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September 22, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Who We Are” based on Exodus 3:1-14a and Mark 9:30-35 (Homecoming Sunday)

I was once lucky enough to spend a term studying at Oxford, specifically at Magdalen College, where a portion of the campus was referred to as the “New Quad” and dated to about 1733. The day after I arrived back in the United States I heard on the radio about a “great historical find” of a 100 year old Buffalo Bill poster. I remember wondering what the people at Magdalen would call something so new as to be only 100 years old.

This congregation was founded in that same century as the new quad… although a little later. We were founded in 1789, and our current church building dates to almost a hundred years later, in 1872. We’ve now been in this building for 152 years, although like Americans, we don’t refer to it as the new church anymore 😉

Our history books tell wonderful stories of the faithfulness of our fore-bearers in faith, and their commitment to God and each other. They also tell stories of change! This is the 3rd church building this community built – 4th location, and as it was being built the first worship space as over the fellowship hall in a space we mostly don’t use anymore. The now Wesley Lounge was the original church office, and the education wing didn’t come along until the 1950s. Bill Isles once said he’d been fighting leaks in the roof since then.

I’m often awed as I look at the long list of pastors who have served this church – found on the walls just before you enter the Narthex. It is also notable how many years of one-year service there was in those early days. Maybe the biggest change in the list of clergy is the relatively recent inclusion of women, staring 45 years ago with Rev. Eileen Demming.

I also think about the technological changes that have happened over the course of this church’s history. When the church began the US Postal Service was brand new and Post Offices were just beginning to be build. This church saw the advent of the telegram, the radio, the telephone, electric lights, television, fax machines, the internet and email, cell phones and text messages, social media, and even Zoom. Thanks Thomas Edison and GE! These all impacted how life was lived, and thus how ministry played out. Honestly, 5 years ago we lacked live-streaming and Zoom meetings – can you even remember that??

This week we had a meeting to plan our fall retreat – and it was so interesting to hear the beloved traditions of the past meet the needs and values of the present day. I loved it because that’s pretty must the gist of everything. In Christianity we talk about the “Living Tradition” where we honor and respect the past, and use its wisdom, while bringing it into the present day and leaving behind what no longer serves us while adding in what we now need. Everything in church is Living Tradition as I see it – from the church retreat to the worship liturgy, from coffee hour to the church library.

We have this constant awareness of and gratitude for the past, while also holding the present and the future together. Over the course of the past year we’ve made some plans for more change. While this building was bustling with ministry activities in the 1950s, it is now more building than we really need. The maintenance and upkeep of the building take a lot of energy and resources, we love it, but it drains us. This church has decided to go forward, looking at ways this building can be a resource for the community while also becoming a source of financial stability.

I’ve was awed and amazed to watch the Holy Spirit at work in this community as this way forward was discerned. The part I loved best was watching various groups of people gather together with fear and trepidation about the future, and then think about what it could mean if our building could be used fo provide low-income housing AND financial stability, and see each group get excited and hopeful.

It is a huge change, and it is going to take a lot of work, but the decision is one that was made with incredible faithfulness. And, it is a continuation of the history of change and the reality of the living tradition.

In Exodus this morning we heard the familiar story of Moses encountering the burning bush and hearing God’s name. The New Interpreter’s Bible emphasizes the verbs of God in this passage. God says, “I have seen… I have heard… I have known… I will send…. I am.” It may just be me, but I hear the living tradition right there! God is “The Great I Am”, or “I Am Who I Am” or “I Will Be Who I Will Be” but God is also impacted by what God sees and hears, and acts accordingly. God’s nature is constant – loving mercy all the way through AND God is responsive to human needs and activities.

I loved that our “We Cry Justice” reading reminded us that after Moses saw the burning bush, and went to do what God directed, and the people were freed, and they came out to the wilderness, they returned to the burning bush. And it is there, in the place they are told that God heard them, saw them, considered them, cared for them, and that God simply was, that they work together to figure out the future as God’s beloveds.

In this story, the burning bush is sort of interesting in that it’s only purpose was to get Moses’s attention so that he’d listen to God. Also, there is an angel, but the angel does say or do anything, the angel’s only purpose is to get Moses’s attention so that he’ll listen to God. The bush isn’t the message. The angel isn’t the message. God just wants Moses to pay attention.

I suspect that God puts burning bushes in front of us multiple times a day. Thich Naht Hahn taught that in the communities he founded every time a bell rang the community members were to take a moment to stop, listen, and pay attention to the wonder all around them. He said that it changed the way they answered the phone. I believe there may be fewer bells and notifications in monastic life than modern life, but perhaps that makes it far MORE important for us to try that exercise. Every time a bell rings, a phone vibrates, or an app gives us a notification we too could stop, listen for a moment, and be grateful for the wonder around us.

I don’t know about you, but that’s a lot of times a day for me. And that’s just BELLS. It is also true that in every other human being we encounter a beloved of God, and they may each be a burning bush inviting us to attend to the wonder of each human.

Sometimes God calls us to sit still, and just be. Sometimes God calls us to move, and just be. (I think all of us are called to both at various times.)

I suspect we all could get better at listening to those calls. How do you get them? What is your burning bush? Could it be bells? Notifications? Other people? An internal sense of unease? Maybe just hungry – it may be that we want to think anew about the tradition of table grace, and face each time we nourish our bodies as the true and wonderful miracle it is, and take a moment to be grateful to God and all the people who make it possible for us to eat and drink each thing before us.

I wrote in the August newsletter about my hopes that we would take this election cycle and time of uncertainty as an invitation to deepen our spiritual practices so that we can respond out of being centered in God’s grace. I intended to keep talking about it through August but… well, life went ahead and changed on me and here I am back in the pulpit as of today.

It is so easy to be pulled off kilter by the truly concerning realities around us.

I believe the question for us today, the question of who we are becoming, is how we can care as deeply as ever, while also being able to hold our center. Psalm 1 talks about the people who delight in God as being like trees planted by streams of water, “which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither.” It is my conviction that God is a constant source of love, hope, peace, and joy. God is always with us, God is calling to us with our own burning bushes, God is accessible. We are able to connect to the source of love, hope, peace, and joy. We are able to be like trees planted by the streams – with deep roots in God’s goodness. And when do so, we are able to be stronger in our compassion for others AND our centeredness that cannot be shaken.

Many of us are worried about what will happen. We are also, of course, worried about what is happening and what has happened. Things are not as they should be, and even the most optimistic outcomes aren’t going to solve issues like hungry, homelessness, war, and violence. We are people of faith in the midst of a broken AND beautiful world.

The Bible is full of stories of being in a beautiful and broken world, and finding God in the midst of it. This is just how things go. We don’t get to wait for things to be OK before we deepen our faith. Faith happens in the midst of reality.

In Mark, we hear the line, “whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Jesus saw the hierarchies of his world, and he had no patience for them. He inverted everything he could, and led people to question the very idea that someone should be at the bottom (or top) of a hierarchy.

This is one of the core messages of our faith. This is part of who we are becoming as we connect more and more deeply with God. God’s unconditional love for all people becomes the most important truth and everything else fades away. Along with changing how we see others, this also changes how we see ourselves and loosens the grip of the narrative that we are supposed to compete to be “good enough to be loved.” We are loved. That’s the first thing we teach each other in faith. God loves us. All. That’s where it all begins, and I think even where it all ends.

We have a long history of sharing God’s love with each other and the world. And the changes that are coming are yet another expression of love. And, no matter what the world throws at us – let’s deepen our roots into God’s goodness so we are ready to respond with love and love alone. Amen

September 22, 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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Untitled

December 5, 2021
by Sara Baron

“The Road Home is Under Construction” based on Malachi 3:1-4 and Luke 3:1-6

When preaching is done well the past helps make sense of the present to prepare the people for the future. Preaching isn’t ever supposed to be just retelling the stories of the past, they’re told to make meaning, to help make sense, to get perspective, to gain insight. In oral tradition, the stories themselves change as they’re retold, responding to the needs of the people who are hearing the story as well as the perspective of the story teller. In our tradition, the stories eventually were written down into our scriptures, into one or a few versions, but preachers PLAY with the stories until they build a bridge from the past to the present that can support the future.

In this sense, I note that the scripture writers themselves are doing some “preaching” with the stories of their own tradition in our texts today. In Luke we hear quoted Isaiah, and it is with Isaiah we’re going to start.

Isaiah is speaking to the Exiles, displaced in Babylon, trying to make sense of the traumas they’ve experienced, the losses they’ve lived, the discombobulation of being displaced, and the sense that God let them down. I think more of us fit in here than we tend to admit. I hear my colleagues talk about the pandemic as collective trauma, and I believe they are right. When we add together the childhood traumas that most people have experienced, to traumas in adulthood, to collective trauma – it becomes clear that we have similarities with the exiles. And, trauma isn’t just a word for “ a bad thing.” Shelly Rambo in her book Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining talks about trauma as “an encounter with death.”1 She, like other writers on trauma, clarifies that it isn’t just suffering, “Suffering is what, in time, can be integrated into one’s understanding of the world. Trauma is what is not integrated in time; it is the difference between a closed and an open wound. Trauma is an open wound.”

Into this brokenness, into this trauma, Isaiah speaks a vision. He says that God will level out the way home, create an easy pathway back to Israel with the mountains brought low and the valleys made high, and the curves straightened out. There are some important aspects to this story: God does it! The people don’t have to. God smoothing the way home tells them that God still cares about them, a response to their biggest fear. The trauma doesn’t go away, it isn’t solved by this vision of homecoming, or even the homecoming itself. However, the trauma ALSO doesn’t get to have the last word.

Isaiah is preaching “don’t give up” to a people who thinking about giving up. Isaiah is sharing that God still cares to a people who aren’t sure if God still cares. Isaiah is offering a vision of hope to a moment of hopelessness. And he does it with an imagery of justice, of bringing down the mighty and bringing up the weak. You see it? The past trauma, the present struggles, the bridge to the future?

I wonder how Isaiah would say it to us today. How would Isaiah speak into the loneliness of the past and present, the constancy of ambiguity, the displacement in place that we know today? I wonder what our path home would look like, how we might construe the road construction on that path in meaningful ways. What are the mountains we struggle to climb? What are the valleys light doesn’t reach? What curves keep us from seeing the way forward? What rough spots slow us down?

I’m struck that in all the layers of stories today, which are all themed on preparation, the preparation is always of “the people” and never of a person. I wonder if Isaiah’s metaphor for us today would be of God building the bullet train tracks home – so that we can journey together instead of apart, and take care of creation while we’re at it.

Now, Luke as a preacher, is using the story Isaiah told to make sense of HIS present. Luke’s present is situated in the powers and principalities of Rome, the passage starts by naming the era via the names of the men who were profiting from the control of the Jewish people. (And then the names of the high priests they’d appointed, which lacks subtlety.) And then, Luke switches, he says that into this powerful mess of oppression came John the Baptist, preaching and asking people to change their minds, turn around, get reoriented (#repentance). Luke uses the story of the past, the imagery of a safe road home, to make sense of John’s ministry. What had been a vision for exiled people to have hope that trauma didn’t have the last word became for Luke a vision of a prophet preparing the people to hear the words of the the Messiah, so that everyone might have healing (#salvation).

Luke is preparing the people to stand up to Rome, by telling them a story of John preparing the way for Jesus by preaching repentance.

How would we name our present day? Would we say, “During the presidency of…” or “When …. was governor of NY” or “in the time when trust was at an all time low” or “when income inequality had reached new highs?” It seems that how we name the present impacts how we contrast it with what God is up to. Funny that. Its true of how we name the past too, right? What stories do we tell, and which ones do we leave out? How do our memories adapt over time?

You may notice that different parts of Christianity understand Jesus pretty differently. It is likely fair to say in ways that are polar opposites. In the United Methodist Church, there is a similar phenomenon with John Wesley – the ways he is interpreted say more about the theology of the interpreters than of John Wesley. To be honest, I think Luke is pushing Isaiah’s vision pretty far here, to make it fit John the Baptist, but it does tell us how Luke understood John and Jesus which is exactly what it was intending to do.

How we tell the stories of the past (and which stories we tell), relates to what we perceive and we need in the present and what we dream for the future. This applies to our individual lives as well as our communal lives.

The past isn’t quite as… fixed as we might imagine it to be. It is complicated, and it can only be seen through the lenses brought to it. In this season of preparation, it seems fair to be asking ourselves: what are we preparing FOR, and how does that relate to our past and our present?

The rest of our lives are going to be “after the start of the pandemic.” Which means that the time before the pandemic is now our past. How do we tell its stories, and how do we tell them to make sense of the present and the future? More broadly, I suspect the days of Christianity being the de facto religion of the United States and mainline denominations dominating the religious landscape are also in the past. How do we tell those stories, and the stories of our own church with awareness that the present is different from the past and the future from both?

In between Isaiah and Luke, speaks Malachi. Malachi speaks to the POST-exilic people, who were a combination of the exiles who had come home, the people who had been left behind, and those who had moved into ancient Israel in the meantime. For the returned exiles, the return wasn’t as idealized they might have hoped. They got home, but it wasn’t what they expected. There were conflicts between groups, misunderstandings, and DIFFERENT traumas that led to DIFFERENT triggers, all mixed up together.

In the midst of this, Malachi tells of a messenger who is preparing the way by purifying the people into righteousness. Malachi is preparing the people for the work they have to do by re-imagining the stories of the past. He reuses the idea of God sending a messenger, but changes what the messenger would do. Malachi looks to the past to purify the present to make space for the future, but to do so requires reworking the past.

All this preparing the prophets and writers were doing, all this worrying about the people and their connection to God, all of this awareness of the flow of time and its intersections, all of these criss crosses of timelines and imagery:

What do they say to us today? How do they help us be in our uncomfortable present? Well, all of the “presents” of the texts were uncomfortable. They were all times where people were just waiting it out, hoping for it to end – the exile, the discomfort after the exile, Roman rule. For what has felt to us like a very long time, we’ve been trying to wait out this pandemic.

But, the prophets and writers of God spoke into those uncomfortable presents to make meaning and do the work that needed to be done. This pandemic has lasted too long to just wait for it to go away. This IS our present, this one, not the one we expected, and God is with us in it, and God is working with us to build a bridge that can support the future.

I wonder what it will take to sort through the stories of the past, to tell them and hear them, and pick from them what stories we need to take with us into the future. I wonder how we get better at being in this uncomfortable and ambiguous now. I suspect a lot of it has to do with telling stories, and with taking the time to listen to God and ourselves. It has to do with not rushing away, but being present. And so once again, I invite you into the uncomfortable, into the present, into the NOW, with trust that God meets us here. Amen

Time with Young People

What is it like to be YOUR AGE years old today? What do I need to know, since I haven’t ever been YOUR AGE OLD in today?

Things are different than they have been, and it is hard to make sense of, but I’d love to know what you know, as I try to tell you what I know.

I”m 40 years old right now, and … I still have dreams that I am in public and forgot my mask…. and I also left the house this weke and got 5 steps away before I realized I really had forgotten my mask. My brain still forgets even big changes!!!

God is with us, God will always be with us, and God helps us adapt. Thanks be to God!

1 12.

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

December 5, 2021