Power, time, place, and
position dominate their interaction.

The
borderlands is a juicy place. It is a place full of possibilities,
chaos, creativity, conflict, beauty. It’s the place where harmony
and conflict exist – simultaneously. It’s a place that transcends
and defies dualism, where rigid linear reality cannot exist; a place
where multiculturalism and diverse identities mix and mingle in a
constant ebb and flow of mess, mediation, and mitigation.

Our
institutions are structured to rein force and maintain the center.
When
institutions ‘embrace diversity’ people of the borderlands must
assimilate in order to come in to the center, though they will never
fully belong there. The tension that results is troublesome for the
center. It creates conflict that the center is not structured to
tolerate. Thus, brining the borderlands into the institution means
forcing it to conform, contort, and homogenize.

There
is peacefulness in the borderlands but not peace. The power and
privilege of the center causes separation, divisiveness, and
ultimately destruction within the borderlands. The center demands
conformity and sameness, making scarce the resources required to
creatively and collectively resolve conflict. This is the daily
experience of the borderlands.

The
power of People of Color and other oppressed groups is in the
borderlands. Coming to the center disempowers the borderlands and
destroys its spirit.

Our
institutions are defined by rigid boundaries, which isolate both
institutions and the center. The challenge for anti-racism
transformation teams is to make these boundaries more permeable
and to move the institutions to the in-between-ness of the center and
the borderlands.

Journeying
through the in-between-ness brings the center to the borderlands,
making permeable the walls and boundaries of the institution. It
pushes the center out into the borderlands, making it part of its
chaos and creativity, conflict and beauty.

In
doing this, the borderlands becomes what is normal, diversity and
justice become the standard. The borderlands becomes the Beloved
Community for which we all yearn.”²

This
model of the world as it is, and as it could be, has been playing
around in my mind for 2 months, and I needed to share it with you.
It has helped me to see more clearly. Within this model it was
useful to learn that one of the ways the center maintains its power
is through the control of resources and “legitimacy” which sets
up different groups in the borderlands to compete with each other.
It was also helpful, if radically uncomfortable, to be confronted
with the idea that charity is a means by which the center deals with
its guilt AND attempts to bring the borderlands into conformity.
(I’m still squirming.)

After
this training, when I was invited to work on dreaming an anti-racist
United Methodist Church at the Change Maker’s Summit led by the
General Commission on Religion and Race, I was super excited!! When
I got there and started listening, I realized that my newfound
knowledge of how white supremacy works and the language I
could use to talk about it was ALREADY shared language among the
people of color I was in conversation with. I’d had this MAJOR
learning experience that had reformed my thinking, which I’m still
struggling to fully understand, and then I realized that I’m still
super far behind.

I
think, perhaps, that knowing how far behind I am is an appropriate
place to be, at least as long as I don’t get comfortable and stay
here. Part of the way that white supremacy, and “the center” are
maintained are by encouraging white people NOT to see the structural
and institutional ways that they’re maintained. From within the
center, things just look “good, orderly, and right.” As we
looked carefully at the sorts of factors that impact how closely an
individual lies to “the center”, I realized that I share ALMOST
all of those characteristics, and I have been socialized to seek the
sort of power that “the center” brokers, and move myself closer
and closer to the center.

Thanks
be to God, I’ve also been introduced to Jesus, the Bible, the vision
of the Torah, and the concept of the kin-dom of God. The values that
I’ve learned in THOSE places are the values that led me to every
anti-racism training I’ve ever gone to, and are the values that give
me a way to counter the narratives and socialization of “the
center.” Now, to be clear, The United Methodist Church as an
institution operates with a confusing mix of the values of “the
center”, the language of Jesus, and an occasional reflection of the
actual values of Jesus. It is a very confusing place to be. That
mix of values and language pervades all the levels of the church,
albeit in different concentrations of each ingredient.

One
of the other take-aways from the anti-racism training is that no
person, institution, or experience is truly free from the values,
power, and impact of “the center” and we kid ourselves if we
think we are. Yet, together, we are able to make progress anyway, if
we try.

So,
loving God and following Jesus offer us a way out of the center and
its values, into the borderlands to be part the Beloved Community in
all of its beautiful diversity. God’s universal love for all people
leads to God’s dream of world where people are able to survive and
thrive together. However, even in the Bible, that universal love of
God gets held in tension with other values and ideas.

For
instance, let’s take this brilliant speech of Paul’s in Acts. He
meets people where they are, and takes what they already know
seriously. He is speaking to people who don’t share his experience
of God, he started out as a monotheist and was well educated in
Judaism. He is speaking to polytheists, and he makes space for them.
I love that he notices to their humility in the altar to the unknown
God, as uses it an opening to tell about the God he knows. I also
love that he quotes one of their well-known sayings, “in God we
live and move and have our being” and applies it to God as he knows
God! I also think it is really funny that one of my favorite
descriptions of God (“in whom we live and move and have our being”)
was ADAPTED to fit the monotheistic God. I think it is beautiful
that Paul includes the people he speaks to as being children of God,
and indicating that in his faith God loves them all.

Of
course, then the passage comes to its end, and Paul tells people that
they all have to do things his way, and follow his God while
abandoning what they’ve known, or his God will punish them all.
SIGH. Paul thinks there is ONE right way, he knows it, they don’t,
and they should all do it his way. That’s not so beautiful, nor so
welcoming or respectful of the people he is talking to. He changes
from accepting people as they are to telling them how they should be.
It is a switch from valuing the borderlands to demanding that they
comply with the center. His speech ends telling them that unless
they think like he does, they’re of less value. He requires unity
with his ideas rather than joining with the people in solidarity with
their needs.

John
presents this differently. He shows Jesus speaking to people who
already know and love God. The speech says that God has desires for
how people act, but the desires are that people treat each other with
God’s love for them, and build communities centered in love. This
makes it clear that unless love defines actions, people are not truly
following God. There is no space for exceptions so that anyone can
be excluded, instead there is a reminder that the Spirit can help us
live as God wants us to live. We’re told we aren’t alone, and that
doing God’s work IS the same same as loving God, and then when we
want to seek out God we can do so by loving God’s people. In this
brief passage I hear the values of God and Jesus without significant
muddling of the center! (Thanks be to God for moments like that!)

Loving
God is loving God’s people. All of them. Loving people who are in
the borderlands is sometimes a challenge. So too is loving people
who live near the center. But God doesn’t make space for exceptions.
Only for love.

I’m
pretty sure that one of the most important forms of loving God’s
people is truly seeing, hearing, and knowing each other. That means
helping to loosen the walls between the borderlands and the center,
and for me at least, that’s going to require continued anti-racism
and anti-white supremacy work. But, thanks to the writer of the
Gospel of John, the Methodist Federation for Action, and this
church, I know that I don’t go it alone. Thanks be to God!

Amen

1 http://mfsaweb.org/?page_id=2692

2
Robette Anne Dias & Chuck Ruehle, Executive Co-Directors,
©Crossroads Ministry
http://www.crossroadsantiracism.org/wp-content/themes/crossroads/PDFs/The%20Borderlands.pdf

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

May 14, 2017

Events and Celebrations

“First, Last, and In-Between” based on Mark 10:17-31

October 13, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

“First,
Last, and In-Between”

Mark
10:17-31

First
United Methodist Church, Schenectady, NY

Chett
Pritchett, Executive Director, Methodist Federation for Social Action

Good
morning,

I
bring greetings today from the board of directors of the Methodist
Federation for Social Action and from our staff and interns in our
Washington, DC office. I’m so thankful for the witness of this
congregation, for those who have been part of the Troy, and now Upper
New York Chapter, and for giving us your former pastor to lead our
coalitional work toward General Conference.

I
also bring greetings from my home congregation, Dumbarton United
Methodist Church in Washington, DC. For 27 years, Dumbarton has been
a reconciling congregation, welcoming persons of all sexual
orientations and gender identities into the life and leadership of
the church.

I
am blessed to be in this sanctuary today. In a lot of way, I think of
First Church and Dumbarton as kindred spirits. Over the past three
years as the executive director of the Methodist Federation for
Social Action, I have come to know many such congregations. Although
it may seem like it, I am here to say, “You are not alone!”

“You
are not alone” seems to be a good place to start from today’s
Gospel lesson. As found in the Gospel attributed to Mark, this
passage of Scripture is part of a larger story. Jesus and Peter and
James and John had left the glory of the transfiguration on the top
of the mountain and found their way, with the other disciples, in the
valley, with their faces turned toward Jerusalem.

Here
is where Jesus began his teaching ministry. Those who had heard of
Jesus’ ability to perform miracles gathered around him and asked
him questions. Some asked him trick questions and Jesus replied with
trick answers…I mean parables. And so today, we find Jesus asked
by a rich young man, “What Must I Do To Inherit Eternal Life?”

Jesus
replied, telling the man, “you know the commandments,” and then,
as a good rabbi would do, added instruction: “you lack one thing:
go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will
have treasure in heaven, then come and follow me.”

Wow.

Jesus
must not have had his coffee that morning.

“It
is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for
someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

This
Jesus guy pulls no punches.

Then
the disciples got scared: “Then who can be saved?” they asked.

The
disciples and the rich man were asking the same question. They were
concerned with what they needed to do – how must we behave, what
can we do. Peter even says it with a little snippiness: “Look, we
have left everything and followed you.”

We’re
the good guys. We’re the ones who left our families and belongings.
We’re the ones facing ridicule for your sake. Surely, we’re going
to be blessed! We have to be blessed! We’re going to be blessed,
right?

Jesus
assured them that now and it the age to come their goodness would be
noted. But then he threw in a zinger:

“The
first will be last…and the last will be first.”

I
mean, come on – is it any wonder Judas betrayed him and Peter
denied him?

Before
coming to the Methodist Federation for Social Action, I spent more
than 7 years as a manager for Cokesbury, the United Methodist
bookstore. While there, I got to meet seminarians and clergy and lay
people who were hungry to share their faith with others. One of the
most curious books I came across during those years was a children’s
book with plastic relief faces on the cover. The title was “Jesus
and the 12 Dudes Who Did.” I can’t remember what the book
actually said, but I remember the cover and the title with great
clarity. “Jesus and the 12 Dudes Who Did.” Placed alongside
today’s Gospel reading, I think the author got the title exactly
right. The Disciples saw themselves as do-ers, part of the in-crowd,
doing stuff, doing things, because they were going to be front and
center on the right side of history.

But
when Jesus says “the first will be last…and the last will be
first” – he’s making a bold theological statement.

When
Jesus says “the first will be last…and the last will be first”
he’s saying that good works are fine, but they aren’t the be-all
and end-all of God’s message.

When
Jesus says “the first will be last and the last will be first,”
he’s stating that it’s not about the ACT of selling your
possessions and leaving all you have that will help you gain eternal
life. It’s about the transformation, the re-orientation, the
newness that comes when your life is turned toward God more fully.
It’s about loving God with all your heart and mind and soul.

When
Jesus says “the first will be last and the last will be first,”
he’s making the most basic theological statement: “God’s grace
is available to all.”

This
is an interesting conundrum for those of us progressive,
socially-aware, engaged United Methodists.

The
Protestant work ethic did a number on most of us. We work hard to
make the world a better place and provide for those who go without
and challenge the powers that be. We put in hundreds of volunteer
hours, we give money to organizations working to change the world
(thank you). And if Jesus came back, he’d say, that’s all well
and good – BUT…

*You
are already good enough.

That’s
all well and good – BUT…

*God
already loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

And
here’s the scandalous part of Jesus’ parable. God loves everyone
else, too.

*Your
annoying colleague at work. God loves them.

*Your
oblivious, unaware neighbor who always parks too close to your
driveway. God loves them.

*Your
racist, homophobic cousin. God loves them.

And
there’s nothing you can do about it, except welcome them as they
are. And show a little love.

Because
the reality, friends, is that we are, as Martin Luther once wrote,
simul Justus
et Peccator.

Always,
at all times, we are somewhere in-between saints and sinners– in
the same body, at the same time. We never fully embody godliness,
and sometimes – OK, a lot of times – we are as oblivious as those
twelve disciples.

You
see, the human condition, is not, as pure Calvinists would say, one
of total depravity.

Instead
it is one of always being in-between.

Scripture
reminds us of this again and again.

We’re
in-between birth and death.

We’re
in-between fear and safety.

We’re
in-between chaos and community.

We’re
in-between joy and sorrow.

We’re
in-between what has been and what could be.

For
many of us, we know that it means to live in-between.

Some
of us live in-between as exiles – either forced upon or chosen.

Some
of us live in-between because the culture that formed us is different
from the culture in which we reside.

Some
of us live in-between because it’s how we must balance our
overlapping and multiple identities.

I
grew up along the Ohio River in a town that was in-between
Pittsburgh, PA and Columbus,OH and Charleston, WV. In Appalachia, we
always seemed to be in-between one place or another.

In-between
a mountain and valley.

In-between
jobs.

In-between
a pay day.

In-between
illness, or a mining accident, or a chemical spill.

When
I came out of the closet as a gay man in 1995, no one would have
expected a United Methodist-related college in the middle of small
town West Virginia to be a place of acceptance and welcome. For many
of my friends who grew up as good Methodists, my coming out forced
them to think about sexual orientation in a new way. And for my
friends who are LGBTQ, my faith has forced them to think about
religion in a new way. Being queer and Christian is an in-between
place I have learned to inhabit – and could only do so, not by any
acts of good works, but by God’s grace. Grace, which on this
National Coming Out Day, allows me to say boldly to those struggling
to reconcile their faith with their sexual orientation or gender
identity, “You are not alone!”

And
that’s what I do every day at the Methodist Federation for Social
Action. But not just for the LGBTQ communities, but for United
Methodists across our connection who are seeking ways to live into
their baptismal vows “to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in
whatever forms they present themselves.”

One
way we do this is through our involvement with the Love Your Neighbor
Coalition, the work of 12 United Methodist caucuses spanning
racial/ethnic, progressive, and LGBTQ caucuses within The United
Methodist Church. I’ll be talking a little bit more about our work
after this service, but I want to encourage everyone here to go to
www.lyncoalition.org –
I’ll give you time to write it down and repeat slowly. Check out
our vision for The United Methodist Church and add your name as a
supporter.

Because
this work isn’t done for extra jewels in our crown, it’s not done
to show Jesus how much we love him. We do this work because we know
the importance of lifting up the voices of those who find themselves
in-between: in-between the powers that be and loving our neighbors;
in-between justice and injustice; in-between hope (and fear) for the
future.

The
work of the Church must be to continue sharing the message of God’s
love and grace for all people.

It’s
that simple. And yet, you and I know, it’s that difficult, too. I
call it “Living in the Land of Maybe.”

Because,
just like the rich young man, and just like the disciples, and just
like the faithful saints and sinners who have composed the Church for
almost two thousand years. Sometimes we get it wrong. And sometimes,
just sometimes, we get it right and we get a glimpse of the world as
it is and can be. A world that is chaotic, and messy, and downright
beautiful, and loved by God, not because of what you or I have done,
but because we have decided to participate in God’s world.

Brazillian
feminist theologian, Ivona Gebara, imagines God’s hope for the
world in this way:

“Men
and women will dwell in their houses; men and women will eat the same
bread, drink the same wine, and dance together in the brightly lit
square, celebrating the bonds uniting all humanity.”¹

This
is no works righteousness folks, but this is to say that we can
partake in the presence of grace and love in the world.

And
every now and then, we get to join in the dance where we can proclaim
together “you are not alone,” to a world in-between injustice and
righteousness, in-between fear and hope, in-between saints and
sinners.

Won’t
you join me in the dance?

1
Gebara, Ivone. “Women Doing Theology in Latin America,” in
Feminist Theology from the Third World, Ursula King, editor,
Orbis Books: Maryknoll, NY, 1994, 59.