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February 4, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Yet Always Rejoicing” based on Deuteronomy 15:1-11 and 2 Corinthians 6:1-10

This church has been described a church who loves to learn. Its true. We love knowledge around here. We love learning things. We especially love learning things that help us know how to build the kindom of God, but I think it is fair to say that most of us also believe knowing more will help in the long run, so we’ll take learning for its own sake too.

We like knowing how things are. We like knowing how things could be. We like knowing how to get from here to there.

I am not an exception to this, I fit right in. Maybe I’m a little MORESO than average. And the desire to learn, and to know, and to consider are things I love about this church.

It also relates to some of our shared frustrations. Because we also want the world to value learning and knowledge, and to use knowledge for good, and generally to make things better, but we look around and that doesn’t seem to happen. (Or at least not fast enough.) Worse, we look around and the values we share: love, justice, compassion, inclusion, and humility are also not shared in the world.

We look around and things are a mess and we lose hope. And I’m going to play with hope and faith for Lent, so hold on to that for a few weeks. But for now, I think maybe we need a reminder that we may love to learn, and we may be invested in building the kindom of God, but at exactly the same time, we are not God. And God is going to work for good no matter what – with us, through us, despite us, no matter what. If we know something useful, great! If we don’t, God will find a way. If we find great partners, awesome. If not, God will find a way.

We end up being taught by the world that there isn’t enough. Right? There aren’t enough good jobs, so some people some people get ones that don’t pay enough. There isn’t enough good housing, so some people don’t get it. There isn’t enough… you name it and some people get the thing and some people don’t.

But that’s the way our society works, not the way God works. With God there is enough. There is enough love, everyone is loved. There is enough food, enough for everyone to be fed well. There is enough hope, enough to get us through. And, funny enough, there is enough MONEY for everyone to actually do OK. But the ways the world deals with debt and interest gets in the way.

Shifting from the world’s scarcity model to God’s abundance model is a hard thing to do! It takes constant awareness. It takes leaps of faith. It takes a community holding the truth of abundance together. And it takes God’s willingness to give us strength and knowledge to keep moving towards the narrative of abundance.

One important piece of the narrative of abundance for me these days is the reminder that there are enough people working for the kindom, that I can trust God working through all of us and only be responsible for my little contributions. I’ve been thinking about Jesus saying “my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” It sounds a bit like “We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything. “ from our Pauline reading today.

God’s abundance is there – including the abundance of rest and joy!!

So, I’m all for us continuing to be people who love to learn. We’re good at it, it is needed, and it helps us work with God. And I’m for us continuing to listen to God’s dreams, because they are amazing and because they inoculate us against the myths of scarcity. I’m for our work of justice and advocacy and our actions of compassion because they all build the kindom of God.

Part of our job, too, is to trust that if we do our part, God works with others to do theirs, and change happens. God plants seeds that can take years, decades, centuries to grow, but boy oh boy when they do! So let’s make sure we are nurturing God’s seeds in us and in our community, and hold on to the knowledge that with the God of abundance, all things are possible. Amen

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January 28, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Changing the Narrative” based on Deuteronomy 15:1-4 and Matthew 26:1-16

I grew up in the country, and went to college in rural New Hampshire, so when I started interning as a pastor in urban Los Angeles, …. well, there was a big learning curve. I was scared of cities, because they were just new to me, and I found them overwhelming. Los Angeles is a major urban center, and like most of our urban centers it has dazzling wealth and heartbreaking poverty. Homelessness is an especially huge problem in Los Angeles because people spend their live savings to get there expecting to “make it big” by walking down the street and having a producer hire them for a major movie. Also, it isn’t cold there, so there aren’t networks of code blue shelters.

I worked at a wonderful church, the Hollywood United Methodist Church, and in ways similar to here, the congregation itself was a mixture of the housed and the unhoused, and no conversation about the church happened without awareness of their unhoused neighbors. One of the most distressing moments of my life was in getting to know the unhoused in the Hollywood Church and those who lived around it, and realizing that many of them were the same population as the people I cared for at Sky Lake Special Needs camps. That the most vulnerable among us were living the hardest lives is a lesson I’ve never gotten over. While I served there we would also go to Skid Row – the poorest part of Los Angeles – and serve meals, an experience that wiped any lingering blinders I had about the justice of unfettered competitive capitalism.

After my first year interning at Hollywood, I went on a mission trip to Cuba with Volunteers in Mission. We started in Havana, and eventually drove east to the site where we would work. After several days on the road I finally realized that I was tense all the time because it constantly felt like we were about to slip into a neighborhood like Skid Row, and I expected the punch to the stomach that I’d experienced in seeing Skid Row. But, in Cuba, everything felt like the neighborhood before you got to jaw-dropping poverty. But you never got to jaw-dropping poverty. This was 2004, and I’ve since learned that in the early years after the US embargo there really wasn’t enough enough food, but by 2004 the island had figured out how to feed and house everyone sufficiently – even though cement crumbled and drug stores were largely bare.

There wasn’t much panhandling in Cuba either. There was a little bit, in tourist spots, but our hosts pointed out that because everyone is housed and fed in Cuba, the panhandling was for extra money, not for for basics. I ended up going back to Cuba a few years later, and had very similar experiences. Like the metaphors of a fish being unable to understand water, it took leaving unfettered competitive capitalism for me to be able to see it.

This week I had the chance to attend a conversation led by the Labor and Religion Coalition on the New York State Budget. Many of us are familiar with the Federal Poverty Line, right? And we’re also familiar with it’s limitations, namely that it is abysmally low and a person or family living above that line will still be struggling to make ends meet. You may already know about the United Way measure “ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed)”, but I didn’t. (Can’t tell you if I hadn’t heard it or hadn’t retained it though. Shrug.)

ALICE is a measure of who isn’t making ends meet in society. Fabulously, United Way does an amazing amount of work with the data on Alice. For instance, in NYS 14% of people live under the poverty line. Another 30% of people are in ALICE, and 56% of people are “doing OK” and making ends meet. The numbers a bit worse in Schenectady – in our city 49.8 people live below the ALICE threshold, which is to say that HALF of the people in this city aren’t making ends meet.

What was particularly interesting in the presentation this week was the visual on recent poverty rates.

Namely, that during 2020, when the government focused on responding to people’s needs with stimulus checks, child tax credits, and expansion of SNAP benefits, people living under the national poverty line hit a 20 year LOW.

And since then, the rates have been creeping back up. The work of the Labor and Religion Coalition and their partners The Poor People’s campaign includes asking NYS to readjust it’s priorities. Stop having regressive tax laws that benefit corporations and the wealthy, and use the income gained to bring greater support for the most vulnerable.

Compared to how we have been operating as a society, this feels like a PIPE DREAM. There so many barriers, so many counter arguments, so much fear of the accusation of “raising taxes.” But then I read the Bible, and I read it with the guidance of Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis and Rev. Dr. William Barber, and God is behind that pipe dream.

Which, for me at least, means it is possible.

Which means we can dream about what it would feel like to live in a society where everyone is housed, and housed adequately. Archaeology suggests that in the first 400 years of Ancient Israelite society – the years before kings – all the houses were about the same size. Which means that society was organized around mutual care for each other and sharing of resources. I’ve been shocked to learn from the book “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow that MANY ancient societies were really egalitarian like that, including ones with major urban centers, including ones that were stable for many centuries. The ancient Hebrews weren’t an outlier.

The Hebrew Bible, though, gets really clear on what is needed to create a society where people care for each other. Everyone needs access to resources – in their case land. Did you know that in Hawaii the native people divvied up the land like really narrow pieces of pie because they knew every group of people needed access to the resources of both the land and the sea? God has worked with peoples in so many times and places to take care of each other, and that means it is possible. Liz Theoharis sufficiently mentions the other rules, “forgiving debts, raising wages, outlawing slavery, and restructuring society around the needs of the poor.”1 That’s what we hear in Deuteronomy today. That’s what Jesus reflect on in the gospel.

I’m struck by her clear statement that “charity will not end poverty.” It reminds me of the Simone Weil quote, “It is only by the grace of God that the poor can forgive the rich the bread they feed them.” As long as we have a society that makes some people rich BY making other people poor we’ll have lots and lots of opportunities for charity, but nothing will change.

Our work, I believe, is the work of “narrative takeover.” For us, it may take some time. There is a lot in this unfettered competitive capitalism that we’ve been trained not to see, or to think is necessary, or acceptable, and the work we’re doing with “We Cry Justice” this year helps us reframe the narrative.

What IS the purpose of a society? If it is to fulfill “there will be no need among you,” then we know what direction to turn in, even it it will be a long journey to get there. It is funny, isn’t it? That people know the quote “the poor you will always have with you” but they don’t know that the implication of it is “as long as you fail to follow what God is asking of you.”

So I invite us to this dream. What would it be like to live in a society that houses people well, where everyone had enough nutritious food, where healthcare can accessed? Can you even dream it? What are the implications? I think life would be easier for teachers – because so many barriers to learning would be eliminated. If those who spend their lives fighting to make ends meet were able to focus there gifts elsewhere, what could they offer? We would be able to offer great care to those who are aging, those who are young, and those with special needs – none of which we’re doing now. People fighting to survive might then have energy for art, music, gardening, and other wonderful things that would enrich their lives and the lives of those around them! I suspect mental health would increase, because the fundamental fear of falling through the safety net wouldn’t keep people up at night, and because there would be less stress, and more time for people to connect with those they love. Lives would probably get longer, violence would decrease, ERs would be less crowded, I think there might even be less litter and faster scientific progress. OH, and just that quick reminder- studies say that housing everyone, and feeding everyone, and getting healthcare to everyone would COST US LESS AS A SOCIETY THAN HOW WE DO IT NOW.

Kinda makes you wonder who benefits from how we do it now, doesn’t it?

OK, that’s probably about as much fish trying to see the water as we can take for a day. But I’d love to hear from you what else WILL happen when we make God’s dreams a reality…. let’s keep on building that narrative for each other, until we can see the dream clearly and then see the ways we are most gifted at moving towards it. May there be no need among us. Amen

1Liz Theoharis “1: Is Ending Poverty Possible?” in We Cry Justice, ed. Liz Theoharis (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021) used with permission.

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

January 28, 2024

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December 3, 2023
by Sara Baron

“Yearning for Hope” based on Job 24:1-11, 22-25

Today we re-start the Christian Year, the liturgical cycle of waiting, celebrating, growing, waiting, celebrating, growing. We are now back in waiting. I think I fall deeper in love with Advent every year. The more commercialist Christmas pushes red and white, the more I find myself retreating the Advent colors of purple and pink. The more commercialism pushes secular carols, the more I find myself retreating into the quiet of the sanctuary and the integrity of Advent Hymns. The more commercialism pushes sales and deals the more attention I give to Alternative Christmas.

While secular Christmas has its bright, cheery, feel-good energy all around us, Christian Advent calls us to slow down, reflect, savor. Today we lit the candle of hope, one small light in an ever expanding darkness, one small light that will prove to be enough.

Now, I’m not against secular Christmas, I rather like it, but it feels disconnected from the one Christian one. This fall we did a Bible Study on the Christmas Stories in the Gospels, and we compared and contrasted them with our Christmas memories, our Christmas delights, and even the meaning we make from Christmas. (There is a poster in the back inviting you to do the same.) For most of us, Luke’s story of Christmas fit our faith the best, and made the most sense of it all. We also discovered that reading Luke 1 and 2 together made Luke 2 a whole lot more delightful. Luke centers on women, and on the disenfranchised, and the good news to all people. It fits who we seek to be as a church.

But for now, we’re still waiting, right? We’re waiting, and the description of the world being terribly wrong from the Bible’s most depressive abused character (Job) is doing its job of settling us into waiting. The description Job offers is of the world as it is and we YEARN with all our beings for the KINDOM of God where those descriptions no longer apply.

This Christian Year, the Worship Committee has taken seriously a request from the Intersectional Justice Committee to focus together on the book “We Cry Justice” put out by the Poor People’s Campaign. It is a book in 52 parts, meant to be read devotionally, and no matter how many times our Book Club tried, it didn’t become a readable book. It is a devotional book, so they asked if we could incorporate it into worship, and Worship Committee and I thought that was a wonderful idea. We have completed our year with “A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church,” which was a gift from God via Dr. Wil Gafney, and there is space for a different focus.

The Poor People’s Campaign is a group of amazing activists who decided it was time to pick up the mantle from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr who was himself leading a Poor People’s Campaign at the time of his death. We have been lightly involved with the modern campaign for years, and we have KNOWN that it is one of the ways God is at work in the world, and yet we haven’t quite given it our attention, until now. The book “We Cry Justice” is intentional Biblical interpretation with an eye towards the injustices of the world towards people in poverty. When I wrote them asking for permission to use prayers and quotations in worship they got back to us immediately granting it!

So this year as we settle to wait, our waiting is really defined by our waiting for JUSTICE for the vulnerable and those living in poverty. This fits the life this church particularly well, when I think about what we focus on in mission, while it hasn’t even been a decision exactly, the goals seem to be to lighten the burdens of those living in poverty. We see in our neighbors, our fellow members and worshippers, those dear to us, and quite ourselves the struggles of trying to live in a world that values the creation of capital over the well-being of the vulnerable.

I don’t know about you, but it breaks my heart.

Over and over again.

Actually, I kind of do know about you. I know that this is a community of faith whose belief in God and God’s dreams for the world include knowing that what is just and right in the world is for people to have access to food that is nutritious, delicious and plentiful; to housing that is safe, mold-free, and affordable; and to healthcare that is caring, effective, and doesn’t require declaring bankruptcy. That we are people who believe that God’s desires in the world are for people to live full abundant lives, and we know what is impairing that.

I expect that what I just said was so ridiculously obvious that you don’t know why I’m bothering wasting my breath on it. Thank you for that, because, dear ones, what is clear and obvious here isn’t in the world at large. Our society as a whole is at peace with people being hungry or we would expand SNAP benefits to cover the WHOLE month, expand access to SNAP benefits to everyone who really needs it, and … oh, let’s talk about reality, we wouldn’t have had our federal government cut $22 million from funding for regional food banks that are the last-gap measure between those who are struggling and hunger. (THIS is why we have to go to the store for meat, because the Food Bank can’t afford to get it anymore.) Our society as a whole is at peace with homelessness, or we’d prioritize safe, accessible housing in our budgets and our legislation. Our society as a whole is at peace with people not have access to healthcare, or not being able to afford to access healthcare, or going bankrupt from accessing healthcare or – wait for it – we’d have a different way of providing and funding healthcare.

And when I’m out in the world, listening, a shocking number of people think that those living in poverty should just try harder, or suffer a little because they deserve it, or …. well, basically the assumption is that poverty is the fault of the individual and poverty is the punishment someone deserves for not “succeeding” in capitalism.

Thank God, we see people as beloved children of God worthy of good things and abundant life, and not worthy of being punished because the game is rigged and they can’t win.

Thank God we know a God who is defined by universal love, grace, and mercy. It turns out that matters a lot in what we think justice looks like.

So, here we are on this first Sunday of Advent with one candle-flicker of light in our sanctuary reminding us to hold on to hope. And we have that while we heard words from Job that tell us how the world really is. In “We Cry Justice” Aaron Scott reflects on this Job reading saying:

I see countless tents, tarps, and shacks lining freeway underpasses – up one day, then disappearing the next, removed by cities desperate to keep up appearances instead of keeping up with justice and mercy. I see signs turning parking lots and stoplights across the country into hostile territory: “No Loitering,” “No Illegal Shopping Carts, “No Panhandling.”

And last week while our social worker Sylvester worked to find housing for God’s beloveds who had shown up last week, he confirmed counties in the capital region are buying people bus passes to other counties to avoid the cost of housing them.

The world as it is.

But, dear ones, we aren’t waiting for more of the same. We are waiting for God’s Kindom on earth. And this year, I have noticed something terribly obvious. We aren’t just waiting with our ancestors in faith who also yearned for justice and God’s dreams. I believe we are waiting with God’s own self, God who yearns to see us make different choices and offer better care for God’s vulnerable beloveds.

A challenge of faith today is to look at all the brokenness, all the injustice, all the heartaches, and hold hope. And yet, dear ones, there is plenty. There is hope because God seeks justice. There is hope because this is a community of faith that sees the injustice around us and calls it “immoral.” There is hope because there is a whole Poor People’s Campaign out there working on it! There is hope because God and we, and others along with us, will never concede that this is good enough. There is hope because at the deepest core of reality, there is goodness (God’s goodness) and it is going to break through eventually.

There is hope in this darkness. And the yearning for hope, the yearning for better, the yearning for the kindom is some of the hope itself. Thanks be to God. Amen

December 3, 2023

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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“Nonviolent Protests” based on Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29 and Luke…

April 10, 2022
by Sara Baron

Palm Sunday, quick and dirty:

Passover is a Jewish holiday
celebrating God’s acts in freeing oppressed people from their
oppressors, and leading them to freedom even when a superior
military force wanted to prevent it.
The Celebration of Passover
brought crowds of faithful Jews into Jerusalem to celebrate God’s
power to free them from their oppressors.
Judea, and Galilee were
functionally Roman Colonies, overburdened with taxes that took the
wealth of the land and transferred it to the wealthy artistocrats at
the top of the Roman hierarchy.
The Roman Empire was fairly
nervous and jerky about large crowds of religiously faithful people
who believed in the power of God to overcome oppressors.
Thus, before Passover, the
Roman Empire had a HUGE military parade into Jerusalem emphasizing
the power of their military and bringing the Governor into town to –
as they would say – keep the peace.
The military parade and the
presence of the Governor functioned as THREATS OF VIOLENCE against
anyone who might think God was up to freeing people from oppression
once again.
(It may be worth remembering as
well that a few decades later there WAS a big protest and the Empire
responded with a massacre as well as the destruction of the temple.
They weren’t kidding about the threat of violence.
The military parade happened
EVERY YEAR.
Knowing this, Jesus engaged in
NONVIOLENT DIRECT ACTION to parody their parade and clarify the
differences between Rome’s violent power and God’s nonviolent realm.

As the Jesus Seminar puts it,
“For his part, Jesus made it clear that he was entering Jerusalem
to face death. In that case, the ‘triumphal entry’ as Mark depicts
it is a satire of revolutionary processions and of the kind of
triumphal entry the Romans enjoyed making into cities they had
conquered.”¹
That is, “Jesus was not making a statement about his own
messiahship, but contrasting God’s imperial rule (‘Congratulations,
you poor! God’s domain belongs to you”) with Roman Imperial
Rule.”²

When I think about nonviolent
direct action, this Palm Sunday protest parade is an outstanding
example. It is up there with the best. I believe most of you are
aware of the lunch counter protests whereby people of color (gasp)
sat down at lunch counters where they would not be served to draw
attention to that injustice (and take the space of someone who might
be served AND PAY).

I believe most of you are aware
of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when for over a year African Americans
refused to ride buses in Montgomery, Alabama until the buses stoped
having segregated seating. They refused to ride AS second class
citizens, and without their participation, the buses weren’t
sustainable.

Nonviolent direction action is
really, really hard work. In both of those cases people faced
violence and hardship in response to seeking justice. I’m always
astounded at the commitment people made FOR MORE THAN A YEAR in the
bus boycott, and in the face of VIOLENCE at lunch counters.

Those actions changed our
society for the better. They didn’t counter violence with violence,
but rather with nonviolence. They showed up or didn’t as needed, and
allowed their nonviolent actions to create change.

Our society isn’t particularly
fond of protest, or at least that what I hear when Black Lives
Matters gets brought up in most places. I hear that people should
seek justice in other ways, which makes it clear to me that a lot of
people don’t actually understand the point of protests.

Protests or nonviolent direct
actions are what you do when other avenues of justice are closed OR
you need to increase public awareness of injustice in order to work
through other avenues of justice. If a problem can be solved
directly, most people chose that route. Nonviolent direction action
is the HARDER way forward – one that comes at personal cost, often
with a threat of violence against those who are involved with the
action, and when other avenues are closed.

I’m quite confident that if a
nicely worded letter to a Diner or a local paper managed to
desegregate restaurants, people would have done that. I’m assured
that if a phone call to a city councilman or a postcard campaign to
the transit authority would have desegregated buses, people would
have been thrilled to take the easier route.

Several years ago now, the Poor
People’s Campaign NY did a series of nonviolent direct actions in the
New York State capital to draw attention to the ways that the needs
of people in poverty are being ignored. The one I thought was most
creative was the Fort Orange Club action. Kevin Nelson was present
and he explains it this way:

“We were protesting the
influence of lobbying interests (and their related campaign
donations) on policies that subvert the interest of average New
Yorkers. We had a human chain thing from the Legislative Office
Building (LOB) to the Fort Orange Club, with “bags of money”
along the chain to indicate the money flow. We blocked exits and
entrances to the parking lots at the Club for several hours.”

This one particularly reminds me
of the Jesus Palm Sunday protest, in that it seems equally BRILLIANT,
and infuriating to those in power.

The injustice I have spent the
most time working to change is the structural institutional
homophobia of The United Methodist Church. Because of my work there,
I’ve seen the ways that all other avenues have been blocked. Since
1972, petitions to change the homophobic stances have come to the
floor at General Conference, with no positive action. The judicial
branch of the UMC has upheld the discrimination, and most Bishops
will enforce it. LGBTQIA+ people and their allies lack the votes,
the power, and the access to justice.

Thus, there has been a need to
increase the pressure to create change, to increase anxiety, to bring
attention to injustice, and to be clear that the only way to stop the
demands for justice was to BRING JUSTICE to God’s people.

There have been a lot of
protests, and I want to talk about two of them.

For the first, I’m going to
share it in the words of Rev. Dr. Julie Todd who spent many DECADES
as an activist for Queer and Trans rights in the UMC. This is from
the “Love Prevails Blog”

There was a regularly scheduled
communion at every lunch break in the plenary hall at General
Conference 2004 in Pittsburgh. On the day the votes went badly yet
again for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ)
people, we decided as a movement to go to that communion service,
where we could stand in the presence of the broken and resurrected
Body of Christ. We did this as a means of re-asserting our presence
in that Body. We did this as a means of resistance against the false
institutional proclamation of one cup, one Body, and one baptism,
when clearly the actions of the General Conference actively sought to
harm and exclude members of that Body. All forms of our resistance
and disruption are embodied statements that the unity of the church
cannot continue to come at the cost of LGBTQ lives. These same acts
of resistance are theological affirmations that the resurrected Jesus
lives on in our whole and beloved queer bodies.

There was weeping and there was
anger at communion. There was a need for a deep and spiritual release
of the violence that had just been done to the queer body of Christ.
Because when votes are cast against the very existence of LGBTQ
lives, that is what is happens: violence. Christ’s body crucified
again. To not act in the face of such violence does further violence.

When the sacrament was over,
Rev. James Preston grabbed a chalice from the communion altar and
smashed it on the floor. The smashing of the chalice was not a
planned disruption. While there were many interpretations of that
moment of breaking the chalice, in fact there was no chaos, no
storming the altar, no desecration of the sacrament. There was a holy
anger that took shape in a prophetic act. A movement of the Spirit
interceded to express anguished sighs too deep for words. In the
breaking of the cup, Christ spoke to the real brokenness of the
moment.3

The
destruction of that chalice REALLY upset a lot of people. To this
day I remain horrified that they were upset at the breaking of a
sacred symbol, but not at the ways the church has broken God’s
beloved PEOPLE.

At
that same 2004 General Conference, people started wearing short
rainbow stoles to symbolize a commitment to full inclusion of
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer person in the life and
policy of The UMC. Rainbow stoles become particularly symbolic at
Annual Conferences and their ordination services – when they are a
sign of protest over who gets the authority to wear a stole (a symbol
of being ordained) in The UMC. When I was ordained, I was supposed
to have a red stole placed on my shoulders, as red is the color of
pentecost and ordination. Instead I was ordained with a rainbow
stole (and still won’t wear a red one – not until all those called
can serve). My mentors laid hands on me without their robes or
stoles (and one of them in a LOVELY rainbow shawl), as further
expressions of my objections (and theirs.)

In
the scheme of things, what a clergy person wears or doesn’t while
being ordained into a homophobic institution is a pretty low form of
protest. (I joined to bring change, but I’m often still
uncomfortable with it.) There were no consequences, and no changes
came from it. But I remember having a colleague I was getting
ordained with asking me to refrain from those signs of protest so
that our shared ordination could be “sacred.” And I remember
responding that I couldn’t refrain from sharing my objections about
ORDINATION AT ORDINATION. (By the grace of God, that colleague later
changed their mind and told me so, thanking me for my witness.)

So, this Palm Sunday, this day
of remembering a nonviolent direct action that was responded to with
deadly force, I invite you into reflection on justice, protests, and

nonviolent direct actions.

When you see a protest – ask
yourself – what justice is missing, and WHY and HOW is it blocked?

When you see an injustice, talk
with others and pray about what means of responding will bring
change.

It seems that’s the Jesus way,
thanks be to God.

Amen

1. Acts
of Jesus, 120.

2. Acts
of Jesus, 121.

3. https://loveprevailsumc.com/2016/05/12/on-the-body-being-broken/

Sermons

“The Work of the Kindom” based on Matthew 5:13-20…

February 9, 2020February 11, 2020
by Sara Baron

I
often hear it said, “Like a fish in water,” reflecting the idea
that a fish isn’t aware of water, which is meant to help us notice
our own contexts. During a wonderful and life giving conversation
with a person from a FAR more conservative Christian upbringing, that
person said to me, “Your Christianity sounds exhausting.” I was
unclear about the meaning of that and asked about it. The person
replied, “All I have to do to be right with God is profess my
belief in the right things and then trust that all is as God wills it
to be. But you think that you are responsible along with God, so you
think you have to fix all the things that are broken, and so you
never get a break as long as the world is still broken.” I sat
with that for a minute and then admitted, “Yes, it is exhausting.”

I
hadn’t seen it until it was pointed out to me though, and I remain
very grateful for that conversation and that person’s willingness to
be in those conversations with me.

As
much as I adore Isaiah, and as much as I adore Isaiah for passages
like this, the temptation towards exhaustion is certainly raised.
Walter Bruggemann¹
does wonderful work with this passage, pointing out that it
criticizes “feel good worship” that doesn’t lead to action,
worship done to manipulate God, worship without humane economic
practices, and a lack of neighborliness. Three things are asked of
God-worshippers: “(a) shared bread, (b) shared houses, and ©
shared clothing.”²
Food, shelter, and clothing being imperative for life, worshippers
of God are to see those who are struggling as beloved members of
their own families and provide for them.

Doris
Clark told me once about her childhood in rural Western NY. Her
family, like all the other families around, lived on a small family
farm. Their lives were sustainable, but not wealth producing. One
of the nearby families was impoverished because they’d had many
children and the resources they had didn’t stretch far enough for all
the mouths they had to feed and bodies they had to clothe. Doris
reflected on the fact that her family, like all the other families in
the area, shared their excess with that one family and were able to
keep them afloat. She also reflected that what had seemed possible
with one family out of many, when all were interconnected felt VERY
different from responding to poverty and need in this place and era.

That
was another fish noticing the water conversation for me. I knew I
was overwhelmed by the needs around us, but I hadn’t ever experienced
anything different in order to be able to make sense of it. As of
the last census, more than half the kids in our city live under the
poverty rate, and recent administrative changes to social service
programs has made that far worse.³
The Schenectady City School Districts puts it this way, 79% of our
school children are “economically disadvantaged” which translates
to “eligible for free or reduced lunch.”⁴
On these statistics alone, it feels like a different world than the
one Doris grew up in.

And
the challenge is that these aren’t the only problems we are aware of.
Just to put it into perspective, we are aware of gross injustice at
our borders, including nearly 70,000 children in cages and
deportations of integral members of communities; we are are of gross
injustice in our so-called justice system, which has the impact of
decimating communities of color with imprisonment, probation, and
life-time bans on social service supports for crimes that are
committed equally by people of all races; we are aware of a gross
injustice to our the youngest members of our society when parents
don’t have paid leave and aren’t able to spend the time with their
infants that is needed; we are aware of a raging climate crisis that
has one of our continents burning and then flooding at unprecedented
levels, seas rising, extreme weather events becoming normal, and mass
migration pressing the capacities of nations; we are aware of
governmental instability around the world, of dictatorships and wars
and genocides…. and I just picked SOME of the big issues floating
around us today.

And
so when I hear Isaiah speaking for God saying, “Is this not the
fast I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of
the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is
it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless
poor into your house, when you see the naked, to cover them, and not
hide yourself from from your own kin?” I admit to some feelings of
utter exhaustion, and sometimes even hopelessness. I know God is big,
but humanity isn’t terribly faithful to God and our problems are
ENORMOUS.

So,
a person might say, pick one problem, one close to home and work on
that! I’m game for that, let’s look a childhood poverty in
Schenectady? Where does it come from? This one I know the answer
to! People who are the caregivers of children in Schenectady don’t
have enough money. (Mathematical proof complete.)

So,
why don’t the caregivers of children in Schenectady have enough
money? Well, that gets complicated. Some of it is because there
aren’t enough jobs; some if it is because there aren’t enough jobs
that pay a living wage; some of it is because people don’t have the
knowledge, training, or skills to get the jobs that exist; and some
of it is because people aren’t able to participate in the workforce
get so very little money to live off of; some of it could even be
because people don’t have good skills in financial management. But
that’s only the beginning.

When
we root down deeper in these questions we get to a lot of other
issues. Schenectady definitely deals with impoverished people of
color being being imprisoned – with the greatest impact being in
the African American community, and a person in prison can’t make
money while in prison and is profoundly impeded from doing so
afterwards (not can they get the support they need.) Schenectady
City Schools have been underfunded by the state for decades, making
it exceptionally difficult to provide the services our students need
to thrive, ESPECIALLY given the struggles students have when they
grow up in impoverished neighborhoods. This also means that many of
our graduates aren’t prepared for the job market. We clearly also
have struggles with drug and alcohol addiction, which is complicated
by drug companies that have decided to make profits off of people’s
lives. We in this community are deeply impacted by the cost of
medical care, which has impoverished many and prevents even more from
getting the care they need. We also struggle with old housing stock
and a high water table that results in some of the highest asthma
rates in the country.

There
are also the complicating aspects of poverty – the part where
everything in poverty is more expensive: the cost to cash a check
without a bank account, bank fees if you don’t have a high enough
balance, buying things on credit and paying much more with interest,
INSANE interest and fees, trying to eat cheaper food and paying for
it with health, the pure cost of eviction and then the increased cost
of housing after eviction, the increased cost of buying food near
one’s house when that isn’t where the grocery store is but the store
is far away and costs too much to get to, the smaller earning power
of women – with larger impact when men are imprisoned, the impact
of stress on the body and the family, and the list goes on and on.

Right,
so everything is intersecting and it isn’t easy to change. A few
years ago I went to TEDx Albany and heard some great speakers offer
wonderful inspirational stories. Most of them that year were about
the speaker’s intentional work to change the lives of people living
in poverty, and that was great! But I was a little horrified to
realize that all of them were working on poverty on an individual
level. That is, “if I help this person (or these people) in this
one small way, it increases the likelihood that they’ll be able to
get out of poverty.” Excellent, for sure, and a great use of
compassion and capacity. What scared me was that no one seemed to be
looking at poverty on the larger scale. Because in our society,
when one person or family fworks their way out of poverty, someone
else falls in.

Our
capitalist system depends on there being a lower class and an
impoverished class… because all those ways that poverty is
expensive are ways that other people are able to make money of of
people’s suffering.

This
isn’t new, it isn’t news, and it definitely isn’t just the USA. One
of the things that is most helpful about the gospels for me are that
they are based in a very similar economic system, and so the analysis
of Jesus is particularly applicable for us today. The context of
Isaiah is a little bit more complicated, and that’s good too. This
passage is from Third Isaiah, reflecting the struggles of the
community newly back from exile. So, they were still a vassal state
to an external empire, but they also had some freedom, and were
trying to rebuild their society. Thus, the normal struggles of “what
does justice look like” were relevant for them. During the exile,
the people left behind were defenseless and struggled mightily for
generations. And, during the exile, the people taken into exile were
used as slaves and struggled mightily for generations. That’s a hard
place to start rebuilding from! And it might be an easy place to
become individualistic. After all, everyone has had a hard time,
there aren’t a lot of resources, it might make sense to gather what
you can and share it sparingly.

But
also, the people were FREE, and they were REBUILDING, and they were
grateful to God for this new era were particularly faithful to their
worship and religious rituals. Which is where we find this passage.
The people are worshipping, yes, but aren’t living out God’s values.
God’s values are ALWAYS for the well-being of the whole, the care for
the vulnerable, and the acknowledgment of shared humanity with those
who are struggling.

And,
yes, sometimes this is really hard, and it is almost always
overwhelming. And these problems are big, and complicated. There
are three pieces of good news here though: 1. God is on the side of
vulnerable, and God is a really really good ally, 2. The Body of
Christ works so that if each of us do our part, big changes happen,
but we only have to do our small part, 3. The Poor People’s Campaign
is working on all of this and they’re amazing.
(Copies of my sermon have the NY state fact sheet attached.)⁵

Actually,
there is a 4^th
piece of really good news, and this is one I should talk about more.
One of the most valuable ways to change the world is to settle into
God’s love for us. Because when we are TRYING to be lovable, we tend
to get really defensive about our errors and then that leads to us
judging others to protect ourselves, and things can go downhill
quickly. But when we TRUST that God loves us, and also that God has
good work for us to do in the world, THEN we can participate in the
world as expressions of that love, and things just go far better. As
we allow ourselves, and our humanity, and even our weaknesses and
failures to be acceptable to ourselves and visible to others, we tend
to get better at letting other people be human too. And as we do
that, we increase our capacity to see other people as fully human and
fully beloved by God – and THEN we have the best possible
motivation to work towards bettering the lives of those around us.

So,
dear ones of God, I invite you to do what you can do to settle into
God’s love for you, and also to follow God’s will in the world: to
create more justice, to break more yokes, and to bring freedom to the
oppressed. May God help us all. Amen

1Yep,
it is paragraph three and I’ve now cited Isaiah and Brueggemann.
#ProgressivePastorCredentials. Also, if you were wondering, my
computer knows how to spell Brueggemann.

2Walter
Bruggemann, Isaiah
40-66
(Louisville, KT: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 187-189

3 https://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Census-Most-Schenectady-kids-live-in-poverty-3925563.php

4 http://www.schenectady.k12.ny.us/about_us/district_dashboard/demographics

5 https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/New-York-Fact-Sheet.pdf

Sermons

Untitled

January 19, 2020February 11, 2020
by Sara Baron

Two
years ago, our niece got a new game for Christmas: Harry Potter,
Hogwarts Battle. We usually spend New Years together, and it is a
great 4 person game, so Kevin and I got to break into the game with
our niece and her mother. It is now fair to say that this is our
favorite game, and the four us clocked A LOT of hours playing it.

Beyond
the really fun Harry Potter connections, and the truly excellent game
design, I think we all love it so much because it is a collaborative
game. The players are all working together towards a goal, so in the
end either everyone wins or everyone loses. Which also means that no
one of us ends up as the winner while the rest of us have lost.
Truthfully, I really like board games, and most of the ones I play
have winners and losers, and I’m generally OK with that, but there is
something really great about a collaborative game. It is especially
engaging because each choice we make impacts each other player, so we
have to pay attention to what each person needs and what each
person’s strengths are, and how each person can make the best use of
their strengths.

The
game is hard, and we lose sometimes. Really, we lose about half of
the games we play, and we sometimes give up a game before playing
just because the starting conditions are too difficult. But the
collaboration makes it interesting enough that even losing isn’t THAT
bad. (Most of the time.)

I
find it interesting that the collaborative game is so much fun. When
I was growing up our church had a copy “The Ungame” which was
mean to be a fun game that was collaborative rather than competitive,
and while I fully support the creators and their intentions it was
the least fun game imaginable. Yet,
there is so much already in our capitalistic society that is
inherently about winners and losers, and zero sum games, and
competing against each other – and I’m really, really glad that
there are now super fun games that don’t buy into that model.

Collaborative
games seem more like the model of working for the common good. Maybe
it is just because I was born and raised in the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania, but the moment when I finally actually noticed the word
“commonwealth” and thought about what it meant was eye-opening
for me. I think of the common good and commonwealths as other ways
of speaking about the kindom.

Over
the past 3+ years we’ve talked about Intersectional Justice and
Intersectionality a lot, but just in case the ideas are still fuzzy
for you, here is MFSA’s definition of its “intersectional
organizing principal.”

All experiences of marginalization
and injustice are interconnected because the struggle for justice is
tied to concepts of power and privilege. Intersectional organizing
recognizes that injustice works on multiple and simultaneous levels.
Because experiences of injustice do not happen in a vacuum, it is
imperative to: develop the most effective strategies to create space
for understanding privilege; organize in an intersectional framework
led by marginalized communities; and build effective systems of
resistance and cooperation to take action for justice. Practical
intersectional organizing always focuses on collaboration and
relationship building.

To
bring that a little bit more into reality, intersectionality means
acknowledging that working on ONE issue and making as small as
possible so you can make some gains really doesn’t help that much.
For example, it is said that 101 years ago women gained the right to
vote in NY state, that misses that it only applied to white women.
That came from a choice to empower white women at the expense of
women of color and was NOT intersectional organizing. There have
been a LOT of times organizing has worked this way, most of the time
it has worked this way, and it has done a lot of harm.

During
an anti-white supremacy training, I was taught to think holistically
about power. That is, we all know what traits are most associated
with power in our society: white, male, rich, straight, English
speaking, cisgender, citizen, with a full range of ableness,
educated, tall… etc, right? In each case, there is an opposite to
the description that is disempowered. I’m expecting you are
following thus far. Well, because the people who have the traits
connected to power control the resources, they use most of them! And
then, it turns out, the people who are DISCONNECTED from power end up
fighting to get access to the scraps of resources that the powerful
are willing to share. There are two
REALLY bad parts of this – first of all, to get access to those
resources usually means playing by the rules of the ones who have
power, and secondly, those without power are usually set up to fight
AGAINST EACH OTHER for access to those scraps.

That
is, when white women decided to try to get the vote for themselves,
and not seek voting rights for all women, they made a decision to
play by the rules of how power already worked, and to distance
themselves from people of color to try to get what they wanted and
needed. And, this happens time and time again.

Intersectionality
is about seeing the wholeness of the power dynamics, and the
complicated realities of people – who all have power in some ways
and lack power in others – and holding the whole together while
working for good. It is really, really hard.

It
is probably also why I teared up when reading Isaiah this week. The
passage quotes God as saying, “It is too light a thing that you
should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore
the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.“ The way I
heard that was, don’t just work for the benefit of a few, even if
they are the ones you identify with – work for the well being of
ALL. And all, in all places, including enemy nations!!

Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is best known for his transformational
work on racial justice, work that make our country noticeably better.
Yet, at the end of his life, he had broadened his work, and was
organizing around poverty. As several of the past year’s
Intersectional Justice Book Club books have pointed out, the powers
that exist in the United States have VERY INTENTIONALLY used race to
divide people, in large part so that impoverished white people and
impoverished people of color wouldn’t start working together against
their common oppressor. Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign was
designed to bring people together for their common good, and truly
for every’s good. As King once said, “In your struggle for
justice, let your oppressor know that you are not attempting to
defeat or humiliate him, or even to pay him back for injustices that
he has heaped upon you. Let him know that you are merely seeking
justice for him as well as yourself.” Because, truly, oppressing
anyone harms both the oppressed AND inherently, the oppressor.

Today,
other’s have picked up Dr. King’s mantle, and there is an active Poor
People’s Campaign underway. While their “Fundamental Principals”
are expansive – there are 12 – they are a coherent whole and I
couldn’t edit them down. I want you hear, and be filled with hope,
and maybe even be motivated to work with this campaign, so here they
are:

We are rooted
in a moral analysis based on our deepest religious and
constitutional values that demand justice for all. Moral revival is
necessary to save the heart and soul of our democracy.
We
are committed to lifting up and deepening the leadership of those
most affected by systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, and
ecological devastation and to building unity across lines of
division.
We
believe in the dismantling of unjust criminalization systems that
exploit poor communities and communities of color and the
transformation of the “War Economy” into a “Peace Economy”
that values all humanity.
We
believe that equal protection under the law is non-negotiable.
We
believe that people should not live in or die from poverty in the
richest nation ever to exist. Blaming the poor and claiming that the
United States does not have an abundance of resources to overcome
poverty are false narratives used to perpetuate economic
exploitation, exclusion, and deep inequality.
We
recognize the centrality of systemic racism in maintaining economic
oppression must be named, detailed and exposed empirically, morally
and spiritually. Poverty and economic inequality cannot be
understood apart from a society built on white supremacy.
We
aim to shift the distorted moral narrative often promoted by
religious extremists in the nation from issues like prayer in
school, abortion, and gun rights to one that is concerned with how
our society treats the poor, those on the margins, the least of
these, women, LGBTQIA folks, workers, immigrants, the disabled and
the sick; equality and representation under the law; and the desire
for peace, love and harmony within and among nations.
We
will build up the power of people and state-based movements to serve
as a vehicle for a powerful moral movement in the country and to
transform the political, economic and moral structures of our
society.
We
recognize the need to organize at the state and local level—many
of the most regressive policies are being passed at the state level,
and these policies will have long and lasting effect, past even
executive orders. The movement is not from above but below.
We
will do our work in a non-partisan way—no elected officials or
candidates get the stage or serve on the State Organizing Committee
of the Campaign. This is not about left and right, Democrat or
Republican but about right and wrong.
We
uphold the need to do a season of sustained moral direct action as a
way to break through the tweets and shift the moral narrative. We
are demonstrating the power of people coming together across issues
and geography and putting our bodies on the line to the issues that
are affecting us all.
The Campaign
and all its Participants and Endorsers embrace nonviolence. Violent
tactics or actions will not be tolerated.

This
campaign is DEEPLY good news. I encourage you to look them up, their
demands are even better (but ever longer) and well worth the read.
There are a lot of opportunities to volunteer with and support the
Poor People’s Campaign, and I’d be happy to connect to to those who
are organizing – as would your Intersectional Justice chairs.

Working
towards justice for all is really, really hard work. It can even be
overwhelming, but as Isaiah says, God is out for the well-being of
the whole world. Before you get overwhelmed though, let me remind
you that God has a LOT of partners in this work and no ONE of us is
called to do all the work. In fact, we’re called to trust each other
and each other’s work, and to carefully discern what our work is to
do. Love exists, its power can spread, justice is possible, and good
people are at work. We are meant to be a light to ALL the nations,
and with God at our backs, we can and we will. And it is possible
because of collaboration. Thanks be to God. Amen

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/
 https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

January 19, 2019

Sermons

“Change and Letting Go” based on Psalm 32 and…

April 15, 2019February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

As human beings, we come into the world with needs. New
babies need milk, diaper changes, human touch, soothing, temperature
control, shelter, communication, emotional mirroring, safe spaces,
tummy time, and lots and lots of sleep. As far as I can tell, our
needs as humans grow from there.

Our needs remain complicated as well. We have physical
needs for food, drink, clothing, shelter, and equally important
social and emotional needs to be heard, to be understood, to play, to
find peace, to connect. Nonviolent Communication teachers share
lists of universal human needs, the one I use most often lists more
than 90 of them.

Because there are so many, and because life is so
complicated, it is rare for us to have our needs met at the same
time. Nonviolent Communication theory suggests that everything we
say and do is really about trying to get those needs met, and I
haven’t seen any reason to disbelieve it. It may help to know that
needs for peace, contribution, learning, purpose, and celebration
exist – so some of the needs make space for us to want to do things
that impact others.

The Isaiah passage opens up for me the dream of having
needs being met, perhaps even to have all of them met all at once.
Without Isaiah dreaming it, I’m not sure I could conceive of this.
Furthermore, the dream isn’t of some weak, minimalistic set of needs
being met. It is all of them being met well. Using the direct,
physical needs of thirst and hunger, Isaiah speaks of being offered
water, wine, milk, and rich food – without having to even pay for
them!

These were not foods that average people were eating –
these were the foods of the rich, and Isaiah proposes that God wants
all the people to access those good foods. This is an opening to
thinking about life with God, life in relationship to God, life that
is shared under God’s vision of how things are supposed to be.

How things are supposed to be is incredibly disconnected
from how the world actually was, and how it actually is. This
passage comes from the end of Second Isaiah, which dreams of a
different life for the exiles who God is going to lead home. The
people have been in captivity in Babylon, and their captivity is
about to be transformed. The hope of the passage is that in coming
home to Ancient Israel, the people will also come home to God’s ways.
Walter Brueggemann writes,

“The initial verse, perhaps in the summoning mode of a
street vendor, offers to passersby free water, free wine, and free
milk. This of course is in contrast to the life resources offered by
the empire that are always expensive, grudging, and unsatisfying.
Israel is invited to choose the free, alternative nourishment offered
by Yahweh. Thus, although we may ponder the metaphor of free food,
the underlying urging is the sharp contrast between the way of life
given in Babylon that leads to death and the way of Yahweh that leads
to joyous homecoming.”¹

The vision of Yahweh for Ancient Israel, which I believe
is still the vision of God for all people, is for the people to have
enough to survive AND thrive. The world itself produces plenty, but
our societies distribution patterns prevent the “enough” from
getting to the people. According to the Poor People’s campaign, in
the US today, 43.5% of US population are in poverty or are
low-income.²
Those old systems of the empires – the ones that bring the wealth
created by the many to the top – those are still happening.

It is funny to think of our needs being met, not only
because there are so many of them, but because even the idea of
universally satisfying the basic physical human needs is so far from
reality. What would it look like if all people had enough to eat –
of nutritious and delicious food? Can we quite imagine it? What
would it look like here and elsewhere if the housing stock was mold
free, well insulated, repairs were up to date, water was safe to
drink, AND homelessness was eliminated? It is a thing to ponder.
Can we imagine universal health care in this country, and one that
works? Where people can afford both preventative care and
necessarily life-giving measures? What about this – can we imagine
a world where there are enough mental health care providers for all
who need them, and all are offering top notch, compassionate care
(and the mental health care providers aren’t over worked, are
adequately paid, and have time and energy to do necessary self care)?
Oh what a world this would be!! Ready for one more? Can we imagine
a society with expansive parental leave policies for people at every
income level, with excellent nursery and day care for babies AND
nursing and adult care for adults in need, provided by people who are
adequately compensated for their imperative work, and trained to
offer it at the highest levels?

Can we even dream it? Those are the BASICS, and Isaiah
invites us to dream them. Those aren’t quite milk, wine, and rich
foods. Those are merely clean water and enough bread for everyone.
Even with these pieces met, a lot of problems would remain. But if
the BASICS were met, it would matter a lot. And it is POSSIBLE.
This is not an unattainable dream – the capacity to make it happen
already exists.

I think it is a dream that Isaiah pushes us to
contemplate. If we don’t dream a little bit, we can’t know what we
are working towards, and we have no chance of getting there.

Of course, if we had a system where basic needs were
met, it would radically upend the economy, and society. It is a very
BIG dream. To have people’s needs met would mean that some of the
value of their labor would have to return to them, and that more the
value of all of our labor would be needed to care for those who
cannot labor. We can’t have a system that cares adequately for all
people AND one that allows the work of most to enrich the few.

In addition to dreaming a dream of human needs being
met, Isaiah’s passage also condemns the system as it was for how it
worked. It indicts the labor system for enriching the empire at the
expense of the labors. It also called out the thinking that allowed
it, called people out of the idea that working harder within the
system would find them a way to get to satisfaction. This is one of
the hardest lessons for us today. Working harder in rigged systems
only exhausts us, it does not get us what we need. We still have a
system where people “spend your money for that which is not bread
and your labor for that which does not satisfy,” because the labor
is not permitted to bring satisfaction!

God’s dream is NOT a system of competition, of forced
labor, or even of economic gain over another. God’s dream is NOT one
where people have to work harder than their neighbors into to fight
for the scraps they need to survive. This is true BOTH with regards
to food and health care AND with regard to love and beauty. God
wants us to have what we need, and the earth is capable of providing
it, but not when people are exploited for other’s excess.

I suspect is is this system of thinking that is
reflected in the later words of the “righteous” and the “wicked”
– the ones who are willing to let go of the systems of exploitation
of the empire to move into God’s vision are the righteous, and those
who continue to participate in it and be co-opted by it are the
“wicked.” This isn’t just me. Brueggemann came to the same
conclusions 😉 (and that makes me feel SUPER smart.) “’The
wicked’, I suggest, are not disobedient people in general. In
context, they are those who are so settled in Babylon and so
accommodated to imperial ways that they have no intention of making a
positive response to Yahweh’s invitation of homecoming.”³

Between all of this, and the echoes from the Psalm, I’m
wondering us and about how well we are doing “making a positive
response to Yahweh’s invitation of homecoming.” How well are we
able to leave behind the systems and thought patterns of oppression
and competition to move into a brave new world? How interested are
we in the possibilities of the present and the future?

For me, some of the process of freeing myself from the
systems of oppression come in the practices of Sabbath-keeping and
meditative prayer. It is EASY to get pulled in to never-ending
productivity, but when I STOP trying to be productive, I’m more able
to figure out what the goal of the production is anyway! It is easy
to get pulled into a roller-coaster of emotions with the 24 hour news
cycle, but when I stop and get quiet, I can hear which parts of what
is happening I’m most able to respond to in a useful way. The times
of quiet in my life are when I can hear my own soul, and the Divine
prodding, when I can let go of how I’m supposed to present myself,
and simply be. And unless I’m doing those things, I’m VERY easily
swayed by the systems of oppression.

This is where spirituality intersects with both justice
work and my own well-being. It isn’t healthy for us to live in the
levels of anxiety that modern life produces, but it isn’t easy to let
go of i either! (In a different sort of church, that might merit an
“amen.”) It is hard to focus on what needs to be done to build a
better society and world, particularly when dumpster fires are
happening all around us – but the capacity to build focus is part
of the gift of spiritual practice, as is the process of being able to
prioritize.

Beloveds of God, are we finding the ways to listen to
the Holy One? God’s guidance is worthwhile – the Psalmist even
finds it worth clinging to. Are we taking the time for rest, for
Sabbath, for prayer, so that we can have those needs met and be able
to envision a world where many needs are met for all people? The
invitation is given to us – to be fed, to rest, to be filled, to be
satiated. May we receive it, and pass it on. Amen

1Walter
Bruggemann, Isaiah
40-66
(Louisville, KT: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998),159.

2Institute
for Policy Studies, “The Souls of Poor Folk: A Preliminary Report”
(December 2017)
https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/PPC-Report-Draft-1.pdf,
page 8.

3Brueggemann,
160.

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/
 https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

March 24, 2019