“Strange Prophetic Voices” based on Isaiah 55:1-9 and Luke 13:1-9

February 29, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I once asked a confirmation class about joy. They said that the shortest spurts of happiness come from material gifts, while the longest living joy comes from relationships. They understood, as well, that happiness is fleeting, but joy comes from within.

When I prepare funerals, I ask families to tell me what the person loved. Almost always the first answer is relational – spouse, children, family, friends, church family, all of the above…. and then come the answers that are active: gardening, sports, some club, travel, cooking, work etc. (Sometimes sports affiliation arise as well. Loving or hating the Yankees is, apparently, identity forming.) Almost always, the list of what a person loves fits into “relationships” and “activities.”

At times, I wonder how that question would be answered for me. I’m sure just about anyone could say people and skiing and Sky Lake, but beyond that its not fully clear. Our concept of what we love may be different than what others see of us. What we love is visible by what we DO, not just what we think about doing. I wonder how what I do is different from what I think.

Hopefully what we DO, what we spend our time on and show our love for, are the rich food and bread that truly feed us. That is, we seek to live so that the places we put our love may be the ones that feed our inner spring of joy. The book of Isaiah almost outdoes itself with the questions of 55:2: “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.” Why DO we spend our time on activities that don’t feed our souls? Why DO we spend money on things that won’t feed any part of us?

This is a passage that scholars believe was written during the exile. That is, the first hearers were in captivity in a foreign land. I don’t know how Babylonians treated their war captives for sure, but it seems reasonable to assume that they were similar to most other nations throughout time. I doubt there was rich food to be had, nor milk. There may have been bread, and lousy wine, but maybe not a lot of it. I don’t know if they were getting wages, but if they were, they were likely not very high. I doubt as well that they had much choice about what they did with their labor.

On that basis, this strange prophecy seems pie in the sky high. The suggestion is that God will provide abundant wine and milk, bread and rich food – for free. These weren’t things they were getting at all. God is said to reaffirm God’s love for David and the Davidic covenant, but the king’s line had been killed off. It is said that the nations will run to Israel, but Israel can’t even go home. Why would Isaiah say such words to people who knew better?

They’d gone without enough food for a long time. They knew that God hadn’t provided. They’d labored for other people’s wealth for a long time. They knew that God hadn’t intervened.

This is a passage that indicates that God is going to change God’s mind and choose to take care of the people again, after God has intentionally chosen not to for a while. After all, it ends with a call to repentance, suggesting that God wants to give these good gifts, but that they are contingent on the people’s choice to return to God. This is the point where I get squirmy. It sounds a lot like preaching to the Syrian refugees that if they return to “right worship” and “regular prayer” that God will take care of them again.

Yet, it speaks a deep truth. In the book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” David Graeber suggests that all the world’s major religions emerged as counters to the world’s markets. As market economies came into being, and dehumanized in profound ways (paid armies, unraveling of community ties, interest, debt slavery, etc) there was a need for a voice to call into question the standards of the market. Each of the world’s religions argues against usury (high interest), affirms the value of human life, calls on people to treat each other as precious, rebukes the acquisition of excessive material goods, and claims that the deeper meaning of life cannot be bought nor sold. That is, each of the major world religions argues against the underlying principles of the world’s markets. Graeber goes further to indicate how the various ways that markets developed around the world impacted the ways that each of the religions took on different stances and flavors.

Isaiah’s call to repentance is a stronghold of this principle. Even speaking to captives in a foreign land, he calls them away from the principles of the market into the principles of God. Isaiah refuses the idea that access to food should be reserved to those who have money! Isaiah suggests that God offers the good stuff without cost, upsetting the whole system. Isaiah diminishes the value of work itself as a means of survival. (It is pretty socialist, I’ll admit. Then again, capitalism isn’t a Biblical value.) Isaiah calls the people out of the system that dehumanizes and into a relationship with God that can vaccinate them against the values of the market.

Jesus’ parable does some similar things. May we remember that nurturing a tree in the desert of Israel takes serious resources. Water is scarce, and trees need water! (Think the crisis of almond farming in CA during this epic drought.) Fertile soil takes effort and resources. Market economies would suggest that the tree was wasting preciously allocated resources.

Yet, the gardener doesn’t want to give up on the tree that has been wasting resources though. Instead, the gardner wants to GIVE MORE to that tree – to bury it in manure and give it every chance it might have to bear fruit. Rather than blame the tree, the gardener seems to take blame on himself, for not giving it all it needs. This doesn’t make sense! It makes sense to uproot the tree and put in a new one – if we are talking about trees. More likely this passage is about Israel’s spiritual condition (because that’s how the metaphor usually goes in the Bible). Like Isaiah, this passage is a call to repentance.

Isn’t it interesting though, to reconsider repentance? What if it isn’t about sins in the ways that it so often as been discussed, but rather is about turning way from the morals of the market economy and turning to the morals of God and God’s kin-dom? Remember, just in case I haven’t said it recently, that the Bible indicates that our work as Jesus followers is to transform the world we have into one where everyone has enough and the gifts of life abundant are shared among everyone – the kin-dom. Doesn’t that take the sting out of repentance and make it really awesome? (#ThingsNoOneExpectedThePreacherToSay)

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I’m happy to say that the Gospel theologically debunks the issues that the Isaiah passage presents! The Isaiah passage, in case you forgot, implies that exile is the fault of the people for not being sufficiently faithful to God. This is a pretty normal perspective in the Bible, although not the only one. It is probably fair to call it the Deuteronomy perspective. It may also be worth remembering that the end of the exile came about 500 years before Jesus was born, but the meantime hadn’t been great for the Jews. First they were a vassal state of Persia (although they got to go home, which was great), and then Greece, and then Rome. So the wounds of the exile were still present among the Jews.

The two particular problems that get named are unique to Luke, unknown in other sources, and yet feasible historically. The first is the murder of a bunch of Galileans in Jerusalem while they were bringing ritual sacrifices to the temple. Historically speaking, if this happened, it was assumed that they were part of a violent revolt against the empire. That’s feasible. The second is the death of a group of people when part of the wall of Jerusalem fell on them. The existence of a tower there hasn’t been confirmed, but it is a place where it would have made sense to have a tower.

The point, however, that is made is that the people didn’t die because God was punishing them. They were no different from everyone else. Those who lived couldn’t claim to be alive because they were better. Death and destruction is not a punishment from God, nor and life abundant a sign of God’s favor. Those premises are rejected, and it has significant consequences for understanding the world and the Bible. Of course, it also gets turned into a call for repentance, because it is Lent and all scriptures call for repentance. Good thing we found a way to LIKE repentance.

The scriptures serve to remind us to concentrate on the things we love and the things that bring us life. Joy can’t be purchased. The premises of the market are wrong. We need not be distracted by them, particularly because it makes it harder to the markets to account for the ways they dehumanize God’s beloved people.

Seek joy where it can be found: in relationships with people you love and activities you deeply enjoy. That, it turns out, is part of turning the world upside down – to how God would have it be. Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

February 28, 2016

Sermons

“On Bread” based on Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Luke 4:1-13

February 14, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

It does not require an advanced degree in logic, nor a working knowledge of Greek to have a big question about this passage. Here we go: as Jesus was alone in the desert until the questionable appearance of the Tempter, there was no one there to witness and tell the story. Furthermore, I’m comfortable guessing that Jesus didn’t tell his disciples so they could write it down later. It feels too brag-y for that. These two factors decrease the likelihood that this is the telling of a story that happened, and increase the likelihood that the story is being told to make a point (or points?).

The story shows up in Mark and Matthew as well, with some changes, meaning that a bunch of people found it worthwhile. So, what value is there in telling a story of Jesus’ temptation? Let’s start by considering it’s location in Luke. The story of Jesus’ birth and childhood take up Luke 1 and 2. Luke 3 mostly concerns John the Baptist – his ministry, teaching, and imprisonment – and then moves on to Jesus’ baptism and then Jesus’ genealogy. Then we get this story, which is followed by Jesus’ first teachings and then his first healing and THEN the call of the disciples. This story is really early, as if it is trying to clarify who Jesus is.

I found a few excellent theories on what is going on here. The Jesus seminar says, “Luke utilizes this story in the manner of a Greco-Roman biography: he has placed an ordeal story between an account of the hero’s remarkable birth and the beginning of his career, as a way of foreshadowing his life and destiny.”¹ That seems fair, yet still leave me wondering why THIS story is the one chosen.

Alan Culpepper in the New Interpreter’s Bible comes up with a number of theories, I’m going to share only the ones I found enlightening. He suggests that for those who had been expecting a Messiah, there were significant questions about what kind of Messiah would come. Would the Messiah be a royal Messiah bringing back the kingdom of Israel? Would the Messiah be a priestly Messiah purifying the rituals of the Temple? This story clarifies that Jesus won’t misuse his power and isn’t going to do party tricks with his power either. At the very least then, if he won’t misuse his power, he won’t be a bad king, and if he won’t do party trick with his power, he won’t be a bad priest.

It connects Jesus with the history of Israel (a theory we’ll return to) and gives the followers of Jesus a model for resisting temptation. Culpepper also offers an intriguing point about the gospel of John, which does not include this story. Instead, he suggests that there are stories in the Gospel of John that form a basis for Jesus being tempted and resisting temptation in each of these ways. Therefore, the Synoptic version is a condensed poetic expression of what to expect from Jesus.²

Amy Jill Levine in points out in The Jewish Annotated New Testament made extra clear the connections to the Hebrew Bible. First of all, having Jesus in the desert for 40 days “recalls Israel’s testing”.³ That I could have come up with on my own, but then she points out that it connects Jesus to Moses and Elijah. In Deuteronomy 9:9, Moses says, “When I went up the mountain to receive the stone tablets, the tablets of the covenant that the Lord made with you, I remained on the mountain for forty days and forty nights; I neither ate bread nor drank water.” 1 Kings 19:8 speaks of Elijah, “He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food for forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.” Who knew that the Transfiguration was foreshadowed in Luke? (Not me.) Amy Jill Levine also helps with understanding the role of the Devil in this story. She says that Satan, in Jewish thought is a member of the heavenly court, his role is to test the righteous.”⁴ Now, this doesn’t FIX the story for me, nor does it make me comfortable talking about a personification of temptation, but it softens it enough to make it usable.

Let’s review. Basic theories as to why this story would be included in the Gospels: because Greco-Roman biographies included a story of testing, to clarify what kind of Messiah Jesus was, to show people how to resist temptation (although I’m not sure that quoting scripture really WORKS for this), to establish the trustability of Jesus, to connect Jesus to the history of Israel and Moses and Elijah. If a few of those are actually true, then the story seems to have sufficient reason to exist.

Now that we’re clear on that, I’d like to obsess over the first bit of the story – the temptation regarding bread. I’m still a little testy on this one. It helps a little bit to think of this story as Jesus’ vision quest, but I worry that Jesus simply didn’t have enough money to have enough excess fat on him to be able to survive so long in the desert without food. That is likely taking the story too literally though. More so, I’m concerned about the presentation of food as temptation, and the giving up of food as God-desired sacrifice.

Wandering for 40 days in the desert is certainly a way of recalling the desert wanderings of the people under the leadership of Moses – but they got manna to eat. Of course, both Moses and Elijah are said to go as long with out food, and I suspect the underlying point in both is that God will take care of them, just as the story of the manna in the desert is mean to imply. I am a bit distracted by the rocks that Jesus is said to be tempted to make into bread. I’m not sure why you’d start with rocks anyway, unless you were trying to connect the rocks to the ones that get mentioned in the triumphal entry into Jerusalem story. Remember? The crowds are cheering Jesus and, “Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’ He answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.” (Luke 19:39-40) While in the beginning of his ministry Jesus shows constraint in his power, it seems like the Gospel suggests that there is an unstoppable growth in the power and energy that surrounds Jesus. Perhaps, in fact, it suggests that while Jesus self-constrains, following Jesus has an energy of its own! I’m not sure, but I think it is interesting.

The passage from Deuteronomy is, like all of Deuteronomy, attributed to Moses as a speech. I think it is one of the more profound passages of the Bible. Moses speaks of the future, to the people who are said to be standing outside the Promised Land looking into it with wonder. Moses will die before they enter. He says them, when you have come into the land and posses it, and settled into it… and all of the instructions we hear today are for that time, although they are spoken to people who are not yet in the land. Deuteronomy tends to conflate generations in meaningful ways, moving backward and forward in time through them.

When a generation came who had settled the land and brought forth fruit from it, they were then to take the first fruits of the land to a priest with a particular story of remembrance. I want you to hear it again,

“Today I declare to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our ancestors to give us. A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me.”

Do you hear all the generations? There is the one bringing the fruit, and the ones who lived with the promise of the land, but outside of it. There is a reference to Abraham, the wandering Aramean (and PLEASE remember that this reference to Abraham with today’s national borders would make him a Syrian refugee), the sons of Jacob who went to Egypt, and the many generations who lived there, the generation of the exodus, and the generation who settled the land. All of them interact in this retelling of the story, and the speaker is all of them at once. The best part though, is the conclusion. After the first fruits have been gathered, and taken to the priest in ritual, “Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house.” The people are all to eat together in remembrance and celebration.

The generations who knew wealth and plenty remembered what it was to know hardship and hunger, and the celebration of having food becomes the invitation to those who don’t have food to share the bounty. It is a bit like our Community Breakfast, isn’t it? It is a bit like the gifts we give to the church, also.

I’m struck by the contrasting ideas of bread. Granted, the first fruits may not literally have been bread, but let’s assume some of them were grain that may or may not have been baked into bread. It would become bread eventually, so go with me. In Deuteronomy the bread is a blessing, one that moves a person to rituals of gratitude and celebrations of sharing. The bread becomes the reminder of the times without bread, and is thus both a blessing and a symbol of humility. In the Gospel the bread is a temptation, it is a symbol of weakness that the human body would desire food. The comparative Hebrew Bible passages infer that food was unnecessary because of the presence and care of God, but the Gospel acknowledges Jesus’ hunger and need for food, but takes it as weakness. (And people wonder why I like the Hebrew Bible???) In this premise, where bread is temptation, Jesus is good because he doe not bending to the human need for nourishment. This is the same bread that is used in sacrament “This is my body” and in table fellowship, in the giving of the first fruits, and the sharing of the table with Levites and foreigners.

There are those who say that Jesus did well in resisting the temptation, because the temptation was to use his power for his own good. To them I reply: some of our power in life must be used for our own good, God would have it be that way. God does not want us to give away all of our life power and goodness. God calls for everyone to have a full and abundant life. Sometime a sacrifice is called for in order to care for the greater good, but there is no value in sacrificing what is wonderful JUST TO DO SO.

I’m going to assume instead that Jesus had been hungry in the desert long enough to be having delusions, and one of them was that a stone looked like bread. He responded to the delusion with a refusal to break his teeth on a stone, aware that his mind was playing tricks on him. I assume this because along with Deuteronomy and the Communion Table, I affirm that bread and food are good gifts from God with physical and symbolic value. When a person is hungry we are instructed to feed them. That includes ourselves. May we remember the wonder that comes with the food we eat, and the nourishment it gives us, and may we come to every table with gratitude for food and awareness calling us to feed those who are hungry. May we let go of the assumption that sacrifice is inherently good, and return to a sense of the holiness of every day items – including food. Amen

1Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Autthentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), page 278.

2 R. Alan Culpepper, “Luke,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. 9 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994): 97-98.

3Amy Jill Levine “Notes on Luke” in The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 106.

4Ibid.

–

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

February 14, 2016

Sermons

“The Value of Mountaintops” based on Exodus 34:29-34 and Luke…

February 8, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

The story of the Transfiguration, as the Gospel lesson is called, comes up every year the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. Conveniently, it is found in each of the synoptic Gospels, so there is a different version for every year. Basically, I’m saying that this is the 10^th year in a row that I’ve preached on this story, and I’m sort of amazed that there are new things to notice in it.

The first thing came from this line, “Just as [Moses and Elijah] were leaving Jesus, Peter said to Jesus “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” – not knowing what he said.” It is easy to assume that this is just another story of Peter being an idiot, because if you pay attention to the Gospels that’s a major theme. I’ve suggested that in the past, and talked about how human it is to want to hold on to a moment and memorialize it in physical space. I’ve talked about Peter talking because he is anxious, and not even listening to himself, because he doesn’t know what else to do.

Another possibility occurred to me this week. I thought to ask, “where is the mountaintop” and while the particular mountain isn’t definitive, the answer is that it is somewhere in Galilee. That answer is enough. One of the major theological splits between the Southern Kingdom (Judah) and the Northern Kingdom (Israel) was over the correct place to worship YHWH. The Temple was in the South, and the Southerners claimed that the Temple had special significance as a worship center. They dismissed the Northerners as “just worshiping in high places” as if that was heathen.

In fact, the Northerners often DID worship in high places. They built altars and worship spaces on mountaintops and (you’d hope) had pretty great worship experiences there. There really is something profound about being on a mountaintop and the closeness to God experienced there. Perhaps it is the view. Perhaps it is the starkness. Perhaps it is the journey required to get there. Perhaps it is the wind, and the clouds, and the experience of exposure. Perhaps it is the oxygen deprivation. (Really, the mountains in Israel are like the medium sized Catskill mountains. It wasn’t oxygen deprivation.) In any case, the people in the North had been settling up worship sites on mountains for many centuries, while the people in the South had decried it as heresy.

Galilee (in the North), in the time of Jesus, was resettled by Judeans (Southern) who were reclaiming it as a Jewish space. It may be that Peter’s seemingly simple/idiotic ramblings reflected a pretty serious cultural clash in the region they were in. The Gospel of John presents Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman by the well and claiming that God can be worshiped ANYWHERE. The Synoptics don’t have that story. The Gospel of John was written well after the fall of the Temple, while the Synoptic were written in the more immediate aftermath of the fall. I think Peter MAY have been expressing a natural human tendency to want to build a space to give thanks to God on that mountaintop. And I think it may have been heard as heresy!! In fact, I think the story may truncate there because the early Jesus followers weren’t quite sure what do to with the heresy.

Of course, the Northerners weren’t the only ones to have mountaintop experiences. The Hebrew Bible reading tells of Moses coming back down off the mountain where he’d been “conversing with God” and he was so strongly transformed by it that he had a freaky glow to him. There IS something about mountaintops. Sometimes the people who go up them come back quite a bit different.

The second thing that emerged from the gospel reading today came from a colleague in my lectionary group who said, “Hey, isn’t the voice of God literally in the feminine?” I had no idea, but I looked it up and it is! “Voice of God” in Hebrew is bat(h) kol which is literally “daughter of a voice.” Apparently, no matter how wonderful Morgan Freedman is at “playing God,” his voice is all wrong! I’ve been at so many plays and skits and movies where God’s voice has been presumed to be a bass, and yet the words “voice of God” connotes the feminine.

It was at that point that I realized that even in the lesson Gospel I’d always heard the voice of God as male. How is it different if it really is just “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!“ without assuming that me saying it is a little bit wrong? Similarly, how different is it to consider that Moses might have been up the mountain for 40 days hearing a feminine voice telling him all sorts of wisdom and giving guidance?

Now, of course, I’m NOT suggesting that God has a gender, and I’m NOT suggesting that God really speaks like a human and therefore I’m certainly NOT suggesting that God speaks like a girl or woman. I am suggesting that projecting a masculine tone onto God’s voice is inaccurate to Hebrew, and that should keep us all on our toes.

Today is “Camp Sunday,” specially designed to try to get everyone excited about camp and the great things that happen there. It is more toned down than last year because… well, you can’t go big every year. So really, this means that the songs are camp favorites and I get to talk about camp. It has turned out to be remarkably helpful that it is also transfiguration Sunday, as the mountaintop experience of God thing is basically what I’m talking about.

Now, camp is definitely for kids, but it isn’t JUST for kids. As a church, we put down a deposit for the weekend BEFORE Labor Day at Sky Lake for an All Church Retreat with Sabine O’Hara. That’s an experience designed for all ages. All of the Upper New York Camps are also retreat centers, and that’s a great gift for anyone needing to get away. Yet, they started as camps, and that’s important too. For some of you, this is a subtle invitation to consider volunteer counseling. For some of you, this is a mostly irrelevant set of (hopefully uplifting stories). For some of you, this is the motivation you’ve been needing to talk to a kid in your life about camp. But best of all, for some of you, this is an invitation to get yourself to CAMP.

I’ve been thinking this week about what camp was like for me as a camper. At first, it was scary. Simply being away in an unknown environment was overwhelming. Luckily, the first time I went to camp, my pastor’s wife was my counselor and one of my church friends was my cabin mate. My brother and his best friend from church were also at camp, and that made for an easy transition. After that first year, I didn’t care who was there, because I’d realized that at camp I was welcome and liked for who I was.

That may not sound like much, but it was to me. I was a really socially awkward kid, and I got picked on a lot at school. I hadn’t experienced social success in my life until I went to camp. Being in the naturally supportive environment, with an emphasis on cooperation and fun, I was able to thrive and make real connections. I was included, and a part of the group, friends with my cabin mates and family group. I “fit.”

The experience of being welcome, included, and connected changed the way I saw myself, maybe a bit like Moses looking different to others when he came down the mountain. I began to believe it was possible that I could be likable, and that was amazing!

Of course, the way that it all happens at camp is sort of mysterious. Having done 61 weeks at Sky Lake, I still don’t quite know how it works. The components don’t seem like they should be able to add up to the whole. There are meals, some of them cooked over a campfire. There are songs, some of them about God. There is time to swim and boat, to hike and do crafts. There is Bible Study, and there are games. There is usually a dance and often a talent show. Ice cream is usually made, tie die is created, and personal hygiene is occasionally cared for. There is a lot of silliness: water ballet, mud hikes, wacky outfits, kumbaya marathons, belly flop contests (ow!), exceptionally loud praying, and/or ridiculous songs. There is a lot of sacredness: fog on the water, the call of birds, quiet stillness, deep friendships, cooperation and support, laughter, tears, healing, worship, and nature. And somehow, each and every week ends up being a mountaintop experience.

Sometimes I get curious about it. How does it ALWAYS work? What are the component parts that make it work? Why does it work just as well when it is cold and raining as when it is warm and beautiful or miserably hot? Why is it just as great with all ages and ability levels? Why is it always the same and always different?

Why does Christian camping share God’s love so well?? Why are people able to be so much more authentic and supportive at camp than anywhere else? Why is it OK to be who you are at camp when it isn’t at home? How does it WORK? It is a mystery, but it always works. Not every camper (or counselor) has a good week every week, but every week amazing and beautiful things happen and people leave transformed. Camp isn’t for everyone – or so I hear – but for many people it is the most loving (and fun!) place they’ll ever go.

Ever since I first went to camp I’ve been trying to figure out how to make the world more like camp. Eventually I learned the language for kin-dom of God and realized that it IS the world as camp (yet somehow with less bugs for those who need less bugs to have a good time). Mountaintops are very important – both physically and metaphorically – because they help us gain a vision of what IS and what can be. Sometimes the descent is rough and the transition back into “real life” is challenging, but the lessons learned on a mountain can change a whole life, and sometimes a whole society (Moses) or the whole world (the disciples). May it ever be so. Amen

–

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

February 7, 2016

Sermons

“Smooth Ride” based on Luke 1:68-79, Baruch 5:1-9, Luke 3:1-6

December 6, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Whenever possible, I pick a window seat when I fly. I am endlessly mesmerized by the alternative view of the world it provides. There is the strange perspective shifting of take off and landing, when people, cars, houses, and roads either shrink or grow as the plane changes altitude. There is powerful metaphor that it is ALWAYS a sunny day – above the clouds – its just that sometimes we can’t see it. Once, I watched a multi-hour sunset as the plane and the rotation of the earth kept time with each other. Most frequently though, my attention is drawn by the patterns of nature and of human impact on nature.

Somehow, it doesn’t get old to fly by mountains and notice that the snow is deeper on the north side than on the south, or to look at streams running into rivers and see fractals emerge. Nor have I yet ceased to be interested in how fields and roads are formed around the natural elements of plains, mountains and water. I’m amazed at how strong humankind is in changing the nature of the world, and in how strong the elements of the world are in impacting human behavior.

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a window seat on the way home from Wisconsin, and I watched the rolling mountain/hills of the Appalachians, the roads running in the valleys, the valleys visibly distanced from one another. I looked for the roads between the valleys, and found one. It mostly went over the mountains, but in a few cases, it was visible from the plane, that the mountains had been cut in two so the road could pass on level ground. The valleys were connected, presumably the use of a whole lot of dynamite.

That’s crazy. We live in a world where mountains are cut in half for our roads. Or, at times tunnels are cut through them. Similarly, we have tunnels under rivers and bridges over them. Very little stops us from building roads and traversing the world.

It has not always been so. The prophesy we heard in Baruch which was also in Isaiah and was quoted in Luke was an impossible vision when it was written. Roads weren’t flat, nor straight, nor particularly easy to travel in ancient times. Mountains had to be gone over, or around. Valleys had to be gone down into, or around. Rivers had to be crossed without bridges, and perhaps worse than all of that for Biblical literature, deserts had to be crossed without access to potable water.

That’s why it was such a great vision. Only God could raise up valleys and drop down mountains and shade the way home through the desert. It was impossible for humans. But God could, and the vision says that God WOULD. It was a vision of hope, one that encouraged resiliency. The end had not come, there was more that God would be up to and it would be so good that the people wouldn’t even be able to believe it possible.

They did go home, but the path wasn’t smooth. The vision remained, even after its initial use had been fulfilled. I think that’s a sign of good literature – it has even layers of meaning that when the most obvious one is no longer relevant the text is still relevant. The vision gets quoted here in Luke again, because the power of the empire of Rome felt a little bit like the exiles’ experience in Babylon, and there was a need to connect again to this impossible hope. We noticed something in my lectionary group this week. By the time of Jesus, this impossible vision wasn’t so impossible anymore. Rome built roads, and they built GOOD roads. They made it possible to travel where it had not been possible, and made it a whole lot smoother of a ride. I wonder if Luke wrote this with the nostalgia of yearning for roads and with the awareness that the capacity of humans had changed, or if he just hadn’t NOTICED. (Sometimes things change and we don’t notice.)

Granted, Roman roads didn’t quite qualify as the wholeness of the vision. Frankly, our roads don’t either. We can split a rolling hill in the Appalachian range in two, but we aren’t there yet with the Rockies, and while we’ve done amazing work with bridges and tunnels, anyone who has fought traffic going into or out of NYC knows that physical barriers are still a reality. And, anyone who has driven… say… in the city of Schenectady knows that the ride is not generally smooth. (Seriously, how on earth are we going to get through winter and the road damage it brings when things are already this bad??)

Regardless, the Isaiah passage quoted in Luke is intriguing because it is set into it’s Lukan context. It is, to some degree, still about roads, but it is also about leveling the playing field, as is much of the Bible’s poetry. The interplay of the today’s passages intrigue me. I don’t usually include apocryphal texts in worship, but I loved this one too much to ignore it. It is the epitome of hopeful restoration language, and it fits SO WELL into this this second Sunday of Advent when we focus on our yearning for peace. It not only talks about mountains dropping and valleys lifting and shade trees protecting the travelers, it talks about the people as God’s Glory, and as Righteous Peace and as mercy and light.

And it sounds enough like Mary’s Magnificant to take the parallels seriously.

[God] has shown strength with [God’s ]arm;
[and] has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
[God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
[God] has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.

Both the road home and societies tend to be in need of leveling, and some respite of shade. In the joint meaning of the songs of Luke chapter one, we are reminded about God who doesn’t care about our status quo. God isn’t interested in who is higher up a hierarchy, God is interested in taking care of all the people, and that usually means lifting up the bottom, and filling it in with the extra from the top. A level playing field takes better care of all of God’s people. Please note that this doesn’t inverse reality: it isn’t that the poor become rich and the rich become poor. It is that everyone moves toward the middle ground. It is like the opposite of our world today: instead of growing income inequality, Luke 1 envisions growing income equality.

I think the most interesting character in today’s reading is Zechariah. Zechariah is identified multiple times as John the Baptist’s father and was an old priest. That meant that he was in the upper class and a descendent of Aaron. The story goes that he and his wife were barren. Those who have been in the Young Adult Study on Genesis know where this is going. Elizabeth was past child bearing years, and then got pregnant with John. Zechariah (whose name means, “God remembered”) is struck mute for the length of the pregnancy for his disbelief that this would come to pass. When the child is born, his mother wishes to name him John (which means “God’s gift”), but the people are horrified that she isn’t’ naming him for his father. He writes (further proof that he is upper class) “his name is John” and his mouth is opened again.

When it is open he speaks the first of the Luke passages we heard today, which is spectacular. It is also sort of weird for an upper class, entitled priest to say! It is all about God’s inversions in the world, and usually the people who are empowered by a system aren’t the ones who yearn to change it.

Zechariah also shows up, in name at least, in the second Luke passage about John’s ministry in the desert. This is quite curious. If Zechariah was an upper class man, a priest in the hereditary order of Aaron, then his son would have been too. Instead we meet John on the outskirts of society, teaching, preaching, and baptizing in the Jordan River. John forwent the privilege he was born into, and the gospel tells us that instead he spent his life “preparing the way of the Lord.”

That is, his work was to make the paths straight and smooth. Its funny though, the way of the Lord that John prepares seems ALSO to be the way of the Lord that Jesus worked on. I always thought, as a child at least, that John was preparing the way for Jesus. But this passage suggests that both John and Jesus are preparing the way for the people to connect with God and come home to the ways of God. The leveled road makes the journey easier, it also creates a more just society.

The level road is the way of peace, and it is hard to build, but worth working on anyway. If any people at any time in human history have known that, we are among them. We are people living in a society where mass murder has become normal, where special interest groups and the desires of profit-industry prevent change to our laws, and where we see with increasing clarity the disparity of violence in our world. As if the regular gun violence wasn’t enough, the response of our society is to demonize Muslims and dark-skinned people in response, making the actual shootings only the beginning of the problems we face. We take our pre-existence prejudices and add them into the pain and suffering in our society.

Over the past few years I’ve tried not to demonize gun rights supporters. As weak as it sounds, I have friends who own guns, and they aren’t bad people. I grew up in an area that prized deer hunting, and I see the value of hunting rifles (although, SERIOUSLY, if you are going to kill animals for sport, I think you should make it a little bit more of an actual challenge and go bow hunting). I can’t figure out the value of pistols, but at the moment I’m willing to let that go. The biggest problem we have is that military style assault rifles are legal to buy and use in our country. Without wanting to demonize anyone, and while wanting to participate in a genuine conversation with those with whom I disagree, I find that it is time to make an unambiguous statement: The only purpose of assault rifles is to kill a lot of people at once, and to protect the right of people to have assault rifles IS to protect the “right” to engage in mass murder.

Our country’s ride isn’t going to get any smoother until we change our gun laws. (We aren’t going to magically find the ability find perfect mental health care for all of our citizens, we aren’t able to stop propaganda from all extremist groups, we can’t prevent everyone from wanting to do harm. We can only change the access they have to the tools that make it EASY.)

I’m tired of preaching about violence and guns, but not tired enough to stick my head in the sand and pretend that the 350+ mass shootings in the USA this year didn’t happen. This is the season where we participate with our ancestors in faith in YEARNING for the world to be as God would have it be. Today we are YEARNING for peace, and while peace means a whole lot more than a lack of violence, it has to start there. One commentator on Zechariah’s song of praise (the Benedictus) wrote, “Advent continues, our ruminations go deeper. We wait, watch, wonder if we will ever know peace. Will we find peace in our own souls? Will there be peace on earth?”¹

Friends we live in an age and a country that can cut mountains in two to make the road smooth. We live in an age and a world that has eliminated polio and is about to eliminate malaria. We live in a world where extreme poverty has been cut in HALF over the past 25 years. We live in an age and and a country where an African American man is finishing his second term in office. We live in an age and a county where ROADS cut through MOUNTAINS. Roads can be made smooth. Gun control is not beyond our grasp ( PLEASE call/email/and write to your legislators).Peace is possible.

The road isn’t current easy. It turns out that driving along a smooth road is A LOT easier than building a road and making it safe and easy. I suspect we are called to be the road builders, and God is the one who gives us the strength and vision. Let’s get back to work. Amen

1Randall R. Mixon “Homiletical Perspective on Luke 1:68-79” in Feasting on the Word Year C Volume 1 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009) page 33.

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

December 6, 2015