“A kindom parable?” based on Romans 15:1-12 and Matthew…

September 13, 2020
by Sara Baron

There
are some simple takes on today’s parable. If you read it the way
Matthew wrote it, is an allegory about the importance of forgiveness.
As a reminder, the STORY itself says,

“A king called one of his
servants to settle accounts, the servant owed an extraordinary amount
of money. When the servant couldn’t immediately produce the money,
the king ordered that the servant, his family,
and all their possessions be sold to cover the debt
(worth noting, it wouldn’t have covered the debt.) The servant
grovels, the king not only relents, but FORGIVES the whole debt.

However, upon leaving, the
servant encounters someone who owes him money, requests that it be
repaid, and when that is impossible,
the servant threw the man into prison.

This got reported to the king,
who then had the servant tortured until he could pay back the debt.”

(It
is worth noting that the amounts of money in this parable are
OBSCENE. I’ve seen scholars guess that the first figure is as low as
$10 million or as high as $6 billion. The second figure is lower,
but not trivial. It is still more money than most peasants would
ever see, perhaps in the $10,000 range. The Jesus seminar actually
thinks this parable goes back to Jesus, in part, because the numbers
are so huge and they believe Jesus’s parables tended to exaggerate.
Other scholars point out that the first figure essentially equated to
“the largest figure one could ever name.” Our version of a
gazillion dollars, so, A LOT of money.)

So,
when the parable is taken as allegory, it is simple: God is like the
King, God forgives us our debts, we are then supposed to forgive
others their far smaller debts, if we don’t, we will go to hell.

HOWEVER,
despite what I learned in Sunday School as a child, parables aren’t
fables. They don’t tend to be easy to understand. Instead, they
tend to be things that make us think.

So,
when we come to a parable that seems easy to understand, it usually
indicates it has been cleaned up a little bit from what Jesus said
into what the Gospel writer thought it should mean.

If
we take the story just as Matthew wrote it, then God is vindictive
and while we’re instructed to forgive 70*7 times, God forgives once
and then gets unforgiving immediately. That should also give us
pause, since it simply doesn’t fit how we understand the Divine.

Now,
if we take out Matthew’s final scolding at the end, we un-fable the
story and get back to a parable. To take the parable as a parable
first requires that we do NOT assume that the earthly king is a stand
in for God?

If
we read it as parable, the whole thing gets uncomfortable. How could
anyone ever owe a king that much money? How does even the king have
enough money that he can forgive a figure like that on a whim? Where
does the money come from (hint: the laborers who are dying young of
starvation so the money can flow to the top)? Why doesn’t the servant
respond with generosity? Why did the other servants tell the king?
Why did the king respond with such venom? Who or what is good in
this story? What are we supposed to do? Does the second man get
released from prison when the first one gets sent to be tortured?
Does anyone win?

That’s
a solid parable.

However,
if we take out the BEGINNING line about this story being about the
kin(g)dom of God, things get even more interesting.

William
Herzog II in “Parables as Subversive Speech” suggests that we
first look at the story on its own merits – in the context of the
day. What follows is my adaptations of Herzog’s work. The king in
this story is most likely a client king of the Roman Empire. Someone
placed by Rome, and replaceable by Rome. He is in charge of
extracting wealth from the area he is king of, keeping some, and
sending the rest on. The system by which he does this is pretty
complicated, including many levels of bureaucracy that does his dirty
work for him – and is paid well enough to be grateful not to be the
peasants. The bureaucracy is kept on its toes with fear, and as such
the “work environment” is deeply suspicious, prone to untruths,
and manipulative. Everyone is “playing politics” with everyone
else because that’s how you survive.

When
leaders exist to extract wealth, they have to use their power to
terrify, and when power is inherently violent, the systems that
support it won’t be healthy. One could simply say that bad leaders
create bad systems, and that’s true, but under it all is a question
of what is the POINT of leadership.

The
Hebrew Bible suggests that the point of a leader is to care for the
people and pay attention to the needs of the whole, by
creating a system of justice that is fair, a society that enables
even impoverished people to survive, and an economic system that
distributes livable wages and sustainability as broadly as possible
(and prevents both generational wealth and its counter generational
poverty). Because the Jewish people knew this, the way the Roman
Empire worked was seen as inherently immoral. The Roman Empire, like
any empire understood the king to “own” the whole land and the
people, and to be responsible for using them to to extract wealth
from and to send to the top, and to do so by creating an unjust
system and threatening everyone with death and destruction. You can
see their point on this being a bad system.

OK,
so we have a Roman client king, and the first Jewish hearers would
have STARTED with distrust of this guy. Helpful to know, right?

And,
while the king was inherently immoral, SO WAS HIS COURT, as they were
the ones doing his dirty work. In fact, that first servant, was a
top level bureaucrat, and that large “loan” he was supposed to
replay was actually the “taxes and tributes” he and his
department were responsible for extracting from the people and the
land. Calling in the “loan” was demanding his money, perhaps as
a test of the servant, in order to threaten violence and keep the
fear up in the system. Being arbitrary and making unreasonable
demands helps create a culture of fear. The man doesn’t have the
full amount yet, possibly because it wasn’t “due” yet.

Now,
the first hearers likely would not have had a lot of identification
with this servant, because he was … basically a cabinet level
official whose own actions had done incredible damage to their
country and their lives. The king’s anger and threats are par for
the course, but, in fact, so is his forgiveness. Because the king
has now RE-ESTABLISHED his dominance, which was always the point. I
suspect the “Forgiveness” of the loan in this case is inherently
untrue, this was just a show of power, forcing the otherwise powerful
servant to be submissive and reminded of what can happen to him.

This
servant goes out after the “forgiveness” and then demands a
smaller BUT STILL LARGE sum be paid back to him. Again, it is worth
noting that the people Jesus spoke to would not have identified with
the man owing the smaller sum because it was still more money than
they ever had. And in this case the top level bureaucrat does not
forgive the debt, probably because most of the time debts are not
simply forgiven. Then other people in the court, who gained power
and prestige by lowering someone else’s, used this to take down the
top level official. And the king’s whims take him down this time.

That
is, perhaps this is not
parable of “what the kindom of God is like” and more a
description of “what the kingdom of Rome is like.”
By making plain how the systems of power work in the world,
Jesus was able to invite people to consider how they are complicit in
the system as well as if they want to continue to be.

Because
I, for one, don’t want to be part of systems like that.

Recently,
I’ve seen how beautifully another option can work. The practice that
I went to for care during my pregnancy and birth is one that prides
itself on putting patients first. And they did! My medical care was
profoundly humane, I was taken seriously all along, and my caregivers
took the time to talk with me – and not just about medical issues!
This seemed to penetrate the whole system. From the person who
greeted us at the desk, to the one weighing me, to the ones
scheduling next appointments, there was grace abundance, as well as
patience and kindness.

I
also noticed that the practice was humane to its workers. People at
various “levels” in the practice could be seen talking and
laughing with each other. It felt much more like people were doing
various tasks that all mattered than like there was a hierarchy in
the office. I also heard, at the hospital (as we were there for a
while) how incredibly well respected the group is!

Truthfully,
I found it mesmerizing. I wanted to know all their secrets. I asked
a bit, and what I heard was that the whole group was deeply committed
to putting patients first
and people came to work there to do that. The nature of the
organization was created by its primary value being lived out.

On
a smaller scale, I love the story of a very VERY mild mannered man
becoming the roads supervisor in a small town. As you’d expect,
people tended to call that office in a fury when something was wrong
with their roads, and lots can go wrong with roads. Those that loved
the man worried about him being eaten alive by other people’s fury,
but instead, his mild manners, calm assurances, tendency to listen
and commitment to doing his job well transformed those who called.
Even one person can make a huge difference.

Many
of Jesus’s stories teach us how to subvert broken systems. I think
this story teaches us how those systems work so we can make decisions
about engage with them. Funny enough, the reading from Romans goes
through this as well. Either we can take people down for making
different choices than we do, or we can participate with God in
building the kindom. Judgement, like manipulation, fear, and
suspicion keep us participating in systems of oppression.
Compassion, equity, listening build the kindom of God. In every word
that we say, and every action we take, we get to choose where we put
our lives. We can choose fear and violence or we can choose to build
the kindom of God for all people. May God help us choose well. 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

September 13, 2020

Sermons

“How Not to Treat the Family Idols” based on Genesis…

October 16, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

The
characters in this story don’t emerge from a vacuum. Their story has
been going on for quite a while by the time we get to this part of
Genesis. Jacob, you may remember, was the second born of a set of
twins who infuriated his brother by stealing both his brother’s
birthright and their father’s final blessing. In order to avoid
being murdered by his twin brother, and at their mother’s advice, he
went to live with her family.

The
first person he encountered when he arrived was a beautiful woman at
a well (which is Biblical foreshadowing for …. marriage) who
happened to be his cousin Rachel. Her father Laban was his mother’s
brother. This is not presented as an issue. Jacob wants to marry
Rachel, and Laban says he has to work for him for 7 years in order to
pay off her bride-price. So, besotted, Jacob does. After seven
years there is a wedding and a wedding night, and when he wakes up in
the morning Jacob discovers that it is Rachel’s sister Leah in his
bed. He objects – rather strongly. Laban comes up with some weak
explanation about not being able to marry off the younger sister
first and then suggests that Jacob can marry Rachel too, if he’ll
simply spend one week with Leah first and agree to work for him for
another 7 years.

It
turns out, in case you couldn’t figure this out yourself, that
sisters make super terrible sister wives. I bet you were able to
figure that out on your own though. Leah and Rachel spent years
trying to fight with each other for Jacob’s attention, and that
included a fairly elongated “baby war” in which each tried to
outdo the other in producing offspring for Jacob. If you wanted to
know, Leah won, although Rachel remained Jacob’s favorite. After the
next 7 years of labor had been completed, Jacob made a deal with
Laban to stay on for a while longer in order to leave with some herds
of his own. At that point both Laban and Jacob did everything they
could to trick each other into getting the worst possible deal.
Jacob was a trickster, Laban was a trickster, and neither of them
treated each other well. On the whole, Laban treated Jacob more
roughly than Jacob treated him.

Finally,
about 21 years after arriving on his uncle’s doorstep – and
apparently while his uncle was as far from home as possible, Jacob
packed up his wives, his children, his herds, and his possessions and
headed back home (uncertain about if his brother still wanted to kill
him).

So
now we’re caught up – as long as we remember that when they packed
everything up to leave, Rachel took the family idols with them and
Jacob didn’t know about it. What were the family idols? Well,
they’re also called the family gods. They were physical
representations of gods used in some sort of ritual worship, usually
at an at-home altar. In addition to being items to which one
directed one’s prayers, they were also thought to protect the family
and its good fortune. That is, if they were lost or stolen, it was
assumed that the LUCK of the family went with them. While the Bible
suggests that Jacob and Laban prospered because God was with Jacob,
Rachel may not have shared that assumption.

In
the story that precedes this one in Genesis, Leah and Rachel discuss
how their father cheated them by not giving them their portion of
their bride prices, and it is also possible that Rachel just took the
idols to counteract that, or to bother her father, or because she was
scared and wanted their protection, or maybe she was just greedy. I
do think, on the basis of the stories of Genesis and what they say
and what they don’t say, that Laban was probably an abusive parent
and employer. Furthermore, by the story Genesis tells, Jacob himself
isn’t really converted to YHWH worship yet. That will happen on this
journey back into the land, on the night when he is said to have
“wrestled with an angel” and gets renamed Israel. It thus seems
unlikely that Jacob’s wives would be monotheistic at this point, and
whatever other reasons Rachel had for taking the household idols,
likely she thought they’d be a source of protection for their family.

Laban
was furious when he found out and he brought a war party with him to
go after the family. It isn’t clear if he would have gone if it were
not for the family idols, but it sort of sounds like he is most upset
about the idols and not the loss of his children and grandchildren.

The
story gives us just enough geography to know that the place Jacob,
Leah, and Rachel were staying was INSIDE the boundaries of what would
one day be ancient Israel. It was just far enough inside that the
place Laban slept the night before he caught up with them was inside
too. This is significant because it tells us this is both an OLD OLD
story and one that got edited as they years went by. In the early
development of understanding YHWH, there was a time when it was
assumed that YHWH’s powers only existed within the boundaries of the
Promised Land. Genesis tells us that Jacob had a dream involving a
message from God on his way out of the land, and Laban has one right
after he crosses into it. It is as if God is limited by those
boundaries. The understanding of where the boundaries would BE
however was defined by political boundaries that existed centuries
later, and the clues the text gives us imply those boundaries. Isn’t
the Bible fun?

OK.
So Laban has a dream in which he is warned not to speak harshly to
Jacob which is most significant because it reminds us that people
used to think that God had boundaries. Although, let’s be honest.
People still think that. It is remarkable how people think about
churches and other places of worship as more “holy” or more
“filled with God” than other places. When he does catch up with
the next generation of his family, Jacob is HORRIFIED as his
accusations and responds with surety that no one has done what he is
accusing them of. That is, Jacob thinks Laban is falsely accusing
them – with good reason based on their history – and grandiosely
offers a death penalty for the one who has the idols because he is SO
SURE they don’t have them.

This
is a problem for Rachel. Nothing of her motivation is explained in
the text but it seems clear that she decided she didn’t want to die.
She thinks fast and she comes up with a plan, she enacts it, and it
works. She lives, her father goes home, and all is well, except
maybe for the idols. The plan itself, however, is proof of how
little power she otherwise had. She used what she had – her
femininity and how it was treated in her culture – to save her own
hide.

The
plan was super simple: she put the idols underneath her and she told
her father she was menstruating. Was she? That’s completely unclear
and likely irrelevant. However, she SAID she was. By the customs of
the time, no man shouldn’t have been in her tent while she was
menstruating, and he violated that cultural expectation by examining
the rest of her tent. He wasn’t going to push any further though,
and he left. By putting the idols underneath her AND coming up with
a valid reason not to get up, Rachel saved her own life and got to
keep the idols she’d wanted to begin with. She used what she had –
fear of menstruating women and an assurance that no one would check
her on that – to subvert the power of her father.

However,
she also desecrated the idols. It sort of doesn’t matter if she
actually was menstruating on them or not, the implication is enough.
It may be that this story has multiple intentions and denigrating the
power of idols is one of them. By the time this story was written
down the people knew the Ten Commandments, including the one about
not making idols. It was clear that YHWH was not to be represented
in physical form, and Walter Brueggemann says that this is so that
people can’t pick up the idol, move it around, put it where they want
it, and have the sense that they control YHWH. YHWH is not a God who
is controlled by humans. This story, which discusses menstruating on
idols seems like a very effective reminder to those who weren’t YHWH
worshippers about the relative weakness of their gods.

The
story also functions as a story about the formation of the national
boundaries. It claims that the Eastern boundary of Israel was first
created by a covenant between Laban and Jacob, and that as such it is
almost inherent.

It
is also a good story – it keeps our attention pretty well. Sadly
though, this is the last interaction that Leah and Rachel have with
their father. Rachel is left sitting alone in her tent while the
covenant is formed and her father leaves again. While Jacob and his
family are safe, and while Laban was likely an awful father, there is
some lingering sadness at the end.

The
biggest clue in this story that something is WRONG isn’t that Jacob
decides to leave while Laban is far away, and no one in the household
tells Laban for THREE DAYS. That would indicate they thought they
were protecting the vulnerable from the one who was doing them harm.
Jacob got Rachel and Leah, as well as his family, out of an unsafe
home for them.

Rachel
tried to take something with her for protection along the way, and it
became the excuse by which her father almost killed them all. In
that moment Laban sounds like an abusive partner who will kill their
partner rather than let them leave, and Laban’s dream is the only
thing that held him back. Rachel survived, and likely they ALL
survived, because of her quick thinking and willingness to use what
she had.

Many
women throughout history have been used and abused by powerful men.
Furthermore, many PEOPLE throughout history have been used and abused
by those with more power than they had. Some, like Rachel, use
everything they have, everything in their power, every subversive
action in the world to get out. Sometimes they succeed. May God
continue to guide those who seek safety, and may those who need
safety keep Rachel’s wits about them! Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hershttp://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

October 16. 2016

Sermons

“Allowing the Boys to Live” based on Exodus 1:8-22

October 9, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the people are reminded that they were once slaves in Egypt. It is used to explain the Sabbath, or maybe just to explain why servants get to have Sabbath too in Ancient Israelite society. It is used in the commandments to take care of the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner as well. Basically, the people are reminded time and time again to have compassion for the vulnerable because they were once a vulnerable population.

However, there aren’t many stories about the people being enslaved in Egypt, this is one of the few. The ones that exist all revolve around Moses, and this story is the prelude to the story of Moses’ birth. It is very difficult to tell if there is any authentic memory underneath this story, because it is an old enough story that there really shouldn’t be and yet there are such epically profound truths in it about what it means to be an oppressed people and what subversiveness looks like from within oppression that it feels more true than most stories in the Bible. This story may not be a factual accounting of a particular incident in history, but because it contains so many larger truths, I’m going to treat it as if it is, and let it speak for itself.

According to the end of Genesis, the descendants of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob had all moved down to Egypt during a famine after Joseph had become the right hand person to the Pharaoh. Joseph had urged them to come down, where he could ensure that they would have sufficient food and land to be safe. The story explained that Joseph had interpreted the Pharaoh’s dream and predicted 7 years of excellent harvests followed by 7 years of famine. Pharaoh was so pleased that he elevated Joseph to the 2^nd highest office in the land, and while there Joseph reigned over an agricultural policy that completely impoverished the entire nation and brought their wealth into the Pharaoh’s hands. The people ended up selling their livestock, their land, and then themselves for access to Joseph’s grain stores.

So the same guy who “saved” his family did so while utterly destroying the people of the nation he was – supposedly – serving. The new Pharaoh “didn’t know Joseph” (the Bible suggests this story happened 400 years later, so that would be reasonable). However, it is a bit ironic that the Hebrews were enslaved by the people who one of their forefathers had masterminded enslaving.

Perhaps that suggests that oppression breeds oppression, and oppressors should be careful. In any case, by the premises of this story, by this time the Egyptians were in full fledge oppressor roles and the Hebrews were enslaved by them and oppressed by them.

In our Bible Study we were struck by the similarities between the story in Exodus and the experiences of slaves here in the United States. There is something universal about this story, and it strikes cords through the eons.

Puah and Shiphrah are midwives who are given an immoral order. They are to kill all the baby boys of their people. The names Puah and Shiphrah are classically Hebrew names, and the text reminds us that they’re Hebrew as well as mentioning twice that they are in awe of God. (The “awe” is often translated “fear” but “awe” is a much better translation.) We are not supposed to miss that they’re Hebrew, or that they’re being ordered to kill the boys of their own ethnic group.

It took me entirely too long to figure out why the boys were to be killed. I was thinking of males as especially strong laborers in the fields, and wondered why you’d want to have fewer of them. If you wanted fewer descendants, I thought, why not kill the girls who have the babies and leave the workers? Our Bible Study participants responded that the death of the male babies meant that the females would be sexually available to the Egyptians, and they’d presume that as half-Egyptian – the next generation would be more pliable and “better.” The participants in the Bible Study figured this out by considering American slave history.

We also noticed the language of fear created around the oppressed group, and the dehumanization of them. The Hebrews are called “powerful” and “numerous” and the myth is that they would do harm for the Egyptians, a myth used to justify enslaving them. It is suggested that they could be spies, or fight against Egypt in a war, or abandon their posts of much needed labor. Therefore, the myth of the oppressors says, we must enslave them and double down on the harm we do to them to keep them below us.

Oppression is very powerful, and human oppressors are capable of extensive harm, but there is a resiliency to life itself, and it fights back when life is oppressed. This story says that the more the Hebrews were oppressed the more they multiplied. I think we’re supposed to believe this was God’s hand at work; I think it is more the myth of the Egyptians continuing to justify evil. In any case, both the Hebrews of this story and the African American slaves oppressed in the United States suffered great losses as a community – losses of life and identity, language and culture, dignity and hope. Yet, the communities found ways to fight back, reform, and try again and again. This story suggests that the power to do so came from God, as do many of the songs and stories that remain from the American slave era. God supports the experience of the oppressed in overcoming oppression.

The midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, were unusual women. It doesn’t seem reasonable that only two midwives could have been sufficient for all the births of the Hebrew women, so more likely they were the LEADERS of the midwives. It may even be that they were also midwives to the Egyptian women, as they imply they know the difference between each set of women giving birth. They are BRILLIANT, DEFIANT, and seemingly FEARLESS (although I’d stake a bet that they were terrified even while they kept their cool.)

They are given a direct order by the most powerful man in their country to kill the baby boys of their community and they don’t! If it is true that they were the leaders of the midwives, they give counter instructions. In any case, the voices of all the midwives are united in the shared voices of Puah and Shiphrah, and their voices respond to this immoral command with “no.” They just don’t! It makes me wonder how they had been formed as humans, and what empowered them to know better. The text says it was that they knew God, and I hope it is true for all who know God that our relationship with God empowers us to refuse to follow unjust orders, but I’ve seen it go other ways. How is it that knowing the Holy One can form us into people who more deeply believe in the sacredness of life? How is that being present to God helps us overcome our fears of the powers of the world? How were the midwives able to be so brave? I wish I knew, but for now I’ll accept the premise that God can help us overcome our fears and resist the power of oppression.

Did the midwives refuse the Pharaoh because he was Egyptian? Because the order was so atrocious? Because someone had already been training them on resisting oppression? Was it about who gave it, how terrible it was, or about who they were? How were they strong enough to simply refuse? And how were they wise enough NOT to say “no” to the Pharaoh (who would have killed them and replaced them with someone who would do what he said) but instead to simply not to it? I’d love to know, but for now I’ll accept the premise that God helped them overcome the power of the oppressor.

When they get called back to account for the live baby Israelite boys, they have a crafty answer in hand. They give a compliment to the femininity of the Egyptian women while using the fear of the Hebrews and assumptions about them to their benefit. They respond along the lines of “your women are more feminine and fragile while ours are more like animals.” To be precise, they say, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” You see? The answer they give manipulates the Pharaoh by complimenting his ethnic group and denigrating theirs, and it is believable to him. They save their boys. To do it they have to imply terrible things about the lack of humanity of the women they were related to, and they did because it was totally worth it.

Puah and Shiphrah aren’t the only ones in history who have played the assumptions of oppressors against the oppressors to gain freedom for the oppressed, but they did it as well as anyone.

Now, the incredible actions of these subversive women to save the lives of Israelite boys ended with things worse off than they started – sort of. The midwives had been told to kill the babies, the tactics then were supposed to be somewhat hidden and covert. Their actions forced his hand to make the death sentence to baby boys OVERT and visible. He continues to order the death of the baby boys, and he makes everyone responsible for it, since he hadn’t been able to control the midwives. In the short term, that meant more babies died.

But in the long term, it meant that the Hebrews lived. The overt action of the Pharaoh led to more subversive actions – by Moses’ mother and sister – and by Pharaoh’s own daughter. The fear of Pharaoh that led to his orders for murder resulted in Moses being raised in his own house – an Israelite boy who he had ordered killed. When Pharaoh raised the stakes it ended up backfiring on him and he eventually lost all his slaves.

It seems important to take note of how it must have felt to be Puah and Shiphrah in the moment when Pharaoh ordered the Hebrew babies to be thrown into the Nile. It would have felt like failure, right? They took risks with their own lives and likely the lives of those who worked with them to save the babies. They took morality and the love of God more seriously than the power of the Pharaoh/King. They fought with their wits about them for the well-being of their people and they won…

Until the Pharaoh made it worse and raised the stakes. They tried to save those baby boys and allow them to live, and then Pharaoh orders everyone to kill the baby boys and the organizational methods of the midwives can’t protect the babies anymore. Puah and Shiphrah must have been dismayed. Yet, the tactics they used ended up in one generation with the freedom of their people – instead of the death of the males of a generation and the rape of that generation’s women. Yes, things got worse. That’s what happens when you fight back against oppression. The oppressors make things worse first. Which means that when women – and men – are forced to use subversive tactics they have to be prepared for things to get much worse before they get better.

In The United Methodist Church right now, things are getting worse. The many brave people who have refused to follow unjust rules in the church have upset the status quo. Those who are committed to excluding LGBTQ people from full participation in the Body of Christ are furious that they can’t make people follow the rules. As they double-down on exclusion and tightening rules and punishments, they push the UMC toward schism. This weekend in Chicago a group of 1700 people deeply committed to exclusion gathered, and formally launched a para-Church structure they are calling the Wesleyan Covenant Association. Their first demand is that the Church end the resistance to exclusion once and for all. Since we all know that the progressives fighting for inclusion will not be silenced that is not possible. They suggest, that if resistance can’t be silenced that a plan needs to be developed to divide the denomination. Things are getting worse.

That means we are on the road to ending oppression. Thanks be to God for the midwives and all those willing and able to follow their lead. What a joy it is, in God’s holy name, to be part of ending oppression in any form. Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

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October 9, 2016

Sermons

“Infuriating Plumb-Lines” based on Amos 7:7-17

July 10, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

This poem is entitled “Allowables” and it is by Nikki Giovanni:

	I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn't
And she scared me
And I smashed her

I don't think
I'm allowed

To kill something

Because I am

Frightened¹

And yet, so many people are dead because others were afraid. We, as a country, are frightened.

The fear lives in us in many ways. We have anxiety for our own futures and for the futures of those we love, particularly of younger generations. We are afraid of the world that is becoming, particularly with regard to: Global Climate Change and the ways it is destabilizing the world; the global refugee crisis and the millions of humans left without a place to call home; and the global economy, still slumped in many ways and still biased to producing wealth for the rich by continuing to devalue the lives of the poor.

We are afraid, as well, of the prevalence of violence. Violence also comes in many different forms to keep us afraid. Around us there is domestic violence (emotional, physical, and sexual), violent crime, mass shootings, bombings, terrorism, and of course war – both declared and undeclared. Violence is terrifyingly common!

We a country that lives in fear of violence and death for ourselves and our loved ones. Most of us are afraid of not having enough to survive – no matter how much we have right now. We are afraid that we too could become refugees. We are afraid that our government and way of life could collapse under us (or is collapsing under us.) We are afraid of what another single person could do out of their fear or anger.

I watched the videos of the shootings that were perpetrated by police this week. I didn’t want to, but I did because it didn’t feel responsible to stick my head in the sand. It was clear that the officers were responding to their fear, and not to the actual events occurring around them. It is not yet clear what motived the police shootings in Dallas, and what we hear indicates that it was motivated by hatred. Yet, I suspect there is fear under that as well.

The fear itself is not the problem, although it is nearly epidemic. The problem is how the fear gets dealt with. It get denied, repressed, and projected – rather than admitted to and faced. That makes it stronger and less rational. Furthermore, the projection usually means that fear gets placed on people perceived to be “other”. That’s when fear gets dangerous. This, however, isn’t a new phenomenon.

In fact, I think what we see in our society today is also reflected in what Amos was calling out in his society in the 750’s BCE. Amos’s life as a prophet occurred during the reign of King Jeroboam II, who was the most “successful” king in the history of Israel. He was successful militarily, economically, and politically. He restored the kingdom to its largest known boundaries, brokered deals with other leaders, and the nation prospered. Well, like it goes, the wealthy prospered. Amos was from Judah, so the other country from whom Israel had succeeded in a civil war. Amos describes himself as a simple farmer, called by God to speak what others would not.

As Rev. Dr. Thomas Mann eloquently put it in my reading this week, “Prophesy is the gifted ability to see what other people cannot or will not see. Prophets focus primarily on the moral and spiritual conditions of a nation; they do not simply predict future events but warn of consequences to injustice.”² The nation of Israel was “successful” but as we’ll hear next week, Amos accuses the wealthy and the king of “buying the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals.” (Amos 8:6) The cost of “success” was oppression. Amos was calling out the upper class for what they did to the lower class – and if you are patient, I’ll get to how that has to do with fear.

When people are oppressing others there are two interconnecting ways that they have to dehumanize the people they are oppressing. First of all, to choose to oppress someone requires creating a narrative that says that the other person or people matter less than you do. That can be done lots of ways: via race or gender or age or economic status or SAT score or position or whatever. Secondly though, to choose to oppress another person or people is an inherently terrifying act. When you are an oppressor, you have to be aware (at least subconsciously) that YOU could be the oppressed instead of the oppressor. Given that reality, it becomes imperative to continue to dehumanize the other, to oppress them further, to keep as much separation as possible between your full humanity and their partial humanity. Also, you have to make sure that they will never rise up and oppress you.

This was a significant piece of our history as a nation that engaged in racially “justified” slavery. There was a narrative – the race theory- created to justify dehumanizing people. There was a constant fear of slave rebellion, and there was a terror of slaves wanting to do harm to their masters like the harm done to them. The cycles of violence against people of color were deep, as was the fear of white people of being treated the way they treated their slaves. Both the violence and the fear live on. At the Schenectady Black Lives Matter march on Thursday someone made a sign that said “This is the new genocide of Black People.”

Race, of course, is not the only marker used to justify oppression. Any “otherness” will do – real or imagined. Often the marker has been economic – although the definitions of who gets to be wealthy and who doesn’t has changed with place and time. In Amos’s time, some of the poor in that society were poor by position: widows because they had no male protection nor access to land, orphans because they had no male protection nor access to land, and foreigners because they no male protection that counted nor access to land. Some would have been poor by circumstance – because of bad harvests or because there were too many male children in a generation or because they were the youngest sons of youngest sons.

There were people living in poverty, and the policies of those in power was to add to their struggle with oppression, rather than to lighten their load with policies of support. The vision of the Torah is of a nation where the widows, orphans, and foreigners are provided for, and where it is not possible to slip into generational poverty. By this time though, the people who claimed the vision of the Torah were acting more “normally.” They were participating in systems that used the labor of the poor to enrich the wealthy and strengthen the power of the already empowered. As Mann says, “For Amos, the primary failure is injustice,”³ and injustice is prevalent.

Amos doesn’t think God likes the injustice of Israel, nor the way it found its “success,” one little bit. He expresses it by suggesting that justice is not found in the nation, and God is so upset as to abandon the people. That’s the role of a prophet. The role of “those in power” is played in this story by Amaziah, the priest of Bethel. According to Mann, “Bethel is something like northern Israel’s ‘national cathedral.’ The collusion of religious and political institutions is blatant when Amaziah says to Amos, ’[Bethel] is the king’s sanctuary.’ One would have thought it was God’s.”⁴ In particular, the name “Beth-el” means “house of God” so the suggestion here is not overly subtle.

Amaziah wants Amos to GO AWAY, because he is upsetting the kingdom by speaking the truth. Then Amos basically predicts the exile of the Israel, which will happen Assyria in a single generation. The important pieces of this passage for me today are: that the role of the prophet was to speak uncomfortable truths, that the man understood to be speaking for God was calling for justice for the least empowered, and that those in power desperately wanted the one calling for justice to HUSH.

Often prophets, however, have to point out not only what injustice looks like but what consequences it has. Amos pointed out that the “success” of Israel was unstable and could lead to its demise. As people of God, prophecy is some of our work. We end up having to say that unless this country turns itself around and faces its own racism as well as its ridiculous gun laws, the violence we experience now will only continue to escalate.

There is such fear in our society because there is such oppression, and those of us who benefit from it live in fear that it will turn around and oppress us. (Because life and society are complicated, almost of us benefit from it in some ways and are oppressed by it in others.) Injustice anywhere is not ONLY a threat to justice everywhere, is it a source of our anxiety and fear, and thus a piece of the violence of our society itself.

There are many intersecting issues in our country today, and I’m expecting that many of you who are listening have already done many of the things that can make a difference. I’m going to remind us all of them again though, because in the midst of fear it is a good reminder that we can do things that matter.

We take courage from each other and from the God we know so that we can acknowledge our fears without repressing them nor letting them rule our lives.

We continue to educate ourselves about our past and present as a nation with racial oppression, to destabilize the myths of racism and thereby change them.

We can speak up about gun access.

We name injustice and oppression wherever we see it, and we participate in actions to change them. We do this even when it infuriates others.

We love all of God’s people as much as we can as often as we can and as well as we can, and trust that God will use our love to build the world as God would have it be.

We trust that if we work together, and act out of faith, hope, and love, even the brokenness of our country can be fixed.

May it be so, and may the God of justice use us to help heal our country, even if it means infuriating others with our calls for justice. Amen

1“Allowables” a poem by Nicki Giovanni, in her book Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid, page 109.

2Thomas W. Mann in “Exegetical Perspective on Amos 7:7-17” found on page 221 of “Feasting on the Word Year C Volume 3” edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2010).

3Mann, 221.

4Mann, 225.

–

Rev. Sara E. BaronFirst United Methodist Church of Schenectady603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady