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Sermons

“My Delight Is in Her” based on Isaiah 62:1-5 and…

  • January 17, 2016February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

This strange story, unique to the Gospel of John, is traditionally connected with the Epiphany. It is only relatively recently that it got pushed out the second Sunday after the Epiphany, and is now only included every three years. I’m grateful that this is not a text that comes up every year. It is a story that leads to a whole lot more questions than answers.

Perhaps you didn’t come up with that many questions. Allow me to share with you some of the questions I have about this strange story:

  1. Why were the disciples invited to this wedding? They’ve been “the disciples” for 1-2 days.
  2. Why did Mary ignore Jesus’s rejection of her request?
  3. Why did Jesus do what he tells his mother he won’t do?
  4. Why was Mary sticking her nose into this wine issue anyway?
  5. Who was getting married?
  6. Why did they have 6 ritual cleansing pots at their house? Why were they empty?
  7. How did they fill the pots? Was it from a well? How far away was it and how long did it take?
  8. We know that people drank wine instead of water because of disease at that time, was “really good wine” watered down to 30% potency like the rest of it?

But more so than any of these, the big question is:

WHY ON EARTH IS THIS PRESENTED AS THE FIRST MIRACLE IN JOHN?

Some commentators do some beautiful work trying to justify this story. Before we even get started on that, let me articulate my biggest issue with preaching about “The First Miracle”: addictions exist, they’re real, and alcoholism is a big deal. It is hard to talk about this passage without waxing poetic about “good wine” and yet it is hard to wax poetic about “good wine” while being truly pastoral to people struck with the disease of alcoholism.

I think that is very important to remember that without water purification technology, in settled communities in the ancient world, no one drank water. People drank wine because the fermentation killed the bacteria that would otherwise kill them – although they didn’t know that. They just knew that they died from water and not from wine. Furthermore, people seemed to enjoy drinking. It shows up early and often in the Bible, and there isn’t condemnation of it. That’s cool, and sometimes fun, for those who don’t have drinking problems. Its hard for those who do. Perhaps it is useful to remember that just as the ancient people didn’t know about bacteria, they didn’t know about alcoholism. Therefore, the Bible seems to assume that wine is equally good for everyone. We know it isn’t.

OK, so now that we acknowledged all that, one commentator that I read this week talked about how great it is that Jesus’s first miracle was for the sake of joy and fun. He wrote, “Sometimes the church has forgotten that our Lord once attended a wedding feast and said yes to gladness and joy.”1 He continued on describing “a God who loves to hear the laugher of people.”2 I like this take on the miracle. I think it has some validity. I’ve been around lots of churches, and church people, who take the entire enterprise way too seriously. The whole idea of connecting to a God of love, and communing with God’s beloved people is that it is supposed to be awesome. There is goodness in God, in worship, in prayer, in study, in sharing God’s love in the world. It is FUN. If you don’t believe me, stay for communion. Communities that don’t enjoy each other and have fun are missing something really important about life with God. This isn’t a competition about who can sacrifice the most. This is about sharing and enjoying life! The presentation of Jesus as someone who cared enough about parties to make sure that they kept having the wine flowing surely does remind us that life with God is GOOD.

There are many reasons to believe that Jesus was a bit of a party-boy. There are lots of passages in the Bible that suggest that God wants us to live life, and live it abundantly, and ENJOY the time we have on this beautiful planet. However, they live in completion with the reminder that we’re supposed to enjoy life AND make sure that others get to as well.

This story, taken seriously, challenges us to receive and then share this extravagant generosity and grace. If we consider God to be interested in people enjoying each other at good parties, it follows that understand a God who really cares about the joy of life. Then we get to wonder about how well we’re receiving it: God who is generous and loving and wants us to enjoy the gift of life offers us opportunities for love, connection, play, and laughter. Sometimes we’re “too busy” or “too serious” to take them. We might want to rethink priorities! Furthermore, this is a great set up to consider the Genesis line “blessed to be a blessing.” How can we follow the example of Jesus in offering extravagant generosity and opportunities for great joy to others? When are we giving things to others for the pure joy of watching their disbelief? This angle on the story is productive and interesting, but it doesn’t really explain why this story comes FIRST.

Many have suggested that this is a post-Easter perspective of Jesus. That’s viable, since John was the last of the gospels to be written, this story only shows up in John, and it has the capacity to be understood has highly metaphorical. John is into poetry. So, if John were working with a story to try to explain Jesus, this could sound like something he might create. From that perspective, we would do well to take note that there are two highly visible, detailed miracles in John. One is this one, and the other is the feeding of the 5000. That one is pretty excessive as well. If the two most visible miracles about about WINE and BREAD, it might be reasonable to assume that there is an intentional theme of Communion underlying them.

Jesus provides wine in radical abundance. Jesus feeds all who come to him. Yeah. That works. It still doesn’t explain why this story comes FIRST, in fact, it would work better right after the feeding, right??

This week my reading pointed me to two verses in the minor prophet section of the Hebrew Bible. The verses are Amos 9:13 and Joel 3:18 and they read:

The time is surely coming, says the Lord,
  when the one who ploughs shall overtake the one who reaps,
  and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed;
the mountains shall drip sweet wine,
  and all the hills shall flow with it. (Amos 9:13)

On that day
the mountains shall drip sweet wine,
  the hills shall flow with milk,
and all the stream beds of Judah
  shall flow with water;
a fountain shall come forth from the house of the Lord
  and water the Wadi Shittim. (Joel 3:18)

That is, in the Hebrew Bible, “an abundance of good wine is an eschatological symbol, a sign of the joyous arrival of God’s new age.”3 I suspect that THIS is the most likely reason for the inclusion of this “first miracle” story in the Gospel of John. John doesn’t have a birth narrative. He starts with the poetry about the Word becoming flesh, transitions to talking about John the Baptist, and then jumps right into Jesus calling the disciples.

This story comes next. Jesus calls a bunch of disciples one day, he calls a bunch more the next day, and on the third day (yes, people suspect that’s intentional too), Jesus and the disciples go to this wedding. It is, at least as told in John, the very first thing they do as Jesus’s disciples. And then Jesus preforms a miracle that is a sign of the joyous arrival of God’s new age. It is “a rich symbol in the biblical tradition inferring prosperity, abundance, good times; the wine will overflow the water pots.”4 The abundance of God’s goodness is expressed in the abundance of the wine. The new age begins here, and it is declared in a way that the ancients can understand. (Apparently, many ancients – not just the Jewish ones. The same commentator wrote, “A miraculous supply of wine as a sign of the presence of a god is a common motif in Greek folklore.”5 She warns us not to take this too seriously. I find it worth mentioning.)

I’m so grateful for this connection to the symbolism that the first hearers of this story would have understood. It makes a lot of sense if this is a symbol that would have been understood as the declaration of a new age of God’s work in the world. In fact, this functions much like Matthew and Luke’s Christmas stories function in their gospels.

Now, to take a step further backward, the setting of this narrative at a wedding is likely not trivial either. The metaphor of marriage as a way of understanding God’s relationship to Israel was longstanding. The prophets played with it extensively. Our Hebrew Bible passage draws the prior narratives to bring a new one to light. The idea of God and Israel as married was old. The prophets who spoke of the coming exile talked about God’s right to divorce Israel. The prophets of the exile talked about God’s abandonment of God’s wife Israel. And then, in this passage, God restores Israel to her status as wife. Dr. Rick Nutt, chair of the department of Religion and Philosophy at Muskingum University in Ohio writes:

“God’s liberating action grows out of God’s covenant promise to Israel – for marriage always evokes ideas of covenant. The gods of the ancient world were often capricious, one could not know when favor or disfavor might be forthcoming. YHWH, on the other hand, imposed limits on God’s freedom to exercise power. In the covenant, God promised steadfast love – hesed – as the basis of the relationship with the people, and in return the people promised to love and serve God. Judgement may come, but it will always be on the basis of the covenant – and because of the covenant, restoration will always follow. Liberation renews Israel’s relationship with God to wholeness, because God will be true to covenant.”6

I believe that the writer of the Gospel of John was a smart man, well versed in the scriptures of his day. He knew what he was doing, when placing this story at a wedding feast. He was intentionally invoking the concept of God as a loving spouse, even if only as a underlying theme. The words “My Delight is in Her” from Isaiah end up as one of the backgrounds that set the scene for Jesus. The writer was intentionally developing the idea of wine as a symbol of life, and of God’s presence, and of a new age in the history of God’s work among the people. The incredible excess of the story: the presence of SIX empty water jars, their large size, the water filled to the brim and nearly over flowing, and the goodness of the wine serve as symbols of the abundance of God’s love – hesed– in this new age.

There are still plenty of questions, but this story is not accidental. Thanks be to God for reminders of life, abundance, and goodness.  May we learn to live fully into life, abundance, and goodness. Amen

___

Sermon Talkback Questions

  1. What are your questions about this passage?
  2. Which interpretation was most interesting to you?
  3. What are the problems, and powers, of the metaphor of marriage for God and “the people”?
  4. What else can wine symbolize?
  5. In what ways did Jesus usher in a “new age”? In what ways are we still waiting for one?
  6. What is your general opinion of the Gospel of John?
  7. What might be good alternatives to discussing the rich wonder of WINE?
  8. What do you take from this passage today?

—

1Robert B. Brearley, “Pastoral Perspective on John 2:1-11” 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 262.

2Ibid.

3Gail O’Day, “John” in New Interpreter’s Study Bible, vol. 9 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), 538

4Linda McKinnish Bridges, “Exegetical Perspective on John 2:1-11” 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 265.

5Ibid

6Rick Nutt, “Theological Perspective on Isaiah 61:1-5” 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 246.

–

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

January 17, 2016

Sermons

“A Do’” based on Isaiah 43:1-7 and Luke 3:15-22

  • January 10, 2016February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

A
long time ago, before I had realized the wisdom of reading novellas
to children for Children’s Time, I had prepared a Children’s Time on
baptism.  This was when I was serving the Morris United Methodist
Church, and it turned out we had a baptism that day.  When Children’s
Time began there were two children present: an infant and a two year
old.  This wasn’t going to make my work particularly easy.  

At
the Morris United Methodist Church, they do baptisms in the back of
the sanctuary.  The font is in the center of aisle right in the back,
against the wall.  A baptismal banner hangs above it.  They do this
on purpose.  Their idea is that baptism is the entrance to the church
family, so it makes sense to have it in the area they enter from.
When the time in the service came to do baptisms everyone would stand
up and turn to watch.  That is, everyone who could.  There was one
man in the church who couldn’t stand: the pastor emeritus who was in
a wheelchair.  The space where the pew had been cut out was all the
way in the back row, so he just got turned around in his wheelchair.
As time when on, we got smart, and when babies were being baptized I
would put them in his arms while I baptized them so we got to do it
together.  

In
that church I was responsible for the creation of the bulletin (which
meant that there was a game entitled “who can find one of Sara’s
typos first”) and I would pick images for the font cover of the
bulletin.  That week I’d taken a picture of the front doors of the
church and made it the image on the cover of the bulletin.  As
planned, I asked the kids what was on the cover of the bulletin.  The
two year old cheerfully responded, “a do’”.  At this point, I was
in trouble.  The response “a do’” was entirely correct, but I
couldn’t do much more with it.  Somehow, and it felt as amazing then
as it does now in telling it, at that point a 10 year old showed up
and joined children’s time.   So I asked, “why would I have a
picture of doors on the cover of the bulletin.”  The 10 old rolled
his eyes at the stupidness of my question and responded, “Because
you are doing a baptism today, and those are the church doors, and
baptism is an entrance to the church family like the doors are the
entrance to the church.”  The adults responded with an enthusiastic
“oh!” and accused me of prepping the kid ahead of time.  (I
didn’t!  I swear.  He was just that smart.  And he thought it was so
obvious as to be beneath him.)

I’ve
always appreciated the wisdom of the Morris United Methodist Church,
and their understanding of baptism as an entrance.  There are many
good ways to think of baptism, and that’s certainly one of them.
Martin Luther King Jr. was known to speak of the Beloved Community,
an idea that sounds like another name for the kin-dom of God to me.
According to the King Center,

“For
Dr. King, The Beloved Community was not a lofty utopian goal to be
confused with the rapturous image of the Peaceable Kingdom, in which
lions and lambs coexist in idyllic harmony. Rather, The Beloved
Community was for him a realistic, achievable goal that could be
attained by a critical mass of people committed to and trained in the
philosophy and methods of nonviolence.

Dr.
King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people
can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community,
poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because
international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism
and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be
replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In
the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by
peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries,
instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and
hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military
conflict.”1

Rev.
Dr. King’s wording is a smooth fit with the gospel lesson.  In Luke
the Divine message doesn’t show up until after Jesus has been
baptized and is praying.  The language is similar in each of the
gospels, the Divine message says, “You
are my Child, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.“ (Luke
3:22b, NRSV)  Luke is one one of the gospel writers to suggest that
Jesus had to wait in line like the rest of the crowd to be baptized.
He was one of many.

It
has always seemed to me that the words of that came at Jesus’ baptism
are the words intended for every baptism.  “This is my Child, the
Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  It suggests that each
baptized person has been named as God’s beloved in that experience,
and that the community of baptized people IS the Beloved Community.
Of course, to fit King’s vision we need more training in nonviolence
and peaceful conflict-resolution, but if you keep paying attention to
the Children’s Time novella, that may count!

Now,
baptism is a sacrament.  Most people agree that a sacrament is an
outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.  Or, a
“sign-act” which is an action that also has words to go along
with it.  The other sacrament that we acknowledge as United
Methodists is communion.  I think it is important to note that God’s
love is available to us at all times in our lives.  The sacraments
are simply times when it is easier for us to remember that!  God
doesn’t change.  We are more attentive to God in those moments.

We
accept baptism and communion as sacraments because the Bible tells us
that Jesus participated in them and instructed other to do so a well!
In baptism, the grace that is offered is the
initiating act of a covenant.  Baptism is the covenantal act of
acknowledging the love of God and the way that it is expressed by
family, sponsors, clergy, and church community.  The acceptance of
the covenant is an act of inclusion into the Church, the community
that is aware of God’s grace.  The candidate for baptism has two
primary responsibilities.  The first is to be open to the experience
of being loved, both in the ritual of baptism throughout the rest of
life.  The second is to complete the covenant, to seek always to love
God and love neighbors as the response to God’s love.

God’s
grace is available at all times, and thus is available at baptism;
the ritual cannot exist without God’s grace.  Baptism is a public
act of accepting God’s love, but God’s love exists for each
person with or without baptism.  The
covenant is eternal, even if the person ignores it.  God does not
stop loving.  The water is symbolic, and as such its efficacy is not
based on its quantity.  That is a baptism is real whether the water
is poured or sprinkled over a person OR they are dunked!

I
haven’t ever done a baptism where a person is dunked, although I was
trained in it in seminary.  I suspect that symbolism of new life is
more tangible in those baptisms.  When I was in college one of the
churches in town left the doors to its sanctuary open at all times.
I would often go there to pray, and to ponder.  The entrance to that
sanctuary was though two sets of solid wooden doors.  The first set
connected the church to outside.  The second set connected the
entrance to the sanctuary.  The space between them was pretty small,
and there were no windows or lights.  (This was in New Hampshire, I’m
pretty sure the design was intended to keep the cold out.)  I usually
paused in that space between the sets of doors.  I didn’t yet know
the word “liminal,” but I  knew that I liked the in-betweenness
of that space.  Between the sets of doors I was not in the outside
world, nor was I in the sanctuary.  I was in the middle, in nowhere.
Young adulthood often felt disorienting, and being in a physical
space that reflected that no-whereness brought it some peace.

I
suspect that for those who undergo full immersion baptism, the moment
under the water might be the the space between the doors.  The person
is, symbolically, dead to their old life and yet not yet alive in
their new one.  I’ve worried, at times, about the pressure a person
might feel under if they understood baptism that way.  What happens
the first time that they are cranky, or tempted, or mean!  Do they
worry that the baptism didn’t work?  Do they feel unworthy?

I
hope that baptism is a reminder that we are Beloved, and that when we
participate in the baptisms of others we remember the covenant also
applies to us!  God’s grace is exceptionally powerful stuff.  It
counters any argument that suggests that we are not enough, that we
have to work harder or have more in order to be sufficient.  It
reminds us that our bodies, minds, emotions, and spirits are beloved
JUST AS THEY ARE, and that we need not earn our way into God’s favor.

It
does occur to me at times that believing in God’s grace is much more
radical than simply believing in God.  As odds would have it, I
figure that God’s existence is a 50/50.  It can’t be proven either
way.  (Or, perhaps, the existence of God is equivalent to Schroeder’s
cat.  On a strictly logical level, God both is and isn’t!  Please
take that idea lightly.)  On the other hand, the premise that the God
who exists is benevolent, that the One who Created cares, that the
Energy and Connector of All that Is is by nature Grace – all of
that is much less logical.  

Anyone
looking at the injustices and evils of the world could easily
conclude that a Higher Power simply doesn’t care.  Because, they
would conclude, if a Higher Power exists AND cares, then why are
there such awful realities?  Therefore, a logical person might
conclude, one of 3 things must be true:

God
doesn’t exist.

God
doesn’t care.

God
doesn’t have the power to change things.

To
be fair, I’ve heard people suggest that there is a 4th
option, that God’s ways are not like our ways and that what we see as
injustice is OK with God, but that’s such a lousy argument that I
refuse to work with it.

My
training has been in a theology that turns to #3, “God doesn’t have
the power to change things.”  Process theology argues over whether
God CAN’T interfere with human will or simply WON’T, but admits that
if you want to understand God as existing and loving, you are forced
by logic to concede that God does not stop us from doing each other
harm.  Instead, Process Theology says, God works with all of us all
the time.  God “whispers” to us suggestions of how we might act
in the most loving of ways.  God works with us where we are and
offers us the possibility of turning in good directions.  However, we
are truly free to ignore God’s whispers, hopes, and suggestions and
do the opposite.  Whether this is because God simply refuses to treat
us as slaves or because creation itself won’t allow the violation of
imposed will, we are free to do good and we are free to do harm, and
we do both.

And
yet, we are Beloved.  We are Beloved when we live out God’s love to
the fullest and share love with all we meet.  We are Beloved when we
are simply awful, and do profound and lasting damage to others.
God’s love comes from God’s nature, not from our earning it.  It may
not be logical, the way we see things.  God’s existence is fair game.
God’s GRACE, God’s LOVE, God’s desire for goodness isn’t something
we can derive from pure logic.  We find it scripture.  We hear about
in tradition and from those we know in the Body of Christ.  We can
experience it in our bodies, and we can learn about it through a
variety of fields of research if we look with the right lenses.  But
it is a matter of faith to believe in a God of love.

And
yet, the do’ is open to all.

Thanks
be to God.  Amen

1http://www.thekingcenter.org/king-philosophy#sub4

Sermons

Untitled

  • January 3, 2016February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

While Luke places the announcement of the birth of Jesus in the hills around Bethlehem with the lowly shepherds, Matthew brings in the wise men from the east. It works pretty well both thematically and as foreshadowing. Matthew ends with “the great commissioning” telling the disciples go “go and make disciples of all nations.” The premise here is that the those with authority within the religious structure misread what is going on in their midst, and yet those who are paying attention – even those from outside of Judaism – are able to see. Jesus’s life was more expansive than anyone could have dreamed, and Matthew sets up this truth from the very beginning.

The magi also play an interesting role in engaging with the political power of the day – dropping by on King Herod and raising his fears about remaining “the king of the Jews.” In Matthew, this is the title under which Jesus is crucified. The words of the magi are terrifying to King Herod. They represent his worst fears, even the rumor of such a thing as what they are saying – that a new King of the Jews has been born – could end his rule. Herod plays it wisely, seeking ever more information, and inviting the magi back to tell him what they have found.

The magi “having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod,” go home to “their own country by another road.” All week I’ve been hearing the Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken in my head.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

I first came to know Frost’s poem when I was a teenager at Sky Lake’s music camp and we sang Randall Thomas’ arrangement of it. The words were engraved in my mind at that point, and the beauty of the music and the words have stayed with me. Scholars debate about whether or not Frost’s poem is satirical, and I recognize that it may well be satire, or at least partially self-effacing. The last stanza, starting with “I shall be telling this with a sigh” seems a bit overdramatic not to have SOME irony in it. Yet it also contains some deep truths.

This week, considering the journey home of the magi, their journey kept being informed by “The Road Not Taken.” What would have happened if they had gone back by the same road? How were their lives, and the lives of those around them, changed by their choice to change course? I guess, even more than that, it occurs to me that to take the story seriously to ask how their lives were impacted by their earlier choice to “follow the star.” Their entire journey was “The Road Less Traveled.” They left their country, their homes, their language and customs in order to follow a hunch. Theirs was a unique journey.

The text says that they were overwhelmed with joy when they saw that the star had stopped. It implies that the joy was related to actually getting to see the new-born king of the Jews. The experience seems to have mattered to the magi. While we don’t know much about them, we have heard that they are course-changers. They were willing to travel to follow a hunch, and they were willing to change course on the way home based on another one.

I find myself wondering what happened AFTER this story in their lives. Symbolically, their presence in the Gospel is powerful. They stand in for the importance of Jesus, they foreshadows the breadth of the meaning of his life, they condemn both the political and the religious power structures of the day. But what about THEM?

Now, I’d say that “we don’t know” because the story doesn’t tell us, but even that isn’t entirely true. I think the story of the magi is unlikely to be based in historical fact. However, as John Dominic Crossan is often saying, “Emmaus never happened, Emmaus always happens.” So, let’s go with that. “The Magi never came, the Magi are always arriving AND departing.”

I guess my question, at its core, is: What would it have mattered to magi from the east to see a baby with his mother somewhere in Judea or Galilee? This is, to be frank, not a particularly unusual sight. Most of societies through most of history can offer an opportunity to see a mother with her child. Would it have been special because of the expectations around it? Are we meant to believe it was special because of the parties involved? If so, how would a 18 month old Jesus be different from another 18 month out? (I’m making up months here, we have no idea how long the travel took, but historically it is believed to be more than a year and less than two.)

Actually, I really love that question! What would we expect from a toddling baby who would as a man utter some of the great wisdom of the world? Would he be particularly gregarious? Or rather shy? Would he be absorbing all the information coming at him, or would he be a little bit sleepy at that point in the day? Would he be cranky? Sometimes 18 month olds are cranky. Would he be wandering around, putting everything in sight in his mouth? Would that include the gold, frankincense and myrrh? If we want to think of Jesus as the most perfect human ever to be (and if I had to guess, I’d guess some of you do and some of you don’t), what would that look like in an 18 month old? And furthermore, what does that tell us about what we believe perfection looks like and what we’re trying to be???

These magi met a baby and his mother in some nondescript location. And, for the sake of the story, let’s say that it was an amazing and miraculous experience. I mean, I feel that way about babies EVERY SINGLE TIME, so I can guess that if someone was looking for a miracle and hanging out with a baby, they could leave with the impression they’d had one.

Then what? Were the magi people who tended to travel around the world looking for curious experiences and new wonders? If so, how did they manage to have such expensive gifts to offer? If not, what drew them that time? I think it makes more sense to assume that this was an unusual experience for them. What would their lives have been like afterward? Unlike the disciples, or even the would-be disciples we hear about later in the Gospels who had the chance to talk with Jesus, hear his teachings, experience his healing, and turn around their lives, the magi met a babbling baby.

Did they go home from their journey west and start seeking out the stories of the Jewish people and reading up about their messianic expectations? Did they go home still overwhelmed with joy and wonder, and ponder these things in their hearts like Luke tells us Mary did? Did they go home and eventually forget?

Was it hard to get home after a journey like that, where everything changed, and find that home was still very much the same? Sometimes in the church we talk about mountaintop experiences, moments like the transfiguration where there is clarity and wonder and connection all at once. At the end of the transfiguration, the disciples go back down the mountain. At the end of this time with Jesus, the magi go home.

Coming down from mountaintop experiences for me is usually quiet and sad. Instead of being continually lifted up by the highs I’ve experienced, coming back down after them is jarring and often painful. A friend this year had “post-wedding depression.” All of the hopes and dreams she had, and all of the work she’d gone through (and all of the Pinterest projects she’d completed) gave her life focus and meaning. The day itself was amazing! Everything came into place, everyone was together, and the party went on and on. Even the next day there was brunch and laughter. But after that, there was packing the car, and going home, and unpacking the car and figuring out what to eat for dinner. (The honeymoon did not immediately follow the wedding.)

And it was hard. Her descriptions of the lostness that came after the wedding had such resonance in my life. After intense focus on a project, or after an experience that I’ve been looking forward to for a while, or – let’s be real here – after I finish a book I really really like, I wander around a little bit lost for a while, not quite able to figure out what way to turn or what I’m really wanting to DO next.

If they magi existed, and if they followed an errant star, and if they came to Bethlehem and met Mary and Jesus, and if they were filled with joy and wonder, and warned in a dream to go home by another route – then what happened when they got home? Was it a bit anticlimactic after the journey? Was it a tiny bit boring? What were they going to do NEXT? Did they find themselves wishing they’d gone back to Herod just for the excitement of finding out what would have happened? Did they wander again, following another hunch, soon thereafter, in hopes of finding something meaningful again?

I think perhaps the ebbs and flows of life are meant to include some aimlessness, some post-project depression, some sadness when something is complete and intense focus dissipates. It feels natural. Life isn’t a really really long marathon! There are down times, and in those we are subconsciously deciding on the next course we’ll follow. We don’t thrive with constant intensity (although some of us seek it anyway!) As humans we do best when something REALLY draws us in – and then lets us go so that something else can. We need the thrill of the intensity and the let-down that comes afterward.

Two roads diverge often. We end up at crossroad’s well never get to come back to, regularly. May we be wise enough to stand in them from time to time, even in melancholy, and consider the next stages of our journey. Perhaps we’ll decide to follow another road.

Perhaps it will make a difference. And if not, at least the moment of looking and wondering will serve to steady us on the roads we choose and give us a chance to listen to the whisperings of the Divine. Thanks be to God for that. 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

January 3, 2016

Uncategorized

“It is FINALLY Christmas: Now What?”based on Isaiah 52:7-10 and…

  • December 27, 2015
  • by Administrator

Second
Isaiah is a cheerful writer.  He writes from the exile, to
broken-hearted, broken people.  He speaks words of hope, reminders of
the nature of God, and expectations that healing is possible.
Today’s passage is classic Second Isaiah.  

For
those who have NO CLUE what I’m talking about – Isaiah is a book
with 66 chapters.  Scholars agree that chapters 1-39 reflect one
point of view “First Isaiah”, 40-55 a second “Second Isaiah,”
and 56-66 a third – wait for it – “Third Isaiah.”  First Isaiah
comes before the exile.  Second Isaiah speaks DURING the exile – in
the immediate aftermath.  Third Isaiah has a later voice, debated to
be either near the end of the exile, or post exilic.  For those who
still have no idea what I’m talking about – in 587 BCE the
Babylonian Empire defeated Judea, took the city of Jerusalem,
destroyed it, and force marched its leaders across the desert to
serve as slaves in Babylonia.  70 years later they were freed when
the Persian Empire beat the Babylonian empire and the exiles
RETURNED.  So I’m saying that this cheerful dude was writing after
his city and country had been utterly devastated.

Our
passage today starts with “How beautiful upon the mountains are the
feet of the messenger who brings peace.”  This is not a literal
statement.  In those days important news was “brought by a runner,
an athlete whose marathon commitment to good news drove him across
the arduous mountain, where his whole frame ached from the effort of
bringing good news.  His feet were crusted with callouses and torn by
the rocks and thorns of his course.”1

The
messenger’s feet were NOT pretty.  The feet were ugly.  The news they
brought though, could make even  the ugly feet beautiful.  The
beautification of the feet continues as the message is shared.   God
Reigns, restoration is coming, goodness will return, people will
spontaneously break out in song, God’s comfort will be known, and all
the earth will see the healing power of God.

The
message of Second Isaiah was heartening to its first hearers – they
desperately needed the hope it brought.  The message was obviously
heartening beyond its first hearers, as it made the cut to be a part
of the book of Isaiah.  Furthermore, this text is part of Christmas
every single year in the traditional readings.  (Although not the
most common ones.)  Christianity has claimed this text as a way of
understanding Jesus, and the meaning of his birth.  That implies that
it has significant meaning beyond the original intention.

Second
Isaiah wrote to a displaced, broken hearted, broken people, with
signs of hope.  The concerns of the people were practical.  The
meaning is different when applied to Jesus.  Connected with the
Christmas story, the messenger gets undertones of angelic messengers
– who very well may have beautiful feet for all I know.  Connected
with the birth of Christ, this passage has often been spiritualized,
which I mean in the bad way.  The sort of spiritualization that I’m
referring to takes this passage out of the practical concerns of the
world and into some sort of forgiveness of sins/afterlife concerns.

The
ironic change of the meaning of salvation from being a down to earth
act of liberation from oppressors to an otherworldly acceptance into
heaven really weakens this passage.  As one commentator puts it,
“Among the affirmations [Second Isaiah] offers are: (1) God cares
deeply about this world –
so deeply, in fact, that God intends not rescue us from it but to
redeem this world through us; (2) where we are matters; that is, if
God wants to redeem that
place (Zion/Jerusalem), God wants to redeem this
place.”2
If WE want to take this passage as our own, and as a valid
interpretation of our Christmas narrative, then I think we have to
start there!

Traditional
incarnation theory suggests that God became human in the form of
Jesus in order to redeem the world.  Many of the theologians I like
best are very excited about the incarnation.  For some it is the
centerpiece of their understanding of God.  My New Testament
professor was one of them.  He loved to quote Philippians 1, which
says,

“Christ
Jesus,

who,
though he was in the form of God,
did
not regard equality with God
as
something to be exploited, 
but
emptied himself,
taking
the form of a slave,
being
born in human likeness.”

For
many years, I struggled with incarnation.  It is such a powerful and
meaningful theological idea for MANY people, including most of the
people I look up to theologically.  I never knew why I couldn’t get
excited about it.  I felt like I was missing something.  (Namely, I
felt like I was missing the entire point of Christmas, if not
Christianity.)

My
dear friend Chad is a much more orthodox Christian than I am.  He is
the one who TOLD me why I don’t care.  He said to me one say, “You
are a panentheist, right?”  (A panentheist believes that all that
exists, is within God and yet God is more than all that is.)  
“Yeah,” I responded without understanding.  “Well, then the
incarnation would be sort of redundant to you, wouldn’t it?  I mean
if you already think God is fully present in the world in all times
and places, then Jesus isn’t really different, is he?”  

“OH!”
I responded.  Which cleared things up for me.  I fully support
anyone, including Chad, for whom the traditional understanding of the
incarnation works.  You are in good company.  But I’ve never been
able to wrap my head around
it.  It doesn’t make sense to me to think that Jesus WAS God, at
least not in a unique way.  My favorite succinct summary of Jesus is
Marcus Borg’s, “Jesus was a Jewish mystic.” He goes on to
explain, “My claim that Jesus was a Jewish mystic means Jesus
was one for whom God was an experiential reality. He was one of those
people for whom the sacred was, to use William James’ terms, a
firsthand religious experience rather than a secondhand belief.”3

That
fits what I hear in the Gospels.  Jesus was unusually connected to
the Divine, and he had wisdom that most people lack.  He was faithful
to loving all of God’s children in a particularly unusual way.  He
lived as if he KNEW God.  I’m pretty sure that’s so amazing, and so
exciting, that it is why we still talk about him and his teachings
all these years later.  

In
some ways this gospel  story seems abrupt.  Jesus is born, and then
that’s sort of it.  The passage from Luke today is unique to Luke.
Only Luke and Matthew present Jesus before he was a grown man, and
Matthew has nothing between his birth and his ministry.  Luke has two
stories: the story of the presentation of Jesus at the Temple, during
which two wise old sages proclaim respond to meeting Jesus with
praising God, and this story.  Both present the “holy family” as
particularly devote Jews.  Both conform to common practice of
biographies in that day – including by having the hero show his
precocious talents while still a child.  (Jesus is 12 here.  He was a
“man” at 13.)  This story is the first time that Jesus speaks in
the Gospel of Luke, it serves beautifully to foreshadow Jesus’s
ministry.  The story mostly seems to exist in order to remind us that
Jesus was God’s first and only his parents’ second.  The story
clearly comes from a separate tradition than that of the Bethlehem
birth, as it seems to come as a surprise to his parents that Jesus is
so… different.

The
interesting piece of the story, whether it is intentional or not, is
the expansiveness of it.  There is no boundary around the nuclear
family.  Jesus’s parents did not travel alone on the journey to
Jerusalem.  They were with a large group of friends and family –
that’s how we can presume he was lose-able.  Jesus himself wanders
away from those he knows in order to inquire among the teachers of
the law.  Both the holy family, with their large expansive group of
travelers, and Jesus himself, who drew the circle wider, foreshadow
the welcome that will exist in following Jesus.  The welcome never
ends.

The
ministry of Jesus was decidedly earthly, and practical, much like the
original meaning of the Second Isaiah passage.  Jesus heals broken
bodies.  He worries about food and drink for the people .  He talks
about animals and agriculture. He takes seriously concerns about
taxation.  The sacraments of the church are symbolized with water,
wine, and bread.  The salvation that Isaiah references, that
Christians understand to come through Jesus, is an earthy one.  

The
work of Jesus is to redeem THIS world, and for us, in part, THIS
city.  God’s work of redemption and salvation is also earthy.  As far
as I know, “heaven” isn’t a place in NEED of healing or
redemption.  Peace is needed on EARTH.  Equality is needed on EARTH.
Justice is needed on EARTH.  New policies, procedures and laws that
recognize the value of all human lives are desperately need on EARTH.

No
matter how we understand the birth, Jesus served to remind us of
God’s presence with us on EARTH, and God’s work here to bring hope
and healing.  The work of the followers of the way of Jesus is to
continue his earthy ministry.  May we do so – with the
cheeriness of Second Isaiah himself.  After all, if he could speak
words of hope in a time such as THAT, then we can do so in a time
such as this.  Thanks be to God for hope.  Amen

1Neal
Walls, “Homiletical Perspective on Isaiah 52:7-10” from 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 125-7.

2Stephen
B. Boyd “Theological Perspsective on Isaiah 52:7-10” also in
Feasting on the World Year C Vol 1, page 122.

3Marcus
Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (HarperOne:
1995), page 60.

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady 

Sermons

Christmas Dawn Meditation

  • December 25, 2015February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

I know its early, and I know it is Christmas, so I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to say this, but I’m really sick of this story.  By my rough estimations I’ve read it about 500 times, and maybe 100 of those out-loud.  It isn’t really that good.  Frankly, of the whole story we’re given only 2 verses that really have anything to do with Jesus being born and they’re pretty anticlimactic.     But, again, I know it is early and I know it is Christmas and none of you got out of bed this morning to hear me whine about the Lukan birth narrative.  I’m not sure any of you got out of bed to listen to me do exegesis either, but oh well 😉     As sick as I am of this story, these 14 verses still have surprises left in them.  This year it is the geography that jumped out at me.  It is only in the past few years that I’ve really understood Galilee and Judea.  To be direct about it, Judea, the Southern Kingdom, that came back from exile in 538 BCE was the land of the “Jews.”  That is, the word Jew comes from Judah who was the primary ancestor of the Southern Kingdom.     The Northern Kingdom – Israel – which went into exile first in 722 BCE, never returned.  The “10 lost tribes” did not regain their previous existence as a country.  This tends to become relevant when we’re talking about the Good Samaritan or the Samaritan Woman at the well, because the Samaritans were the hated Northern neighbors of Judea, the place where people who had once been followers of the same God had deviated and intermarried and not got it all WRONG.  

The weird thing is that Galilee is NORTH of Samaria.  So all the things that we say about Samaria should be true of Galilee.  Galilee should be an area of outcasts who don’t follow God correctly, but it isn’t!  The difference was a policital one.  
Judean leaders decided to colonize Galilee as an outpost of Jewish thought and culture, and they had!  The Galilean backwater was an experiment in exporting the “true faith” of the Judeans up into the north.  The three areas were then very different.  Judea with Jerusalem – and Bethlehem – was the center of Jewish life.  Samaria, directly to the north, was distinct enemy territory (which is really dumb since the Empire was the real problem, but that’s how humans work, right?).  To the north of Samaria was Galilee, the backwater colony of Jewish thought and life, a place to go if your family couldn’t make it in Judea.  
Mary and Joseph were from Nazarath, a TINY town in Galilee.  Jesus was from Nazareth.  It is one of the few facts about Jesus that can be even a little bit historically validified.  Jesus, the Nazarean – that’s how he was KNOWN.  
And yet both Matthew and Luke go through great pains to explain how Jesus – known as a Nazarene –  was ACTUALLY born in Bethlehem.  They come up with two very different answers.  Matthew suggests that the family was originally from Bethlehem but after the Magi left, Joseph had a dream and they went off to Egypt to hide away for a few years and then when they moved back they moved to Nazareth.  Luke comes up with the census narrative, which is cute, but has no historical basis.  And even if there was a census, NO census makes you go to the land of your ancestors.  EVERY country wants you to register according to where you live (and pay taxes.)  
But David was born in Bethlehem, and David was the great king.  The awaited Messiah was supposed to be a New David.  And the Gospel writers wanted to make their points abundantly clear.  The new King was, also, like David, born in Bethlehem.  It is where Jacob’s wife Rachel died.  It is where Ruth the Moabite settled.  The great kingS were born there.  

Bethlehem is a 100 mile walk from Nazareth, and that’s without the struggle of getting around Samaria.  Bethlehem is near enough to Jerusalem (about 17 miles).  Jesus, whose ministry centered around the Galilean backwater, is said to be born and die in the same places as King David.    

If the Gospel writers do so much creative work to connect Jesus to David, there must be theological significance for them in it.  Luke also does a lot of work to place Jesus in the political context of the day.  Throughout the first two chapters Luke reminds us again and again who the power players were in the Empire.  This poor boy was born into a world that already had rich, famous, and extraordinarily powerful men in it.  And he was born in the city of the King.  

And then, Luke, tells us that the announcement of the birth of Jesus was made the SHEPHERDS.  Shepherds were despised at the time of Jesus, they were seen as thieves of a sort – because they were always grazing their sheep on other people’s land.  (Which happens when all the land is privately owned.)  They were USELESS.  But after telling us about the Men who Ran the Empire, after doing all that work to put Jesus in Bethlehem, Luke goes on to describe in explicit detail an interaction between the angels of God and the shepherds up in the hills.  

Now, to be fair, David was a shepherd.  So maybe Luke was just going over his point again.  The more I study Luke, the more I can believe it.  Of all the Gospel writers, he is the smartest and the best story teller.  He’d weave something like that in on purpose.  But he also choose to talk about shepherds.  Matthew talks about Magi.  Luke’s shepherds IMMEDIATELY differentiate the sort of King that Jesus is going to be.  

He’s born in the City of David.  He’ll ride triumphant into Jerusalem and die there like David did.  But his kingship isn’t going to look anything like David’s.  He isn’t going to take the throne.  He isn’t going to lead an army.  He isn’t going to go through political machinations to increase his power.  Jesus is going to be the one who pays attention to the poor, the sick, the women and children, the powerless, the refugees, and gives them ways to help each other.  He is going to call the powerful away from their power.  He is going turn the world upside down, and wash his disciples’ feet, and change what even power means.  He’s the son of a backwater carpenter and a teenage mother.  And while we’ve all but forgotten the other great man whose names appear in his birth story – other than their appearance in his birth story – we’re still getting out of bed before Dawn to celebrate the wonder of the one who brought peace to earth and purpose to our lives.  Born in the City of David, but from Nazareth.  Isn’t that everything all at once?  Jesus wasn’t a part of the power structure of Judea, but he changed the world more than any of them did.  All the contrasts, conflicts and wonders of Jesus!  Isn’t it great?   Merry Christmas!  Amen   

– 

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

December 25, 2015

Sermons

“Rejoice!?”based on  Luke 3:7-18

  • December 13, 2015February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

In
the book Debt:
The First 5,000 Years,
David Graeber writes,

“If
one is on sociable terms with someone, it’s hard to completely ignore
their situation.  Merchants often reduce prices for the needy.  This
is one of the main reasons why shopkeepers in poor neighborhoods are
almost never of the same ethnic group as their customers; it would be
almost impossible for a merchant who grew up in the neighborhood to
make money, as they would be under constant pressure to give
financial breaks, or at least easy credit terms, to their
impoverished relatives and school chums.”1

What
intrigues me about the “good news” of the John the Baptist is
that he completely ignores this universal reality.  He speaks with
the same expectations and demand to everyone, regardless of their
relationships to each other.  He is calling people back into
community, and they aren’t even community!  

He
starts out being sort of nasty, I tried to wiggle out of preaching
this text because I rather dislike the brood of vipers language, but
upon examination he is saying radically loving things.  (I have come,
rather despite myself, to really like John the Baptism.  It turns out
most of my assumptions about him have proven entirely untrue.)  John
calls on all the people to change their lives, he doesn’t just ask it
of the leaders or of the wealthy.  He makes the same demands on
everyone who comes.

To
the crowds who have gathered, he demands a morality of sharing.  No
one should have two coats while anyone has none.  This is a standard
that makes a lot of sense, right?  It isn’t trivial though.  The
person who has two coats may feel as if they’ve2
earned them, or they really like them, or they are aware of the
differing fashion needs they respond to!!  They may feel that they
aren’t their brother’s keeper, or that there are too many people
without coats to have the coatless be their responsibility.  

That
is, they may not experience the other person as an extension of
themselves.  In functional families, it would not go that way.  If
there were 4 people and 4 coats, the distribution would not be such
that 2 people and 2 coats and 2 people had no coats.  In a functional
family, 4 coats for 4 people would be distributed 1 coat per person.
Calling on people to give away extra coats, and extra food, is
calling on them to take each other’s well-being as extensions of
their own.  That is something we naturally do for people we love and
are in relationship to.  John calls for the extension of that
community.  (This is the problem I have with trying to dislike John.
He sounds like Jesus.)  He calls for it to extend without limit.  

To
the tax collectors, John also extended a challenge.  His words are
deceptively simple.

“Collect
no more than the amount prescribed for you.”  That would, again,
be something we might expect to happen in a family.  If the tax
collector came to the house of their cousin, they wouldn’t ask for
more than they were required to ask!  This is an extension of
fairness to the whole community.  It is treating each person as
someone you’d care about.3

The
final group that John is said to speak to is the soldiers.  They are
probably the most interesting group.  This is not because of what
John tells them, it is an extension of what he suggest to the tax
collectors: don’t take money you aren’t entitled to.  What is
interesting is that they were there at all.  The soldiers were Roman
soldiers.  Why were they coming out to a radical Jewish prophet in
the wilderness?  What was it about being part of the power structure
of the empire, or maybe even more simply about being human, that led
them to banks of the Jordan River and the preachings of the Wild One
seeking a better life?  What were they expecting?  Did they find it?
Did any of them follow it?  Did they have a better life afterward?  

The
challenge to the soldiers, while equivalent, may be even harder than
the rest of what John said because he calls on them to treat people
like family and they aren’t from the same group AT ALL.  They are
different ethnically, and linguistically, and religiously.  The
soldiers were the threat of force maintaining the empire and its
power to take wealth from the poor and transfer it to the wealthy.
John doesn’t call on them to stop being soldiers, he just calls on
them to be GOOD soldiers, and to let go of their greed, and to see
the humanity of the people they were (theoretically not) occupying.  

Then
John goes back into a statement that I find cringe worthy.  He speaks
of Jesus and says, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his
threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the
chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.“  This is called good
news!  And it is.  Christianity has done some terrible things.  One
of them is assuming that there are good people and bad people and God
loves and forgives the good people while sending the bad people to
hell.  Unfortunately, that’s the first thing I hear in this passage.
But I don’t think it is an appropriate reading of the passage.
Instead, I think it is consistent with the rest of the passage.  As
Rev. Dr. Barbara Thorington Green says, the line between the wheat
and the chaff is not between people, it is within each of us.  

This
is a passage of hope.  God’s work includes taking away the greedy,
lifeless, selfish parts of ourselves so that we can be freed for
connection, love, and wholeness.  The burning of the chaff is the
permanent removal of the things that hold us back from love, and the
making of space for love.  This is a process of sanctification.

The
paradigm of the wheat and chaff is easily translatable into an
extension of Isaiah’s beautiful vision.  In that vision, God offers
well-springs of joy for us to draw from; strength and might of the
Divine to trust in; and freedom from fear.  It is a vision of joy and
beauty.  

All
week I’ve been thinking about what it means to rejoice in the midst
of the quiet waiting of Advent.  I’ve also been thinking about what
it means to call for joy when there is so much pain around us.  I’m
not just talking about mass shootings and Islamophobia in our
society.  I’m also profoundly aware of the many in our midst who are
grieving.  For some among us the wounds are fresh or unhealed.  For
others the holiday season itself is a source of pain.  And we live in
a broken world.  Many of us, me included, have too many coats.  And
far too many people have none.  The relationships that lead us to
sharing and wholeness are often not present in our lives.  

To
go back to David Gaeber, he proposes that
“sharing is not simply about morality, but also about pleasure.
Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the
most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something:
music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds.  There is a certain
amount of communism of the senses at the root of most things we
consider fun.”4
He says that we tend to share best with those we consider equals.
I’m not sure that John was proposing charity at all – in the sense
that charity is a gift of undeserved love to a stranger.  Instead, I
think John was proposing making people family.  When that happens,
the sharing follows naturally.  (This is why anyone who has ever
researched it has said that socio-economically diverse neighborhoods
are best for everyone in a society.)

Joy
comes, at least in large part, by sharing the goodness of life with
each other.  Isn’t that interesting?  So much of what society tells
us is simply wrong.  It isn’t about acquisition or outdoing each
other.  It is about the wonder of experience together.  There is
plenty of sorrow and sadness to go around these days, but there are
ways to pick ourselves up to.  Thanks be to God!  Amen

1David
Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years
(Brooklyn and London: Melville House, 2011), p. 102.

2As
of this week the Washington Post style guide has approved of using
“they/them” in the singular.  This is helpful both for the
transgender community and for speaking without having to name a
gender for a person.  On that basis, despite some old teaching that
rankles, I’m going to follow their lead.  

3
I will note, however, that this is historically complicated.  The
system in Rome as I understand it did not involve having a pay scale
for tax collectors.  Instead, they were permitted to acquire both
the taxes they’d pass on and their own income as they determined
necessary.  Therefore I’m not quite sure how this would work in
practice, but let’s leave it be and hope I’m just missing something.

4Graeber,
99.

December 13, 2015

Sermons

“Promise and Hope” based on Jeremiah 33:14-16, 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13

  • November 29, 2015February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

The holidays are supposed to be the highlight of the year – right? In truth they’re much more complicated than that. Holidays are overlaid with expectations and conflicting needs. Buttons can get pushed and desperately needed healing can fail to appear. Additionally, holidays bring up grief from the past, awareness of who is no longer present at the table, and who didn’t care enough to return. Many are lonely in our world, and loneliness can be strongest when happiness is most expected. Or, perhaps, time with family and friends is quite lovely! But afterward is a bit of a let down. Holidays are supposed to be the highlight, and that’s exactly what makes them so complicated. (Please note the existence of the Longest Night service on December 16th at 7.)

Advent is a strange little occurrence in the midst of the secular “holiday season.” In the Christian liturgical calendar, we are in a season of waiting and hoping. Christmas itself doesn’t show up in the 25th, and lasts all 12 days to January 5th, culminating the next day in Epiphany. I have come to love the contrast between the busyness of the secular holiday season and the quietness of Advent. Together, they’re quite fulfilling.

Advent starts a new liturgical year, and we start in the waiting and yearning for God to act that has pervaded humanity for millenia. In Jeremiah, the yearning has emerged from military defeat and exile. Jeremiah preached before, during, and after the siege of Jerusalem. Most of his words are words of warning, of condemnation, and of despair. (After all, he was warning people about the battle they were able to lose.) But in a few passages, he speaks of hope. His hope is one that he does not expect to see in his lifetime, and yet his hope is BIG and profound and still relevant today.

Initially it seems that the promise is that David’s dynasty will not end, that eventually God will raise it back up, and use it to bring justice and goodness back to God’s people. Our passage ends saying, “In those days, Judah will live in safety, and Jerusalem will be secure. The land will known by the name: ‘God is our Justice.” More broadly though, it is a promise of restoration. Translators offer the last line “God is our…” as “justice” at times and “righteousness” at others. I wonder about this word.

There were many interpretations of the exile, I’m pretty sure trying to explain the exile is the theme of the entire Hebrew Bible. None of them came shame free. Either the siege of Jerusalem was lost because the people were unfaithful, or because God was unfaithful, or because God was weak. The generations who lived through the exile and all the generations since have had to struggle to make meaning of the world where the people chosen to be a light on the hill and a blessing to the nations, LOST like any other people. No matter what way it gets explained, there is shame – either shame in action or shame in belief.

Yet the promise is one of calling God Justice or Righteousness. It isn’t just that the people will come home and be safe, it is that their relationship with God will be restored. Perhaps I’m projecting a bit, but in my life, my relationship with God and my relationship with myself have flowed into one another so seamlessly as to be hard to differentiate. For a people struggling with loss and then with shame to return to a relationship of trust in the world with a clarity of God as Justice and Righteousness seems to be a particularly enormous transition.

The words of the prophet Jeremiah set out a guidepost of hope in the midst of destruction. The wholeness they offer seems well tuned into the shame they were responding to. This ancient yearning for the world to be turned right-side-up-again is the start of Advent because it is still our yearning.

We are a people WAITING for fulfillment of promises and for the living of hope. We start the liturgical year in a season of waiting and hope. We believe that God is at work to bring goodness into the world. We believe that the purpose of our existence is to participate in God’s work to bring goodness into the world. And the combination of the two: God’s work with ours is the reason for the hope.

And that brings us to the New Testament reading. These words of Paul are so TRUE! I can feel them in my gut. They sound like my life. I hope they sound like yours. He writes, “How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you?” I could spend all day making a list of people that make me feel like that! And, most of them I have met through the Church. I’ve met the most amazing people, and been regularly astounded by their love of God and people.

One of my favorite activities for teaching about the wonderfulness of “church” is an exercise on the Fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.)   The exercise is simple. I ask whatever students I’m teaching to think of people in their church and match them to the gift they most embody. It turns out, though, to be a little bit hard because people have multiple gifts. In every case that I’ve done the exercise, we’ve left with wonder at the amazing gifts of God in community.

When we look through the lens of hope and gratitude, we find there is much to be excited about! God’s work is not done, but God is at work in the world. God’s people are not perfect, but God’s people are gifted by God in astounding ways.

And, the work that needs to be done is not always difficult. When have you been most grateful for another person recently? Taking time to reflect on the goodness helps it shine more light into the darkness. And it isn’t really all that difficult. It may also be a way of entering more fully into the season of advent:

One of the most frequently used forms of prayer in the Christian Tradition is the process of examen. It is a very simple form of prayer. Generally examen is a repeated process, done every day, or every week, or at some regular interval. After intentionally opening yourself to God, you and God consider the two questions (asked here in a number of ways):

What has been the best part of today? Or, what has been the most life-giving piece of today? Or, how have I best been able to shine forth God’s love today? Or, when did I feel most connected to the Divine today?

What has been the worst part of today? Or, what has been the least life-giving piece of today? Or, how have struggled most to show God’s love today? Or, when did I feel most distanced from the Divine today?

After reviewing the time since the last examen and answering the questions, prayer is offered to thank God for the good and the bad.  

For those looking for a spiritual practice to guide them this season, that would be my suggestion. I find it is most helpful if the answers to the questions are either recorded in a journal or shared collectively with loved ones. Sometimes patterns emerge that are only visible if the answers are seen together.

In Biblical history, the exiles would come home, but not the same generation as the ones that left, and not all came home. It was 70 years later, and things were never the same again. But they came home, and rebuilt, and it was good again. And then … frankly, it got bad again. Things were pretty awful during the time of Jesus and got even worse afterward.

Life is complicated. I think maybe more so than average when your “promised land” is one of the crossroads of the world that every empire needs to control in order to expand, but really, it is for everyone. Good comes, and its great. Bad comes and it is terrible. Life ebbs and flows, and it is very rarely static.

I think life with God is like floating softly in warm water. There is gentle current nudging us along, but with the ease of a flick of a wrist we can resist the pull of the current. With one good kick we can define our own way. But we can also let the current guide us, and see where it takes us, trusting in what we can’t yet see. This metaphor is not just for the good and easy times. When the water is soft and gentle and warm, it can be a sweet soak, OR we can choose to live in fear of a stronger current, a cold spring, or a thunderstorm. When the clouds turn dark and rainy, when the wind comes with sorrows, we can give up and drown in the sorrow, OR we can swim with all our might for shore, OR we can keep floating, ride out the storm, and see where we are when the sun comes again.

Perhaps this is one of the meanings of the waters of baptism. Of course, at times, we will all fight the current, worry in the warm water, and swim with all our might until we are exhausted. We’re human. We work like that. But the waters of baptism aren’t a white water river, they aren’t an oceans undertow, they aren’t a churning sea. Faith won’t drown us. Sorrow won’t kill us (although it feels like it can). The waters of baptism are trustworthy waters.

Hope is the gentle current. It’s ok to float.

And dear goodness, during this madness of the holiday season, may the lessons of quiet Advent hope be the ones we rest on. 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

November 29, 2015

Sermons

“Strive for Gratitude” based on  Matthew 6:25-33

  • November 22, 2015February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Jesus was a Middle Eastern refugee, according to the Gospel of Matthew. Abraham was a Middle Eastern refugee – specifically a Syrian one- according to the Torah. The entire Exodus narrative is the story of the people who would become ancient Israel as refugees wandering in the desert. And the entirety of the Bible obsesses over welcoming foreigners and offering hospitality to strangers.

According to the UN Refugee Agency, “Globally, one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. If this were the population of a country, it would be the world’s 24th biggest. ‘We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before,’ said UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres.”1 And, sadly, it appears that many US politicians are responding to terrorist attacks around the world with fear of refugees themselves – instead of with a desire to adapt to the needs of the displaced and to change the realities of our broken world.

It is hard, initially, to talk about “don’t worry about what you’ll eat or drink or wear” when the world has never seen so many displaced people who don’t have access to food or water or clothing. It is ALSO hard to talk about it after having been at our Community Breakfast, and seen the beautiful faces of our guests, who don’t have adequate access to food or water or clothing either.

This is a hard text to preach while acknowledging the realities of the world, but I think it started out that way. The Jesus Seminar, who are pretty picky about what they think Jesus did and didn’t say, wrote this about the passage, “Among the more important things Jesus said are a series of pronouncements on anxieties and fretting. It is possible that we have before us the longest connected discourse that can be directly attributed to Jesus, with the exception of some of the longer narrative parables.”2They also aknowledge the assumed audience, “The string of sayings is addressed to those who are preoccupied with day-to-day existence rather than with political or apocalyptic crises.”3

That is, Jesus was talking to people who were struggling to have enough to eat and telling them not to worry about food. (But he wasn’t talking to refugees.) The aspects of this passage that make it difficult to preach are inherent to it, not a modern challenge of it. Furthermore, it is consistent with how Jesus spoke and what he taught. To go back to the Jesus seminar, and their reasoning for believing in the authenticity of this passage, “these formulations betray the stamp of Jesus’ speech and connect with other sayings stemming from him: congratulations to the hungry (Luke 6:21), petitions for the day’s bread (Matt 6:11), and the certainty that those who ask will receive (Luke 11:10), to cite but a few examples.”4 This SOUNDS LIKE Jesus.

Jesus tells hungry people not to worry about bread.

What the heck, Jesus?

I figure there are a few ways to understand this:

  1. We could assume that Jesus doesn’t care about human life and thinks the whole purpose of everything is the spiritual realm and/or access to heaven.
  2. We could assume that God does take care of God’s people, that Jesus’ teaching is true, and that if people are dying of starvation it indicates that God actually doesn’t like them. (Or that they sinned or some other justification for God’s lack of affection.)
  3. We could explain it all away with a conversation about the lack of human capacity to understand Divine Will.

(Please note that I don’t find these options valid enough to bother refuting them. If you need help with that though, let me know, and we can go through them.)

Personally, I’m going to go with the fourth option.

4. Maybe Jesus means it. Maybe paying attention to what you don’t have and worrying over how you’ll get it is a waste of life. Maybe worrying is more of a problem than even hunger and maybe this applies to a lot of aspects of life. Maybe, even, focusing on what you do have and being grateful for it will make more of a difference than having more. (Not to say I’m not still at “What the heck Jesus?” but MAYBE…)

Studies say that we gain more from giving than we do from keeping. In one of my favorites, researchers gave college students $5 and either instructed them to spend it on themselves or on others. They nearly universally went to Starbucks, which would make an interesting study in itself. In any case, in spending the money on themselves, there was a burst of happiness that lasted for a few minutes. The burst of joy that came from spending a gift on others lasted several days.

In concentration camps the power of that phenomenon showed up more powerfully. The people in concentration camps were given starvation level meals. They didn’t have enough to live, and yet the people who choose to share their INSUFFICIENT food with others (usually ones who needed it more) ended up living LONGER. Food, it turns out, is not the most important thing. It may be that hope is. It may be that connection is. It may be that making a contribution to someone else’s well being is. It may be that caring enough to try is. I don’t know. I don’t know how it works, but it does.

And I’m pretty sure that Jesus’ ministry, which happened among people who didn’t have enough to eat anyway, was mostly about freeing people from fear so that they could share and work together and although it doesn’t really make sense if you look at it economically: when a whole group of people who don’t have enough combine their resources, there is MORE than enough. That seems to prove economics wrong.

But I think that may have been the truth that Jesus was getting at. There really is more to life than food and clothing. And, obviously, worrying doesn’t help ONE LITTLE BIT. And, clearly, God wishes for us all to have enough. Yet we know that not everyone does – not every close. And yet, there are also many people in the world who have enough food, water, and clothing and live entirely meaningless lives. I think building a just society and a just world is the responsibility of us as the followers of Jesus (and as people of faith more broadly.) I think we have failed in many ways, just as we have succeeded in many ways. I don’t think everyone is going to have enough to eat – this year. But maybe the year will come when we all will.

In the any case, life IS more than food, and the body IS more than clothing. And there are many, many things to be grateful for. This week I read a book by Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams entitled Uncommon Gratitude: Alleluia For All That Is. One of the chapters is on gratitude and singing alleluia for poverty, which is not something I’d spend a lot of time thinking about. Apparently, Socrates said that the richest person is the one who is content with the least and Epicurus said “Wealth consists in not having great possessions but in having few wants.”5 Joan Chittester says:

Poverty brings with it a spiritual vision the lack of which may in the end underlie the final corrosion of this wealthy society in which we live. Poverty stretches us to a vision of life that extends beyond the countinghouse, beyond the glutting of our lives with things. Poverty enables a person to see life in all its dimensions, to taste it in all its sweetness, and to recognize its vacuousness. It enables a person to choose between what is real and what is not about a life lived in midst of plastic and sparkles, of the lasting and the ephemeral, of the dehumanizing and the excessive. It reminds us of what is necessary and what is nothing but fluff, nothing but indulgence, nothing but consumption for the sake of show. Poverty keeps us real.

I do not applaud poverty or recommend it or justify it or minimize its struggles and its cruelty. I do not glorify the “happy poor.” But I do see that a bit less engorgement and a bit more sufficiency in a society long ago surfeited and satiated by the unnecessary could, would, make the whole world richer. 6

It isn’t all about feeding physical hunger, because physical satiation isn’t enough for us as humans. We are more. A lack of food is a problem – a justice issue – a thing to try to change. But food isn’t enough. Food, water, and clothes aren’t enough. Maybe Jesus was just telling the truth.

So even now, when the world sometimes feels like it is falling apart at the seams, when so many are hungry, when so little justice is to be found, we still hear Jesus saying, “don’t worry about it!”. What do we do?

We can notice what we have – whatever it is and be grateful. It will multiply the effect of whatever we have – both in our lives and in the lives around us. Gratitude is an antithesis of fear and worry, it is a sister of hospitality and care, it is a way of following Jesus’ commands:

Strive to respond with gratitude; pay attention to the goodness. It all matters. It changes you! Thanks be to God. Amen


___

1“Worldwide displacement hits all-time high as war and persecution increase”http://www.unhcr.org/558193896.html accessed on November 21, 2015.

2Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Autthentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), page 152.

3Funk et al, page 153.

4Funk et al, page 153.

5For the first, I got rid of male language, it is thus not a true quote.

6 Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams entitled Uncommon Gratitude: Alleluia For All That Is(Liturgical Press: Collegeveille, MN, 2010.) page 28.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 22, 2015

Sermons

“NOT Worthless”based on  1 Samuel 1:4-20 and 1 Samuel 2:1-10

  • November 15, 2015February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

I spent a lot of time thinking about what to say about the terrorist attacks in Paris, before I realized that there were also terrorist attacks made by the same group in Baghdad and Beirut which the news cycle had not taken quite so seriously. Then I realized that there were also deadly natural disasters in Japan and Mexico on Friday. Then I worried that there were likely other tragedies that I didn’t know about. Then I thought of the 200,000 deaths in Syria that have motivated 4 million refugees to leave their homes. Then I remembered that there are lots of refugees NOT from Syria. On Facebook I kept seeing these words, written by a poet named Warsan Shire from Nairobi, Kenya:

“later that night

i held an atlas in my lap

ran my fingers across the whole world

and whispered

where does it hurt?

it answered

everywhere

everywhere

everywhere.”1

I asked Drew Vickery, who was here this weekend for the CCCYM (Conference Council on Youth Ministries) event what he thought I should say about the attacks on Paris, and after a few hours he got back to be and said, “Nothing. I think you should focus on hope.” #fromthemouthsofteens. I don’t have words to take away the pain of the world, I don’t have words that will stop or transform extremist militants, and I surely don’t have words that will bring any of the lives tragically lost.

The hours I spent reading up on the terrorist group last night brought one imperative sentence to light, “For certain true believers—the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil battles—visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a deep psychological need.”2 This clarified my role for today: to offer a form of faith that is not about defining “good” or “evil” but rather about seeking wholeness for ourselves that can encourage others into wholeness. So, here we go…

Hannah is surprisingly resilient. It isn’t that painful things don’t seem to hurt her – they do – a lot! They don’t overcome her. We see it twice in her story. The first thing that we know about her is that she’s barren. Now, people in the ancient world did not think that barrenness COULD be a male problem, but even if they had, Hannah’s husband’s OTHER wife was distinctly not barren. A woman’s value came in her childbearing capacity, and to be barren was to be worthless. To be barren was to be ashamed. Hannah was barren.

And yet…her husband loved her. This is not particularly normal, nor expected for marital relationships at the time. In fact, it looks like it was true in only one of Elkanah’s marriages. He loved Hannah, and he gave her preferential treatment because of it. His words indicate that he doesn’t even care that she’s barren, which I think supports the case that he really loves her and not just her “value” in his life.

This was not sufficient for Hannah. She wanted to have a child. We are completely incapable of determining if this is about her maternal instincts or if it is about a desire not to be in shame, but let’s assume it is some of both. Her husband’s love did not take away her shame, although it may have helped her have resilience to it.

Every year when she had the chance, she went to the house of God and prayed there. We’re told that she asked God to open her womb, and even tried to strike a deal with God about it. This is imperative to her story, she eventually gave birth to the prophet who would anoint the first kings, and it better be clear how faithful his mother was in order to establish his faith.

This is the first place that I see Hannah’s unusual resilience. By most accounting, if a woman’s womb was barren, it was barren because of divine punishment. Yet, as one scholar put it,

“Hannah at once embodies both the patriarchal constructions of her worth and a deep assumption that God is concerned about her. … When Hannah seeks out God’s presence in this state of anguish, her prayer signals that she is aware of a divine concern for those who are questionable worth. She does not come to God with formal petition. She does not come with traditional sacrifice. She comes in loneliness, isolation, and despair. She lays bare all the emotion and pain.”3

She believes that God cares about her, despite her barrenness, despite her shame. She is resilient to her own shame. It doesn’t stop her from seeking the Holy One AND making requests of God and EVEN bargaining with God (which is a dangerous idea). She doesn’t let it stop her, and that indicates that she thinks God might listen to her.

That’s some GOOD theology for a mostly powerless, shamed woman 3000 years ago.

There is a repetition of her resiliency as well. Eli, the priest, is often presented as not knowing a whole lot about God. He isn’t a bad guy, he just hasn’t had much contact with the Divine. So, when Hannah was praying with all her heart, Eli confused this with a drunken stupor, and decided to come up and shame her about that.

She might have slinked away.

But not Hannah. She, a lowly, barren woman corrected him. She is such a delight! She wasn’t mean about it, she correct his assumption. She has NOT been drinking. She explains that she was PRAYING (we don’t know if she gets this out with or without sarcasm in her voice), and she makes a request of him, “Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time.” She not only asks favors of God, she asks one of the high priest.

And we should know something is going on by now, because Eli receives her correction and grants her request. Then God does too, and she gives birth to a child and names him Sam-u-el, “God has heard.”

I wish more people were like Hannah, refusing to be put in their place, denying the capacity of anyone else to define their value to the divine. I wish more people took the mantle of shame that other people tried to put on them and simply refused to wear it because they KNOW that they are worthwhile to God.

The Magnificat of Mary which celebrates God’s mighty acts is song that fell from Mary’s lips when she was pregnant with Jesus. It is based strongly on Hannah’s song that she sang to celebrate God’s mighty acts when Hannah was pregnant with Samuel. Hannah’s song, just like Mary’s, focuses on God’s power to care for the poor, the broken, and the vulnerable. It also emphasizes God’s capacity and willingness to bring down the high, the mighty, and the rich. They are songs of celebration of God’s work for the disenfranchised. They are RADICAL claims about God that anyone with a vested interest in the status quo should worry about.

Hannah is the Biblical predecessor to Mary. She’s a big deal, in large part because she knows that God cares about the people that the people don’t care about – including her.

Hannah is a model of shame resilience on the basis of God’s grace, a model we desperately need in modern day Christianity. This week I read Karen McClintock’s book Shame-Less Lives, Grace-Full Congregations, and she had a lot of wisdom to share about shame and grace. Early on in the book she points out that, “We are encouraged by the dominant culture to self-improve rather than self-affirm and to strive for more rather than to be content with what is and satisfied with ourselves. The pervasive and soul-defeating presence of cultural shame leads to perfectionism, addition, and self-hatred.”4 Later, she clarifies that, “Shame is not a course-correcting emotion. While guilt says, “I made a mistake,” shame says, “I am a mistake.‘”5

At two point she offers the words that make SO MUCH sense of the world, “Shame is often the first tool grabbed off the workbench by those entrusted to maintain the status quo,”6 and, “Because shame feels so terrible, we avoid it through the use of blame.”7 But it wasn’t until she said, “You can never be satisfied with yourself if you are constantly striving to be as wise, good, kind, or as generous as God,”8 that I knew she was preaching to me. She continued that point with a quote from Barbara Brown Taylor who said, “I thought that being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was, and it was not until this project failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.”9

Finally, since this is a quick run through of an excellent book, I want to offer one of her stories:

“I had the opportunity to mentor a clergyperson I’ll call Sam during his first few years as a parish pastor. … To help him integrate his adult self and his ashamed little boy, I had him spend a few weeks between our conversations thinking of himself as ordinary.  I encouraged him to ask himself, ‘What would an ordinary person feel right now?  What would an ordinary person want, do, say? The exercise provided him with a reflective distance between his idealized self and his ordinary self. Once he accepted his ordinariness, he could balance service with replenishment and encouragement with separation."10

I think Hannah knew how to do that. She was just an ordinary woman, so was Mary, and they knew God to care for ordinary people.

With the possible exception of Jesus, every character in the Bible is visibly and deeply flawed. This clarifies that God works with and through real people, not perfect ones. They called on their actions sometimes, but God doesn’t ask them to “shape up or ship out” when it comes to their flaws. They’re just accepted as they are.

Dear ones, God created you as you are and loves you are as you are. You need not be perfect, you need not be particularly GOOD, you need not be extraordinary. You are enough.

May that knowledge fill the world.

I suspect it will help. Thanks be to God and may God help us ALL. Amen  

____

1 Accessed at http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/812310-later-that-night-i-held-an-atlas-in-my-lapon 11-14-15.

2 Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants” in The Atlantic March 2015 Issue. Accessed athttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/ on Nov. 14, 2015.

3 Marcia Mount Shoop “Theological Perspective of 1 Samuel 1:4-20” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009) page 292.

4 Karen A. McClintock, Shame-Less Lives, Grace-Full Congregations  (Herndon, VA: The Alban Intitute, 2012) p. 4.

5 McClintock, 22.

6 McClintock, 52.

7 McClintock, 67.

8 McClintock, 95.

9 McClintock, 101, quoting Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), 218-219.

10 McClintock, 107-109.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

November 15, 2015

Sermons

“Visibly Invisible”based on Mark 10:42

  • November 11, 2015February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

I’m going to mention two important dates in my life. The first is Tuesday, January 28, 1986. That is the date of my first class in a course I took during my first year in seminary called “Religion and the Social Process.” It is the ONLY course I ever took where I still remember the introductory comments of one of the three professors who were team teaching the course.  Professor Joanna Gillespie looked at us and said, very emphatically, “In this course we are going to give you a lens which will enable you to see structures of oppression.”

That stuck with me. It kind of hit. I had never heard that kind of talk before. Structures of oppression. I had not really thought much about oppression up to that point in my life and I kind of had the vague impression that oppression was what bad people did to the helpless.  Oppressors were villains. And of course, I wasn’t an oppressor. I wasn’t racist. I wasn’t sexist.  Let me tell you, was I ever in for a wild ride that semester.

In reflecting on this I went back to my notebook from that course. Still have all my notebooks. I was reminded of the phrases and concepts that, as I look back, shaped my thinking and the way I look at the world. Simple things such as an operative definition of oppression:

  • The use of coercion, force or violence by any holder of power – individual or institution -to constrain others or deny their rights.
  • Or the idea that social relationships can not be seen except as they are given meaning by the culture.
  • That there are ways that structure mediates meaning
  • And that institutions create their own value system

         Here is one that I found very powerful.

         Social structure operates in three realms; discrimination, segregation and stereotype.

                   Discrimination – denial of the right to have.

                             Segregation – denial of the right to belong

                                       Stereotype – denial of the right to be

         And all of this organized around a system of in groups and out groups.

Now as the course unfolded through the lectures, readings, group and written assignments it became very clear, to me at least, that my own personal beliefs, attitudes and view of the world came out of this whole structural social-political realm. My belief system was

formed in the context of being a white, middle class, protestant heterosexual.

Fast forward thirteen years. Thursday, May 20, 1999.

That is the day I walked into the administration building of Bare Hill Correctional Facility in Malone, New York, to begin my new job as that prison’s Protestant Chaplain. As I walked into that august institution I very quickly discovered that I might as well have landed on

another planet. It was a different world. And yet it is a world that, in many respects, is a microcosm of the outside world. It is a world where everything is intensified and where the lines of demarcation a brutally sharp.

Talk about a structure that has in groups and out groups! I mean, you can see it as soon as you walk in. Officers in blue, inmates in green, civilians in civilian attire. It’s right there before you. The lines of demarcation were so sharp that as a civilian staff member I was not permitted to wear green or red. Only inmates. The security staff, the guards, in fact all staff, had to be able to visually discriminate population – that is, the incarcerated ones – from non-population. There are many things a prisoner is not permitted to have. And there are groups to which a prisoner is not permitted to belong, namely gangs. And it is the Department that determines what a gang is.

It is a world of organized discrimination, segregation and stereotyping.

Now to be sure, there are sound security reasons for this in most, but by no means all, cases. It wouldn’t be good for prisoners to have guns, knives, drugs, certain metal objects or escape paraphernalia, of course. And gang activities in prison are never good. But the point is all these restrictions are imposed from above.

However, all too often a line gets crossed. And it gets crossed because staff in that setting are cloaked with power. While at Bare Hill I had two clerks who were inmates. One day I called out for one to come into my office for a moment and in about one second he was in front of my desk with a ‘yes sir?’ Boom! There!

Now, in eleven years of teaching prior to that I NEVER had any student respond that way. In 23 years of parenting up to that point I NEVER had a response like that. In 25 years of marriage….well, never mind.

But I call out the clerk’s name and in one second he’s there.

Now this had absolutely nothing to do with me. It is no reflection on how my clerks viewed me. You see, there was something else controlling the situation. It was in the form of something called rule 106.10. Rule 106.10 is in a little booklet that is issued to anyone entering a New York State prison to serve a sentence. It is called Standards of Inmate Behavior. Rule 106.10 is the only rule printed in bold faced upper case letters. Rule 106.10 states AN INMATE SHALL OBEY ALL ORDERS OF DEPARTMENT PERSONNEL PROMPTLY AND WITHOUT ARGUMENT.

It doesn’t say ‘follow,’ doesn’t say ‘comply,’ it says OBEY. Absolutely no wiggle room is given in that rule. And WE, staff, were expected to follow a principle that has a name I’ve always hated, called ‘zero tolerance.’

That simple phrase is a manifestation of immense power. So much so that it gets invoked almost as a religious talisman. I would see signs posted that said such things as “Inmates can not enter without permission of staff.” and the numbers 106.10 would be printed underneath.

Power.

Power.

We see the manifestation of it. But there is an invisible component to it. It is visibly invisible.

“You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them.” So Jesus told the disciples in our Gospel reading. I’m only going to deal with that statement.

The phrases ‘lord it over’ and ‘exercise authority over’ are each rendered as a single word in the Greek. ‘Lord it over’ has as its root ‘kyrie’ meaning lord and the ‘exercise authority over’ has the word exousia, meaning authority. And the word ‘archein’ or ruler is in that sentence.

Ruler. Lord. Authority.

I’m going to use those three words as a jumping off point into the work of a remarkable scholar who has given me deeper insight into what I began learning thirty years ago in that wonderful course, my experience as a prison chaplain of fifteen years, and an awful lot of what has been going on in our country, world and yes, in our denomination.

Walter Wink, a New Testament scholar and teacher at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York and who died in 2012, produced a five volume work known collectively as “The Powers” in which he explores the language of power as used in New Testament writings; how the language is used, how the biblical writers conceived of power and the powers and the very real implications that has for us now. Like all good scholars he was not without his critics but I have found his work remarkable.

Those three words, ruler, lord, authority, are power words, part of a language of power that, according to Wink, pervades the New Testament. Other words are kings, rulers, principalities, power, name, wisdom, commission, throne, dominion, lordship. He also observes that the language of power is imprecise, liquid, changeable, and unsystematic. His words. But in spite of this there are clear patterns of usage that can be seen. He also finds that, because they are interchangeable, one word can be used to represent them all.

Now here is one of several kickers. And I’ll quote him directly: “These Powers are both heavenly and earthly, divine and human, spiritual and political, invisible and structured.” That is, invisibly visible.

Now here’s the other kicker; the Powers are both good AND evil.

The processes, definitions and categories that were identified in that course all those years ago could easily be dismissed as mere sociological and psychological reductionism. Explained, or explained away by our modern mindset and world view.

What I have always found remarkable and invigorating is that this work that Wink had done gives us a way to see all of this theologically and biblically. He shows us a way to have a theological and biblical understanding of these processes and categories.

Yes, on one level we can think of kings, rulers, principalities, power, name, wisdom, commission, throne, dominion, lordship, as political structures, social systems and institutions. But he found that there was always something that could not entirely be reduced to those

categories, something immaterial, invisible, spiritual and real.

He argues that the principalities and powers are the inner and outer aspects of any manifestation of power.

The inner aspects are the spirituality of institutions, the inner essence of outer organizations. The outer aspect is seen as political systems, appointed officials, the chair of an organization, laws, all the tangible manifestations which power takes.

Police and law enforcement. Prison guards and prison systems. Chaplains and Administrators in those systems. Governors and governments. Churches and pastors. Bishops. Annual Conferences. Boards of Ordained Ministry.

There is a visible pole, an outer form – be it church, nation, economy – and an invisible pole, the inner spirit, the driving force that animates, legitimates, regulates its physical manifestation in the world. Neither pole is the cause of the other. Both come into existence together and cease to exist together. And the way the inner and outer aspects of a power work, the relationship they have to each other can be complex and is largely unseen. Unless we look for it. I feel it is legitimate for us to think of the spirit of an institution as having a mind of its own that, collectively, may be fundamentally different from the minds of the individuals within that institution, and that the spiritual aspect can influence in unseen ways those who are a part of that institution.

When a particular Power becomes idolatrous, placing itself above God’s purposes for the good of the whole, then that Power becomes demonic.

The church’s task is to unmask this idolatry.

One example that comes to mind is the long, complex and convoluted legal history of corporate personhood. The Citizens United Supreme Court case was but the latest occurrence in a history that goes back centuries. The whole question of what rights are to be afforded a corporate entity has a long, long history. Of course corporations have long had the right to enter into contractual agreements and individuals have long had the right to file suit against corporations, both of which are aspects of personhood. The longstanding question, though, seems to have been just what rights are to be afforded a corporation. ALL the rights of an individual or just some of the rights? To my mind the simple fact that this question has been seriously considered for so many years is an indication that there is an immense and largely unseen power at work here.

When a corporate entity gets to the point that IT’s existence and life is it’s only reason for being and is to be considered of more importance than actual individuals and if it’s life is to be fostered at the expense of individuals – THEN THAT POWER HAS BECOME DEMONIC.

And this is true whether that inner spiritual dimension is that of a corporation, or a law enforcement agency, prison system…

even ideas and ideologies…

And yes, even a religion and it’s concomitant organizations, such denominations.

As I’ve already stated, the church’s task is to unmask this idolatry. Bring it into the light of day. Make it visible. Allow people to see it for what it is.

A warning. You know how you can tell if a person or group is successfully doing this?  The more successful anyone is in unmasking a power and shining a light on it, the more angrily and even violently that power will respond.

We’ve seen it in the Occupy Wall Street movement in which the violent response was, at least to me, horrifying. We’ve seen it in Ferguson when the racist basis of law enforcement was called into question.

And yes, we see it in our own denomination – now I’m goin’ from preachin’ to meddlin’ here – we’ve seen it in our own denomination in the recent spate of church trials over the issue of marriage equality. Violence doesn’t have to be physical.

So, that’s it. Our task as part of the Body of Christ is to unmask that which is hidden. To see the invisible in that which is visible. To shine a light and be a light. And to do so without fear. And to do it with love not anger. And yes, to bear the response when it comes.

For are we not the Body of Christ, and do we not have a task to do?

Amen.

Appendix and notes

The references to the course Religion and the Social Process, a course that was taught during the spring semester of my first year at Drew Theological School in Madison, New Jersey, are based on my own recollections and the notes I took during that course.

Our required texts were

The Predicament of the Prosperous, Bruce C. Birch and Larry L. Rasmussen

Beyond Liberation, Carl Ellis

Sexual Violence, Marie Fortune

Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?, Letha Scanzoni and Virginia R. Mollenkott

Hunger for Justice, Jack A. Nelson

Habits of the Heart, Robert N. Bellah, et al.

My very brief discussion of the work of Walter Wink is taken from his three volume work collectively entitled “The Powers.”

Naming the Powers: the Language of Power in the New Testament Fortress Press, 1984

Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence Fortress Press, 1986

Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination Fortress Press, 1992

My comments are primarily from the first volume. For those who are interested, but are hesitant about tackling a fairly monumental three volume work I recommend his 1998 book The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium, originally published by Augsburg and now available in paperback. It is a digest of the third volume with elements of the previous two and at 200 pages considerably shorter than the 784 page total of the three volume work. He also omits almost all the secondary literature references from the larger work.

One important element in Wink’s work, which I did not address, is his coining the term ‘the myth of redemptive violence.’ It is a powerful concept very pertinent to our own time.

This sermon was primarily descriptive as opposed to prescriptive. In addressing any kind of prescriptive approach to the issue we need to be aware of some issues regarding the nature of the Powers, for the Powers are ignorant of God’s plan. I conclude these notes with a fairly extensive quote from Naming the Powers. All emphases are mine.

“The Powers did not know”: seen from the perspective provided by our hypothesis,evangelism and social action are the inner and outer approaches to the same phenomenon of power. I have already described the subversive character of the early church’s refusal to worship the imperial genius and its recourse instead to prayer. Many modern Christians have unfortunately understood injustice in simply materialistic terms and have not recognized the need to “convert” people from the spirituality that binds them to a particular material expression of power. It is not enough merely to change social structures. People are not simply determined by the material forces that impinge on them. They are also the victims of the very spirituality that the material means of production and socialization have fostered, even as these material means are themselves the spin-off of a particular spirituality. In a new structure people will continue to behave on the basis of the old spirituality, as they have to varying degrees in every communist regime, unless not only the structure but also their own psyches are reorganized.

Evangelism is always (Wink’s emphasis) a form of social action. It is an indispensable component of any new “world” Unfortunately, Christian evangelism has all too often been wedded to a politics of the status quo and merely serves to relieve distress by displacing hope to an afterlife and ignoring the causes of oppression. The repugnance with which most liberal Christians regard evangelism betrays their own failure to discern that all liberation involves conversion. Whenever evangelism is carried out in full awareness of the Powers, whether in confronting those in power or liberating those crushed by it, proclaiming the sovereignty of Christ is by that very act a critique of injustice and idolatry. And as the churches of South Korea and Brazil and Chile and around the world have learned, such evangelism will inevitably spark persecution. In sum structural change is not enough; the heart and soul must also be freed, forgiven, energized, given focus, reunited with their Source.

Walter Wink

Naming the Powers

Pages 116-117

___

–

Rev. James Sprenger 

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

October 18, 2015

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