“Image of God” based on Isaiah 45:1-6 and Matthew 22:15-22

October 22, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

The Bible often sounds
so… Bible-y that it can be easy to tune out. Or, at least, it can
be for me. Sometimes when I’m reading I’m tempted to “yadda yadda”
the stuff that feels like its been said over and over. This is
similar to trying to read legalese and make sense of the actual
point, which I know is there somewhere, but I have to break through
ALL the words that don’t actually mean anything to me.

I mention this because
I’m not entirely convinced I’m the only person with this problem, and
because I think many a normal person might have had this issue with
our Hebrew Bible text today. Yes yes, God opens doors, God levels
mountains, God gives riches, God calls us by name, God chooses the
chosen, God is the only one. We’ve heard all this before, it is
practically a chorus.

The big difference in
this passage, the part that makes it not at all redundant nor boring,
comes in the very beginning. “Thus
says the LORD to his anointed.” (I KNOW, you are half tempted to
zone out the Bible-ese already, but I promise, you want to hear the
next two words) “to Cyrus”. This, my friends, is some crazy turn
of a phrase.

A
quick set of historical reminders is in order to make sense of it
though. Around 587 to 586 BCE the Jewish people living in Jerusalem
were defeated by the Babylonian army, and the city and temple were
destroyed. The leaders and the educated were taken to Babylon as
slaves and the rest of the people were left behind without defenses,
food, or hope. This is known as “the Exile” and we believe that
the Hebrew Bible as we know it was written down during and after the
Exile, which means the stories were told in particular ways to try to
answer the question “Why did this happen to us?” In fact, the
very idea of a Jewish Messiah developed at the time of the Exile, as
a person who would right the wrong of the Exile itself and recreate a
vibrant Jewish Empire.

The
Exile ended when the Persian Empire defeated the Babylonian Empire in
battle, and took it over. The Emperor of the Persian Empire then
decided that he didn’t much care about the Jewish captives, and freed
them to go home as they wished. It had, however, been 48 years,
which is several generations without birth control, and not everyone
went home.

Back
to our passage, do you know who was the Emperor of the Persian Empire
in 539 and let the captives go free? Cyrus. So, this passage, which
is the first one to claim anyone as the Messiah (“God’s anointed”),
claims that role for a FOREIGN, NON-JEWISH, EMPEROR. Well, now,
that’s pretty curious, isn’t it? This stuff isn’t all just
Bible-ese. 😉

The
idea here is that by freeing God’s people, Cyrus was doing God’s
work. But the claims are rather radical. First of all, Cyrus is
called the messiah, then Cyrus is said to be called by name by God,
and to be given a last name by God EVEN THOUGH Cyrus doesn’t know or
worship God. So, the work of freeing the people was done through the
work of Cyrus, and God helped Cyrus along the way to make it happen.

The
most curious part is that God used an EMPEROR, which doesn’t tend to
be the way God works, at least when we get to the Gospels. However,
the fantastic thing we can take from the Isaiah passage is this: God
doesn’t limit God’s work just to people who believe particular things
or speak of God in particular ways; God is willing to work with and
through anyone who is open to working with God! The fact that this
was clear enough in 539 BCE that the people of God thought Cyrus was
God’s chosen messiah is very good news indeed. Inclusivity runs deep
with God, and God’s people have known it for a long time.

Now,
Matthew is distinctly less enamored with foreign emperors than Isaiah
is. Matthew sets up this story beautifully, designing a narrative
around the snappy statement of Jesus which said, “Give therefore to
the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things
that are God’s.” That little saying is one of the very few things
the Jesus Seminar REALLY thinks Jesus said, and Matthew builds a
story around it to make sense of it. The story is well constructed.
The coin described has on it the face of the Emperor, while our faith
tradition has always claimed that people have on them the “image of
God.” Matthew even word plays this, having the adversaries
describe Jesus as a man who shows no partiality, which is literally,
“you do not regard the face of anyone.”¹
The whole story then plays around with faces, and images, wondering
whose matches with whose.

While
Matthew’s story is well constructed, we think the authentic memory is
simply in that statement, “Give therefore to the emperor the things
that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
That statement seems to direct us to a reasonable follow up question:
What is it that belongs to Caesar and what is it that belongs to
God? In fact, I think it is this question that makes the statement
so powerful and memorable. It appears benign, and would have sounded
benign to Roman ears. They might have thought, “Yeah, sure, give
money to the Emperor, that’s really what he wants, and as long as he
also gets the power and respect he deserves, your God can have what’s
left.”

Jewish
ears would not have heard the same thing at all. They would have
heard Jesus and immediately considered, “But, if we are to give to
God what is God’s, there is nothing left for the emperor!” So,
Jesus’ saying manages to totally subvert the power of the empire
WHILE sounding benign to the emperor’s ears. Well played, Jesus.

So,
for a faithful Jewish person at the time of Jesus as today, all
things belong to God. That’s one of the implications of thinking of
God as Creator, God created all things and all things are thus God’s.
The less obvious follow up question is: what does it mean to give
something to God who is already the Creator of all things? I don’t
mean to be trite, I think this is a valid question. We might have a
sense of being able to “give our hearts” to God, but we aren’t
just looking for that. We certainly have the capacity to give money
to the church, and to other groups whose work builds the kin-dom of
God, which can be a way to give to God, but if God is the God of
EVERYTHING and we are to give what is God’s to God, then… how?

Jesus
doesn’t clarify. As the Jesus seminar puts it, he leaves that as
homework, “He does not tell his questioners what to do other than
to decide the claims of God in relation to the claims of the
emperor.”²
As far as I can figure it out, to give something to God is to use it
for the building of God’s kin-dom; or sometimes that’s called God’s
kingdom; that is, to create the world into the world as God would
have it be; that is, a world where everyone has enough to survive AND
thrive; that is, a world of justice that allows for peace; that is a
reality where all people are humanized and no one is left
dehumanized; some call this the beloved community. I know that’s a
lot of rephrasing, but we Christians find this idea important enough
that we talk about it in a lot of ways, and it seems important to
point out that they’re all the SAME idea.

In
seminary I was offered the idea that we are co-creators with God.
That is, God created, but in that creation we received free will and
that free will is a part of creating what is and what will come next.
If the kin-dom is to come, then we need to be co-creators with God
in making it happen, because God will not work without us nor force
it upon us. I’m proposing that to “give to God” is to offer it
for the sake of the kin-dom. Resources I see all us as having
include: our time, our energy, our mental though space, our money,
our gifts, and our passions. None of us have any of those in equal
measure, but we all have the chance to decide what to do with them.

There
is a heck of a lot of work to be done in building the kin-dom as
well, and the work is quite varied. Paul did some good work on
making lists of various gifts that are useful and various work that
is to be done, but the end point is that we need lots of different
skill sets and we need not judge ourselves nor others for what we’re
able to offer.

As
a practical example, when the area I was in flooded in 2011 I was
asked to do some organizing work, because the fire department was
busy emptying basement and the fire auxiliary was busy trying to
distribute food and water. So I sat at the fire department and made
lists: lists of people who wanted to help and lists of people who
needed help. To be honest, I’m not all that useful at most building
or demolishing work, I don’t know all that much about it. However,
it turned out that a deeply necessary job was the one that involved
keeping lists and making phone calls. It was more than a year before
I lifted my hand with anything but a pen or a phone in it for that
recovery, and yet I got enough feedback to know that the work I’d
done mattered. At the same time, nothing I did would have mattered
if there weren’t people willing to do the heavy lifting, nor others
working to get supplies, nor if the people working to restore the
utilities hadn’t succeeded, nor if the basements weren’t drained, nor
if the people hadn’t had food and water in the meantime.

I
think perhaps disaster recovery is a decent metaphor for building the
kin-dom if anything is: it takes a lot of people doing what they are
best at, some of which may not seem that important, much of which is
mucking out, but all of which together can transform it all!

Another
practical example seems to be in order. Many in this congregation
have been doing the long term work for full inclusion of LGBTQIA+
people in the church and in the world. That requires a lot of
different effort: from strategy work to protests, from legal work to
acts of defiance, from the the “work” of celebration to the
simple acts of inclusion, and beyond. A few years ago a friend
mentioned the deeply necessary work of having initial conversations
with people who are closed minded, or who are having their very first
thoughts that perhaps God loves LBGTQIA+ people too – and that she
no longer feels called to do it. She is an incredible organizer, we
really need her organizing rather than in those conversations, and
she was wise enough to know continuing to be in those talks decade
after decade was too much for her. Her stance felt like freedom. We
don’t all have to do the same work, there is too much to do to be
stuck on only one thing!

So, to give to God’s what
is God’s, what does it mean? It means our whole lives being directed
towards co-creating the fullness of God’s vision into the world. The
really good news is that when we are working along with God, the
burden is lightened and the possibilities are expanded. Thanks be to
God! Amen

1Richard
E. Spalding, Pastoral Perspective on Matthew 22:15-22,
Feasting on the Word Year
A, Volume 4,
edited by David L. Barlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville, KY:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 189.

2Robert
W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The
Search for the Autthentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), 236.

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

October 22, 2017

Sermons

“Bread for the World” based on Isaiah 25:1-9

October 16, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

In 2005 I was commissioned as a probationary Elder in The United Methodist Church, and immediately thereafter I went to Cuba on a Volunteer in Mission Trip (VIM). Cuba was fascinating and the trip was meaningful and educational. We started and ended our time in Cuba at the Methodist Hospitality House in Havana. On our last night, we were to have closing worship and the other clergy on the trip informed me that I was to preside at the communion table (for the first time). As a seminary student, I’d been involved in a lot of conversations about bread and grape juice; particularly around the idea that the the bread and wine that Jesus had used were the common elements of food for the people of his day, and that in places where bread and grape juice are not common food, perhaps they should not be the elements of communion. I found it convincing, particularly after having learned that grape juice is SUPER expensive in Cuba as grapes are not native and embargoes limit trade.

Thus, I decided to preside over the table with the elements of the people: salines and mango juice. Once our Cuban hosts heard about this, they wanted to partake as well. So, in one of those strikingly holy moments of life, I stood as an American woman in a rooftop in Havana, and presided over a bilingual communion service with salines and mango juice.

Not so long after that, I was back at school and back at my pastoral internship, helping to serve a Thanksgiving meal at the Hollywood UMC. It was a Sunday night, and the large room was filled with tables and the tables were filled with people. After serving most of the crowd, I looked up. What I saw took my breath away. It was the church’s Thanksgiving Dinner, so many of the people who were present were church members; but they also made all meals open to the community, so many of those present were people who were homeless and hungry. The two crowds were intermingled at each table, sitting together and sharing a meal. The tables were diverse in other ways as well: age, race, country of origin, sexual orientations, gender identities, and even religious faith. On that day when I looked up and saw God’s beloved people talking, laughing, and eating together I knew I’d seen the kin-dom of God on earth (if only for a moment).

Somewhere along the line, those two powerful moments have bonded in my brain, the communion meal intermingled with the shared meal of church fellowship that also fed the hungry. Perhaps they were tied together by the reflections of Rev. Dr. Barbara Thorington Green, who often speaks about the ways that God’s Table (communion) invokes and also blesses the tables we share fuller meals at. Food is sacred, shared food even more so, and whether it is meals that fill the belly or tiny pieces of bread meant to satiate the soul, they matter.

Isaiah shares a vision of God in our reading today, and it is one that invokes and expands both of the stories I just told you. In this passage God prepares a table, a feast actually, of rich foods that would nourish bodies, and invites ALL people from ALL nations to the feast. God makes the food, for God’s people, and all can eat together. It is so spectacular, so marvelous, that it makes sense that within such a God-drenched experience that God would also bring an end to death and bring God’s presence fully to the people.

Abundant, life-giving food, prepared for ALL people by God’s own self is equivalent, it seems, to swallowing up death itself.

This is not the world we live in. (Sorry to break it to you.) Death is here, still. Abundant, life-giving food is not available to all of God’s people, and while the presence of God may be here with us, we often don’t feel drenched in its goodness. According to the resources provided by Bread for the World, “Nearly 15 percent of U.S. households — approximately 49 million Americans, including 15.9 million children — struggle to put food on the table.”¹ The problem is not limited to the United States. They also share, “The number of hungry people in Asia has also declined substantially, by 217 million between 1990-92 and 2012-14, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Yet Asia still has to two-thirds of the world’s hungry people.” Specifically, “More than 40 percent of children in India are stunted (being too short for their age group) due to malnutrition.” The other area of the world in greatest need is sub-Saharan Africa, “Just over a quarter of the world’s undernourished people live in the countries south of the Sahara Desert in Africa. Progress against hunger has been slow in this region. In 1990, one in three people in the region were undernourished. Today, one in four suffer from hunger”.² “All added up, worldwide, 1.2 billion people still live in extreme poverty—on less than $1.25 per day.”³ This is WAY down from the recent past, but still unacceptable.

Bread for the world links to the United Nations Sustainable Development goals, which include the information that “In 2016, an estimated 155 million children under age 5 were stunted (low height for their age), down from 198 million in 2000, ”⁴ and “The proportion of undernourished people worldwide declined from 15 per cent in 2000-2002 to about 11 per cent in 2014-2016. … Globally, about 793 million people were undernourished in 2014-2016, down from 930 million in 2000-2002.”⁵ The decline in global hunger is a great thing, but it is still way too much.

We don’t live in a world where abundant, life-giving food is available to all of God’s people, not at all. And while global poverty and hunger was on the decline this year (praise God!), within the United States it rose, and is expected to keep rising. In previous years we have participated in the Bread for the World offering of Letters, asking our state and federal elected officials to pass expansive legislation to make food available to hungry people, this year we are aware that it will fall on deaf ears. We aren’t fighting to expand programs to hungry people anymore, we are now fighting to keep resources that exist, insufficient though they are.

It is especially difficult right now, in the US and in the world, because the impacts of Global Climate change are drastically impacting food production, droughts and floods, wars and migration, transportation and food prices. All of this means that access to abundant, life-giving food is very difficult for many. Thanks be to God for the many organizations committed to finding ways to get food to hungry people, and thanks be to God that in the world at large there was a DECLINE in hunger despite these extra challenges!!

Isaiah’s dream, however, still feels far off. I want to retell you the dream, in slightly different language, because I think we all need to soak in it a bit.

Our God, the one who never abandons us, the one who holds us together,
We remember all that you have done,
all the acts of liberation, and justice,
all the ways you’ve sparked creativity, nurtured love, and healed brokenness.
You have acted, and you have guided us to destroy the fortresses of oppression,
and you ensure they will never be rebuild.
The powers that deny anyone’s humanity are over.
The systems that privilege one over another are no more.
Awe has struck all of us, the strong and the weak alike, at what you can do.
You have reminded us of your values, and brought them to life.
You are the sanctuary for the poor,
the one who is safe shelter to those in need and in despair,
protection from from hurricanes and rainstorms,
a fireproof haven from the sun and from the fires,
a sturdy foundation that not even an earthquake can harm.
When the powerful attacked the weak,
like a blizzard attacking a disintegrating home,
when the cries of those calling for injustice
seemed to drown out the voices calling for justice,
you acted.
You provided reinforcements and insulation for the homes,
you reminded those calling for injustice of their own needs,
and they stopped yelling and started listening.
Here, here in this place,
this place that has known such tragedy,
fear, anger, sadness, and despair,
here in this place you will give gifts to all your people.
One will sit by another, and no characteristic of humanity will separate them.
Here, in this place, you feed us all with delicious food,
nourishing us, healing us, reminding us of goodness once again.
Here, in this place,
comfort will be shared,
tears will be dried,
shame will be destroyed,
and death itself will lose its power to frighten us or bring us pain.
Knowing that this will happen, let us be glad and rejoice in the goodness.

Commentators say that this vision won’t necessarily come true exactly as written. #spoileralert Yet, I’m told that we can’t be part of creating what we can’t dream of, and we can’t see what we can’t conceive of. In the midst of the brokenness all around us, we need reminders of what goodness looks like, what hope would create if it could, what dreams God is dreaming over the long run. Some of us (me included) are so busy being concerned about the present that we lose sight of the idea that God is very good at playing a very long game.

So, bread for the world, that’s the dream. All people being fed with abundant, life-giving food. Isaiah says not just bread but delicious soups and sauces, not just food but drink as well. No one going hungry, no one in need, not in body nor in soul.

That’s one of God’s dreams, and it is surely a God sized dream. Bread for the World and the United Nations are actually dreaming it with God, the goal is to eliminate hunger in the world by 2030. They say it is going more slowly than the hoped – but it is GOING. God’s dreams might just be in reach, this one and all the rest as well. May we take the time to soak in the goodness of God’s dreams, to trust in the visions God has for an abundant and just world, and give our attention to what might be – God is so good the dreams and visions are nourishing for us. Amen

1Bread for the World “About Hunger” http://www.bread.org/where-does-hunger-existaccessed on 10/12/17.

2Grassroots Advocacy Resources, Facts on Hunger and Poverty,http://www.bread.org/sites/default/files/downloads/gar-issues-poverty-hunger-us.pdfaccessed on 10/12/17.

3Grassroots Advocacy Resources

4United Nations, The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2017,https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/files/report/2017/TheSustainableDevelopmentGoalsReport2017.pdf accessed on 10/12/17.

5United Nations

–

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

October 15, 2017

Sermons

“The Power of Nonviolence” based on Isaiah 5:1-7 and Matthew…

October 8, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

As
my paternal grandmother (Nana) aged, she needed increasing levels of
help. After she’d transitioned to assisted living, her beloved only
son (my father) would often take her out on shopping excursions. My
Nana was a woman who loved to shop, ok, she was a woman who lived to
shop. It regularly amused me to talk to both my father and my Nana
after said excursions. My Nana would relate the experiences this
way, “Your father is SO impatient! All I wanted to do was go to a
few stores, look at what they had, and enjoy being out. All he
wanted was to get out of there. It is like he doesn’t know how to
have any fun!” My father would relate the experiences this way,
“Your grandmother takes forever! I took her to the store, she
wanted me to push her down each of the the aisles, slowly, and then
when we were done she’d want to do it again!”

Their
two versions of shopping together always made me giggle because it
was so clear that they were relating the same story, just from two
different experiences. I’ve been thinking about their shopping
excursions this week because the Gospel does the opposite.

As
far as I can figure it out, what we have in the Gospel is one story
being used for two totally different purposes at the same time
(without changing perspectives). One of these stories is the
narrative that Jesus told and the other is the one that the early
Christian community told, and they told them for VERY different
reasons.

Since
we are are much more familiar with the one the early Christian
community told, and since it is the version we see in the Gospel
today, we’re going to start by looking at that one. It is
brilliantly done, poetically beautiful, and intended to insult the
Jews. SIGH. As the Jesus Seminar puts it, “This
parable was a favorite in early Christian circles because it could
easily be allegorized [to the story where] God’s favor was
transferred from its original recipients (Israel) to its new heirs
(Christians, principally gentiles).”¹
This version intentionally reflections on Isaiah 5:1-7. They start
in parallel ways, with the description of the creation of the
vineyard: planting, enclosing, digging, building a watch tower. The
parallels in the beginning of the passages are intended to remind us
of the conclusion of the Isaiah reading, which says (in case you
forgot), “[God] expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness,
but heard a cry!” (Isaiah 5:7b, NRSV)

In
Isaiah the shock is that after all that work (and it takes years to
get grapes from the vineyard), the grapes were sour. The metaphor
indicates that God had invested in creating a just society with
Israel and is horrified that they didn’t become one. Matthew extends
this metaphor, indicating that he thinks the Jews failed to create a
just society, but that the Christians will succeed. In the
allegorical reading of the parable, God will kick out the tenants and
replace them. It seems that this reflects a time when Christians
were feeling disempowered and felt the need to tell stories that
empowered them. The problem is that for a whole lot of centuries
now, Christians have been the empowered and by continuing to tell
themselves this story they have disempowered Jewish people and
perpetuated antisemitism.

We
can be clear that the Matthew version is the creation of the
Christian community and not Jesus because it includes the detail
about the son being killed and cast off. Ched Myers writes, “The
son is killed and cast off (without proper burial, the ultimate
insult) Jesus too will be cast ‘outside’ the city of Jerusalem.”²

The
good news is that scholars think they can get a good guess at how the
original parable sounded, the one Jesus told. This is the other
version of the parable, and it wasn’t allegorical. William Herzog
points out the version in Matthew is quite different from others,
saying, “The parable begins with a description of a man creating a
vineyard yet neither Luke nor the Gospel of Thomas include these
details.”³
That means that the original parable wasn’t meant to be an extension
of Isaiah 5, and likely wasn’t intending to dismiss the Jews. The
Gospel of Thomas version is thought to be the closest to what Jesus
might actually have said:

“He
said, A […] person owned a vineyard and rented it to some
farmers, so they could work it and he could collect its crop from
them. He sent his slave so the farmers would give him the vineyard’s
crop. They grabbed him, beat him, and almost killed him, and the
slave returned and told his master. His master said, “Perhaps
he didn’t know them.” He sent another slave, and the farmers
beat that one as well. Then the master sent his son and said,
“Perhaps they’ll show my son some respect.” Because the
farmers knew that he was the heir to the vineyard, they grabbed him
and killed him.”⁴

This
parable seems to describe something that might have actually happened
during Jesus life time. It reflects tensions that were present in
Galilee at that time. In the Social Science Commentary they write,
“If we may assume that at the earliest stage of the Gospel
tradition the story was not an allegory about God’s dealings with
Israel, as it is now, it may well have been a warning to absentee
landowners expropriating and exporting the produce of the land.”⁵
Another commentator concludes, “And however the vengeance of the
owner may be interpreted allegorically, it certainly reflects a
landowner’s wrath, which which the landless Palestinian was all too
familiar.”⁶

So
the problem in the parable according to Herzog is “the creation of
a vineyard would, on economic grounds alone, have disturbed the
hearers of the parable. Because land in Galilee was largely
accounted for and intensively cultivated, ‘a man’ could acquire the
land required to build a vineyard only by taking it from someone
else. The most likely way he would have added the land to his
holdings was through foreclosure on loans to free peasant farmers who
were unable to pay off the loans because of poor harvests.”⁷
This means that “building vineyards was a ‘speculative investment’
and therefore the prerogative of the rich.”⁸
So the parable reflects economic realities that were doing GREAT
harm in Galilee at the time of Jesus.

It
also reflected a reality of violence at the time of Jesus. Herzog
continues, “If the peasants resorted to violence only when their
subsistence itself was threatened then the conversion of land from
farmland to a vineyard ([Mark] 12:1b, 2) would be an event that would
trigger such a response. The building of the vineyard and the
violence it generates also describes the conflict of two value
systems. Elites continually sought to expand their holdings and add
to their wealth at the expense of the peasants.”⁹
So, the creation of new vineyards was part of a system of wealth
transformation from the subsistence peasants to the very wealthy.
Herzog then seems this as step one in a spiral of violence that went
like this:

“The
spiral begins in the everyday oppression and exploitation of the poor
by the ruling class.This violence is often covert and sanctioned by
law, such as the hostile takeover of peasant land. More often than
not, peasants simply adjust and adapt to these incursions by the
elites in order to maintain their subsistence standard; but… even
peasants have a breaking point. When their very subsistence is
threatened, they will revolt. This is the second phrase of the
spiral of violence, and it is this phase that the parable depicts in
great detail. Inevitably, such rebellions or revolts are repressed
through the use of force, as the final question of the parable
suggests. This officially sanctioned violence defines the final
phase of the spiral of violence, which always occurs ‘under the
pretext of safeguarding public order [or] national security.”¹⁰

I
have, to this point, been following the commentaries of multiple
brilliant scholars: ones who differentiated the current form of the
parable from the one Jesus likely told, ones that explain the
economic factors of vineyards, ones that connect economic systems
with violence. However, first I’m going to draw my own conclusion,
one that none of them came around to.

To
get there, I want to go back to a seemingly simple point John Dominic
Crossan made while he was here. He mentioned that Jesus was killed
for being a non-violent revolutionary, and we know this because he
was killed alone instead of being killed with all of his followers
like he would have been if he’d led a violent revolt. John Dominic
Crossan is one of many scholars who think that Jesus was very
intentionally nonviolent, and that was a definitional characteristic
of his movement. I agree with them.

My
suspicion is that if Jesus told this story, he told it to talk about
violent resistance and nonviolent resistance. He would have told
this story to point out that violence tends to beget violence, and to
offer an alternative. The spiral of violence: taking away people’s
livelihoods, killing in self-defense, repressed rebellions was NOT
the vision Jesus had for the people. By naming how things tend to go
down in the world, by talking about how others were choosing to act,
he would have been differentiating his movement from theirs.

The
answer to Matthew’s question at the end of the parable, “Now when
the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”
is that the owner would either kill them directly or displace them
without any resources to allow them to die slowly. In the
allegorical version of the story when God becomes the landowner,
that’s disgusting. However, if Jesus’ intention was to point out how
the world works and
offer an alternative,
it
is worth listening to.

This
week, it seems worth remembering that we are followers of a man who
lived in a time of violence, who choose nonviolence and invited
others to choose nonviolence with him. John Dominic Crossan invited
us to remember that there is power in nonviolence too, and that is a
power of the followers of Christ. The empire that perpetuated
violence in the of Jesus killed only him because they thought the
threat of violence would kill his movement, but it failed.
Nonviolent resistance could not be stopped so easily.

The
question for today is how we practice nonviolent resistance in the
ways that Jesus did: which were pointed, powerful, and effective in
caring for the vulnerable people of God. This week has felt
overwhelming: paying attention to yet another mass murder, learning
more and more about the ways that the people of Puerto Rico have been
systematically impoverished, and watching as another large swath of
people prepare for yet another hurricane. Nonviolent resistance
takes intentionality, focus, communication, collaboration,
creativity, and commitment. But it has brought justice to this world
time and time again. (If you need an example, the Civil Rights
Movement in this country is the most accessible, but the list is
really quite long). The next successful movements for justice will
be wise to follow the same method that Jesus used: nonviolent
resistance. For that I hope we can all say: Thanks be to God. Amen

1
Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five
Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA,
1993), pages 510.

2
Ched Myers, Binding
the Strong Man
( Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988, 2008), page 309.

3
William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech,
(Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994), p. 101.

4Gospel
of Thomas 65:1-7, Scholars Version.

5
Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social Science
Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), p. 110.

6
Myers, 309.

7
Herzog, 102.

8
Herzog, 103.

9
Herzog, 107-108.

10
Herzog, 108-109, working with work from Helder Camara, 1971.

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

October 8, 2018

Sermons

“Enough” based on Exodus 17:1-7 and Philippians 2:1-5

October 1, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Not
to give the answer away or anything, but I think both of these
passages try to prod us toward trust; trust in God and trust in each
other. Exodus tells of God giving the people what they need,
Philippians instructs people to take care of each other (which is a
way of ensuring everyone’s needs are met, if it is done well). When
people are paying attention to each other, and to the ones who are
most vulnerable, God’s abundant creation is able to care for all. I
suspect that trusting in God requires two things of us: trusting in
each other, and being trust worthy for each other. Let’s take a
deeper look.

The
Exodus story is about the people of God being quarrelsome, whiny, and
unfaithful. Or, at least, it seems to be. I’ve never quite
understood this passage though, because they’re said by the text
itself to be quarrelsome, whiny, and unfaithful BECAUSE they want
access to water, and are afraid that they are about to die of thirst.
Just as a reminder, they are wandering around a desert. In fact, in
the Bible, the words desert and wilderness are functionally
interchangeable, and they both indicate that the land is not capable
of sustaining human life without God’s help.

The
people are in the desert without water, and they ask for water, and
that’s unfaithful? I don’t follow. It doesn’t seem unfaithful that
the people in Puerto Rico are asking for water, water is necessary
for life, and they don’t have water. They need more than water, but
they desperately need water. Just like the people in the desert. In
both cases, asking for water doesn’t make them whiny, or quarrelsome.
It makes them alive, and wanting to stay alive! Being without water
is dangerous to life! Articulating that it is a problem and asking
for help finding a solution is reasonable, rational, and wise.

Regarding
Exodus, I don’t think the people misbehave nearly as much as Moses
does. The people notice there isn’t water and ask for water. Now,
if we want to defend Moses we can say that they don’t ask terribly
politely (“Give us water to drink.”) but within the story itself
Moses has preformed a heck of a lot of miracles already and has
claimed to be leading the people. They don’t know why he hasn’t
dealt with this already. If the leader isn’t taking care of the
people’s needs, the people need not be POLITE in demanding what they
need to live.

Moses
responds poorly. He takes their request personally. He asks why
they are quarreling with him and why they are testing God. Clearly
we can now see whose perspective is dominating the interpretation of
the story! (Maybe this is why the tradition has said Moses wrote
this book… 😉 ) His angry response and accusation quiet the people
momentarily, but they are still thirsty. They still need water, for
life. So they can’t be silenced. The second time they ask for water
with significantly more drama, perhaps hoping that it will elicit a
different response. They are desperate, indicating that dying of
dehydration in the desert is worse than slavery in Egypt.

Moses,
again, mishears them. He turns to God, but not to advocate for the
people, to advocate for himself! He prays, crying out that he
doesn’t know how to handle the people and they’re so angry with him
he is afraid for his life. #MissingThePoint The story says that God
does NOT miss the point though, and responds with a way to provide
water. Moses does as he’s told, and the people get water. However,
the narrative ends with Moses naming the place “Quarreling” and
“Testing” as his interpretation of how the people behaved.

According
to Deuteronomy, the entire story of the people wandering in the
desert is said to be so that they can learn to depend on God, and not
on their own capacities. Deuteronomy, in fact, spends a lot of time
worrying that once the people enter the land and have milk and honey
in abundance they will think this is because of their hard work,
rather than God’s good grace. Thus, the Exodus narratives are meant
to teach that God can be depended on.

This
is both an imperative lesson for all people of faith, and a dangerous
one. God can be depended on, this I believe. Creation is abundant,
and there is enough food, water, shelter, and love for everyone.
However, I haven’t found human societies to be as dependable as God,
and while there is enough in the world, there is not enough if it is
hoarded, or wasted. Abundant clean water is being destroyed by
fracking, sources of it are drying up with global climate change, and
various companies are seeking to glean profit from limiting people’s
water access except through their sales. Analysis I’ve read about
the humanitarian crisis in Syria that has created a refugee crisis
around the world suggests that it started with years of drought that
kept people from being able to grow crops and sustain themselves.
Furthermore, our sisters, brothers, and siblings in Puerto Rico and
other Caribbean islands don’t have clean water, and that reality is
life threatening.

God
created enough, but that doesn’t mean people have access to enough.
Simply claiming that God will take care of the vulnerable and thirsty
doesn’t do them any good if the mechanisms of human society prevent
them from having access to life giving water.

And
yet God created enough, and works with us and through us to
connect resources to people in need. In this church we seek to
connect food, water, coffee, soap, toilet paper, diapers, hygiene
products, home furnishings, flood buckets, hygiene kits, beauty,
music, and knowledge to those who need them! (To name a few.) We
are part of the work of redistributing so that God’s abundance can be
known. We are seeking to live out the instructions in Philippians 2.

Did
any of the computer geeks notice that the Philippians text is
basically written in if/then code? Just me? That’s OK. IF there is
any encouragement in Christ (implication here seems to be that anyone
hearing this would say “YES! Of course there is), IF there is any
consolation in love (almost everyone would agree with this), IF there
is any sharing in the Spirit, IF you have experienced any compassion
and sympathy (so most people by this time are yearning to say yes),
THEN “make my joy complete.” OK, how?

With
connection. Use your lives to take care of each other. Let go of
ambition that is only about you and work towards helping others. Be
together in love. Actually, it says a lot more, but I think the
church and the world both abuse the idea of “unity” as a means of
controlling the vulnerable: that is they claim that those who call
for justice for all are disturbing the peace and should be silenced
in the name of unity. This makes me squirm and I want to to skip
over the “same mind, same love” part. However, I think more
nuance is called for! (#whenindoubtmorenuance)

In
an article I read this week on NPR, they
talked about the form of Russian influence on US public opinion
saying, “Moscow’s
intelligence agencies not only used secret cyberattacks to steal and
leak information, as the U.S. intelligence community concluded. The
Russians also openly bought ads on Facebook aimed at amplifying the
most controversial issues in American political life — including
abortion, guns and LGBT issues — and used fake accounts to spread
disinformation and even organize real-life
rallies.”¹

While
I have many strong opinions, most certainly including on the issues
that Russia is trying to use our society, I’m really struck by this
story. Another country thinks that the best way to destabilize our
society and gain influence is by keeping us fighting with each other.
It is likely a great strategy, it leads to deep divisions, and could
even lead to the destruction of our country. When issues divide us,
we can end up not seeing or hearing each other as people at all! So,
while I don’t much like the instruction to be of the “same mind”
(ok, fine, I still hate it), I think perhaps it needs to be taken
very seriously. We must work to humanize each other, even across
differences.

To
return to the stories, God created and created with abundance. When
we trust in each other and are trustworthy for each other, there is
enough. On this World Communion Sunday, where we are reminded that
God’s table extends around our globe, may we savor the abundance of
creation and seek to be people of trust in that “enough-ness.”
Amen

1 Philip
Ewing “As
Scrutiny Of Social Networks Grows, Influence Attacks Continue In
Real Time” published September
28, 2017 at 5:01AM ET
http://www.npr.org/2017/09/28/554024047/as-scrutiny-of-social-networks-grows-influence-attacks-continue-in-real-time

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

October 1, 2017

Sermons

“Holes in the Story” based on Judges 4 and…

September 10, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

It should be noted that I’m a wimp. I blame my parents.
(But in a good way.) As a young child I was limited to an hour of
TV a day and it had to be PBS. I’ve never quite normalized to our
culture in that I have a super low tolerance for media violence or
horror. To be honest, I don’t like this story, I think it is too
violence, and if I was trying to hold the Bible to a standard of
“Church Appropriate” then this passage would not meet it.
However, I think dealing with this story is important and necessary,
so we’re going to do it despite my distaste. That being said, there
are many reasons why you might not want to hear/read the rest of this
sermon:

**** Trigger Warning ****

This story contains excessive violence, in detail, and
sexual violence.

****

I will not take it personally if you choose to take a
very long bathroom break at this point.

Now, despite its graphic nature, this text isn’t
particularly easy to follow. I had to read it half a dozen times and
read several commentaries before I could even follow what is
happening. Because this text is from the book of Judges, we can
start by knowing a few things. The ancient Hebrew people have
“entered the promised land” (they did that in the prior book,
Joshua) and are currently functioning as a loose alliance of tribes
without a central government. They have settled into hilly, desert
land. Later in their history the land would be in high demand
because of its functionality as a crossroads, but in this early
history this land is a bit outside of society. It was hard to
scratch out a living there, which means outsiders usually didn’t
bother with it.

However, sometimes neighboring countries (and we should
understand “countries” pretty loosely, maybe as akin to a small
city-state) would try to expand into some part of the “Promised
Land” and then there would be a need for a leader/general to guide
the people in fighting back. That leader/general would then be
called a “judge” and would lead the people until their death.
Then things would be OK for a while until a different country tried
the same deal on a different boarder.

This is the second set of stories of such a judge in the
book of Judges, and there are a few adaptations to the standard story
line. The first is that the “neighboring country” is actually an
internal one. The Israelites had invaded the land of the Canaanites,
because the Canaanites were the ones living on their “promised
land.” However, the Canaanites were neither entirely destroyed nor
entirely willing to adapt to Israelite customs. So, the two both
occupied the land, with ever shifting borders between them.

According to the story, at this point in history the
Canaanites were a FAR more technologically advanced society than the
ancient Hebrew people. They’d entered the “iron age”, as
evidenced by the 900 iron chariots they brought to war. (It is
reasonable to assume exaggeration.) The ancient Hebrews not only had
no iron (they’re in the late bronze age), they’re said to have no
shields nor spears. The armies are incredibly mismatched.

The second adaptation is that the role of Judge is a bit
fuzzy. The story says that Deborah had been judge – but in that
case they mean that people brought their disputes to her and trusted
her to judge between them fairly. Since she appears to have come by
that reputation on her own, that’s pretty cool. Deborah is, in case
you were wondering, the only woman to be called a Judge of Israel.
However, she isn’t the military general, so that’s unusual for these
stories. And neither she, nor the general, actually complete the act
of defeating their opponent. That role belongs to another woman,
and a foreigner at that.

Now, I have a lot of issues with this story in
particular and with the book of Judges in general. Judges assumes
that everything that happens is God’s will. So, they think that when
outsiders attack them or oppress them it is because God is punishing
them. They try to protect God’s reputation, so they claim that when
there is no judge in Israel, the people do what is evil in the sight
of the Lord, which they assume to justify God’s anger and punishment.
It doesn’t work for me. It is easy to see that the Israelites
were experiencing fairly normal conflict with neighbors – internal
and external to their country. It is easy to see that the stories
are trying to be faithful when they attribute all of it to God. But
they seem to miss that they make God into an egotistical abusive
parent when they do so.

And, in case this isn’t clear to you, I don’t think God
is egotistical, nor abusive (although it is fine with me if the
parental metaphors work for you).

Those are my GENERAL issues. Specifically, I pretty
much hate that this is a story of war, death, and murder that is
claimed as a victory. Similar to the point I just made, I understand
that those who told it and those who wrote it down thought that they
were telling a story of a God who freed them from oppression, and I
see why that’s good. The problem is that I believe in a God who is
the God of the Israelites AND the Canaanites. And, generally
speaking, I don’t think there are winners in war, even when there are
victors.

So, you ask, why am I preaching on it? Well, two
reasons. First of all because when I’ve spent most of a year
preaching about the subversive women of the Bible, I didn’t think I
could reasonably skip out on the first FEMALE to lead the country
(and only one said to do so rightfully). Secondly, because war,
violence, and murder are real parts of life. To refuse a text that
includes them because of them means pretending life is cleaner,
easier, and more acceptable than it really is. This story reflects
the lives of many people who live today, both in literal and in
metaphorical terms.

Now you might ask, WHAT HAPPENS?!?!? Well, that’s
complicated. There are actually two versions of this story. The
version in chapter 5 is much older. Along with the (much, much
shorter) song of Miriam, it is thought to be the oldest text in the
Bible. It may date to the 12^th century BCE.¹
(For reference, the next youngest parts were 400 years later and the
majority of the Torah was written down around 800 years later.) The
two oldest parts are both women’s songs, and they reflect very
similar stories: natural events defeat an army and the Israelites
associate that with God’s work and give thanks to God for saving
them. It has been guessed that women passed down their songs from
generation to generation, perhaps while the men passed down their
stories. We read from Judges 4 because it is easier to make sense
of, but I want to focus on Judges 5, the poetry version passed down
as song.

In Judges 5, the people have been oppressed by the
Canaanites. But when God raised up Deborah, the peasants rejoiced
because she took care of them. She is called a mother in Israel.
The song celebrates the courage of those who went to fight the
Canaanites without even having any weapons, and it acknowledges
Barack as the military leader. The song emphatically claims that
God, as the Divine Warrior, marched with the people. The third time
it mentions this, it puts it this way:

The
stars fought from heaven,
from
their courses they fought against Sisera.
The
torrent Kishon swept them away,
the
onrushing torrent, the torrent Kishon.
March
on, my soul, with might! (Judges 5: 20-21, NRSV)

That
is to say, with God on their side, even the stars were fighting for
the Israelites against the Canaanite general, Sisera. The battle
happened in the Kishon riverbed valley. But because it is a desert
climate, the river bed usually ran dry. The river flowed with
strength enough to stop the army.

Then
the song changes, and celebrates Jael. Jael is said to be the wife
of Heber the Kenite. Moses’s father in law was a Kenite, so she
would have been seen as a distant but distinct relative. Jael
welcomes the general into her tent with enthusiasm. It says he asked
for water and she gave him milk curds. Then she kills him.

Then
the song turns even more vicious. It imagines Sisera’s mother
waiting for him at home, fantasizing about the “spoil” he’ll
bring home. In this imagining, she assumes he isn’t home yet because
they are busy raping the women of Israel. The Hebrew text says, “a
womb or two for every man” and then goes on to imagine the
embroidery she is hoping he’ll bring her. Right after this
imagining, the song ends with the words, ‘So perish all your
enemies, O Lord!
But may your friends be like the sun as it
rises in its might.’” (Judges 5:31a, NRSV) Likely there is
direct irony between the imagined two wombs and those of Jael and
Deborah.

The
prose text has a more linear plot that flows like a story, with
explanations and details. It explains why Jael and her husband were
there, implying that Heber the Kenite was a smith who decided to
travel with the Canaanite army to fix their chariots!²
However, it is almost certain that the prose version was created to
help people understand the song, so I don’t think we need to spend
more time with it.

We
do need to spend some more time in that tent with Sisera and Jael
though. There is a rather large hole in both versions of this story:
why does she kill him? Other stories in the Bible have taught us how
sacrosanct hospitality was there. A person welcomed into one’s tent
was often treated with more dignity and respect than even family
members who lived in that tent. And Jael is said to be enthusiastic
in her welcome.

What
happened? Did she make a calculation that if Sisera, the general,
were running away without his army that he must have lost and it
would be better to have the gratitude of the Israelites? Perhaps.
That would make sense. But since this is a woman’s song, I think it
would be reasonable to read into the hidden narrative. Women were
generally in subservient roles throughout the time this song was
passed on, so it seems particularly likely that the song would make
its points in subtext rather than in text that could be used against
them.

And
there is a lot of subtext. I mentioned a moment ago that the song
explicitly mentions Sisera’s mother imagining him raping women.
Futhermore, the details used to describe Sisera’s death are
surprising. Commentators have noted that Jael “penetrates” his
skull with the tent peg, and that this reads like a rape scene. The
Hebrew actually reads, “he sank, he fell, he lay still … he sank,
he fell… he fell dead.” When he dies he is said in Hebrew to
fall “between her feet” or “between her legs” which is “a
sexual euphemism found elsewhere in the Bible.”³
The ancient rabbis noticed all of the sexual overtones, it has long
been debated.

But
what do they mean? I’m not sure, but I can think of three things.
The most obvious one, and I think the one we’re meant to be
distracted by, is that Sisera was “shamed” by being killed by a
woman and further “shamed” in the undertones by having it sound
like a woman raping him. (Please note that I don’t believe that
these things are shameful, rather that the text thinks they are.)
However, two other options seem hidden under this. One is the
possibility of women having their own fantasy of being able to get
retribution for being the “spoils of war.” That even being able
to sing a song where a woman is NOT raped by the enemy but instead
has power over him kept them going through the hard times. The final
option is less empowering. I wonder if Sisera actually raped Jael,
and she choose to kill him afterward. If so, the narrative of the
rape and the narrative of the murder got folded into one.

This
story has made it through 3200 years to get to us today. It has some
themes we can affirm (God liberates! God can work through shared
leadership!) and a whole bunch of others we can’t. This story
captures an ancient way of thinking about God. This conception, of
God as Warrior, of God as egotistical-abuser, is in our shared
general psyche. It comes from our ancients, and as such it lives
with us today. It feels important to be able to read it as an
ancient text and acknowledge that we
no longer live 3200 years ago in the very beginning of the iron age.

We
are allowed to have developed from this point of view, and to
understand things differently now. We can affirm that God liberates
the oppressed, but we don’t have to take the rest of the story with
it. We can let go of a warrior God, and make space for a God who
loves ALL people (on any sides of any divide). We can let go of the
egotistical-abuser, and make space for a God of compassion, vision,
and guidance. We can be grateful for the chance to hear the stories
of 3200 years ago, and still acknowledge the value of the wisdom we
have today. We aren’t stuck in the past, nor in the values of the
past, and we don’t have to leave God there either. Our God is not a
God of violence. We can leave that idea to the past and remove it
from our collective psyche. Thanks be!! Amen

1 Dennis
T. Olsen “Judges” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. 2
(Nashville: Abingdon, 1998) p.
787.

2 Danna
Nolan Fewell, “Judges” in Women’s Bible Commenatry
edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville, Kentucky:
Westminster John Knox Press, 1992, 1998) p. 77

3 Olsen,
788.

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

“Is There Anything To Stop Me?” based on Acts…

September 3, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

If you pay attention to very early church history (and I mean, who doesn’t???) you may know that Paul was the great advocate of sharing the good news of Jesus with “the Gentiles”, aka people who weren’t Jewish. Much of the book of Acts reflects the tension between the apostles, whose focus remained in Jerusalem and with the Jews, and Paul who took the message “to the whole world.”

This has been the story I’ve been taught, the one I’ve then taught in return. Acts 8 argues with it, and I never noticed. In Acts 8, Phillip crosses most of the boundaries that anyone thought existed. He spends the chapter with a Samaritan magician and then an Ethiopian eunuch. This feels consistent with Jesus who kept on talking to Samaritans, Roman Senators, and anyone who wanted to talk to him, but the early church was already struggling with the questions of who was “in” and who was “out.” The people Phillip was with were supposed to be “out,” excluded from the community.

When it all started, Phillip was supposed to be in the 2^nd team of leadership, he was one of the ones chosen to deal with the trivial matters that the apostles couldn’t be bothered with. Yet somehow, the message of grace keeps coming from him to unexpected people. And all of this happens BEFORE the conversion of Paul. Perhaps God, through the Spirit, was already shaking things up, well before Paul’s participation.

Today’s text centers on the interaction between Phillip and the unnamed Ethiopian eunuch. (Noticeably unnamed much like many of the women in the Bible and unlike most of them men.) We have rather a lot of details about the Ethiopian, for not having a name. However, we don’t have clarity on this person’s gender identity. The Bible uses male pronouns, but let’s be honest – the Bible uses male pronouns as a default position. The most defining characteristic of this person was their status as a eunuch. Peterson Toscano, who self describes as a Quaker and obsessive gardener, lives in Sunbury, PA with his husband, the writer, Glen Retief as well as a gay Biblical Scholar, wrote an excellent blog on this passage. In it, he seriously considers the experience of eunuchs in the Bible:

Then there are the eunuchs of the Bible–so many eunuchs. We must remember that in ancient times, eunuchs stood out. They typically had their testicles removed before puberty, sometimes with their consent, but usually not. As a result, they did not develop secondary sex characteristics that come during puberty. They retained high voices. They did not develop the body hair or the facial hair like men of their time. They looked and sounded different from the men and women around them.

Eunuchs could not produce offspring. While some did partner, most did not. They were often single and childless unless they adopted. In a world where everyone seemed to be part of a family unit of some sort, they stood out as loners.¹

Some scholars have said, “In order to earn and to maintain identification as a man, a free adult male citizen or native had to be perceived as one who dominated unmen—women, foreigners, slaves, and children.”²Traditional gender identity didn’t entirely fit for this one.

I’m going to use “they/them/their” pronouns, and ask forgiveness to the one whose story is told if their preference would have been otherwise.

We do know a lot about this unnamed person, whose gender isn’t binary though! They were from Ethiopia, which would have seems really far away for those from Galilee and Judea, almost like the ends of the earth. Most likely, they also looked different than the Galileans and Judeans did, with darker skin and a different sort of dress. They were the queen’s treasurer, which means they were probably very wealthy. The first set of Jesus’s followers were predominantly poor, and someone with that much wealth was quite different in that way too. They were almost certainly not Jewish, although they are a worshipper of YHWH. They were literate, which most people and most disciples were not. And they were employed by a foreign government, which would have aroused some suspicion about priorities within the early church. Those are some big differences.

We’re told that they have just come from worship in Jerusalem. That would not have been an emotionally easy experience, perhaps particularly for this person. Being outside of the gender binary at that time, and in that place, meant a loss of power. For worshipers at the ancient Temple, only Jewish men with unharmed genitalia were permitted to enter the internal (and thereby more sacred) “Israelite Courtyard.” Women, Gentiles, and those with nontypical male genitalia were confined to the outer court. This individual was used to having significant power and influence, and might have particularly not enjoyed being treated as “second class.”

Yet, for the sake of the queen, the eunuch’s status was imperative. In their society, it gave them access to their role. At the same time, as Peterson Toscano says:

Likely as a child this one was taken from home and parents. This one was physically held down, likely without giving consent, and was operated on. Through a painful procedure with the real risk of infection and more pain, testicles were removed.

This one grew up but never went through puberty. As boys matured and changed, this one did not change in the same ways. This one was assigned a position in a royal court. This one could not start a family. This one was both respected and mocked, sometimes at the same time because of an elevated status in the palace and what was seen as a social deformity. This one may well have felt isolated, rejected, and even experienced physical challenges and disabilities because of the lack of testosterone in the system.

So, this person, with so very many identities that differed from the majority of Jesus followers, was reading a passage from Isaiah that might have had some resonance with his own life. They have questions about the passage’s meaning, which is particularly valid to have when one is reading scripture! In the midst of this, Phillip appears and asks if they know the meaning. My friend Michael Airgood wrote a paper on this passage. In it, Michael chooses to use the pronounces xe/xyr/xem for the eunuch. He says, “When Philip asks xym if xe understands what xe is reading, xyr response indicates strongly that xe has felt the exclusionary forces of religious bigotry. You can almost hear the rejection in xyr voice, ‘How can I understand unless someone guides me.’”³ Being excluded had included being excluded from religious education. Once Phillip shares what he knows, the Ethiopian-eunuch-officer-worshiper is convinced that the Jesus movement is something they wanted to be a part of. So, they ask, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

We know the answers to this! Much of this person’s identity could have been used as a barrier to inclusion in the Body of Christ. They were already excluded from full participation in the Jewish Temple as well as from from family life. This person knew exclusion, and the early Christian community was more more self-similar than it is now. This person was different in a lot of ways, and it might have been thought, too many ways. Phillip could have told them that they needed to do more studying and that they should come back in a few years, or that they needed to work with mentor, or that only people with standard order genitalia were welcome, or that they had to pass some sort of purity test, or simply lied and said that the water they were nearby “wasn’t good enough.” I’ve heard of modern-day church folk coming up with many of those excuses, and more.

This is an intensely vulnerable question. The one who asked it knew that there were plenty of things that could have been seen as reasons to prevent them from being baptized. The one who asked it was JUST excluded. The one who asked it had been excluded in innumerable ways throughout their life. Yet, the one who asked it, asked directly, despite expecting a long list of reasons for exclusion, again.

That is, I don’t think the one who asked, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” expected to be welcomed into the Body of Christ, much less without an argument. I also think that the apostles in Jerusalem had a conniption over this when they heard, but that may just be related to my experience of the institutional church 😉 Many commentators have wondered with me if Phillip and the Ethiopian-eunuch-officer-worshiper continued to read the scroll of Isaiah as they discussed things together. I hope they did. If they kept reading, three more chapters, they would have gotten to this passage:

“ Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say,
‘The Lord will surely separate me from his people’;
and do not let the eunuch say,
‘I am just a dry tree.’
For thus says the Lord:
To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths,
who choose the things that please me
and hold fast my covenant,
I will give, in my house and within my walls,
a monument and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that shall not be cut off.” (Isaiah 56:3-5, NRSV)

There was also, Judaism that was already ancient in the eunuch’s time, an awareness that God doesn’t hold to human boundaries. In many ways this story feels like the this Isaiah passage brought to life. Did you notice that the eunuchs don’t stop being eunuchs, they’re accepted as they are and within the faith tradition given all the things that would otherwise be denied to them? The commentator in the New Interpreter’s Bible on this Acts passage intends to speak of Phillip, but also seems to speak of Isaiah when he says, “The essential task of the prophet, then, is to clarify membership requirements of those belonging to God, sometimes in ways that redraw Israel’s boundaries to include the exclude ones.”⁴

One of the oldest Christian communities in the world is the Ethiopian church. Their tradition says that faith was brought to them by this eunuch, and has been maintained ever since. It gives me chills to think that it is only because of the bravery of that one to ask that vulnerable question, that a church could exist.

So much of the world, and counter to the message of God and Jesus, so much of the church teaches people that they are not enough! According to those broken theories, there are standards to be met, barriers to overcome, behaviors that must be amended, and even people who can’t ever measure up. The message of God and Jesus is that we are already enough. This person, this eunuch, even without a name, trusted God enough to ask if they were welcome. Phillip, moved by the Spirit of Grace, knew enough to welcome in those who wanted to be part of the Body of Christ.

This is a story that has happened many times: human beings worry that they’re not enough and wonder if the people claiming to speak for God (the church) will welcome them. This is also a story that hasn’t happened enough: that the people who claim to speak for God (the church) welcome in God’s beloveds (any and all people). This is also a story that hasn’t happened often enough: that the people of God remember that God is enough, that we are enough, and that no one is fundamentally lacking. May we be people of this story, people who trust in God’s enough, in people’s enough, and in God’s unending and unbreakable grace. Amen

1Peterson Toscano, “Intersecting Identities – Queer Identity and the Ethiopian Eunuch” found athttps://petersontoscano.com/ethiopianeunuch/ on August 29, 2017.

2 Ken Stone and Teresa J. Hornsby, Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship. In “Atlanta; Society of Biblical Literature” (ebook, 2011), 177.

3 Michael Airgood, “WHAT IS TO PREVENT ME FROM BEING BAPTIZED?” THE GOSPEL’S QUEER JOURNEY TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH. Turned in for seminary credit 8/18/2017.

4Robert W. Wall “Acts of the Apostles” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. X, edited by Leander Krik et al, (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 2002), 142

–

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

“The Anti-Heroine Extraordinaire” based on 1 Kings 21:1-16

August 20, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Jezebel is evil personified as a human. Or, at least, that’s what we’re supposed to think of her. She may well be the inspiration for Lady Macbeth, and I’m fairly confident that every female antagonist the Walt Disney corporation ever dreamed up is at least loosely based on her. She’s got it all: manipulative skills, greed, power, murderous intent, and the ear of the king.

Every bit of her story is carefully crafted to arouse distaste and horror. She is, right from the beginning, the enemy who has invaded the royal palace. Jezebel is introduced in 1 Kings 16. Right beforehand we hear that King Ahab of Israel (the Northern Kingdom) did more evil in the sight of the Lord than any of his predecessors, which is incredibly impressive. Then it says he married Jezebel, a princess from an external land who worshiped an pagan gods. It then suggests that because of her, Ahab also worshiped those gods and set up worship spaces for those pagan gods (and goddesses! Gasp!) in his capital city.

At the same time that 1 Kings turns its attention to the evils of Ahab and his wife Jezebel it introduces the prophet Elijah. For the Hebrew Bible, Elijah is the prophet of prophets, he sets the tone for the prophetic tradition. He even shows up in the New Testament in the Transfiguration story when Moses represents the Law and Elijah the prophets. Elijah’s introduction at this point is meant to set up the classic balance of power in the time of the kings: an evil King is held to account by a prophet well connected to God. There is, however, one LITTLE incongruity in this particular story.

Elijah is awful. His opening lines are declaring a drought that will bring a famine, and then he LEAVES, going up to Jezebel’s home country so HE can eat. THREE YEARS LATER Elijah declares an end to the drought. (You can decide for yourself if you think Elijah was speaking for God or not). Meanwhile, we’re told, Jezebel was on a killing spree, trying to kill off the rest of God’s prophets in Israel. That counts as a major strike against her. When the drought ends, Elijah intentionally gets himself into a fight with the prophets of her god, Baal, and shows them up. He then orders THEM all killed. This is the “small” problem with Elijah, he murders in the name of God and is still seen as acting on God’s behalf by the Bible.

So, the story goes on, Jezebel is really mad he killed 450 of her priests, and threatens his life, so he runs away for another long while.

The next story we have about her is today’s text about the sulking King. This text is really interesting in that it may reflect actual differences between ancient Israel and the nations that surrounded it. According to the Torah, from the beginning each tribe was allocated land, and then each family within the tribe was given land from what the tribe had. Thus, at least in theory, each family had land to live on and sustain themselves with. The land could not be sold, although it could be leased for a short term. The whole of the Torah vision was meant to create a stable society that didn’t allow for generational cycles of poverty, so no one could permanently lose their land. Furthermore, no one could force someone to lease their land! The land belonged to the people. The King, then, was meant to be as much of a servant to the people as anything else. The King functioned as the general during times of war and as a judge and administrator the rest of the time.

In other nations of the Ancient Near East (as well as many other times and other places), the King was understood to control ALL of the land. Those Kings, then allowed their advisors and Lords to control parts of the land, but only so long as the Kings found their loyalty acceptable. The advisors and Lords could sometimes also break the land up to their loyalists – but the the land was still understood to belong to the Kings.

You see the difference? In Ancient Israel, the land belonged to the people. In surrounding nations, including the land where Jezebel had been raised as a princess, the land belonged to the King. So when Ahab wants to buy land and isn’t able to, he is annoyed and frustrated. For him, it is the final answer. He may appear to be a toddler having a tantrum, but he accepts the system of power of his nation and that the system of power reflects God’s own vision.

Jezebel comes from a different nation, one that understood power and ownership differently. Her father owned all the land. No one could say no to him. She does not accept the premises of Israel’s system. In some ways, I think the Bible’s emphasis on her commitment to her gods and not their YHWH is meant to indicate exactly this. She didn’t buy into the Torah vision, she didn’t buy into the God who envisioned it. Yet, she knew the laws. She knew that a man could only be stoned to death when TWO witnesses agreed, and she put it into action.

After the deed is done, the king stops sulking, almost as if he’d been hoping she’d deal with it for him, and just didn’t want to know how.

Elijah comes next and condemns them for this act of atrocity, this murder. (Not sure what moral foot he is standing on.) He promises both of them terrible deaths. The text is then silent on Jezebel until 2 Kings 9 when it relates her death.

By that point Ahab has died on the battlefield, and his son Ahaziah had taken over after his death. Ahaziah takes a nasty fall and dies from its complications, and his brother Jehoram had become king. He reigned for 12 years. At the end of those years, Jehu, who had been the commander of Ahab’s army, the commander of Ahaziah’s army, and the commander of Jehoram’s army, is anointed as the new king by Elijah’s protege. Then Jehu kills the current king and becomes the King. Jehu thus begins a 5 generation dynasty, the longest in Ancient Israel’s existence. (That history is super messy.) As Jehu arrived to kill his predecessor, Jehoram asked if he came in peace. Jehu replied, “What peace can there be, so long as the many whoredoms and sorceries of your mother Jezebel continue?” Then, it is said, he killed him. Afterward he killed Jezebel. Then he killed all of Ahab’s decedents, said to number 112 men – to start with -and even more whose numbers aren’t known.

There is a little detail in the story of Jehu coming to Jezebel. It reads, “When Jehu came to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it; she painted her eyes, and adorned her head, and looked out of the window.” (He has her thrown out of that window). The text accuses her of PRIMPING before her death. Now, she knew she was going to die, and she choose to do it with some dignity. In fact, for some women, the best chance they have to hold power comes through their looks. We wouldn’t expect a man to face death without at least holding his shield, yet she is derided for trying to hold her own death with the dignity that remains to her.

So, you see, it is very easy to derive from the text that Jezebel was truly terrible. Everything about her story is meant to lead us to that conclusion. The murderous bits are the big parts, but all the other details also point in the same direction. Of course, she seems surrounded by EQUALLY terrible men: Ahab, Elijah, Jehu whose names are not still synonymous with evilness in their genders. Jezebel, in essence, does two things: (1) she defends her faith tradition with all the power she has and (2) she uses power the ways she’s been taught to use power.

So, let’s look at them. You’d almost think that Ancient Israel, what with it’s faith tradition, would understand someone else also being faithful to their faith tradition. Yet, that doesn’t happen at all. The story holds that YHWH is God and everyone else is an impostor, and those who follow the impostors are described as pure evil. I think this is the case of history being written by the victors as well as a case of later editors wanting to pretend that monotheism happened way earlier than it did.

Regarding the second issue with Jezebel, that she uses power how she’s been taught to, I think that actually makes Ancient Israel look really good! It suggests that the vision of the Torah DID hold some power, and the Ancient Israel society WAS doing things right, and that there ARE other ways for societies to understand themselves. However, the stories as they’re told undeniably speak of her using the power she had for evil.

So. Is Jezebel really the worst human ever to walk the face of the earth? Seems unlikely, she wasn’t even the worst character in her story line! Heck, I’m not even sure she was that much worse than the Bible’s most significant heroes. David and Moses are both also accused of murder as well as led military campaigns that killed man under the idea that the God they worshiped wanted those other people to die.

In Bible Study we started to wonder about all of this. We started to question the integrity of the stories themselves. Perhaps there was a Jezebel, and perhaps she’d been a princess in a foreign kingdom, and perhaps she didn’t convert to Ancient Judaism. That’s all pretty feasible. However, it is also feasible that all the rest of the details about her were propagated by Jehu and his dynasty to JUSTIFY his treason, his murder of his king, and taking over the kingdom. Because, I mean to be real, when you murder your king and take his throne, it is REALLY helpful to have some good stories of why he wasn’t worthy of that throne to begin with. And if you can blame it on a terrible, foreign woman who had influence over the last three kings (as wife and then mother), all the better!! Because, people are willing to believe stories about women being terrible, and about outsiders being terrible, so foreign women are a great narrative target!

It seems possible that Jezebel’s name is synonymous with evil because it was easy to believe terrible things about her, whether or not any of them actually happened. Since all of her descendants were killed and the stories were passed down in era’s of their murder’s dynasty, the stories told of her are HIGHLY questionable. She may be “evil personified” only as justification for someone else’s acts of violence.

All of this serves as a great reminder to bring our critical thinking skills to stories. It may be of use to change the human characteristics (gender, race, age, national origin, political party, person we love with person we don’t, etc) of the protagonists and antagonists in the stories we hear, and check to see if our opinions change. That little trick may make us less susceptible to propaganda and more open to seeing the people in stories as fully beloved people of God. We all have biases. Our biases can do significant harm, but with careful attention we can loosen the power of propaganda and make space for God’s mighty power of love! 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

August 20, 2017

Sermons

“Nope, We’re Not Doing That” based on Jeremiah 44:11-19

August 13, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

After she retired, my friend the Rev. Dr. Barbara Thorington Green spent a year away from organized religion so that she could open herself to thinking about the Sacred in new and different ways. Her year off resulted in poetry that became the book “Calling God She? Reflections and insights of a great-grandmother, retired clergywoman, and doctor of theology.” This is one of my favorite poems in it:

Perhaps God is a quilter,

The quilter creates something warm and beautiful

out of bits and pieces of fabric,

using a variety of colors and designs.

The quilter takes things apart and puts them together again

creating something new, unpredictable, unique,

and perhaps never envisioned.

The quilter uses what is at hand

to create a blessing, sometimes planned,

sometimes created in the process.

You can see yourself as a piece of fabric

being used as part of the whole,

or you can envision the various times of life

as the fabrics and yourself as the end product.

Of course more will be added tomorrow

and the next day.

The quilt of our lives is ever changing.

Fabrics we would never chose

often add interest and character.

There can be many shapes and designs

as well as many fabrics in a quilt.

Each quilter has her own style

and way of being and doing.

The marks of the quilter

are everywhere on the quilt.

Hours of labor are required.

The results are always different,

yet in the end there is warmth and comfort.

When God is the quilter,

working internally and externally

Her marks are everywhere

creating beauty, warmth, and comfort.¹

For me, Barb’s work offers freedom and respite. The ways it offers to conceive of God make space for a broader and fuller picture. I’ve spent years thinking about Barb’s assumption that she couldn’t make space for the feminine aspects of God while being connected to the institutional church – because the church’s God is too masculine. I’ve always wanted to be able to argue back at that point, but I’ve yet to find a truly valid point to use 😉

Institutional religion promoting a masculinized version of God is not new. Unfortunately, it may be a particular facet of OUR faith tradition, to start with. The ancient near eastern neighbors of the ancient Jews liked to keep their deities in gender balanced pairs. Judaism’s monotheism was particularly odd because it proposed a stand-alone MALE deity. (We may want to acknowledge that God isn’t gendered, but that’s not the same as saying that the way the ancients saw God lacked gender.) Jeremiah seems to be speaking of a masculine deity in 585 BCE, in today’s passage. He is speaking to Judean refugees, people who escaped Jerusalem during the Babylonian siege in 587-586 BCE and are residing in Egypt. These are traumatized people, as is the prophet, who have all seen the destruction of their homeland and way of life.

Jeremiah is sometimes called the prophet of the Exile. He is believed to have lived and prophesied before, during, and right after the Babylonian siege that started the exile. His early work was an attempt to convince people to change their behavior something terrible happened. In Bible Study we wondered if he got stuck in that message and forgot to update it after the terrible things all happened.

I cut most of his diatribe from our reading this morning, it is particularly miserable to listen to. His speech makes God sound like an abusive spouse. Jeremiah is angry that the Egyptian refugees are worshiping a Goddess. Now, seemingly every commentator in every Bible commentary in existence takes Jeremiah’s side in this argument, supporting the idea that worshiping a Goddess is idolatry and God had a right to act like a jealous (raving lunatic) spouse.

So, I’m going take on all of them! (Although not just for fun. I think they’re all wrong.) The women respond to Jeremiah’s furious accusations in a quite unexpected way. They respond, “Nope, we’re not doing that.” Actually, their words are even better than my summary. They respond, “‘As for the word that you have spoken to us in the name of the Lord, we are not going to listen to you.” GIGGLE. I love the contrast between Jeremiah ranting and raving and expressing fury (I imagine him spitting a little bit at the sides of his mouth while he speaks) and the women calmly denying his authority over their lives.

The women go on to say that they’d worshiped the Goddess for generations, and that she’d always taken good care of them. The women say that things were going fine for them until they stopped worshiping the Goddess, and that everything went to hell when they stopped. Thus, they say, they’re going back to what worked.

Now, early in Jeremiah’s ministry, he got the young King Josiah to listen to him and they instituted serious reforms. The reforms including monotheism, which most scholars think is the first time it was practiced in the history of ancient Judaism. (I could proof text this for you, but I’m not going to. Let me know if you want references later!) Monotheism mean that only YHWH was to be worshiped, and that meant that the long term worship of the Goddess was suppressed. (More on this theory of the long-term worship of a Hebrew Goddess to come.)

Now, I think the theology of both Jeremiah AND the women is flawed. Judea sat on land that was the cross-roads of the ancient world and every empire that existed wanted to control it. Both groups assume a Deity who micromanages and who punishes the people for lack of faith by destroying their nation. I don’t believe in such a Deity, rather I think it stunk for the Jewish people that the “Promised Land” was such a highly prized crossroads. But, to be fair, I think that both Jeremiah and the women’s arguments are EQUALLY problematic.

All those Biblical commentators who take Jeremiah’s side claim that the real issue here was the people’s idolatry and that the response of the women shows the hard-heartedness of the people. They claim that the Jewish women were worshiping some sort of Canaanite or Babylonian Goddess, or perhaps a hybrid of the two. The Biblical commentators seem to think that God is justified in the abusive, violent language of a jealous spouse.

Ironically, they seem to miss that the presentation of God made by Jeremiah is HYPER masculine. To be fair, the origins of YHWH are in a warrior God, so there has always been a hyper masculine tone there. But Jeremiah claiming that this masculine warrior is angry and ready to kill and shame is really the very worst stereotype of masculinity imaginable, right? That’s toxic masculinity. Masculinity can be so much more and so much better than that, and it almost always is! But Jeremiah is speaking of God who is violent, jealous, and murderous, as a warrior – he is presenting God in the very worst of masculine ways.

The women are claiming that there is more to life, and more to the Divine than that. So, I’m on their side. In 1967 Raphael Patai wrote seminal book entitled The Hebrew Goddess². It has been summarized this way, “Raphael Patai argues that the Israelites experienced the same Goddess-hunger that can be found in peoples and cultures all around the world in every age – and Patai insists, too, that the worship of a female deity by the Israelites was not an act of apostasy but rather an integral part of the religion of the Hebrews.‘”³ Patai,and those who have followed in his footsteps in looking for clues about folk religion, think that many ancient Hebrews worshiped a female Goddess they saw as YHWH’s spouse and counterpart. I think this is pretty reasonable. If you conceive of God purely in the masculine, the human need for balance well find a way to also understand God in the feminine.

The Women’s Bible Commentary thinks so too, and take it a step further. They say, “It seems certain that the Israelite women worshiped the queen of heaven. Women were excluded from full participation in temple worship, and the predominate Israelite conception of God was masculine. The queen provided them with a female deity who offered them protection and prosperity.”⁴I think this passage is the most overt place we can see the women’s faith. There are other places that traces of it can be found (and Patai’s book explains them all), but this is the one where it is in plain sight.

The women admit to worshiping a Goddess, and they think it is not only good, it is imperative. They reject the prophet who claims that only the male version of God can be worshiped. They just won’t! In fact, Patai mentions a letter from 419 BCE written by a military man about the Judean colony in Egypt. The collections given to the Jewish priest are enumerated. 123 people donated in the name of YHWY, 120 donated to the Queen of Heaven.⁵ Jeremiah appears to have lost this argument.

Now, as a 21^st century Christian, I don’t think God is male, nor female. I prefer to think of God as existing beyond gender, but I also recognize that our minds are limited and metaphors are often more powerful with more specificity. Sometimes I need to imagine God as a Latina grandmother, in order to remember God’s fierce protection and love. Sometimes I need to remember my own paternal grandfather and use his unfaltering affection as a way to access God’s acceptance. I suspect most of us need metaphors for God that have gender, but that whenever we limit God by holding one image alone (particularly an image that reflects only one gender expression or only one ethnic identity), we end up missing much of God’s nature. The institutional church has often done this, and as a result, splinter groups have left in order to see God more fully. Particularly, when the conception of God that institutional religion propagates fits in with the authority figures of society (ahem, white supremacy and the patriarchy) we know that religion is NOT reflecting God, but rather its own values.

I do, vehemently, support thinking about Goddess imagery sometimes. (And thinking about God as genderqueer sometimes too.) I think those women in Egypt were right to refuse Jeremiah’s decree and to trust their own experience. I’m so thankful that their voices refuse to associate violence and abuse with the Divine! It really matters that they saw more to Holiness than what Jeremiah was claiming! It also matters that they worked together and trusted themselves more than an external authority figure! Finally, I think it matters that they choose to worship the Sacred they know to call them to life and wholeness, not the one who punished and threatened. Those women knew a lot. May we be wise enough to listen to their wisdom. Amen

1 Barbara Thorington Green, Calling God She (Middleton, DE self-published), 84-85. Used with permission.

2 Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967 first edition, 1990, 3^rd edition)

3 Jonathan Kirsch, The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997) p. 224.

4 Katheleen M. O’Connor, “Jeremiah” in Women’s Bible Commenatry edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992, 1998) p. 182

5 Patai, location 1149 in Kindle version (end of chapter 2).

–

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

August 13, 2017

Sermons

“In the Midst of the Mess” based on 1 Kings…

August 6, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

By the time we get to 1 Kings, many of us are lost in the storyline of the Hebrew Bible. It has been an intense soap opera for quite a while, and the intricacies are often convoluted and subtle. This leaves me with the task of setting the stage for the story we just read, a task I’m not entirely sure I’m up to. Nevertheless, I’ll give it a try 😉

You remember the story of Moses, right? Well Moses led the people the the border of the Promised Land before he died. Then Joshua led the people into the land. What followed was about 350 years of various leaders emerging as needed, which was when the tribes were under threat. That 350 year period is described in the book of Judges, and archaeologists tell us that is the period when the people occupying ancient Israel were most consistently living out the rules of the Torah. All the homes seem to be about the same size, meaning that wealth was neither being accumulated nor lost. That’s a significant part of the goal of the laws of the Torah.

Then, there came King Saul. The Bible says that the people wanted a King, but God didn’t want the people to have a King. The prophets kept telling the people that God is their Ruler, but the people wanted a human one anyway. You may be shocked, but I don’t quite believe that one. I think it is much more likely that Saul wanted to be King, and once he was King he made sure that the story being told was that he was King because everyone wanted him to be. I do, however, believe that the prophets thought this was a terrible plan!

Then, somehow, David becomes King. I say “somehow” because the Bible tells several versions of this and they don’t make much sense individually or together. Basically, David led a coup against Saul with military leadership from Judea supported by external mercenaries soldiers. The Bible claims Saul was crazy. It is very difficult to tell if that is propaganda from David. (Then again, historians aren’t sure either of them ever existed, which could potentially resolve this issue for us. However, we’re going with the story as its told, even with ALL of its complications.)

OK. So David is King, which happens to mean he has a whole bunch of wives. Some of the wives predate his kingship. Many of his wives he “inherited” from Saul with the kingship. #sentencesIwishIdidnthavetosay Once David is serving as King in Jerusalem, he acquires more wives. The most famous story of his acquiring a wife is the story of David and Bathsheba. David’s palace was now larger and higher than the homes around his, and thus when Bathsheba was bathing herself on her roof top one day, David saw her and lusted after her. He had her brought to him, raped her, impregnated her, tried to cover for it, and then and had her husband killed on the front lines when the cover didn’t work.

In response, the prophet Nathan brought accusations against him. David turns to God in repentant prayer. David and Bathsheba’s infant son dies, which the Bible tells as if it is God’s punishment (you can tell from my phrasing I don’t believe that either). Bathsheba stays in the palace as David’s wife. She appears to remain his favorite wife according to the stories. Also, she ends up giving birth to 4 more sons, the youngest of which is Solomon. Please note we don’t know if she had daughters because they’re generally not worth talking about as far as the Bible sees it.

There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? We are caught up to the start of 1 Kings. Oh shoot! We aren’t. I need to remind you of another messy bit of this story, in order to make sense of this one. King David’s oldest sons were born to his earliest wives, before he was King. The oldest was Amnon. He was the one who raped his half-sister Tamar, who was a full-sister to the third son, Absalom. Absalom killed Amnon in revenge, years later. Absalom then attempted to claim the kingship of Israel in a coup and was killed by one of David’s generals. The 2^nd son is assumed to have died in infancy. The 4^th son was Adonijah, who was thus the oldest surviving son as of this point in the story. The Bible says there were about 20 sons, Solomon wasn’t one of the oldest 10.

According to normal inheritance laws, Adonijah had a far stronger claim to the throne than Solomon did. The Bible often tells stories that ignore normal inheritance laws. According to the beginning of 1 Kings, the parts we skipped, David was very old and impotent. A new young, beautiful wife, was brought to “warm his bed” but that didn’t work. Her name was Abishag. With awareness of David’s condition, Adonijah holds a coup and claims the kingship. He raises support from his father’s old guard, the part of David’s leadership that was Judea-centric and NOT representative of the whole kingdom of Israel. He excludes ONLY his brother Solomon, which I think would imply that he saw only his brother Solomon as a threat to his claim. David’s newer advisors refuse to attend, and seem to decide to thrown in their lots with Solomon.

The story says that Nathan approaches Bathsheba with a plan. Bathsheba accepts it and goes to King David’s bedroom to make her plea. There may be a new, young, wife in town but Bathsheba still has the privilege of entering David’s bedroom at will and being greeted with an offer to give her whatever she wants.

She takes Nathans suggestions and runs with them. She tells David that he promised her Solomon could be king after him (Nathan said she should SUGGEST it in a question), she tells him Adonijah has claimed the kingship and makes sure it sounds particularly insulting to David himself, she tells him who among his servants have supported his son’s coup, she implies that the whole nation of Israel needs his leadership and that Adonijah will only care about the southern part of Judah, and she names for him the threat to her life and Solomon’s if David lets the coup stand.

There is just one little issue with what she says: there is no reason to believe that David had promised the kingship to Solomon. It is never previously mentioned. The possibility of Solomon as a contender only emerges when Adonijah doesn’t invite him to his coup. Most likely, it wasn’t true. David is likely experiencing memory loss by this point, and Bathsheba manipulates him into doing what she wants. She plays the role of king-maker, and she makes sure it is HER kid who on the throne. Her role has changed a bit since she was first introduced.

Then Nathan backs her up, sort of. He at least backs up the fact that Adonijah has held a coup. He lets her stand on her own in terms of the claim that Solomon would be king. Based on their words, Solomon is named and anointed King.

Then Solomon promises his brother Adonijah that he can live as long as he keeps supporting Solomon’s kingship. David dies, and then comes the next bit of our story. Now, if this part of the Bible is historical, and if all these characters existed, and if things more or less went down the way this story says they went down, I STILL don’t believe this part. Under those circumstances, I think that either Solomon or Bathsheba make it up.

The story SAYS that Adonijah, the eldest living son of David, comes to King Solomon’s mother and asks her to ask her son King Solomon if he can have his father’s youngest wife as his own. Since the King’s harem is seen as part of the King’s rightful possession, getting to marry one of David’s wives would have strengthened Adonijah’s claim to the throne. I don’t quite believe he would have been stupid enough to ask for that, especially when his continued life was already tenuous. However, the story says he asked, and says that Bathsheba goes right to the throne room. Her son bows to her has a THRONE brought out to her, indicative of his affection for his mother (or perhaps of her power in his kingship), and she publicly tells him about this request. In response, Solomon orders the death of Adonijah. It seems a bit too easy, especially in the first days after David dies, and if the story stands as written, I only wonder if Solomon was in on Bathsheba’s plan or not.

All in all, this leaves us with a whole bunch of questions. The most difficult question is one that was posed in Bible Study: is Bathsheba a subversive woman? In terms of saying, “Yes! Of course she is!” we have the following evidence: she made a king, she eliminated his rivals, and she got what she wanted out of the leadership of the country. On the other side, the side that says, “Nope, not a subversive women” we have the following arguments: manipulating people for power and influence is one of the most normal of all human activities, and even more normal when it comes to royal lineage. That argument says that no matter how you worked it, doing the work to get your son on the throne is playing with power, not subverting it.

For me, both of those perspectives hold a lot of water. I kept her story in this sermon series because I love that she has such a complicated life story and significant character development, particularly from being a passive object of lust into being the most powerful agent of her own life and one of the most powerful agents in the country. However, she still mostly exists within those terrible constraints of oppressive power. She just moves from being oppressed to being the oppressor, she doesn’t change the way the game itself is played.

The other big question is: how can the kingship be such a complete and utter mess????? This is the time of history that the rest of the Bible looked to as the golden age. There are only three kings of the United Kingdom (of Israel and Judea) and they are: Saul, David, and Solomon. And all three, and their families, are total messes. They make modern soap operas look boring. They make truly broken modern families look picture perfect. If that was the golden age, heaven help the rest of the ages!

Actually, while the drama factor is higher in the Jerusalem palace, all of the characters of the Hebrew Bible are ridiculous messes. Some are richer than others, some are smarter than others, but they’re all messes. They don’t even look impressive as compared to average humans. (And I think most humans are struggling rather mightily.) And yet, the Bible contends, God CHOOSES to work with and through those messy people. God doesn’t just give up on them because they are terrible parents, or greedy rulers, or manipulative queens, nor manipulated kings. God doesn’t even give up on the ones who are murders (David and Moses). Yeah, think about that for a bit. And who are the most famous murders in the Hebrew Bible? David and Moses. Who are the most celebrated leaders of the Hebrew Bible? David. And. Moses.

God doesn’t give up on us. Ever.

And the Hebrew Bible makes it plain to see that we can’t be so messy that God ever will give up on us. Even better, God keeps working with us to take our messes and make them into something beautiful. Solomon was known for his wisdom. David was known for his Psalms of Praise. Bathsheba found a way to be an agent of her own life (and help a very wise man take the throne). God isn’t scared off by messes, God can work with whatever we are, and bring wonder and beauty out of it all. Thanks be to God for that. 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

August 6, 2017

Sermons

“A Choice of Three”based on Exodus 1:22-2:10

July 30, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

All
the way back in October, we talked about the Hebrew midwives of
Exodus chapter 1, Puah and
Shiphrah. Those two subversive women had pulled out all the stops.
The Pharaoh told them to kill Hebrew boy babies at birth. Puah and
Shiprah disobeyed direct orders from the Pharaoh and used his biases
against the Hebrew people to justify it. Their courage and wisdom had
saved the boys! But only for a moment, after they refused to follow
unjust orders, the orders changed.

And
that’s where today’s story starts. Pharaoh is said to be worried
that the Hebrews are going to overtake the Egyptians (a common way
that oppressors justify inhumane treatment). Since the midwives
won’t kill the baby boys at birth, he orders that all Hebrew baby
boys be thrown into the Nile at birth. As I mentioned when
discussing the midwives, “It took me entirely too long to figure
out why the boys were to be killed. I was thinking of males as
especially strong laborers in the fields, and wondered why you’d want
to have fewer of them. If you wanted fewer descendants, I thought,
why not kill the girls who have the babies and leave the workers?
Our Bible Study participants responded that the death of the male
babies meant that the females would be sexually available to the
Egyptians, and they’d presume that as half-Egyptian – the next
generation would be more pliable and ‘better.’ The participants in
the Bible Study figured this out by considering American slave
history.”¹

This
story is an old story. Order than even the version we have.
Scholars say this story about the birth of Moses is an adaptation of
a story that was already ancient in his time. Sargon
of Akkad, believed to live in the 23^rd
or 24^th
century before the common era, was a ruler of the Akkadian
Empire. According to Wikipedia (which is sometimes much pithier in
explaining things than any other format), “A Neo-Assyrian text
from the 7th century BC purporting to be Sargon’s autobiography
asserts that the great king was the illegitimate son of a priestess.
Only the beginning of the text (the first two columns) are known,
from the fragments of three manuscripts. The first fragments were
discovered as early as 1850.”²
So this story was ALSO written down many centuries after it
happened, which means we can’t be certain what it sounded like in the
time of Moses, but it is the best piece of comparison available. The
text is found the book “The Ancient Near East” and reads:

“Sargon,
the mighty king, king of Agade, am I.
My
mother was a changeling, my father I knew not.
The
brother(s) of my father loved the hills.
My
city is Azupiranu, which is situated on the banks of the
Euphrates.
My
changeling mother conceived me, in secret she bore me.
She
set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid.
She
cast me into the river which rose not (over) me,
The
river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of
water.
Akki,
the drawer of water lifted me out as he dipped his e[w]er.
Akki,
the drawer of water, [took me] as his son (and) reared me.
Akki,
the drawer of water, appointed me as his gardener,
While
I was a gardener, Ishtar granted
me (her) love,”³

It
seems likely that the myth of Sargon’s birth was adapted to explain
the birth of Moses. The similarities are pretty obvious, including
naming that Moses came from a family of Levites, the holy tribe from
which later priests would emerge, while Sargon was the son of a holy
priestess. The whole thrown in a river part is obviously similar,
as is the emphasis on “drawing out” the child from the water,
and raising him as the son of the one who drew him out. The Sargon
story explicitly states that he was loved by a powerful goddess, the
Moses story is the opening to a long narrative about being specially
chosen by YHWH.

However,
when we have likely source material, the interesting part is not the
similarities, it is the differences. The differences here are
astounding. Of course, the Moses story feels more complete, for one
thing. It is since the stone on which the Sargon birth story is
written is incomplete. But we also have a reason for Moses being
put in the river (the decree of Pharaoh), and a masterful turn at
the end that the one who decreed that baby Hebrew boys be put in the
river is the one in whose household the baby is raised. The format
of the story that we have now was polished over many years into an
excellently crafted final form.

Also,
the Sargon birth story has a more limited role for human women: his
mother gives birth and puts him in the basket. The Moses birth
story is an intricate weaving of the actions and intentions of THREE
women, and of whom could easily be “the” subversive woman of the
today’s story. Moses’s mother is not just the woman who birthed
him. She is the one who notices he is an especially fine baby, and
decides to try to save him. She keeps him hidden at home for three
months. And then she carefully crafts the waterproof basket she
lays him in. To this point the story is similar enough to Sargon’s,
but at the same time, the story seems to want us to believe that God
takes care of where the basket floats off to, and wants us to deduce
that God put the basket in the sight-line of the Egyptian princess.
Personally, I think that loving mother who risked her own life for
her son and carefully crafted the basket ALSO would have tried to
make sure the basket went to a good place, but I do think the faith
tradition tells it so we think of it as God’s hand at work. On a
related note, I think this proactive mother might have instructed
her daughter to watch over it!

The
story doesn’t tell us if babies in waterproof baskets were often
floating down the Nile, but the constraints of the story (that is,
the command from the one in charge to put baby boys in the river)
seem to make it likely. It seems like the other women would have
taught her how to weave the basket and how much tar to use. It even
seems likely that for the first 3 months Moses’s mother pretended
she’d had a girl and everyone just played along. I don’t think the
story really believes that Moses was the only baby whose mother
tried to save him, even though the story is designed to help us
believe that Moses was specially cared for by God.

Whether
instructed to or not, Moses’s sister (maybe Miriam) stays at hand
and watches where the basket goes. I imagine her to be at a very
good age for this: young enough not to be noticed by grown ups and
to be free to play as she wished, yet old enough to understand the
importance and be able to convincingly play her role. And she
played her role to perfection! Nothing like this is in Sargon’s
story.

Meanwhile,
in Moses’s story one of the princesses has gone down to the river to
bath, attended by handmaidens. She sees the basket, she sends a
maid to get it, she opens it. She sees a crying baby, and has
compassion for him. I’m told the Hebrew word for compassion
connotes the womb, so this may have some connotations of “and her
womb leapt.” She knew what was happening, what her father’s
decree had been, and she decides to ignore its intentions. She uses
the power she has to adopt him, bring him into the palace, make him
a part of the Pharaoh’s family. She has money that she controls in
order to pay for a wetnurse. We spent some time in Bible study
wondering if she was her father’s favorite, or if there were so many
princesses that no one really noticed her, if she was defiant, if
she was above the law, or if she had special circumstances. By her
presence in the palace, I think it is likely she was unmarried, and
that may well imply she was quite young as well. However, there are
other explanations that might also suffice. Her story is mostly
missing, but her actions are direct and subvert the law of the land.
That’s unique to this story.

Moses’s
sister steps back in with the most brilliant possible solution,
asking the princess if she’d like the baby nursed by a woman of his
own community. Then she brings her brother back to their mother to
be nursed! In fact, it makes me wonder if the whole family moved
into the palace. (maybe, maybe not). But Moses gets fed by
mother’s milk and fed by his family’s story and identity at the same
time. He also gets the privilege of being in the royal family and
the knowledge of how the political system works. The way this story
is used to explain Moses’s identity and compassion for his people
AND his insider knowledge of the Pharaoh and his political system is
a unique part of the Hebrew story – as is the attention to nursing
the baby and the brilliant move by the women of his family to keep
caring for him while also making money to care for their own needs.
All of this is in the portion of the story the Hebrews adapted.

In
fact, given the way the story is adapted, and given the dominance of
human women in it, I’ve started to wonder if it is implied that they
are all working together. Perhaps many people thought the Pharaoh’s
decree was immoral and were working together to subvert it. Maybe
these women had devised this all as a plan, and made it flow so
seamlessly because it was well-rehearsed. Maybe they thought that
the care of babies was more important than decrees of politics. Or
maybe it doesn’t go this far, but maybe there was just a lot of
winking involved when it really happened, and that princess knew
EXACTLY who she was hiring to feed “her” baby.

This
is, after all, a story about saving the baby who would save the
Hebrew people. It is also a story of interdependence. No one of
the three women in it could have pulled off saving Moses alone. The
choice of heroine is any one of the three, but perhaps it isn’t much
of a choice when they all need each other and Moses needs all of
them. The story the Hebrew people tell also says that they needed
Moses, and his cross-cultural competencies, to be free. That means
they needed all three of these women – including the Egyptian one
– to be free from Egyptian oppression.

So,
the Hebrews took an old myth and reworked it in genius ways. They
added several heroines, more intrigue, and a broader context. The
premise that the Hebrew people benefited from the skills Moses had
as someone stuck in-between worlds strikes me as interesting. I
hear a lot about the struggles of being in-between: particularly for
people who have two or more racial identities, or for those who live
between the values of different countries due to immigration in
their family’s recent past, or even those whose social class changes
over their life times. Many people are in-between and it is often
very uncomfortable. Is also a position that enables translations
between groups to be possible, and it can be a position of
incredible power when circumstances emerge in particular ways.

The
liberation of the Hebrews is a meta-narrative of the Torah, and a
story with resonance well beyond the Hebrew people. It was a
primary narrative for African American slave communities in this
country, and is often source of hope for oppressed communities
seeking liberation. I love that it took collaboration, rule
breaking, deep compassion, and connections between unexpected
partners to make it all happen. May we keep noticing the strange
ways God is up to making liberation happen – including by
connecting unexpected partners and using people who stand in
in-between places! Amen

1 Sermon
10-6- 2017.

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargon_of_Akkad#cite_ref-46
accessed July 20, 2017

3 J.B.
Pritchard’s The
Ancient Near East,
Volume I, page 85.

—

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 30, 2017