“Joy and Protest” based on Psalm 98:1-6, Isaiah 55:10-13

October 30, 2022
by Sara Baron

“You shall go out with joy, and be
led forth with peace, the mountains and the hills will break forth
before you, there will be shouts of joy, and all the tress of the
field shall clap (shall clap) their hands.” So goes our final hymn
today, and so has gone our stewardship campaign this year.

Isaiah 55 for the win.

Joy!

Peace!

Imaginatively imagery of pure delight!

So, I went to Walter Brueggemann to
understand better what is going on, and the great Prophetic Scholar
did not disappoint. He reminded me that Isaiah 40, the start of
second Isaiah, begins with
the words, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak
tenderly to Jerusalem.” The entirety of the passage is written to
the exiles, with affirmation that God is not done with them yet.

That while the worst has come, it will
not be their whole story. That when things get hard, God still wins.
That God’s love remained with them, and hope continued.

Our passage today is the very last part
of what scholars call 2^nd Isaiah – this part of the book
written to the exiles to PREPARE them for God’s work of restoration.
And today’s passage imagines the joy of their homecoming. The
passage ties together some of the work of the exodus with the work of
restoration. The rain and snow that can be counted on to produce
crops remind the people of the desert wandering, and God’s
provisions. The verb even “go out” is a verb of the exodus. But
here, in the “2^nd exodus” it is quite different. The
first exodus was hasty and fearful. But the restoration, this “new
exodus” is joy, peace, and well-being.

Bruggemann writes, “Before there can
be any geographical departure from the [Bablyonian] empire, there
must be a liturgical, emotional, and imaginative departure. Israel
in exile must be able to think and feel and imagine its life out
beyond Babylon’s administration. Israel must so trust the rhetoric
of assurance and victory that it can flex its muscles of faith and
sense that the cadences of faith are more compelling than the slogans
of the empire.”¹

And, this is that imaginative
departure. It imagines creatures and … well, mountains and hills
and trees gathered on the roadside to watch the spectacle of the
people returning. As if it is a parade and nature itself is
healed by the
restoration of the people to their homeland.

Instead of thorn and brier – symbols
of judgment and punishment – there are cypress and myrtle – signs
of growth and life and beauty. The restoration of ancient Israel is
envisioned to be the restoration of sustainable living, of the fair
distribution of goods, the return of the ban on interest, the care
for the vulnerable. And that means the restoration of God’s values,
which was very significant for people who had been living in the seat
of power of a large empire because empires ALWAYS involve domination,
hierarchies, debt, and oppression of the vulnerable. Brueggeman
suggests even creation itself would be healed by this restoration
because empire destroys nature, but sustainable equitable living
exists in harmony with nature.

If it takes dreaming of leaving the
exile in order to prepare the people to actually leave the exile,
this is some excellent writing getting them ready. This is writing
for life. This is writing to remind us that life is possible, that
loveliness exists, that hope is reasonable. As Brueggemann says, in
this writing, “All are now at home, safe, beloved, free, free at
last, Thank God Almighty, free at last.”

As rain and snow leave the sky, to
bring life on earth, and grow food so too is it with God’s word that
accomplishes what it aims at – and it aims at joy, peace, and
restoration.

In order to be ready to leave the
empire, to leave the exile, to return, to be restored, the people
needed first to dream God’s dreams. And God sent them dreams.

Before they could leave in fact, they
had work of letting go – I love his phrasing, “there must be a
liturgical, emotional, and imaginative departure. Israel in exile
must be able to think and feel and imagine its life out beyond
Babylon’s administration.”

I preached a few weeks ago about how
ready I am to NOT resonate with exile literature, and that does mean
that I’m pretty excited to hear “end of the exile, beginning of the
return literature.” But I keep noticing that leaving the exile
meant not only leaving the exile but ALSO leaving behind the
pre-exile-ancient-Israel.

Which is to say, I’m all for starting
to vision a post-pandemic life, but I have to keep reminding myself
that to leave the pandemic behind also means finishing the work of
letting go of the pre-pandemic life. It means seeing with clarity
what has changed, and not FIGHTING it anymore. It means accepting
this reality as it is, so that God can dream with me and with us HERE
AND NOW without my too-tight-grip on the past keeping me from
listening.

And, to be honest to these passages, it
also means making more space for joy.

Loosening my grip on what was helps me
make space for joy. Even, loosening my grip on what joy USED TO look
like makes space for how it looks now. And generally speaking,
loosening my grip helps with joy 😉

The thing I’ve noticed about joy, the
continuity of it, is that for me is about connection. I find joy in
connecting with others, in connecting with God, in connecting with
nature. That is, joy happens in togetherness – at least for me.

Which is probably why I’ve been so
moved by our stewardship campaign this year, “Together for joy.”
I simply adore the order of the words. For me, I know joy comes in
togetherness, but I love the INTENTION in being together FOR joy.

It is another wonderful take on the
Psalm:

Make a joyful
noise to the Lord, all the earth;
   break forth
into joyous song and sing praises.
Sing praises to the Lord with
the lyre,
   with the lyre and the sound of melody.

With trumpets and the sound of the horn
   make
a joyful noise before the King, the Lord.

The normal take is the wonder of making
music to praise God, but I love adding to that meaning by seeing each
of our lives as a piece of the music and our lives together as
creating that joyful noise!

In many churches, today is Reformation
Sunday, the day when they remember the initial act of Martin Luther
in nailing the 95 thesis on the church door and starting the
Reformation. We are, curiously enough, a part of Protestantism, but
direct descendants of the Reformation. Lutheran, Presbyterian,
Reformed, and even most Baptist churches descend from the
Reformation, but we split off of the Church of England, which itself
split from the Roman Catholic Church for rather different reasons.
(The king wanted a divorce, the pope didn’t grant one, so the king
nationalized the church.)

Our roots are not in the reformation,
but our identity is in Protestantism. That is, by nature, we PROTEST
the abuses of the church and the world and advocate for God’s people.
Thanks be to God! We are active in the face of injustice, and we are
actively seeking God’s kindom (although, to be fair, this is true of
more people than protestants, so we claim this but not exclusively.)

We are, together for justice, together
for joy, together for compassion. We witness the mountains and the
hills breaking forth before us, and the trees of the field clapping
their hands.

Dear ones, God leads us TO joy. God
leads us to PEACE. Not just for ourselves, for all people, but for
ourselves too. We are blessed with the joy of being together, and we
are together for joy. Thanks be to God! Amen

1Walter
Brueggemann, Isaiah 40-66, Louisville,
Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), p 162.

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 30, 2022

Uncategorized

“Now” based on Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

October 9, 2022
by Sara Baron

Sometimes,
I get tired of preaching about the exile. I get tired of thinking
about the exile. I get tired of the fact that the exile metaphors
resonate with me, and I’d strongly prefer that they didn’t.

But
I’m ahead of myself, because we don’t talk enough about the exile to
assume that people can follow what I mean by it. So, a quick
historical summary: After King David and King Solomon, the ancient
nation of Israel split into two. The northern part had the name
Israel and the southern part the name
Judah. That was stable for a few hundred years, then the northern
nation was subsumed by Assyria in 722 BCE. The southern
kingdom held on for a while longer (mostly by paying tributes to
larger empires) but was destroyed in 586 BCE.

At
that point the leaders, the literate, and the priests were forced
marched to Babylon, while the poor, illiterate majority were left in
the ruins of a destroyed Jerusalem without the protection of city
gates.

That’s
what we call “the exile.” In 539 BCE (47 years later) the first
of the people who’d been exiled were freed to come back. Meanwhile
the people who stayed had been decimated by famine, disease, and
attackers, and “home” wasn’t what people had remembered or been
told about.

The
reality of the exile is formative in the writing down of the Hebrew
Bible, and the questions that were being asked and answered in how
the stories got written down. It is also one of the great narrative
arcs of the Bible, and I think that’s true because it was written
down when it was still so vibrant in people’s lives and memories. I
also think it is true because the sensation of being displaced from
life as we know it and/or life as it should be is quite common, and
having the narrative of the exile helps us make sense of life as we
know it.

And
now we’re back to the beginning. I appreciate the ways the stories
of the exile make sense of life, but I’m rather tired of identifying
with it. I’d rather resonate with some stories of stability instead.

But,
here we are.

And
in the midst of this is Jeremiah’s profound, shocking, amazing,
unexpected communication on behalf of God. He writes to those in
exile, the ones who have been torn from their homes, the ones who are
prevented from going home by exactly the people who tore up their
home and tore them from their homes and he says on behalf of God:

Build houses and live in them;
plant gardens and eat what they produce.
Take wives and have sons
and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in
marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and
do not decrease.
But seek the welfare of the city where I have
sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its
welfare you will find your welfare.

I
can’t imagine that this is what the exiles wanted to hear.

I
would imagine this was the opposite of what they expected. Wouldn’t
they want to be ready to leave at any time? Why settle in? After
all, the passover celebrates God calling the people from Egypt so
quickly they had to cook unleavened bread! Build houses and plant
gardens? That sounds wrong.

Get
married? Have kids? Keep on living? Keep on trying to thrive and
grow? But, that doesn’t fit either. They’re in a temporary place,
shouldn’t they wait until they get home and can be in the “Promised
Land” and connected to life as they know it, life as it is supposed
to be? Why bring kids into the mess of the exile? I mean, does an
exile marriage even COUNT?

And
then, then God gets INTO it. This is one of the most shocking things
attributed to God in the Bible, and that’s saying a lot. God says,
“But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile,
and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find
your welfare.” Seek the welfare of…. Babylon? Pray for Bablyon?
Work for the wellbeing of Babylon? Our well being is correlated
with the well being of our oppressors?

We
aren’t trying to undermine them? We aren’t trying to destroy them?
We aren’t trying to … at the very least just keep our heads down
until we get to leave? We’re working for their WELFARE? (It may be
helpful to know that I don’t think the exiles were slaves, but nor
were they free to leave.)

That’s
about how I think the exiles would have responded. But maybe I’m
wrong, because while everything God says is counter-intuitive,
everything God says also sounds like God. And they, too, knew God.
So maybe they knew to expect the unexpected, to know compassion for
others would come at the most annoying times, to experience God’s
reminders about loving everyone when they least wanted to hear it.

I
hear the echos of this message from God when Jesus heals the
senator’s daughter, when Paul has compassion for his jailers, and
when MLK reminded his listeners that the goal was not to harm the
oppressors but transform them so they too could live a more wonderful
life.

This
is a very, very Godly message, this “But seek the welfare of the
city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its
behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

I’m
not sure when it gets easy.

Because,
right now, this feels like a message to settle into this
late-pandemic reality. Let go of what was, and build houses HERE.
Plant gardens HERE. Savor relationships and build up families HERE
and NOW. And, seek the welfare of the city where we now are.

But
most of us still aren’t all the way here yet. (Maybe the young are?)
We’re still remembering what was. Maybe, even, we’re still letting
God know that we are ready to bake the bread – even the unleavened
bread – and walk away from this mess right now! We don’t want to
settle into this reality. We want to go HOME. We don’t want to seek
the welfare of this time, we want this time to be different than it
is.

But
God meets us in the now.

Not
the past, the future, nor the time we wish it was. The now.

That
pre-exilic time never returned. But there was a vibrant post-exilic
time, which included things like the Bible being written, the Second
Temple being build, the walls of Jerusalem being restored, and as a
thing that is pretty relevant to us, the life of Jesus.

It
seems to me, from where I’m standing, that the temptation of the
exile is the yearning to return to how things used to be. But God
urges the people to be present in their NOW, which prepares them for
the next things God is going to be up to with them.

I
guess, like the exiles, God is dragging us into the now – sometimes
while we kick and scream like toddlers. And I think that’s the word
as I hear it today. God is with us in the now, calling us into the
now, and preparing us for the future.

And
this is where we meet God.

May
we be open to meeting God here. Amen

October 9, 2022

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

Uncategorized

“To Be Known” based on Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18 and…

September 4, 2022
by Sara Baron

For
years now, the book of Philemon has tickled my funny bone. That fact
is now making me squirm.

It
made me laugh cause I read it from a logical perspective, and I was
amused by the choice of argument style. I thought it was
manipulative, but brilliant. From this angle, the line “For this
reason, though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do your
duty, yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love–and I,
Paul, do this as an old man, and now also as a prisoner of Christ
Jesus” is potent. Paul points out his power, steps back from it,
but then adds layers of guilt about his age and his position as a
prisoner to strengthen his claim that what he wants should be given
to him “freely.”

Taken
from a pure logic perspective, it is a strong argument, and indeed
manipulative.

But
I wonder what made me take it from a logic perspective.

Because
when I read it now, it sounds like it is an honest emotional appeal.
The gist is that Paul has come to love and depend on Onesimus. Paul
would like to have Onesimus with him, but decides that the right
thing to do is let Philemon make his own decision. It is pretty
clear Paul isn’t enjoying doing the right thing, sending the letter
to Philemon with Onesimus and awaiting the response (hopefully coming
back with Onesimus) is hard. He doesn’t want to be separated even
that long.

Paul
does the right thing, and he does it while making every appeal he can
to Philemon for the thing he needs.

Now,
Paul’s request is not small. Onesimus is a slave belonging to
Philemon, and Paul requests that Philemon free Onesimus, recognize
him as an equal in the Body of Christ, and then send him back to Paul
as a free person to serve the Body of Christ by accompanying Paul as
a companion and equal.

That’s
really living out the line Paul wrote in Galatians. “There is no
longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no
longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
(3:28) Paul says that now that Onesimus is in Christ, it doesn’t
make sense for him to be the slave of another person with whom he is
“one in Christ Jesus.”

This
is about as radical of a notion as one could have. It upends the
entire economic, familial, and societal structure of Paul’s time. It
is VERY Jesus like. It is the reasonable extension of Jesus’s
teaching. It simply disregards the known hierarchies of the world
and replaces them with the bonds of human affection and equality in
the eyes of God.

This
is ignoring everything but the love of God, and appealing on the
basis of that love for things to be different.

And
Paul actually asks for it. He doesn’t just write about it, doesn’t
just indicate this would be an appropriate way to follow Jesus. He
asks for it, in real time, because he both believes in it and because
he needs it to be true.

The
emotions and needs behind his request are what make me uncomfortable
with my prior interpretation. I’ve been working on becoming more
attentive to my own feelings and needs, as well as learning to see
and name other people’s feelings and needs. I’ve been working on
this for a decade and it makes a difference, but I still have plenty
of work to do.

Maybe
I’ve been in too many manipulative situations where people aren’t
honest about their needs, or I’ve felt backed into the corner, or
disregarded and unheard. Maybe that’s why I’ve read this as if Paul
was trying to manipulate Philemon. But right now, it really looks to
me like he is laying all his cards on the table, and yet making his
request one that Philemon gets to decide about. He asks, he
explains, he offers what he can offer, but he makes space for
Philemon to do what Philemon will do.

He
makes a request of Philemon, not a demand. Maybe because it seems
like it would be really hard to say no to this request, maybe that’s
why I read it as manipulative. But Paul asks, and doesn’t demand.
Paul doesn’t use his authority to decree. He ASKS. It is almost as
if, despite his role as a church leader, he doesn’t hold himself
above other people of faith.

You
know, this letter is making me love Paul a little more.

I
love his love for Onesimus, and I love his honesty in really needing
Onesimus with him. I think I particularly love that last part
because it is so … not stoic. Paul isn’t sitting in prison saying,
“I’m fine, no worries.” He is sitting in prison saying, “this
is really much nicer with someone I love around, and I’d like to keep
having that.”

Now,
maybe you are thinking to yourself, “well, sure, someone who is
confined to PRISON deserves
a little bit of comfort and support.” If so, thank God! I’m a
little bit tired of the narrative that people who get confined to
prisons somehow stop being human and stop needing basic human things
like edible food and human connection.

But,
anyway, if you were thinking to yourself that it was OK for Paul to
ask for some comfort in prison in his old age, then I’d invite you to
take the compassion and apply it to yourself. You, too, have needs,
you too have the right to try to get them met. Regardless of age or
imprisonment status.

When
I say needs I am saying things that could fall under categories like
autonomy, connection, meaning, peace, physical well-being, and play.
I’m not JUST talking about food, water, and shelter although those
are part of physical well-being. The other categories are ALSO
universal human needs, ones we ALL have that impact everything about
our lives.

I’m
making the radical claim that in the letter to Philemon, Paul is
showing himself to be a human being with needs, and that reminds us
that we are human beings with needs too. And we, too, have the right
to find ways to get those needs met. I think that it may be true
that in our society claiming everyone has needs AND a right to seek
to meet those needs almost as radical as Paul saying that a slave
should be freed because of equality in Christ.

Now,
this brings me around to Psalm 139 which may or may not have made you
a little bit uncomfortable. Someone asked me in late June what text
is used to claim that the Bible is against abortion, and my reply
was, “Huh, I don’t know. Cause it isn’t there. But maybe they use
Psalm 139?” After all, verse 13 does refer to a human being known
by God even before birth when they say, “For it was you who formed
my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

However,
that doesn’t say what people say it says. Psalm 139 also talks about
God knowing what we have to say before the words are on our tongues.
The idea that God knows us before we are born is a way of saying that
God us before we even ARE.

When
I take away the ways Psalm 139 has been misused, I find it rather
comforting. God knows us, sees us, is with us, AND LOVES us. God’s
love isn’t some generic thing, nor based on how we preform. God
knows AND love us as we are. We have no secrets from God.

That
is, God knows our feelings and our thoughts, and our needs. God
doesn’t expect us to be able to pretend away our needs, or push away
our feelings. God KNOWS them with us, and works with us to get our
needs met and our feelings acknowledged.

God
isn’t asking us to be perfect or stoic, cause God knows what it is
like to be us. That’s comforting.

Now,
it is possible that some of you are wondering why this matters, and
why I’m making such a huge point about having needs, and it being OK,
and working to get them met. Because these are not exactly the most
obvious points to make from our scriptures today. One piece of this
is that discovering that I TOO was a human who also had needs and
that wasn’t WRONG was a pretty big deal to me. I knew there were
universal human needs, sure, but for a very long time I still though
I was supposed to be exempt from that, and I’d like to help you let
that go too if you hold that idea.

But
also, I think there is a lot of fear around being human and having
needs and being “needy.” There is a sense that it is weak or bad
or something. And I think that does a whole lot of damage to the
world and the church. And I think that if we are going to matter to
each other, if we are going to be a community who loves each other
and helps each other grow, if we are going to matter to the world, if
we are going to be people who meet others where they are – then
we need to get more comfortable with our humanity and our needs. I
think this is a way TOWARDS God.

To
be specific, I hear in this church profound fear of talking about
conflict. There is a sense that if we talk about things we’ve
disagreed about, everything may blow up and we will regret it.

I
believe that if we brush aside our feelings and our needs, if we
pretend away our disagreements, if we sweep our history under the
rug, it will poison us from the inside. I believe that the hardest
things about being a church are the ways that old conflicts never got
resolved and keep on bringing new hurts, and if we keep on doing that
we won’t be able to keep on functioning.

AND,
here is the good news in all of this. If we can hold on to our own
needs, and make space for other people’s needs, conflict gets a whole
lot less scary!! If I have a need for space, ease, and
self-expression while you have a need for connection, and efficacy
and closeness that could lead us to conflict pretty fast, right?
BUT, if instead of blaming me for my need for space or blaming you
for your need for connection we just took those as givens, we could
find some really cool ways to meet both of our needs.

(Summary:
blame is not useful in conflict nor conflict resolutions, but needs
themselves are fine and can help us find win-wins.)

I
believe in a God of win-wins. I believe in a God who knows us and
likes us and is at peace with our needs and would like us to be. I
believe in a God who of equality and equity who has no commitment
whatsoever to the hierarchical systems of any age. And I believe God
is with us, willing and able to work with us in this community and
this church. We don’t need to throw our needs to get to God or
connect with each other. Instead, like Paul, we can acknowledge what
we need and ask each other for help. May God help us find the
strength to be so vulnerable! 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

September 4, 2022

Uncategorized

“The Art of Choosing What to Do With Your…

August 28, 2022
by Sara Baron

I lack the patience and the
commitment to read any newspaper or magazine cover to cover, but I do
scan headlines and read what looks interesting. Two weeks ago there
was an opinion piece in the New York Times entitled, “The Art of
Choosing What to Do With Your Life” which caught my attention. It
was a plea for liberal arts education to include in their curriculum
“initiating students into a culture of rational reflection on how
to live”.^¹
I found myself both emphatically agreeing with their ideas about
helping people make conscious decisions about how they wanted to live
their lives, and also getting a little bit offended at the idea that
this is particularly the role of education and not faith. But, once
I became aware of my sense of being offended, I realized that I’m
actually all for sharing and not being possessive over meaning
making. Phew.

Also,
as I continued to read, I found myself laughing that the ways they
are teaching their students about building a meaningful life is by
using one of the greatest teachers of the Christian tradition. This
really isn’t a competition! They said:

Aquinas
usefully suggests that the ultimate objects of human longing can be
sorted into only eight enduring categories. If we want to understand
where we’re headed, we should ask ourselves these questions: Am I
interested in this opportunity because it leads to wealth? Or am I
aiming at praise and admiration? Do I want enduring glory? Or power —
to “make an impact”? Is my goal to maximize my pleasures? Do I
seek health? Do I seek some “good of the soul,” such as knowledge
or virtue? Or is my ultimate longing to come face-to-face with the
divine?^²

The
authors point out that some of those first options (wealth, praise)
don’t work out to bring a satisfying life. Now, having started
reading that article with both interest and caution, I came around to
thinking that it was a useful article for church too!

Because,
it occurred to me, those are valid questions for us too. Both
individually and collectively, but today I’m talking about
collectively.

“The
Art of Choosing What to Do With Your Life as a Church”

Thinking
that way, we can eliminate some of the options. We are not a church
so we can build wealth, be praised, gain glory, or simply maximize
pleasure. Occasionally I think we do want some power so we can make
an impact, but that isn’t an end goal in itself, and I think we know
that. I sometimes note that being part of a community is good for
one’s health, and community connections are good for community
health, but that too is an aside and not a primary goal.

Which
is to say, that I think only the last two questions are likely to
have significant resonance: Do we seek some ‘good of the soul’ such
as knowledge or virtue? Or, do we primarily seek to connect people
to the Divine? I’d love to hear your answers and reflections on
this. I’m going to offer my best guess as to this community’s
answer, but please note I’m ALSO wanting to hear what you think!

The
thing is, that I don’t think every church has the same reason for
existing. And I suspect our reasons may be quite different from the
norm. That is, I think many churches exist to make more Christians –
as an end goal in itself, which for them is related to keeping people
out of hell. This may be simply about saying a proscribed set of
words, or may be about living a particular set of rules, but avoiding
hell is the end game. Other churches exist, I think, to praise God.
This strikes me as a far more worthy use of time and energy, but, if
I’m honest, not the one that resonates here. (OK, I do think it is
better, but I also am not convinced it is a sufficient end it
itself.)

Around
here we most often talk about our goal as “building the kindom of
God,” and I suspect that falls most directly under seeking good of
the soul, with an awareness that connecting to the Divine is quite
important for building up the desire and capacity to build the
kindom.

Lee
Tupper wrote convincingly that the point of the church is to
“optimize prime values.” I’d take that to be another way of
saying the thing about good for the soul. Lee put it this way:

A
desirable function for the church is to aid in shaping personal value
systems so that they are consistent with prime values. The ultimate
objective of this process is maximizing the degree to which the human
system evolves to ever-higher levels. … The function of the church
here is a crucial one. It
involves three major facets – the first is that of the promotion of
the idea that a concern with this subject is important, the second
is to help in the continued educational process necessary to
understand its implication and the third is to aid people in carrying
out the activities necessary to achieve these objectives.”^³

Lee
was humble about naming the prime values themselves, but took as
examples, love and justice which I’m entirely convinced are prime
values as well. Love and justice, and I’m pretty sure compassion
too, are means toward the kindom.

It
turns out that this wondering about why we exist as a church and what
we think we are aiming to do matters… say, rather a lot. It
impacts everything about what we do and how we make decisions, who we
are and who we seek to become. It impacts what we are trying to do
when we worship, what I am trying to do when I preach, how we related
to our communities and neighbors, what we prioritize, and how we
decide what to let go of. I think it also relates to how we
experience and understand God and God’s wishes for us and our
communities and society.

The
Art of Choosing What to Do With Your Life as a Church matters quite a
lot.

I
think this is obvious, but just to be sure, let’s look at an example.
If the primary goal of a church is to save people from going to hell
by having them profess a faith in Jesus, it would make sense that
they’d put a lot of energy into evangelism, and teaching effective
evangelism, and that worship would be both focused on emphasizing how
good it is to believe in Jesus and how bad it is in afterlife if one
doesn’t. Right? It all follows.

However,
“building the kindom of God” is a really multifaceted thing. It
is not as well defined as a goal as getting people to speak some
particular phrase. Even as we get clearer that building the kindom
is related to optimizing prime values, and that that means “the
first is that of the promotion of the idea that a concern with this
subject is important, the second is to help in the continued
educational process necessary to to understand its implication and
the third is to aid people in carrying out the activities necessary
to achieve these objectives,”
and even if we took as the three prime values love, justice, and
compassion – we are still dealing with multifaceted ways forward.

How
does one build up love? Is it best to start with one’s self and
build up self compassion? Is it best to deepen relationships with
loved ones, and build up skills in good listening and communication?
Is it best to seek out new relationships particularly with people who
are different -and if so, people who are different HERE, or people
who are different in another part of the country or world? Or, do we
best build up love by savoring the love of God and letting it
infiltrate our lives?

You
see how it isn’t entirely clear?

This
has been a struggle for this church for decades at least, a desire
for better clarity of purpose and a reality that it is really
complicated. But, I’d like to point something out that maybe hasn’t
been a sufficient part of this conversation.

What
this church has been doing for these decades has WORKED. How do I
know? Because this church is full of people of mature, thoughtful,
careful, LOVING, JUSTICE-SEEKING, COMPASSIONATE faith. Both those of
you who have been here all along and those of you who arrived here
and discovered it fit who you are are living proof that something
here is working. People are becoming more loving, more
justice-oriented, more compassionate in their time here. These are
shared values. These are lived values. When we, as a church, make
decisions, these are inherently in the conversations, and we end up
discussing how to best live them out.

I
have seen very few other faith communities that so effectively build
up people of faith in these ways. I admit to being a little confused
as to how it happens, because we definitely don’t have a linear
educational paradigm to develop it, but something here WORKS.

The
kindom of God is being built by this community and by the people of
this community in the places they go. We’re doing the stuff we want
to do!

We’re
living our values! We’re working with God! We’re existing in a way
we care about!

THIS
IS AWESOME – and we should probably celebrate it more.

Those
dry cisterns of Jeremiah – those aren’t ours! We’re in the fountain
of living water. Those exclusivist banquets that poor people can’t
attend because they can’t reciprocate? Those aren’t ours. We are
intentionally offering banquets for those who aren’t going to invite
us back.

A
commentator on Luke said, “Exclusive fellowship required an
exclusive table, while inclusive fellowship required an inclusive
one.^⁴”
That was beautifully said, and seems to name another prime value
around here: inclusion. We often ask ourselves about what inclusion
looks like and how to create intersectional inclusion.

Dear
ones, there are a lot of leaking, empty cisterns out there. I’d lump
all of the competitive values of the world into those. But God is
faithful. There are a lot of ways to be church, and I’m not sure
ours is the easiest, but it is a really great one, and it is WORKING.
We’re transforming each other into more loving, more just, more
compassionate, more inclusive beings and taking those values and
skills into the world. Or maybe we’re just making space together for
God to do the changing – I really don’t know how it happens.

We
are people of an inclusive fellowship, of taking the bottom seat, of
inviting everyone to the banquet. And it matters. And it is going
to keep mattering. And maybe, just maybe, the fact that it isn’t
always clear is part of how we have developed some skills at it –
we’ve had to struggle and that’s helped us grow. 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 28, 2022

1 Benjamin
Storey and Jenna Silber Storey, “The Art of Choosing What to Do
With Your Life” in the New York Times, August 15, 2022.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/opinion/college-students-happiness-liberal-arts.html,
accessed again 8/25/2022

2 Ibid.

3 L.C.
Tupper “Eschatology and Related Matters” Nov. 20, 1976.

4 Bruce
J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh Social-Science Commentary on the
Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) “Meals”.

Sermons

“A Nameless Wordless Woman” based on Judges 19

September 17, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Today we conclude the Subversive Women of the Bible Sermon series with this, the absolutely worst story in the Bible. Unfortunately the story doesn’t really end where we leave it, and it does keep getting worse. Our heroine is certainly subversive, but unfortunately her subversion is not the final word; the final word is violence.

Phyllis Trible is a feminist Biblical Scholar whose career included teaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York and Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, NC. In 1984 she published Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives in which she carefully explains and comments on four “texts of terror” in the Bible. This is, of course, one of them. She opens the chapter on this story with these words:

“The betrayal, rape, torture, murder, and dismemberment of an unnamed woman is a story we want to forget but are commanded to speak. It depicts the horrors of male power, brutality, and triumphalism; of female helplessness, abuse, and annihilation. To hear this story is to inhabit a world of unrelenting terror that refuses to let us pass by on the other side.”¹

Unrelenting terror is a reasonable description of this story. I think that she oversimplifies the gendered aspects of power and abuse, but only from a modern perspective. From within the story her description is right on, from within life in the United States now it is both true and untrue. We want to be careful with that today, because this story is strikingly relevant to life. Trible ends her chapter on this story saying:

“Violence and vengeance are not just characteristics of a distant, pre-Christian past; they infect the community of the elect to this day. Woman as object is still captured, betrayed, raped, tortured, murdered, dismembered, and scattered. To take to heart this ancient story, then, is to confess its present reality. The story is alive and not all is well. Beyond confession we must take counsel to say, ‘Never again.’ Yet this counsel is itself ineffectual unless we direct our hearts to that most uncompromising of all biblical commands, speaking the word not to others but to ourselves: Repent. Repent.”²

Let’s take a little bit of time to highlight the big questions in this story and clarify some of the confusing parts. To begin with, a “concubine” is a second class wife. Trible says, “Legally and socially, she is not the equivalent of a wife, but is virtually a slave, secured by a man for his own purposes.”³ Other famous concubines in the Bible include Hagar, and the maidservants of Rachel and Leah. Our heroine’s status as concubine leads to the subversive action that takes place, one that is so radical that no one even tries to figure it out.

The concubine leaves. She leaves her husband, but that wasn’t done. It couldn’t be done. At that time, and by later Torah regulations, only men had the right to initiate divorce. A wife couldn’t leave. This feels way MORE true for a concubine, a second class wife, one who lacked even the dignity and respect given to first class wives who had close to no power to begin with. Leaving husbands wasn’t a thing. And the story says she left, got to her father’s house, and stayed for FOUR MONTHS. This heroine left her husband.

I’m not really sure why her father sheltered her, doing put him into a power battle with her husband when her husband had the legal upper hand. It is possible that this woman lied to her father and told him that her husband had divorced her, or even that her husband HAD divorced her and changed his mind. The father seems to be trying to buy her time when her husband arrives. Her father seems to be trying to keep her sheltered. That’s notable.

I don’t know what it would take for a woman, a concubine, to leave her husband at that time. It seems likely that many concubines were raped and abused, particularly since most women got no choice in their marriages. It seems fair to assume she was being abused, yet most women accepted the social norms that kept them in place and didn’t leave to try to stop it. The biggest question is why this woman was so brave! She left. And it seems like it almost works, but eventually he decides he wants her back. This whole things feels like the cycle of abuse. Likely the motivation for this woman to leave was that the last incident of abuse was so terrible that the next one was going to be deadly. (Terrifying how powerful the norms were that only she is said to leave.)

Trible points out that in Hebrew the woman’s “master” (her word) is said to come after her to “speak to her heart, to bring her back.”⁴This, too, is part of a cycle of abuse. The text never says he actually does so, but the speaking kindly after abuse is part of the cycle. When the husband/master gets to his concubine’s father’s house, he seems open to flattery and being treated well. The woman’s father is able to keep them for several days, I suspect at great expense. If her father had been wealthy, she would not have been a concubine. Yet the food and wine flow freely, and the husband/master struggles to leave the comfortable living.

Finally he breaks free, but does so too late to complete the journey in one day. This seems like a good point to acknowledge that some parts of this story are mean to villify King Saul. This is yet another piece of “David is God’s choosen King” propaganda. The strongest theme in the book of Judges is that the people do evil things without a King, and they need a King. However, multiple parts of this story connect King Saul to the terror and evil of this story: he is said to be from the Tribe whose lands it happens on, his capital is in the city it happens in, a village named later is also relevant in his leadership. Some of this story is anti-Saul propaganda, but it isn’t at all clear which parts. I’m choosing to assume that the propaganda is ONLY in connecting Saul to the story, because I find the story uncomfortably plausible.

The man, his servant, his donkeys, and his concubine arrive in the Benjaminite village of Gibeah rather late and no one invited them in to their homes. This is already evil in the eyes of people for whom hospitality was the highest form of morality. Finally, another outsider, an older man, acknowledges them and the two men talk. Terrifying, as Trible points out, the husband/master “refers to his own concubine as the old man’s property, thereby offering her as bait”.⁵ Once they are in, the story starts to sound strikingly like the story of Sodom in Genesis 19. They eat, drink, and are merry until an angry male mob appears at the door and demands the opportunity to rape the newcomer. It continues with the resonance of Genesis 19. The host offers women instead. In Genesis it was two virgin daughters, here it is one virgin daughter and the concubine. The host negotiates, and it is terrifying. Trible writes:

“No restrictions whatsoever does this lord place upon the use of the two women. Instead he gives the wicked men a license to rape them. His final words of negative command emphasize again the point of it all. ‘But to this man do not do this vial thing.’ If done to a man, such an act is a vile thing; if done to women it is ‘the good’ in the eyes of men. Thus the old man mediates between males to give each side what it wants. No male is to be violated. All males, even wicked ones, are to be granted their wishes. Conflict among them can be solved with the sacrifice of females.”⁶

In Genesis, the messengers of God intervene and no one is harmed. In Johnathan Kirsh’s book The Harlot at the Side of the Road, he writes, “From what we recall about the intervention of the angels in Sodom, we do not really expect the young women in Gibeah to be cast into the arms of the mob – something, angelic or human, will spare them at the very last moment.”⁷ Nothing does.

Instead, the husband/master seizes the concubine and throws her out to the men who rape and torture her until sunrise. As light dawns she summons all of her remaining strength to find her way back to the home where her husband/master was, and fell on the threshold of the home. The story indicates he slept just fine, and when he woke up he decided to go on his way. He seems a bit annoyed to find her blocking his way on the doorstep, but he doesn’t let it slow him down. To this woman who he had pushed out the door, who fought her way back after an unspeakably terrible night, he says, “Get up, we are going.” There is no answer. The text seems intentionally vague about when she dies. Trible says, “Her silence, be it exhaustion or death, deters the master not at all.”⁸ Her death may be after she gets to the threshold. It may be on the journey. It may not be until he takes his knife to cut her into pieces. At the end of this harrowing story, she is dead. It seems to me that if she hadn’t left, this would have been her fate. In leaving she gained herself months of freedom from abuse and hope. Her husband/master was going to kill her. As it happened, he used her to protect himself, nonchalantly. That protection she offered him either killed her, or he did anyway in the end. Their reunion was only a source of violence and terror for her.

Afterward he sends out the pieces of her body to the 12 tribes and call them together to tell his story, but he tells it quite differently than Judges 19 does. When he tells it, he looks better. In both his telling and the responses of the tribes, it is clear that the objections are to: the lack of hospitality, the threat to the man’s well-being, and his loss of property with what was done to the concubine. The horror and the response in the text are not because of what SHE lived through. (Mine is.) In fact, the next two chapters continue the story with civil war, massacre, and at least 600 more women being raped. Still, the narrator remains unconcerned about the women.

The story says that when her body is sent out the Israelites are instructed to “consider, take counsel, and speak out.” Trible responds, “’Direct your heart to her, take counsel, and speak.’ From their ancient setting, these imperatives move into the present, challenging us to answer anew. … Truly, to speak for this woman is to interpret against the narrator, plot, other characters, and the biblical tradition because they have shown her neither compassion nor attention.”⁹

Another feminist author writes, “The ideologies expressed through these [stories] are both degrading and deadly for women.”¹⁰ This is the problem. If this story had happened once, it would be enough to be an atrocity. However, this story is common enough. According to research done by the Center for Disease Control, “Intimate partner contact sexual violence, physical violence, and/ or stalking was experienced by 37.3% of U.S. women during their lifetime…and 30.9% of U.S. Men.”¹¹ At its extreme, it is as deadly as this story.

This man used his partner’s body for his own protection. It seems almost certain there had been previous violence toward her, and the way he treats her during and after this episode is a further experience of abuse and violence. While he didn’t get financial gain from it, only protect, I think it is fair to say that this man sexually trafficked his concubine. He used the power he had over her and her body for his well-being.

Sexual trafficking hasn’t stopped since those ancient times. According to The Atlantic, sexual trafficking today is a business worth $150 billion worldwide, and most of those who are trafficked are minors.¹² Worse yet, the laws and the ways they’re implemented make those who are trafficked more vulnerable to arrest than those who traffick them.

This is a modern story set in a far away time. This text of terror to this one nameless wordless woman is a terrifyingly common and universal story. And, to the depth of my being, I believe that God is horrified. And when God is horrified, God’s people are being called to change horrible realities. While my heart is with this nameless heroine, much of my curiosity focuses on her husband. Like many people who are human trafficked, she used all the power she had to get free and the system pulled her back in. I want to know why her husband so deeply devalued her, and what was so broken in him!

Similarly, I want to know what would have stopped that mob in Gibeah from wanting to rape? In today’s terms, what would stop adult men (it is nearly always men, but not always always men) from paying money to rape children? I don’t entirely know, despite pontificating about this for most of a year. If we want a final word other than violence, these are the things I know: taking women’s points of view in stories helps us understand their experiences and moves us toward gender equality; cultures that have more respect for woman and greater gender equality have fewer instances of intimate partner violence and rape; talking about texts of terror and horrifying realities is imperative if we want to be part of changing those realities.

This sermon series has been LONG. I think many of us have been tired of it at points, and I don’t mind if you celebrate its end. This feels like an odd text to end with, but I’m still trying to respond to Pete Huston asking about the women whose stories aren’t told. Those women are all too often reflected in this nameless and wordless woman’s story. They are all a call to action for us, a reminder that while it may get annoying to talk about women, sexism, and misogyny for a WHOLE YEAR, taking up our part in addressing and working toward ending such injustices necessitates that we talk about and acknowledge them.

Over this year, it has been through taking the points of view of biblical characters that we have been trained and conditioned not to notice, that we have have been able to see and learn so much from stories we thought we knew! For me it been a transformational opportunity to hear the Bible anew, and to finally meet heroines who have been hiding in plain site all along. I hope transformation will stay, even as we leave the sermon series behind.

There is, of course, plenty of work still to be done in relation to the injustices created by sexism, misogyny and patriarchy, and it still very much matters. May God guide us all to do the work. Amen

1Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1984) 65.

2Trible, 87.

3Trible, 66.

4Trible, 67.

5Trible, 72.

6Trible, 74

7Jonathan Kirsch, The Harlot By the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible (Ballantine Books: New York, 1997) 244.

8Trible, 79.

9Trible, 86.

10Kirsch quoting Tapp, 253.

11Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey 2010-2012 State Report tps://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/NISVS-StateReportBook.pdf

12Pricilla Alvarez, “When Sex Trafficking Goes Unnoticed in America” in The Atlantic (Feb. 23, 2016) found at https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/02/how-sex-trafficking-goes-unnoticed-in-america/470166/ on September 14, 2017. Statistic comes from International Labour Organization http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_243201/lang–en/index.htm

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

September 17. 2017

Sermons

“Shouting Stones” based on Psalm 118:1-2, 19-19; Luke 19:28-40

March 20, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I heard a story once of a United Methodist Church invited to be a part of a local Saint Patrick’s Day parade. It was a small church, they didn’t feel like they make much of a difference, but they were invited and they went! A few weeks ahead of time they’d left fliers along the parade route letting residents know that they’d be collecting underwear and socks for kids as they paraded. When the day came it was a bit cold and definitely cloudy. They were near the end of the parade, and not all of them wanted to go after all. But they did it anyway.

The parade route wound through a residential area and when the church group passed by (complete with a BIG sign), residents would yell after them “hey! Wait! I’ve got something for you!” and they’d watch as people ran into their houses and ran back out with the gifts for children. It was amazing, as not all of the residents seemed to have much to share.

Near the end of the route, standing in front of a gas station, came a young boy carrying as many cans of soup as he could hold. He stuck them in the arms of the ones closest to him and said, “These are for the hungry children!” The church didn’t correct him, they took the gift and added it to their pile.

Afterward, they reflected on their experience and realized that most of the people on that route weren’t church goers, didn’t have much to spare, and they might have though wouldn’t care about kids needing new socks … and yet they RAN to give their gifts! They didn’t want to be left behind. They -and that one young boy with the soup especially – CARED and they had gifts they wanted to offer. The church had made it possible for the people to give gifts they wanted to give!

In so many ways, that Saint Patrick’s Day parade embodies the spirit of Palm Sunday!

Now, Jesus wasn’t the only one going into Jerusalem around that time. The Passover was a holy celebration, and many pilgrims made their way to Jerusalem to celebrate it. The city got 5 times bigger at Passover with so many people coming in. In fact, that’s the reason that Pilate, as the Roman appointed governor came into the city at Passover. They were worried that with all those people together celebrating the Passover things might get unruly.

As a reminder, the Jewish holiday of Passover remembers God’s saving actions in freeing the Israelites from their oppressors in Egypt. So, a whole bunch of Israelites oppressed by the Roman Empire were gathering together in their former capital to celebrate God’s actions to free them from oppression, and it made their current oppressors nervous.

That’s why Pilate came in every year. It was a good time to have some extra Roman military power, to remind the people that they would not stand for a revolt or any sort of rebellion. Pilate came in with all the flash and glory of the Empire – showing of the Empire’s power and threatening anyone who would deny the Empire the right to rule Israel. He came in from the coast – from the west, riding a horse, with drums and golden eagle flags and flash and power.

Jesus came in from the East. He came riding on the donkey – fulfilling a Jewish prophesy about God’s appointed King who would free them from oppression. That is, Zechariah 9:9b, “Behold, your king is coming to you;

righteous and having salvation is he,

humble and mounted on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

Riding a donkey was also the way that King Solomon entered when he became king. In fact, I’ve heard it suggested in that in the ancient Middle East Kings rode horses to war, but rode donkeys when they came in peace.¹ Some of the people were at the Western Gate greeting the power of the Empire. Some of the people were parading with Jesus toward the Eastern gate. Most of them were people without any hope of access to power or money through the economic system that existed within the Roman Empire. Yet, they had hope that God’s actions through Jesus might make a difference for them.

They were excited and hopeful, and they were yelling. The Gospel says they were yelling, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!“ To our ears that may sound pretty standard. It certainly excesses exuberance, but it also just sounds like…. the Bible. So, if you aren’t paying attention to it, you might not notice that what they were saying was sedition!²

Israel was a part of the Roman Empire. Therefore, Caesar was the King – God was not, and Jesus was not. Rome ruled Israel, God did not.

Jesus was riding a donkey, which was the way that kings entered Jerusalem. He had a crowd around him supporting him. They were waving Palm branches, which were essentially the national flag of Israel, and they were proclaiming LOUDLY that Jesus was the king – and the one appointed by God. These were words and actions of a rebellion against the Empire – at exactly the same time that the army was coming into the city to stop rebellions.

There were some who tried to silence the crowds – to warn them of what would happen if the Roman Empire found out that people were yelling such things. But Jesus responds that they can’t be silenced. He suggests that the movement has begun and it is unstoppable. He uses the metaphor that if the people were silenced the stones would start shouting. As a child I took that literally, but these days I tend to think it means that the energy and hope of the movement couldn’t be silenced.

Jesus would end up dead by the end of the week, killed for leading a VIOLENT revolt against the Empire. Of course, it wasn’t violent, but it was a revolt. They thought that if they killed him, the movement would stop. We today are the proof that the stones would shout out – the movement can’t be silenced.

It is like the St. Patty’s day parade and the people running from their homes with their hands full of underwear. You’d think they didn’t have anything to give, but it didn’t stop them from giving it! You’d think the Israelite peasants would be too scared to rebel, but they were unstoppable. You’d think the movement started by a backwater Jew in an an Empire from 2000 years ago would have stopped by now, but it hasn’t. The stones still cry out.

For more than a year now I’ve been working with the Love Your Neighbor Coalition in preparation for General Conference in May. As a person who has studied math, and a person paying attention to demographics in The United Methodist Church I have a lot of clarity about what to expect from General Conference: a whole lot of pain and a hard shift towards a more conservative church. The question is how conservative it will become. There have been a lot of times when I’ve wondered why I’m doing progressive organizing in a church where putting our stamp of approval on a piece of legislation almost guarantees that it won’t pass. There have been plenty of times since my first trip to General Conference in 2004 where I have wondered why I stay in this denomination that does such great harm to my sisters and brothers in faith who are lesbian, gay, and bisexual.

I don’t think the people who waved palm branches and shouted, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” were stupid. They knew for sure that it was an act of rebellion, they knew it was seriously dangerous for them and for Jesus, and I suspect they knew that it was REALLY REALLY unlikely that Jesus would live to be king. I can’t be sure what any of them thought, but the Gospels themselves make it clear that Jesus knew the actions of Palm Sunday would get him killed, and I suspect most of the participants did too.

So why did they do it? They were desperate and there was very little reason to have hope outside of the Jesus movement. Peasants were dying young after living lives of hard labor and undernourishment. There wasn’t any reason to believe that would change on its own. Jesus brought hope. He brought a message that was different: showing people ways to work together to have enough, suggesting that the values of the world were all messed up, seeing and caring about women, children, people who were ill or injured, and people living in poverty. Jesus was the living reminder that God still cared, that steadfast love endures forever. They voted for that with their lives and their livelihoods. The cloaks they spread were often the only thing keeping them alive at night, protecting them from the desert night’s chill, and they choose to lay their cloaks before Jesus just like they choose to shout the words that could get them all killed.

They knew they might all die, and it was worth it anyway to have a reason to hope in God.

That sure makes General Conference seem less important! But truth be told, as much as I know that General Conference will be a disaster from a progressive perspective, I have a tiny bit of hope. There are some good things that might happen: legislation written by UM clergy with disabilities to expand the denomination’s care for people with disabilities will likely pass! The work done by Fossil Free UMC to get the denomination’s resources out of fossil fuels might pass and similar work done to get resources out of companies that support the occupation of Palestine might too. (And since our pension plan is worth ~$21 billion, what we do with our investments MATTERS.) And maybe, just maybe, even though it is a long shot, we might pass the legislation that creates global equity in The United Methodist Church and makes us true sisters and brothers with United Methodists outside of the United States.

Most of the injustices of the church will stand, I suspect there will be MORE injustice when we’re done with General Conference then there are now, and yet I’m going to go and work on organizing the progressive voice because I believe that calling for justice in the church and the world is the work of God. And maybe, just maybe, the Spirit will find a way to bring more good than bad out of it all. God has done weirder things already, even if it seems statistically unlikely to me!

Those Palm Sunday crowds took risks for the sake of hope.

They paid attention to what God was up to, even when chances were very slim that God’s loving-kindness and justice would end up in charge. They celebrated God, and they celebrated hope, and they came together cheering for possibility – even though it was dangerous to their LIVES.

They took risks for the sake of hope.

May we do the same.

Amen

___

1 http://www.gotquestions.org/king-ride-donkey.html

2The gist of this whole sermon comes from Marcus Borg and John Dominc Crossan’s book “The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem” (Harper Collins: 2006). This is one of the most important books I’ve read in terms of reframing my understanding of Palm Sunday, and a whole lot of other things.

–

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

March 20, 2016