“Role Model?” based on Luke 16:1-3

September 18, 2022
by Sara Baron

Parables are not fables. They don’t
teach us a direct lesson that can be immediately applied to living a
good life. Case in point: the parable of the dishonest manager. If
I were giving awards for the most morally ambiguous parable, this one
would be in the running.

For starters, the issue presented is of
a DISHONEST manager, that’s who we’re dealing with as the… hero?
The dishonest manager gets fired, but before the word gets out, he
cancels some of the debt of the owners debtors, presumably aiming to
get hired by one of them for his next gig. So he is dishonest,
underhanded, and self-serving. And he gets commended by the person
who had fired him and used as an example of kindom values by Jesus?

This guy is our role model?

Let no one say the role of the preacher
in interpreting the texts for a modern audience is easy.

But… let’s give this a try.

First of all, I think we better have a
solid sense of this
story in its historical context so that we read less into it and hear
it more as first hearers would have. Here is redacted commentary
from the Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels:

Rich landowners
frequently employed estate managers (often a slave born in the
household) who had the authority to rent property, make loans, and
liquidate debts in the name of the master. Such agents were usually
paid in the form of a commission or fee on each transaction they
arranged. While token under-the-table additions to loan contracts
were common, all the principal and interest had to be in a publicly
written contract approved by both parties. There is no warrant for
the frequent assumption here that the agent could exact as much as 50
percent above a contract for his fee. If that had been done, the
rage of the peasants would have immediately been made known to the
landowner ,.. who would have been implicated in the extortion if he
acquiesced. This is clearly not the case in this story.

Traditional
Israelite law provided that an agent was expected to pay for any loss
incurred by his employer for which he was responsible. He could also
be put in prison to extort the funds from his family. If the
dishonesty of the manager became public knowledge, he would have been
seen as damaging the reputation of the master. Severe punishment
could be expected. Startlingly, however, in this story he is simply
dismissed.

In the case of
the dismissal of an agent, the dismissal was effective as soon as the
agent was informed of it, and from that time forward, nothing the
agent did was binding on the person who employed him. The plan
worked out by the manager thus had to be enacted before word of his
dismissal got to the village. …

The scheme of the
manager is to seek new patrons….

The debtors here
[paid a fixed amount of the produce]. The size of the debts is
extraordinary. Though such measures are difficult to pin down, they
are probably equivalent to 900 gallons of oil and 150 bushels of
wheat. Storytelling hyperbole may be involved, or as recent
investigations have suggested, debts are large enough that they may
be the tax debts of an entire village. …

The “rich man”
presumably has …an interpersonal attachment to his manager. Having
discovered the mercy of the landowner in not putting him in prison or
demanding repayment, the manager depends on a similar reaction in the
scheme he cooks up. It is a scheme that places the landowner in a
peculiar bind. If he retracts the actions of the manager, he risks
serious alienation in the village, where villagers would already have
been celebrating his astonishing generosity. If he allows the
reductions to stand, he will be praised far and wide (as will the
manager for having made the “arrangement”) as a noble and
generous man. It is the latter reaction upon which the manager
counts.¹

The more I read about the Jewish
peasants of Jesus day, the more I am convinced that they were well
aware of the systems of injustice that kept them down. I find this
to also be true of people living in poverty today.

I’m not sure if there is an actual
protagonist in this story, really. The rich man is definitely not
seen as a good man, in a society were wealth was assumed to be
stolen. But, the person whose job it was to enable the rich man’s
continued wealth accumulation was ALSO not seen in a positive light.
Many people I know can identify with the managers bind. He was
better off being a manager and getting a decent cut of the accounts
he created than he was in most other positions he was eligible for,
but working for “the man” whose very wealth oppressed others was
also inherently dishonorable work. Or at least, I believe the
peasants would have seen it that way.

And quite often when I think too hard
about what it means to work for “The United Methodist Church”, I
fear it too is inherently dishonorable work, even if I believe
working for THIS church is a moral good. There are SO MANY jobs like
this though. Working for the health care system – YAY, caring for
people! But also, making wealth for investors in insurance
companies. Sigh. Working in education – YAY, teaching people
things they need to know! But also, participating in a system that
maintains income INEQUALITY over lifetimes. Groan. Actually, come
to think of it a lot of jobs, probably most jobs, are really morally
ambiguous given the fact that we live in a society that treats a
large percentage of people as expendable, and the institutions and
systems of society are part of how we maintain this system.

(Right now I feel like John Oliver when
he talks about how incredibly cheery his show.)

So in the midst of the realities of
income inequality, injustice, and violations of Jewish law, comes
this incredibly morally ambiguous parable. I think the way I can
most easily make sense of it is if the debts forgiven are the debts
of the whole village. That brings the whole thing together for me –
including that it suggests the Rich Man owns the whole village which
was common enough in the Roman Empire but INHERENTLY immoral in the
tradition of the Ancient Jews who believed that every family got land
access that could not be taken away from them. This is related to
the banning of INTEREST, which keeps people from being stuck in
poverty cycles. The rich man owning the village means that the
morals of the community have been deeply violated, and both the rich
man and his obsequious servants are at fault.

The post-firing actions of the
dishonest manager have some accidental Robin Hood implications then.
He cancels debt, creates a better balance, eases the lives of the
people. But, it is still pretty clear that he does this FOR HIMSELF,
and the benefit to the people is mostly accidental.

Now, this has some themes that fit
other parables and other teachings of Jesus. There is a value in the
cornering of the rich man into being generous, in winning the
“shrewd” fight, and in taking care of the people, no matter the
intention.

While I believe that the “moral” of
the story is likely tacked on later, the Jesus Seminar thinks it goes
back to Jesus and I think Luke placed it well. “No servant can
serve two masters. No doubt that slave will either hate one and love
the other or be devoted to one and disdain the other. You can’t be
enslaved to both God and a bank account.” The book “Debt: The
History of the First 5000 Years” says that the world’s major
religions emerged IN RESPONSE (to counter) the world’s first market
economies. That is, there started to be an assumption that markets
were GOOD, and defined what life should be, and those who won at the
market deserved it and those who lost at the market deserved it, and
that was just how life was.

In the face of that, religions said,
“nope.” I would make a claim the author didn’t, that this was
related to the Spirit of God NOT being invested in the markets and
the hierarchies they created in the “value” of human life. But,
in a quite literal sense, religions countered the claims of the
market. Money is NOT what matters most. Individual wealth is NOT a
sign of a persons goodness. Instead, all people have value.
Instead, goodness is related to the way All the people are cared for.
Instead, the COMMON GOOD is the definition of a successful society.

God cares for the peasants, even though
the market does not.

This morally ambiguous parable is
likely NOT one we want to take as a simple role model story. BUT, in
the vein of great parables, it is one that invites us into
consideration of our own lives and our own roles. When are we
serving “the rich man” and harming the poor? When are we serving
ourselves, and who is that helping and hurting? When are we serving
the poor, and why? How are we implicated in the systems that
oppress, and how and when are we motivated to shake them up? And,
maybe – when we are backed into a corner afraid for our own
well-being, can we find ways out that help others along the way?

Serving God and not money is not
encouraged in our society. I often fear our economy is the actual
“god” of our society. But the God of our Bible, and the God we
learn about from Jesus is deeply invested in offering us alternatives
to worshipping the economy. Thanks be to God for being worthy of our
worship for being the worthy center of our lives. Amen

1Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh Social-Science
Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
2003) “Textual Notes: Luke 16:1-16” p. 292-3.

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 18, 2022

Sermons

“Calm Seas” based on 1 Samuel 17:32-49 and Mark 4:35-41

June 24, 2018February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

In
seminary, I learned that the calming of the sea narrative was one of
many that was meant to one-up a story about the Greco-Roman gods and
goddesses. Specifically, in Aeneid,
the god Neptune calms the waters that had been raised in a wind
storm. I thought
that was really interesting. I also thought it was sort of
irrelevant to faith.

As
the years have gone on, I’ve revised my opinion. I still think a
competition of “my God is better than your god” is silly, but I
have come to suspect that significantly more is going on. There were
a whole lot of Greco-Roman gods and goddess, and they were said to do
a lot of things. Thus, I suspect there was intentionality in the
choices of which stories of Greco-Roman gods and goddesses were
one-upped. It is similar to when stories in the Hebrew Bible are
adaptations of stories told by their Ancient Near East neighbors.
Both the choice of the which stories to adapt AND the adaptions made
tell a lot about how our ancestors in faith understood God!

In
Aeneid, as the protagonists ships sail from Troy to Italy, the
goddess queen tells the god of wind to send a storm to capsize their
ships and prevent them from their task. The god Neptune feels
infringed upon, as he is the god of the sea, and decides to calm the
storm. The story in Aeneid sounds like this:

[Neptune]
spoke, and swiftlier than his word subdued
the
swelling of the floods; dispersed afar
th’
assembled clouds, and brought back light to heaven.
Cymothoe
then and Triton, with huge toil,
thrust
down the vessels from the sharp-edged reef;
while,
with the trident, the great god’s own hand
assists
the task; then, from the sand-strewn shore
out-ebbing
far, he calms the whole wide sea,
and
glides light-wheeled along the crested foam.
As
when, with not unwonted tumult, roars
in
some vast city a rebellious mob,
and
base-born passions in its bosom burn,
till
rocks and blazing torches fill the air
(rage
never lacks for arms)—if haply then
some
wise man comes, whose reverend looks attest
a
life to duty given, swift silence falls;
all
ears are turned attentive; and he sways
with
clear and soothing speech the people’s will.
So
ceased the sea’s uproar, when its grave Sire
looked
o’er th’ expanse, and, riding on in light,
flung
free rein to his winged obedient car. (Aeneid
book 1:142-156)

So
what does it mean that the early Christian community chose to adapt
stories about gods calming storms into a story about Jesus calming
the storm? And what else does our particular story seem to be
communicating to us?

There
are some similarities – Neptune spoke and the result was immediate.
The wind started the storm. There were multiple boats involved.
Overall, it is a similar enough story to be clear that there is a
connection. There are some differences too, there are helpers for
Neptune, and Neptune’s own life wasn’t threatened by the storm. I
find it potentially notable that Neptune’s actions were motivated by
a sense of being infringed upon. The ancient Greek and Roman gods
and goddesses had their own spheres of influence. Perhaps part of
the point is that YHWH, and thus Jesus, had no need for such jealousy
about spheres of influence because there is no competition and there
is no end to their spheres.

This
also fits with the many ways that stories are adaptations of the
stories of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses- the point is not that
Jesus was better than ONE of them, but rather that he was better than
ALL of them. In the Gospel narrative, the storm was simply a part of
nature (not the work of another deity). Furthermore, in this story
Jesus is leaving Galilee and thus leaving the lands of the people who
knew YHWH, and yet his influence remains. Jesus is not just powerful
in one small region of the world – his sphere of influence is not
limited. Thus, in adapting this story the Gospel writer is able to
claim that Jesus is more powerful than the forces of nature itself.
Thus, a theological turn on an older and well known story.

It
turns out this story is especially interesting because it seems to
both adapt and retell Hebrew Bible stories and Greco-Roman ones. We
remember the story of Moses leading the people out of Egypt, and
controlling the waters. One scholar explains the similarities:

Paralleling
Mark 4:35-41, with darkness looming on the horizon Jesus and his
disciples set sail. Later that night, they encounter a furious
storm on the Sea of Galilee.
At this critical moment Jesus is
found sleeping on a cushion and his disciples are in a state of
terror as the waves begin to break over their boats. They
awaken Jesus and cry out, “Teacher, don’t you care if we perish?”
(Mk 4:36). There is harmony here in all the Synoptic
narratives, but the next detail sets Mark apart from the others when
he tells us specifically what Jesus said to the wind and waves,
“Peace! Be still!” (Mk 4:39).

Returning
to Exodus 14, Moses is pressed for answers as the tension mounts and
the future of the children of Israel hangs in the balance. With the
crowds pressing him, he exclaims, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and
you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring
you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see
again. The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still”
(Ex 14:13-14).

With
both Jesus calming the storm and Moses calming the Israelites, we
have two nearly identical moments involving imminent doom that is
tranquilized by the words “Quiet, be still” or “Peace be
still.”¹

We
start in this story on the seashore,
and the crowds have gathered to hear Jesus teach. Crowds were a
little bit dangerous to Jesus. They put a target on his back in the
Roman Empire, and yet they seemed to emerge anywhere he went. Jesus
was always trying to satisfy the people AND get away from the crowds.
So, in characteristic style, he decided to leave the crowd that had
gathered. To me it sounds a bit desperate, especially when getting
in the boats and going to the other side meant leaving Galilee and
thus leaving the Jewish homeland. Perhaps that’s part of the
metaphor. Maybe the disciples were stormy about where they were
headed, but Jesus was calm. Perhaps they were all stormy, because of
Jesus being worried about the crowds.

Now,
I’m not sure what to make of the idea that Jesus can sleep through a
ranging windstorm, of the sort that would sink boats with crashing
waves, but then again he had taught all day, and after just once
worship service I take a nap I call the pastor’s-coma. So maybe it
was just that? Or maybe it is just that Jesus can keep calm and
focused when no one else can? Or perhaps their panic was not his, as
he trusted all would be well? I’m not sure.

They
wake him up saying, “Teacher, do you not care that we are
perishing?” Do you hear how human this is? It doesn’t sound like
Neptune, it doesn’t even sound like Moses. Jesus, the human, was
sleeping, and had to be roused. His followers were terrified and he
hadn’t even noticed! They were horrified he wasn’t helping – I
suspect they might have expected him to participate in bailing!

Now,
when you hear this story, do you imagine it like a movie in your
mind? If so, how does it sound when Jesus “rebukes the wind”?
Does he actually yell at the wind? Does he just motion? Is he
annoyed? Or parental? Is the wind touching him until he rebukes it,
or is he excluded from it the whole time? Is he standing, sitting,
or still reclined on that cushion? Are the words “Peace! Be
still!” repeated for the wind and the sea, or just the sea, or are
his words for the wind not recorded?

I
don’t know what it means to rebuke the wind. But the wind and the
sea are said to go from roiling and threatening death to a “dead
calm.” Similarly though, both the storm and the people are settled
by the action! The storm isn’t just raging on the waters, the storm
has entered the hearts of the people and they are terrified.

The
people are not calmed as easily as the storm though. While the fear
of death from drowning has passed, their shock at what had happened
seemed to replace it. In this story at least, calming the sea with
words is not considered normal, and the supernatural isn’t considered
the way of the world. They were awed, which has a tinge of “scared”
to it. They were attentive to him and terrified by him. Jesus,
meanwhile seems not to understand why they were scared in the first
place, nor afterward. It is not the most empathetic story told about
Jesus.

So
why did they choose to tell a story about Jesus calming the storm?
One option is because he did so, but even if he did it raises the
question of why this story made the cut to be in the gospels while
others did not. As always with the Bible, my suspicion is that the
stories that kept being told and retold were the ones with great
metaphorical value and insight. In this case, the story tells us
that the storms of life will come, but God is more powerful than they
are. It is a story that encourages us to trust God, and trust in
Jesus’s power as well. Since human life comes with a lot of
metaphorical storms, there is a lot of value in a narrative that
tells us they won’t overcome us.

This
explanation also makes sense of the story of David and Goliath that
is presented to us in the Hebrew Bible lesson offered us today. In
many ways, it is a very similar story. Death, which was the
reasonably assumed outcome from facing a gigantic and successful
warrior, was avoided and even overcome with God on David’s side.
Both stories are told to remind us that God can overcome adversity,
and what looks doomed to humans may not be to God.

With
Jesus, with God, calm seas are possible. We aren’t doomed to live in
fear. We can even be freed from fear, to live in trust. Its pretty
good news, this adaption of an ancient story. Thanks be to God.
Amen

1Exodus
Muses: Jesus as a Type of Moses Calming
Storms & Drowning Legions First
Published JCF Newsletter April 2012 By Jon “Yoni” Gerrish
http://www.jerusalemcornerstone.org/resources/articles_main-page/calming-storms-drowning-legions

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

Sermons

“What is Fair?” based on Matthew 20:1-16

March 11, 2018February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I have preached on this parable before, in this church. It was in September of 2014, and I laid out in that sermon that I was seriously confused by the parable and couldn’t figure out some basic problems. I had noticed that a denarius was not actually enough, and I couldn’t figure out why Jesus would tell a story about a landowner (and stand in for God) who “generously” paid all the workers “not quite enough.” I offered multiple options to try to explain how this could happen, but left the sermon without any certainty.

I have since come across a far better explanation of the parable Jesus told, which does explain why Jesus told a story about a landowner paying the workers “not enough.” It seems that I got pulled in by the first few words of the story “for the kingdom of heaven is like” as do most preachers and scholars. When you do that, then it leads to thinking that the landowner represents a generous God, and the day laborers God’s people. Then the problem in the parable is that the first-hired day laborers resent the equal payment others receive. It is a lot like the prodigal son, and the elder brother struggling with the (F)father’s generosity.

The problem with that interpretation is that the landowner is NOT generous. A denarius was enough money for a day laborer to feed HIMSELF, poorly, THAT DAY. But they didn’t work every day so they didn’t get to eat every day. Generally they were unmarried men, because they couldn’t even support themselves much less anyone else. So, even paying people who’d only labored an hour this “daily wage” doesn’t make the landowner generous because none of the laborers made enough to fill their bellies WELL that night.

William Herzog wrote Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed in 1994 when he was a professor at Colgate Rochester Divinity School. His take on this passage finally makes sense of it. Everything else I say is informed by him.

Instead of assuming that this is about the goodness and generosity of God (which doesn’t fit the parable itself), it is possible to consider that this parable might have illuminated the systems of oppression that God so vehemently stood against. To see it, we’re going to delve deeply into the advanced agrarian (agricultural) society of Jesus’ day. All agrarian societies worked like this, it isn’t particular to the Roman Empire, although it does also apply to the Roman Empire. Jesus’ ministry happened in the backwaters of the oppressive agrarian society of the Roman Empire, in the midst of a people who believed in a God who had freed them from oppression, repeatedly.

The system worked like this: “the economy was still based on redistribution of wealth through tribute and other forms of enforced obligations, whose effect was to leave rural peasants near destitution while urban elites lived in inordinate luxury.”¹ The ruler got about 25% of everything, and the ruling classes, which constituted 1-2% of the population got the same or more. Thus, Herzog says, “the top 2 percent of the population controlled between 50 and 67 percent of the annual wealth of their societies.”² The ruling class was supported by 3 other groups: the military which used force and the threat of force to keep order; the bureaucrats who created and maintained the systems to bring the wealth up the ladder; and the religious leaders, “whose priests justified the emergent order and tended the temples that embodied that order’s traditional legitimation. The role of the priestly retainers was to produce an ideology that either could motivate cultivators to turn over their surplus to the rulers or, failing that, would justify the coercion of those cultivators and their subsequent oppression by the ruling class.”³

All together, those three supportive classes were 5-7 percent of populations. Meanwhile, “The vast majority of the population, about 70 percent, were peasants who worked the land and lived in towns and villages that dotted the countryside. Peasants provided the labor that generated the wealth on which agrarian societies were based.”⁴ The purpose of society was to glean that wealth for the ruling class, who needed it, in part, to gain power over each other. Herzog says, “the goal of the aristocracy was to push exploitation to the limit in order to maximize their yield. Because the limit beyond which they could not go was the extinction of the peasants themselves, urban elites learned how to extract everything but the ‘barest minimum needed for subsistence”⁵

There were two groups of people UNDER the peasants in this hierarchy of society: the “unclean and degraded” who did despised trades, and “the expendables.” The so-called expendables (thought as such by society, but not by God) were usually “the excess children of peasant farmers who could not afford to divide their small patrimony”⁶, or the ones whose land had been ripped out from under them. The expendables comprised 5-10 percent of the population, or 15% if things were going badly. Herzog says, “The presence of expendables was the inevitable outcome of a system driven by unbridled greed. … For the expendables, life was brutal and brief; characteristically they lasted no more than five to seven years after entering this class, but the size of the expendable class remained more or less stable because its ranks were being constantly replenished”.⁷

Now, that we know how the system worked, remember those day laborers in the parable? They’re the so-called expendables. In real life, the landowner wouldn’t REALLY have hired his own day laborers. That was a job for his steward, his steward’s servant perhaps. The parable works better, and the exploitation becomes clearer, when it is him directly. Herzog thinks Jesus puts the landowner directly in this role for the sake of clarity of who is really gaining the benefit. After all, vineyards tended to be owned by the wealthy, and “The owners of great estates increased their holdings through foreclosures on loans, leading to hostile takeovers of peasant farms.”⁸ Those foreclosures also created more so-called expendables. Often the land take overs would change crops from wheat and legumes that fed the people to vineyards that provided their owners with greater wealth. The way the parable is told, the wealthy landowner is doing very well, “his imminent harvest is so great that he cannot even calculate accurately the amount of help needed.”⁹ The labor market is over-saturated with day laborers, so they all take him up on his offer for work, and after the first round they all agree to “whatever” pay the landowner claims is fair. They don’t argue about pay, because they can’t afford to lose the work.

Once the laborers have all been hired, the parable switches immediately to the payment cycle. This is where discussions of parable are usually focused. So, what does Herzog think the first hired were complaining about?

“What is their complaint? They have been shamed. The landowner has aimed a deliberate insult at them, … he has told them in effect that he values their day long effort in the scorching heat no more than the brief labor of the eleventh hour workers. He has shamed their labor, and as day laborers who have nothing left to offer but their animal energy, they must respond to the provocation. If they consent to his judgment, namely that their labor is worthless, then they have nothing at all left to offer.”¹⁰

The landowner would have been intentionally humiliating them as a part of maintaining differentiated social order. Then he goes on to particularly shame the one who spoke out. “The spokesperson has been banned, shunned, blackballed, or blacklisted; he will not likely find work in that neighborhood again.”¹¹ The landowner’s final point is that he is entitled to give what he wants to give, as it is all his. He is the one who says he is generous! There are a few inherent issues in this. He might as well have said, “’I choose to give [dounai] to this last the same as I give to you.” (20:14b) Here there is no question of paying (apodos) laborers for their work done. It is all the gift of the landowner, his charity robs the laborers of any sense of honor.”¹² Furthermore, he claims that he pays out of “what belongs to him.” By Jewish faith and law, that wasn’t true at all. All land belonged to God, and those who lived on it and worked it were God’s stewards. The Torah even makes clear the expectation of redistribution of land on a regular basis so that all have enough. The landowner is operating under those principles at all.

Overall, “Jesus’ parables codify systems of oppression in order to unveil them and make them visible to those victimized them.”¹³ Herzog thinks that, “the landowner’s final remarks likely would have met with initial approval from the peasants and villagers who had, after all, internalized the oppressor’s world.”¹⁴ However, he says Jesus would have talked it over with them, drawing them into further questions, deeper discovery, and new insights. They might even have noticed that this parable is placed “at one of the few moments in the economic cycle in which the elites were dependent on the lowliest of laborers. … [the landowner] smothered the truth that he was dependent on them, and as a result, that they could have power but only a power that grew out of their solidarity. Divided they would fall one by one before the withering hostility and judgment of the elite.”¹⁵

That is, Jesus seems to be telling this story because he sees the plight of the so-called expendables. He doesn’t find it acceptable. In fact, I think Jesus wanted to change the whole system of oppression and of wealth flow to the top. Jesus articulates again and again that God cares about those that society is willing to marginalize, ignore, or exploit. The parables of Jesus are yet another expression of God’s yearning for a just society and world. God isn’t like that landowner, God is truly generous, never an oppression, and always worried about the exploited. God yearns for distributive justice, for societies that care for all people, and God acts by urging prophetic language and creative story telling to expose and eliminate oppression.

Now, here is where this parable gets really scary. Thanks be to God, you may have been thinking, that we don’t live in that agrarian society. Except that we don’t talk much about the wealth of the top 2% in our society, because the wealth if far more concentrated than that. The top 1% own 40% of our country, and really the top .1% owns the vast majority of that.¹⁶ We still have systems where bureaucrats, the military, and religious organizations function to support, empower, and legitimize the systems of oppression. And, while we might want to claim we don’t have “expendables”, in our country as of 2016, 12.7% of the US population currently lives under the poverty line, and nearly all of them people are food insecure.¹⁷ ¹⁸ “In the U.S., the richest 1 percent of men lives 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest 1 percent of men, while among women in those wealth percentiles, the difference is 10.1 years on average.”¹⁹ It seems that many of the things said about society back then add up to talk about society today.

The idea of Jesus telling this story to the ones who were most exploited really strikes me. Even the exploited would have tended to buy into the system, that’s just how the systems work. It means that part of what we need to do today is SEE how the system works. We need to take off whatever blinders we’ve been given by society and notice how oppression and exploitation harm the lives of God’s beloveds today. In order to see, just to see, not even to do, I think there are two parts: (1) study, including words by those who have lived the oppression and (2) prayer and spiritual practice that remind us holistically that there is more to life than consumerism, hierarchy, competition, or violence. It isn’t easy or comfortable to see how this stuff works, but whether or not we want to “know how the sausage is made” it IS made, and I think God calls us to see, to know, and to loosen the grips of the system on our own lives and thought processes. This is necessary before we can do anything to change it. May God help us, even with this part. Amen

1William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech, (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994), p. 58.

2Herzog, 61.

3Herzog, 58.

4Herzog, 63.

5Herzog, 64.

6Herzog, 65.

7Herzog, 66.

8Herzog, 85.

9Herzog, 85.

10Herzog, 91.

11Herzog, 93.

12Herzog, 93.

13Herzog, 87.

14Herzog, 95.

15Herzog, 96.

16 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/06/the-richest-1-percent-now-owns-more-of-the-countrys-wealth-than-at-any-time-in-the-past-50-years/?utm_term=.4dc91658ec90

17 https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-united-states

18 https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics.aspx

19Peter Dizkes, “New study shows rich, poor have huge mortality gap in U.S.”http://news.mit.edu/2016/study-rich-poor-huge-mortality-gap-us-0411

–

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 11, 2018

Sermons

“On Not Being Silent in Church” based on 1 Corinthians…

July 16, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

This passage starts out so well. It starts out reminding me of the good things about Paul, including that Paul would have made a good Wesleyan since he really likes order. His suggestions are sensible, and aimed at creating a positive experience for everyone present. He suggests that worship should be communal, that all who show up should have something to offer. For a small house church, that’s a great model! Even for a larger community, it serves to remind all of us that being the Body of Christ is an active thing, that each of us have things to offer and the Body is at its best when we receive gifts from many people and use them together!

Paul reminds the church in Corinth that the purpose of their shared time of worship is to build each other up. The book of First Corinthians has a whole lot of suggestions like that, and most scholars think that’s because the church in Corinth was spending a lot of time fighting with each other.

Paul seeks to limit the gift of tongues, which he does a lot in his letters. Paul is said to have the gift of tongues, but in the early church there were those who believed speaking in tongues was the best gift of the Spirit and the most faithful people all had it. Paul spends a lot of time fighting that, including in this passage. Here he limits the number of people who should do so at any one gathering AND he says that unless a partner in ministry is present who can interpret tongues, they shouldn’t be spoken out loud. That is a very inclusive perspective, it means that no one present would end up just listening without getting anything out of it.

Paul gives instructions to those who speak prophecy too, also very practical stuff. He tells the church to carefully weigh what is said, not to take it as truth without discussion. Furthermore, he suggests that if two people are getting the same message, only one of them has to say it. That suggestion feels very much like a response to a direct complaint, and a reasonable response at that. He returns to the reminder that the work is to build each other up, and encourage each other. He says on theme in the end of the first paragraph, still responding to a direct issue. I imagine he was told, “They say that they can’t prophesy one by one because the Spirit is moving in them!” As if in direct response, Paul says, “the spirits of prophets are subject to the prophets, for God is a God not of disorder but of peace.”

Beautiful. Uplifting. Profound. Reasonable. Paul is building up the church, he is guiding the people, he is dealing with the reality of human struggles, he is doing it all.

And then.

And then I want to duct tape his mouth shut. The rather interesting passage offering insight about the early church and the sensible solutions of Paul takes a turn for the worse, or more precisely it falls off a cliff. We’re going to see if we can find a safety net for it in a moment, but first I feel the need to convince you to take it seriously. Those of you in the room who join me in wanting to duct tape Paul’s mouth shut may also want to just ignore this passage as irrelevant, or even use it as proof that the Bible is irrelevant. You may not want to talk about it, and you may not think it is worth your time to bother with it.

The issue is that this passage has been used to silence women since the time it was written (which itself is unclear) and is STILL used today. So we need to face the passage and its role in our broken body of Christ, like it or not. The numbers aren’t entirely clear, but in the United States about 11% of religious communities over all, and 10% of Christian faith communities have female clergy leading them. If you want to feel good about your denomination, you can here. The highest number of female clergy in any denomination in the USA is in the UMC 🙂 However, that’s still about 1/3 of UMC clergy. The numbers of clergy women are low in part because of the many denomination that don’t allow clergy women including the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Traditions, most of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Lutheran Missouri Synod, the Church of Latter-Day Saints and a whole lot of non-denominational churches.¹ They quote this passage as justification.

Furthermore, you don’t want to know how many times I’ve gotten this text quoted at me, and been asked to justify my calling. Nor do I really want to relive all of it. This is a safe congregation where the love of God prevails and we all work together to minimize the impact of sexism in our community and our world. The very few overtly sexist comments I’ve received here have resulted in incredible support coming my way. (Thank you all!) However, as is true for other issues as well, this community of faith is like a well protected and vibrant tidal pool – and the rest of the Christian ocean seems very far away and unimportant. However, the rest of the Christian ocean doesn’t actually go away when we ignore it.

People still quote this terrible text, and they still follow its instructions. These simple words are used to justify the institutional sexism of the churches, which are as a whole much more sexist than the culture at large.

So, while I believe that all of you already have ways to respond to this text, I want to make sure we all have a quiver-full of them. You never know when you might want one. Here are a whole lot of ways that a reasonable human could approach this text without assuming that their female pastor should be out of a job, without just ignoring it:

1. If you read along in the NRSV you’d notice that this text is put in parenthesis. That’s because the majority of Biblical scholars believe that it is not an original part of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Rather, they think a later scribe wrote this into the margins to reflect the common practice of his time and it got accidentally moved into the primary text over time. This belief is justified by the fact that in our most ancient manuscripts this paragraph is in two different spots. It is also supported by the fact that in the rest of the 6 authentic Pauline letters, there are ABSOLUTELY NO LIMITS put on the activities of women in churches. To the contrary, in chapter 11 of this letter, women are instructed about how to pray and prophesy in church. There are MANY more examples of Paul speaking to, or about, women leaders of churches and supporting their work, but I think the point is already made: This particular text is unlikely to have been written by Paul, and does not reflect his thinking about women. Instead it looks like the conservative reaction of a later generation of thinker who distrusted women.

2. If, for some reason, you or someone you are in conversation with doesn’t think that is convincing, then we have some ways to work with the text assuming it is authentic to Paul.

a. If Paul said it, then it said it to one particular community in one place in one time. Since it doesn’t fit with other things he said, it seems like he was offering a solution to a particular problem. As no other faith community is the first century Corinthian church, the solution doesn’t apply to all of us. (As an amusing aside, the “women” told to be silent in church are ACTUALLY “married women” according to the word used. This would suggest that if I took this text literally and believed it to be God’s will then I shouldn’t have gotten married this spring.)

b. If this text is assumed to be authentic to Paul, then perhaps it fits into the argument he is already making in this passage. He has given subgroups limits in order to benefit the whole. He told those speaking in tongues to limit their gift, so as not to take over. He told those prophesying not to repeat each other, so as to respect the time of the others gathered. Many commentators have suggested that the women in the Corinthian church were really excited about Jesus and the chance to learn all they could. Because intensive Torah study had been limited to men in Judaism, the women may have been overwhelming the worship services with their questions. Thus, in order to not take over, Paul suggests that they work those questions out in private. It fits with his reactions to overwhelming subgroups AND his tendency toward practical solutions.

c. Because of the lack of punctuation, it is not clear if Paul is actually speaking the words OR if he is quoting the men of the church! (This hypothesis holds a surprising amount of water.) In that case Paul is quoting that women should be silent, that they should be subordinate, and even that they should ask their husbands, that it is shameful for a woman to speak. But then HE is responding to those men who said so with, “Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only ones it has reached?” (1 Cor 14:36, NRSV)²

Great. So, there are 4 reasonable responses to this passage which do not require that I sit down and stop talking. Amazingly a lot of Bible Commentaries don’t come up with any of them though. One of them (that we own) tried to make this passage about keeping women from publicly embarrassing their husbands, and another (that we also currently still own) suggested that Paul was just making a good point about gender differentiated roles. Sometimes I think the Bible is one big ink blot test, something we all just project our already established biases onto. This serves as a commercial for the evening Bible Study: where we together read, question, learn, question, wonder and still question. We do our best to get information from many sources so we aren’t led astray by other people’s biases or our own.

Speaking of biases, this text has been used to weaken the Body of Christ throughout history. The Body is ALWAYS weaker when it represents less diverse voices. It takes the fullness of humanity to best be the Body of Christ, and the way this text has been used has stood in the way of that. The church has been weakened for nearly 2000 years because of misinterpretation of this passage. Let’s be part of turning that around! Everywhere we go we can attend to who is at the table and who isn’t. We can be voices that speak when groups of people missing (women, people of color, people living in poverty, members of the LGBTQIA community, younger or older people, etc), and in doing so heal the Body of Christ and the world. Thanks be to God it isn’t yet too late. Amen

1 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/09/the-divide-over-ordaining-women/ and http://hirr.hartsem.edu/research/quick_question3.html These numbers are a bit dated, but I don’t believe much has changed, unfortunately.

2 Summary worked from the insights found in “First Corinthians” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. IX, Leander Kirk, general editors (Abingdon Press, 2002)

–

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

July 16, 2017

Sermons

“Who Do We Feed First?” based on Acts 2:42-47…

May 8, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

There are times when I find it invigorating to engage in a robust debate. One of the joys of my childhood was being able to score points in verbal battles with my brother, and if I don’t pay attention, I can still engage in conversation as a competitive sport.

On the basis of enjoying the capacity to play and sometimes WIN, if the opportunity presented itself, I would choose not to debate Jesus. He doesn’t lose much. The gospels consistently describe him winning, scoring match points before his opponents have even started to play.

Today’s gospel is one of the exceptions. I cannot yet say it definitively, but I believe the only people who ever score points on Jesus in competitive debate are women. Consequently, very few who beat Jesus are women. This is one of the stories where the woman is said to have won. Jesus himself declares that she has bested him, and gives her a prize for having done so.

Even so, this is one of the most uncomfortable stories in the gospels. Jesus is … well… um… super mean to this woman. He calls her and her people dogs! That is, he disparages their very humanity, and says that it is of less value than the humanity of his people.

I could tell you that the Jesus seminar doesn’t think this story actually happened. Luckily that’s true, but unfortunately it still requires us to consider why the early Christian community included it. We could tell ourselves that Jesus expressed explicit prejudice simply to show us that it was bad, but that doesn’t truly fit the story. The story says he healed the woman’s child because she beat him in oral combat, NOT because he realized her people were of equal value.

So, how do we deal with this horribly insulting, even racist, Jesus? We still have a few options left to us. The story does say that Jesus left Galilee to be in the land of the Gentiles and entered a house in secret. It would be reasonable to conclude that he was getting away for a bit of a reprieve, perhaps because he was tired and needed to catch his breath. Tired, burned out people often don’t operate as their best selves. And being accosted in this home where he was trying to hide and regain his energy might have brought out the worst in him. I don’t think this entirely explains the story, but I do point it out anyway for two reasons: 1. Because when we’re tired we really do make mistakes and I urge you to get rest as an act of faithfulness to God’s call on your life to be your best self and 2. Because when we’re tired we really do make mistakes and some gentleness with ourselves is called for when those mistakes happen. Human beings in human bodies can’t push on indefinitely through exhaustion.

Another pieces of the puzzle comes from a scholar who doesn’t think it makes a lot of sense for the early Christian church to have remembered such a hostile response from Jesus UNLESS it reflects a larger reality. Gerd Theissen looked for a socio-economic explanation and discovered, “Upper Galilee exported produce through the coastal cities. The cities, in turn, depended on these regions for food. In periods of crisis or food shortage, the populace of the hinterlands may have resented producing goods for wealthy cities.”¹ This idea continues, “Those who produced the food, Jewish peasant farmers, see their work consumed by others.”² In this case, ethnic and religious differences are compounded by economic inequalities. Jesus might simply be suggesting that his people have a right to eat the food they produce.

It stands in interesting contrast to the food sharing on Acts 2, doesn’t it? Jesus talking about the inappropriateness of sharing the food with the dogs contrasts with the people sharing all things in common, breaking bread together, and eating with glad and generous hearts?

Or does it?

This beautiful passage of the joy and communal support in the early church does not extend to ALL people. It extends WITHIN the community, not beyond it. I’m not saying that’s wrong, I’m just saying that it is limited. Supporting the community of faith is not the same thing as supporting all of God’s people. Supporting the community of faith, with firm boundaries around who that means, can actually look a lot like Jesus’s response to the Syrophoenician woman in this story! Jesus, too, was advocating keeping resources within the family of faith.

The first summer I was on staff at Sky Lake the summer curriculum included Romans 12, which we tended to read from “The Message.” which I adored. I quoted it once in a secular setting and one of my high school friends asked if I was intentionally excluding her. It said:

9-10 Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle.

11-13 Don’t burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don’t quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy Christians; be inventive in hospitality.

Until she questioned me I hadn’t heard “help needy CHRISTIANS” at all, but once she pointed it out, I squirmed a little bit every time I read it. I wondered if I was allowed to change it so that the command said, “Help needy people” and wondered why it wasn’t written that way to begin with.

I think that human nature includes a tendency toward thinking in terms of groups, and defining “us” that excludes “them.” It happens too commonly not to be part of our nature, and I suspect that it happens for decent evolutionary reasons! In order to thrive, humans need each other, but we’re finite in time and space. So we can’t bond with everyone! I’m thinking our species developed this way: Close bonds form the basis of units, and units expand until they maximize the relationship with resources in an area, and then other groups are established further away, right? Then, because resources on earth aren’t allocated with equal distribution, there are still some things that each group ends up competing with other groups. That would have helped establish the boundaries between the groups!

So, it isn’t bad, and it is likely part of our nature, but it isn’t the end goal either! The Syrophoenician woman reminds us of this. She was, in multiple ways, an outsider to the groups Jesus belonged to, and yet she came to him with a need. Her needed extended past her group identity!

The Syrophoenician woman is presented as the paradigm of committed parent! She crosses boundaries, takes insults, and argues with all her power in order to gain the care her child needs. She shouldn’t have entered that house by laws of both communities. Her community would have preferred if she had refrained from “bowing down” at the feet of a Jewish teacher. She let him call her, her family, and her community DOGS and responded within his metaphor. She found a way to respond, without accepting his premise, without dismissing his premise, and while staying ON POINT. She kept asking for what her daughter needed, and requested that even if Jesus didn’t see her as a fellow human being, he could still extend his power to help her!!!

And Jesus complements her! Going back to the idea that the city of Tyre was part of a problem within an economic system that was extracting wealth from the Galilean farmers – it is as if she points out that the Galilean farmers DO deserve to eat, but that Tyre is hungry too. She doesn’t argue his premise, but she reminds him that hunger is universal.

While on our honeymoon, Kevin and I took some tours of the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It became clear quickly that many immigrant families survived ONLY because of the support of community – in that case communities based on their countries of origin. This is one of the ways that groups defining clear boundaries can be good – it lead to life not death. But then again, I’m sure it left some people unable to access any help.

In the days of overcrowding on the Lower East Side, the barriers that divided people were real. Resources were limited. In the days of food shortages in Galilee and Tyre, the barriers that divided people were real. Resources were limited. In the eras of needing access to limited water for our ancient ancestors, the barriers that divided people were real. Resources were limited.

There are good reasons to establish groups and boundaries. Those reasons apply today, and we see this sort of thinking ALL OVER the place today. However, in some ways, reality has changed! Technology has made it possible to grow enough food for everyone to be fed – well. At the moment we have enough clean water for all to drink (if we don’t waste it). It may always have been true that if groups worked together there would have been enough, I don’t know, but today it is FOR SURE. The world has produced enough for everyone.

And yet, maybe more than ever, people are trying to draw firm lines between those who get access to resources and those who don’t, those we are worthy, and those who aren’t, those who should become more wealthy and those who should become more impoverished, those who get to access health care and those who don’t, … and so on.

I’m told one of my predecessors in this pulpit, J. Edward Carothers, talked about the purpose of church being “to establish and maintain connections of mutual support in an ever widening circle of concern.” I think that’s the essence of the meaning of the kindom, the primary teaching of Jesus. As it has been described to me, the kindom is the Reign of God that will occur when EVERYONE treats EVERYONE else as kin. That is, everyone is IN the group and there is only one group and we are all working together for each other’s good. That’s how (at their best) kin treat each other, and that’s an expression of the desire of God for the world.

So, who do we feed first? The children? The dogs? The Christians? The Jews?

Our church? Our city? Our country? Our race? Our class? Our political allies?

Or perhaps, whoever is most hungry?

Because if we all work together, there is enough for everyone! And once we remember that, we can distribute based on needs rather than fears. Holy God, may that day come SOON. Amen

1 R. Alan Culpepper, “Luke” in Leadner Keck, ed. , The New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press: 1995) 610.

2 Culpepper, 610

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

May 7, 2017

Sermons

Untitled

April 30, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

On
April 4^th several of us went to the University of Albany
to hear Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Very early
in the evening she explained that she likes to be up and moving, and
she started wandering around the room while speaking. The wandering
wasn’t random. She systematically worked her way around the entire
room, stopping at every row of every aisle, and walking across any
front row entirely. While talking coherently. she allowed every
person who reasonably could do so to touch her. She just offered her
hand, and people in the outside 3-4 seats were able to physically
connect with her.

She
was clear from the outset that this is her preferred way of engaging,
but I was also aware that it was a remarkable way to fulfill the
needs of those who come to hear her speak. She is the third woman
appointed to the Supreme Court, and the first Hispanic/Latinx. She
is an inspiration to an enormous percentage of the population, and
her choice to let people touch her seemed like a way to take that
inspiration role seriously.

In
all the wisdom Justice Sotomayor has, knowing the importance of touch
seems like part of it, as does taking seriously the role of being a
bearer of hope. She offered her hand as a beacon, letting her touch
defy some of the brokenness of the world.

–
– – –

The
first gospel lesson today also centers on the power touch. Two
women, in very different life stages are transformed by it. The two
stories, told together, are intended to reflect on each other and
enhance the meaning of each other. The young girl was 12, the
anticipated age of maturity. The woman had suffered for 12 years,
emphasized as long enough for a baby to reach maturity. The young
girl was believed dead. The woman’s was in a living death of
isolation, poverty, and extinguished hope.

The
young girl wasn’t able to speak for herself, so her loving father
begged for Jesus’s help. The woman
wasn’t to touch anyone, and anything she sat on or laid down on (as
well as her touch) would make others unclean. This should have
impeded her capacity to speak for herself too. The story seems to
suggest that she doesn’t have family to care for her, because they
refer to her dissipated wealth as her own. No one could do it for
her. She definitely wasn’t supposed to spend time in tight crowds.

(Two
thoughts about this. As damaging as such a life would be for a
person, I think it makes some sense in context. The ancient Jews
believed that blood was the life force in a body, that’s what made it
sacred. They would be understandably concerned about continual
bloodflow. Secondly, in an era before germ theory or antibiotics
about all people knew for sure about medicine was that you could get
sick from sick people. In order to care for the community, you kept
people from passing along illness. It is awful for the individuals,
but better than letting the whole community die. I don’t want this
story to be heard as implicating ancient Jewish society as unloving.
It seems to me they were doing the best they could.)

This woman, whose 12 years of
life had been without human touch or connection, as well as without
without successful treatment, and was now without resources because
she’d tried to fix it; broke the rules. She moved in a tight crowd,
touching others as she went. She sought, intentionally, to touch
Jesus, EVEN THOUGH her touch would make him ritually unclean. Some
scholars suggest that such an action made her eligible to be stoned.
No one could speak for her, the laws made it impossible for her to
speak for herself, so she broke the laws, taking a huge risk, seeking
life again. She reached out to touch Jesus, not knowing what
would happen next, if she’d be healed or stoned, accepted or
violently rejected.

– – –

On Tuesday the Judicial Council
of The United Methodist Church met in Newark, New Jersey to hear oral
arguments about the election of Bishop Karen Oliveto. Bishop Oliveto
was elected this past July by the Western Jurisdiction of the United
Methodist Church in an unanimous vote that was uncontested. She’s a
gifted spiritual leader, a joy-filled human being, a natural church
leader, and a living example of grace. The issue is very simple:
Karen is married to Robin, and both Karen and Robin are women. The
Western Jurisdiction knew this when they elected her, Karen’s
decision to run happened after the Pulse Nightclub massacre. She was
reminded of all of the violence done to the LGBTQIA¹
community, and thought it was important to use her ministry to
visibly change some of the narrative (in the church and the world.)

The
United Methodist Church is officially a homophobic denomination. It
intentionally and structurally oppresses the queer community. By
putting herself forward for election, she offered the possibility of
giving hope to the queer community in the midst of its grief and the
multitudes of harms. This particular United Methodist Church, along
with 836 other United Methodist churches and communities, has taken
an official stance declaring that we believe that The United
Methodist Church is WRONG and that God’s love and the churches doors
should be open to people without consideration of their sexuality or
gender identity. This church, and 836 others, advocate for the full
inclusion of LGBTQIA people in the church and the world. The Western
Jurisdiction agrees, and they elected Bishop Oliveto because of the
gifts and graces she has for the episcopacy.

Despite the systematic
oppression of the church, as Kevin has explained in 20 page brief
(one of many filed) what they did was legal and appropriate. (The
fact that the Judicial Council ended up sort of disagreeing doesn’t
in any way make me doubt Kevin’s analysis.)

The Judicial Council meets twice
a year, and they always have several items on their docket. Two
other pieces this April related to the commissioning and ordination
of out queer clergy. Unfortunately, while there are MANY in our
denomination who agree with us about God’s love extending to all
people, there are also many willing to engage in witch hunts to
prevent the church’s blessing from falling on queer people. The
conservatives wanted to invalidate the ordinations of out queer
clergy!!!

On
Tuesday, as I woke up, people had already gathered in Newark. Bishop
Oliveto, her wife and her mother, queer clergy from across the
denomination, queer laity, and allies of all sorts were present,
visible, singing, and connecting to each other. I watched it on live
feed. Tickets were given to two rooms: one the room in which the
Judicial Council sat and the arguments would be made, and one for
overflow connected via a live stream. Laity and allies exchanged
tickets with queer clergy so that they could be together, sitting in
solidarity with Bishop Oliveto.

As I watched the live stream, I
saw the Queer Clergy Caucus²
enter the Judicial Council room, and kneel to pray. It took my
breath away. It looked like the hemorrhaging woman reaching her hand
toward Jesus. That group of beloved and beautiful people of God have
stayed in a denomination that has called them names and declared
their lives “incompatible with Christian teaching.” They have
courageously refused to leave, refused to be silent or invisible, and
continued to ask for the church’s blessing on their whole lives and
ministries. They have reached out to touch Jesus, knowing that the
laws stand in the way, that the crowd will judge them, that the
disciples would try to stop them, and needing to touch Jesus anyway.

They knelt to pray, to reach out
and touch Jesus and hoped the church wouldn’t stop them this time.
They’ve done it before. They’ll do it again. But every time it is
an act of courage. So far, every time they reach out, the church has
TRIED to stop them.

– – – –

In the Gospel, Jesus’s response
is grace-filled. He calls out the woman (who must have been
TERRIFIED), and by doing so publicly he is able acknowledge her
healing and restore her relationship with the community at large.
She was able to touch others again, she was able to connect, she was
able to be a part of the whole. She was afraid that by touching him
she’d bring him shame, but she took the risk anyway, and instead all
that separated her from the community was lifted from her.

That’s
what the queer clergy caucus was hoping the church could replicate.

The young girl brought back to
life when Jesus grabbed her hand becomes a metaphor for the life that
Jesus has to offer, and gave as well the hemorrhaging woman. The
touch of Jesus brings life – and hope – as well as healing.

– – –

In our second Gospel lesson,
people are also walking with Jesus, and their lives are also changed
by it. The story ends with people more alive than when they began.
The theologian John Dominic Crossan³
often says, “Emmaus never happened. Emmaus always happens.”
That is, he doesn’t think that it is a story reflecting actual
historical events, but instead reflecting deep Christian realities.
This year it occurs to me to wonder how literally the story is
intending to indicate that a third person actually showed up.

Perhaps, instead, the Holy
Spirit was with the two walking together, and together they started
piecing together the teachings of Jesus and the meanings offered.
Perhaps the collective (even of two) felt so much more than one and
one that it was as if there was another one leading their
conversation. I’ve had conversations like that. (I’ve had
conversations like that this week at the “Change Leaders Summit”
hosted by the General Commission on Religion and Race as we dreamed a
less racist church). I could metaphorically say that the some
moments of talking to another have been so sacred and eye-opening
that it was as if Jesus was the third person in the dialogue.

If that is one of the
metaphorical meanings of the gospel lesson, the it is potent. The
disciples are running away! They’re going in the wrong direction,
and even then Jesus is with them and guiding them. In the end they
turn back and return to the place they’d been frightened away from.
They move from fear back to life. In connecting with Jesus they
connect with their hope, their meaning, and the purposes of their
lives. They were reconnected to Jesus, and perhaps via the power of
the Holy Spirit to guide sacred conversations.

– – –

Returning
to face the fears is part of the inherent Easter story. So is the
transformation of the Body of Christ from the historical Jesus to his
followers throughout time. We are now expected to respond to the
world with his courage and grace, to respond to all the ways he
responded to the hemorrhaging women, the powerless girl, and –
however it happened – the frightened disciples

Those Queer Clergy praying in
the Judical Council hearing room were living out the Easter story.
They faced the fears of rejection, and went anyway. Others may want
to cut them out of the Body of Christ, but they believe that Jesus
responds to them with grace. They know enough to reach out for Jesus
and know that Jesus will see them and bless them, even if the church
will not.

It turns out that today Bishop
Karen Oliveto IS still a Bishop. Thanks be to God. Furthermore,
none of the commissionings or ordinations of our out queer clergy
siblings were overturned. Thanks be to God. Unfortunately, there is
also a lot of bad news that came from the decisions. The church has
attempted to crack down to gain control offer the resistances
movements that seek to include ALL of God’s people fully in the
church. (They seem to forget that their methods NEVER work over the
long run.) There are many in our church who are hurting and there
are many in our world who are hearing from our denomination that they
are not worthy of love.

– – – –

The denomination is wrong. It
can’t control or limit God’s love. Nor can it control or limit the
queer community and its allies. The people of God will keep reaching
for God, whether the church tries to stop them or not. When people
reach out, Jesus responds with grace. When people reach out we can
follow the lead of the Spirit who will guide us to bring hope and
grace to each other. God is faithful, whether the church is or not.
For that, I am mightily thankful to God. Amen

1 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual

2 https://www.facebook.com/UMQClergy/

3 Coming
to First UMC Schenectady on September 23-24. SQUEAL.

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

April 30, 2017