“Generous Gifts of Poor Women” based on Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17…

November 8, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Usually, the educated elite of a society receive more praise an attention than society’s impoverished widows, but usually doesn’t apply to the Bible. The scribes were religious scholars, but they were also more. By Jesus’ day, the Temple high priest was appointed by Rome and the priests and scribes were benefiting from the Empire’s system of taking the wealth of the poor and giving it to the already wealthy. Many of them, I suspect, meant well. They thought they were keeping the peace. They were doing the best they could with what they had. But they were participating in a system of oppression.

Rodger Nishioka is a contributor to Feasting on the Word, and a professor of Christian Education at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA. He writes regarding the gospel:

Together, these two sections read as a lament for and an indictment upon any religious system that results in a poor widow giving all she has so the system’s leaders may continue to live lives of wealth and comfort. The attack is not on Jewish religious practice. The attack is on any religious practice that masks egotism and greed. The scribes are like leeches on the faithful, benefiting from a religious system that allows poor widows to sacrifice what little they have.¹

The little narrative is ripe for interpretation, despite its brevity. As a child I always imagined this widow to be an old woman, a connotation associated with widowhood that often makes life very hard for young women who are widows. But many artists have portrayed this scene, and more often then not they show her as young, sometimes even holding a baby. Then, instead of an older woman sacrificing her own food, that suggests a young mother sacrificing her family’s food.

We don’t know her age, we do know that the “collection plates” of the temple were metal. Since all money was coins, and the bigger coins were worth more, this particular set up insured that people could HEAR how large the donations were. This meant that the big givers got big praise, and the small givers – got shamed.

Jesus upset that system. He didn’t sit there praising the big givers for their big gifts. He noticed the woman giving small gift, a shameful gift, a gift so small it would be tempting not to show up and give it, and he noticed. He noticed that her gift was big IN COMPARISON to what she had, and that the other gifts had been small IN COMPARISION. He took the person most likely to be ignored, disregarded, unimportant, and shamed (because, after all, the MAN of the family should have been giving the gift), and he praised HER. He saw.

Poverty can make people feel invisible. Being a woman in a patriarchy can feel invisible. Being a widow without support can easily feel invisible. But Jesus saw her in the midst of all that was going on in the temple. And he used her as an example of abundant giving.

The Torah sets up a system that is meant to care for widows, orphans and foreigners AND for the Levites who cared for the religious well being of the community. The Levites didn’t get a portion of the land allotted to them. Instead, one of the purposes of tithes was to feed them. They took care of the cultic rituals, and the rest of the tribes took care of them. They didn’t get all of the tithes though, because some of them went back to people’s hometowns to throw feasts for EVERYONE, which was one of the ways of feeding widows, orphans, and foreigners. Widows, orphans, and foreigners were cared for in other ways as well: there were laws about leaving the edges of fields and the second pickings for those who had no land, there was an expectation of levirate marriage which tried to keep family lines alive and widows cared for, and there were laws against the sale of family property and against interest which meant that poverty could exist but didn’t become an inherently downward spiral.

The Torah set up a system to care for the vulnerable AND to allow a set aside group of people to be able to devote themselves to religious practice by being given gifts by the rest. The issue in this passage is that those devoted to religious practice are not simply surviving, they’re thriving, and they’re doing it by taking away the livelihoods of the vulnerable. And Jesus was NOT happy.

The widow may have been paying her expected tithe to the Temple, or she may have been giving of her own expectations of herself. We aren’t told that, but we are told that she has given all that she has to the Temple. What sort of religious organization takes the last money of a poor widow?

Is this story told to praise the widow or to condemn the Temple? The widow’s generous gift is an indictment of the Temple system, and an even bigger one in the context of the scribe’s greed and egotism. Perhaps it is OK to take a poor widow’s last coins, because there is a human need to GIVE, and because contributing to something larger than ourselves matters, and because a person has a right to give whether they have a lot or a little. But it isn’t OK to take a poor widow’s last coins if the system in place isn’t going to take care of the widow. The system is making the clergy wealthy at the expense of the already poor. Or, to make it more simple, the Temple was functioning to take the meager wealth of the poor and redistribute it to the rich. No wonder Jesus was angry.

The widow gives an extraordinary gift that the Temple is not worthy to receive. A friend of mine asked a great question this week: what would it take to make the Temple worthy of such a gift, and what would it take to make our churches worthy of such gifts? That is worth pondering.

The poor widow, however, is not the only generous widow in our scriptures today. We also have Ruth and Naomi. This is a story worth knowing, here is a brief summary of the first two chapters:

Naomi and her husband and two sons left the holy land of Israel to live in in the hated neighboring country of Moab because of a famine. The famine lasted a long time, and both sons grew up and married Moabite women. Then both sons and Naomi’s husband died. She decided it was time to go back to Israel, to live as poor widow on other people’s generosity. As was expected at the time, her daughters in law went with her, but before they had gone far she turned to them and freed them from their bond to her. Custom said they were to stay with the family they married into. She urged them back to their own mothers to start their lives anew. One went, the other was Ruth, who pledged her life in a vow of commitment to Naomi’s. When they get back to Naomi’s village Ruth goes to glean the leftovers of the harvest and the owner of the fields instructs her to be treated with kindness.

That brings us up to the part of the story we read today, which is HIGHLY suggestive in a sexual way. As one scholar put it, “The word for ‘lie down’ in Hebrew often implies sexual intercourse. Moreover, feet are used as euphemism for genitalia in the Bible. Though the word translated as ‘feet’ in this passage is not the usual term, Naomi’s instruction to ‘uncover’ the lower extremities of Boaz is provocative. That this encounter happens at night makes the meeting even more suggestive.”² I generally enjoy it when I’m in on the joke, and I know it when the Bible is making sexual innuendos.

This, however, is not one of those times. The story is thought to end well. Ruth and Naomi are cared for by Boaz, Naomi’s line continues, and eventually King David well be born. Theologically it is magnificent, since the Israelites and Moabites were historic enemies and the Israelites were often vehemently anti-marriage with foreigners. The mere existence of this story is pretty remarkable. You’d think they wouldn’t want to say that their most beloved (no, I don’t know why) king was the great-grandson of Moabite woman, but they DO. And it seems to suggest that God’s ways are bigger than human ways, and God’s inclusion extends to even one’s enemies.

AND YET, I’m a really enormously big fan of the concept of sexual consent, and I’m not sure that Ruth had any of that in this story. I grant that she is said to have gone willingly to Boaz, but her economic circumstances called for desperate measures and she was willing to take them in order to ensure that both she and Naomi would survive. Is it consent when you and your loved one(s) would die if you didn’t? Was Naomi appropriate and wise in finding a way forward, or did she use Ruth’s young and sensually pleasing body for their gain? Who actually had power in this situation and why?

In some ways, and I don’t like of the the ways, holding the Bible up to the standard of sexual consent is unreasonable. Women didn’t often have the power to say “no,” and if you can’t say “no,” then your “yes” doesn’t count. But when a whole society fails to give women the right to say “no” then it becomes odd to call out the lack of consent in any particular story. But I’m doing it anyway, because I think it is wrong every single time.

At best, in this story, Ruth and Naomi choose to use Ruth’s sexual capacity to gain the means of survival. It is a gift much like the widow’s mite – one that is generous in the extreme and an indictment when it is necessary that it be given. Ruth is not alone, by any means, in the history of women, in becoming so poor that they only thing they have left to use towards survival is their own bodies. This is a story with nearly universal undertones, at least in market economies. It is proof yet again that the Bible is not naive about humanity, including the struggles of very poor women. At the same time, every retelling of this story should be a condemnation the society in which it happens.

The story provides evidence that Boaz was a very honorable man, likely even a good man. I like to think that despite all that happened out of necessity that Ruth may even have been quite happy with him, but that’s likely just wishful thinking. Ruth gave what she had, both for herself and for the woman dependent on her and unable to provide anything for herself.

Some generosity is too much.

One poor widow gave her last coins to the Temple.

Another poor widow gave her sexual capacity for the sake of male protection and therefore survival.

May these stop being common stories.

May we build a religious system that is worthy of the widow’s mite.

May we build a world where sex is ONLY mutual, consensual, and NEVER necessary for survival.

May we hear the stories of women and men who have given such gifts, and honor them.

And when we receive gifts of excessive generosity (of any size or type) may our receiving honor the givers. May God help us. Amen

____

1 Rodger Y Nishioka “Pastoral Perspective on Mark 12:38-44” 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 286.

2 Frank M. Yamada “Exegetical Perspective on Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17” 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 269.

–

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 8, 2015

Sermons

Lover’s Quarrel by Rev. Dr. Art Suggs

October 28, 2015February 15, 2020
by Administrator

Lover’s Quarrel

First United Methodist Church, Schenectady, NY, October 25, 2015

Arthur M. Suggs

When I was about five or six years old, a kindergarten kid, my dad had a 20-gallon fish tank, or what you would call a community tank, with lots of different kinds of fish in it. One morning we both got up unusually early, before dawn. I went to the tank, which had a roller-type thumb switch for the lights, and turned them on while it was still dark outside. I remember the fluorescent tubes flickered for a moment, and then bam, they came on bright.

As I was looking at the fish, they were jerking around and some of them swam hard into the glass. In a sort of formative moment for me a long time ago, I turned to my dad and asked, “Why’d they do that?” He answered, “Because you scared the bejesus out of them.” He liked the word bejesus.

What do you mean? Then he explained, “Pretend that you’re lying in your bed, and somebody comes in and turns on the light. Would you like that?” It had never before dawned on me. It was one of those early moments of feeling empathy for creation. I wanted to apologize to the fish. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare the bejesus out of you, and I won’t do it again. I will wait for dawn to come before I turn on the light from now on.” A formative moment for me as a kid.

I’m going to try to preach this morning about science and religion and about God. Bit of a tall order, and I’ll do my best. But to begin I’d like to convey a short story that is very meaningful to me. It’s by John Barrow, a Cambridge professor of math and physics, a superbrainiac kind of guy. He received the Templeton prize for progress in religion in 2006, and so at his awards dinner in March, he began his acceptance speech with this story:

“A little over a year ago, I [Barrow] was in a great church, the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice. Its predecessor was raised in the year 832 to house the mortal remains of St. Mark the Evangelist, which had supposedly been brought to Venice from Alexandria four years earlier by two merchants. They are alleged to have hidden the remains of the martyred saint under layers of pork to avoid the attentions of the Muslim customs officials. The present Byzantine Basilica, a distinctive cluster of low domes, was begun in the year 1063 and consecrated in 1089. I arrived at the church in the early evening with a small group of other scientists for a guided tour after it had closed to the visitors for the day. When we entered, it was almost in total darkness. There are few windows, and those are small and far from transparent. We were asked to sit in the center, allowing just a few faint floor lights and electric candles to guide us to our seats. Above us, only darkness. And then, very slowly, the light levels rose. Above us, around us, the interior began to be illuminated by a discreet system of hidden sodium lights. The darkness around us gave way to this spectacular golden light. The arching ceilings above us were covered in a spectacular, gleaming mosaic of glass and gold. Between the 11th and the 15th Centuries, nearly 11,000 square feet of gold mosaic was made, square by square. On reflection what was more striking to me was the realization that the hundreds of master craftsmen who had worked for four centuries to create this fabulous site had never seen it in its full glory. They worked in the gloomy interior by candlelight and oil lamps to illuminate the small area on which they worked, but not one of them had ever seen the full glory of the golden ceiling. For them, like us 500 years later, appearances can be deceptive. The universe is a bit like that too.”

Turning up the Lights. The advantage in turning up the lights is that one can see more and can see more clearly. But an issue arises with better illumination upon one’s path: The issue is that one needs to integrate what is now seen that wasn’t seen before. Let me speak plainly.

I feel that the lights have been coming on especially brightly in this last century. Here are some of the incredible developments that have come to light –I use that phrase intentionally – in this century:

It was about a century ago that Einstein published the four papers that made him famous, on the subjects of relativism; relativity, general and specific; and quantum mechanics, the insights of which have been filtering down into the population of the world over this last century. The process is not complete, but it’s still happening.

In addition, even though Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in the 1850’s, it was mostly during the last century that the ideas of deep time; evolution; and natural selection, “red in tooth and claw”, have found their way into the imagination of the average person on the street.

In the last couple of decades alone, the incredible insight born of string theory is that basically it seems as though there are eleven dimensions in which we exist. The mathematics behind this theory are well beyond the scope of the sermon. But eleven dimensions! We live in four of them, three spatial and one time, and there are a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, and so on. One thing that is known by virtually everybody about dimensions is that each is infinitely more in scope than the preceding one. So a plane is infinitely more than a line, and a volume is infinitely more than a plane. People get that. But there are yet an eighth, a ninth, a tenth, and even an eleventh in the magnificence of this world in which we live.

As if that weren’t enough, in the 1940’s the Nag Hammadi texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. And the religious world got rocked by an 8.0 earthquake. We realized that the Bible is what it is pretty much because so much was taken out as a result of really petty politics. What God had said – never mind what God is still saying – what God had said in holy writs of all kinds were also discovered in the last century.

We now have a telescope, twenty-five years old, that has taken images of the universe that we had no idea about, including what is named the Hubble Deep Field, which has now led astronomers to estimate the number of galaxies at 1013 (give or take a dozen or so). It was in the 1920’s, between the two World Wars, when we first realized that we live in a galaxy. We haven’t known that for even a century yet. And it was only about four years later that the very first galaxy, Andromeda, named after a beautiful Ethiopian princess of Greek mythology, was discovered. And now it’s 10^13 galaxies of which we’re aware. A billion is 10^9 , so now we have at least ten thousand billion galaxies. (I feel like Carl Sagan.) (Also a galaxy typically has in the neighborhood of 10^11 stars, for an overall total of 10^24 stars!)

And how about the Internet? Ours is the first generation ever to be almost universally connected, such that I could e-mail somebody in China or Moscow or sub-Saharan Africa. And the news of the death of a famous person goes across the globe in about a second.

(Big Bang, DNA, could be mentioned as well.)

The dimmer switch has been cranked – hard and fast. Think about this list of incredible insights, which is by no means all-inclusive: relativism; relativity, general and specific; quantum mechanics; evolution; eleven dimensions; Nag Hammadi and the Dead Sea Scrolls; the Internet; and the Hubble Deep Field. I challenge you to compare that list with any other century in the history of humanity. God apparently took the dimmer switch and cranked it hard and fast. And we’re like little guppies banging into the glass, having the bejesus scared out of us.

Does any of this impact our understanding of God? Our conception of divinity?

Now compare all that scientific, intellectual stuff to a more common, even childish, understanding of God. Teachers asked kindergarteners to write God a question, put it on a Post it note, and then they put all the Post-its up for everyone to see. Here are a few of them. As you listen to these questions or statements about God, dig beneath the surface and imagine the responders’ conceptions of what divinity is:

Dear God, I bet it’s very hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world. There’s only four in our family, and I can’t do it.

Dear God, Please send Dennis Clark to a different camp this year.

Dear God, Thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.

Dear God, I went to this wedding, and they kissed right in church. Is that okay?

Dear God, You don’t have to worry about me. I always look both ways.

Concepts of Divinity! It’s time to for an upgrade. When you get a feeling for kindergarteners’ perceptions of God like a superparent, and considering the vast number of achievements that have come to pass in the last century, from Einstein all the way to the Hubble Deep Field, maybe it’s time for us to upgrade our conception of God.

So what is God? Not exactly sure anymore. I used to think I knew, but now I know that I don’t.

I’m not an atheist…not just because I believe in divinity, but I’m also repulsed by the arrogance of atheists, not to mention the chronic bad attitude.

I’m not agnostic either. It’s too lukewarm and milk toast for my taste. It’s too easy. It poses as respectable, but strikes me as just being lazy.

And perhaps most surprising for a clergyperson, I’m not a theist. What??? I no longer can conceive of God being a separate entity “out there” somewhere, perhaps in heaven. And it most certainly wasn’t the type of divinity Jesus talked about.

I am a spiritualist. I believe that spirit, the non-physical realm, exists at a deeper level of reality than matter does.

I’m also a monist. I believe in the oneness, the interconnectedness of all reality. When Jesus prayed that “they might all be one, even as the Father and I are one” I try to take that to the limit of what my mind can conceive.

And please excuse the jargon, I’m also a panentheist. All, the whole shebang, what the Greeks called the pleuroma, all things physical and spiritual, exists within God.

But it doesn’t matter what I think. What I believe. What do you think? Believe? Hopefully what I’ve said so far might motivate you to at least see if you want an upgrade, need a revision. And toward that end, I want to offer four verses from the Bible, chronically overlooked, that actually can be very helpful as we bring our theology into conversation with science.

Deut 33, Very often awkwardly translated. I originally came across it in the protestant funeral liturgy. “The eternal God is thy dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

Hebrew: olam, eternal, everlasting, cosmos, universe, the world, infinite. Not easily translated into English for it means all these things. It is the ancient Hebrew concept of what we now call Einsteinian space-time. So the verse, more literally is: The Olam God (or God of Olam) is thy house, and underneath (foundation, referring to the house) is the Olam – Strength. One of the great promises, hidden gems, in the Bible. The God of it All is where you live, and foundational to your dwelling is the strength of the universe!

Ecc 3:11 “He has made everything beautiful it its time; also he has put eternity into man’s mind, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” He has put Olam into our nephish, translated as mind or heart is some versions, but more literally is a person’s soul. Olam placed into our soul! Such that yes, it would be difficult to wrap our minds around such a concept.

Luke 17:21 “…for behold, the Kingdom of God is in the midst of you” This is almost exactly the same thing that Ecclesiastes is saying. But here Jesus is using emphasis. “Entos” is the Greek word for an emphatic “in”. English doesn’t have such a word. But imagine, taking the word “in” only with emphasis. The Kingdom of God is in you! Don’t look for it over there, or over here, it’s in you! Olam in you soul.

Acts 17:21 This one is great. Epimenides (Philosopher, Crete, 6^th or 7^th C BCE) was upset with his fellow Cretans in that their belief in and worshipful attitude toward Zeus was waning. Part of his poem: “They fashioned a tomb for you (Zeus), holy and high one, Cretans, always liars, evil hearts, idle bellies. But you are not dead; you live and abide forever, for in you we live and move and have our being.” Paul then used that same line as part of his explanation of divinity to the Greeks.

But note one thing. It seems to be saying the opposite of the two preceding verses. Which is it? God (Kingdom, Olam) in us? Or are we in God? I would suggest to you that it is the interplay of both. It is the interplay, interbeing, of God, humanity, creation that both science and theology is discerning.

In preparation for today, I’ve been reading some of Sara’s sermons on the internet.

There was one from a few weeks back. The context was addressing the question of Jesus, “Who do people say that I am?” And she quotes:

“Rev. Monty Brown, a United Methodist from West Virginia has answered the most important of the questions for all of us, Jesus included I’d say. Who does God think that I am? God thinks that I am a “beloved child of God, precious and beautiful to behold.” Who does God think that you are? God thinks that you are “beloved child of God, precious and beautiful to behold.”

Yes, emphatic yes.

What I would ask of you is to expand your notion of child, for the entire creation is the offspring of God. And one thing that can be said with assurance is that the parent and child are of the same species.

I feel like a guppy that just banged its head really hard. It sort of smarts. But give me a minute, and I’ll acclimate to the light. Amen.

–

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Events and Celebrations

“First, Last, and In-Between” based on Mark 10:17-31

October 13, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

“First,
Last, and In-Between”

Mark
10:17-31

First
United Methodist Church, Schenectady, NY

Chett
Pritchett, Executive Director, Methodist Federation for Social Action

Good
morning,

I
bring greetings today from the board of directors of the Methodist
Federation for Social Action and from our staff and interns in our
Washington, DC office. I’m so thankful for the witness of this
congregation, for those who have been part of the Troy, and now Upper
New York Chapter, and for giving us your former pastor to lead our
coalitional work toward General Conference.

I
also bring greetings from my home congregation, Dumbarton United
Methodist Church in Washington, DC. For 27 years, Dumbarton has been
a reconciling congregation, welcoming persons of all sexual
orientations and gender identities into the life and leadership of
the church.

I
am blessed to be in this sanctuary today. In a lot of way, I think of
First Church and Dumbarton as kindred spirits. Over the past three
years as the executive director of the Methodist Federation for
Social Action, I have come to know many such congregations. Although
it may seem like it, I am here to say, “You are not alone!”

“You
are not alone” seems to be a good place to start from today’s
Gospel lesson. As found in the Gospel attributed to Mark, this
passage of Scripture is part of a larger story. Jesus and Peter and
James and John had left the glory of the transfiguration on the top
of the mountain and found their way, with the other disciples, in the
valley, with their faces turned toward Jerusalem.

Here
is where Jesus began his teaching ministry. Those who had heard of
Jesus’ ability to perform miracles gathered around him and asked
him questions. Some asked him trick questions and Jesus replied with
trick answers…I mean parables. And so today, we find Jesus asked
by a rich young man, “What Must I Do To Inherit Eternal Life?”

Jesus
replied, telling the man, “you know the commandments,” and then,
as a good rabbi would do, added instruction: “you lack one thing:
go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will
have treasure in heaven, then come and follow me.”

Wow.

Jesus
must not have had his coffee that morning.

“It
is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for
someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

This
Jesus guy pulls no punches.

Then
the disciples got scared: “Then who can be saved?” they asked.

The
disciples and the rich man were asking the same question. They were
concerned with what they needed to do – how must we behave, what
can we do. Peter even says it with a little snippiness: “Look, we
have left everything and followed you.”

We’re
the good guys. We’re the ones who left our families and belongings.
We’re the ones facing ridicule for your sake. Surely, we’re going
to be blessed! We have to be blessed! We’re going to be blessed,
right?

Jesus
assured them that now and it the age to come their goodness would be
noted. But then he threw in a zinger:

“The
first will be last…and the last will be first.”

I
mean, come on – is it any wonder Judas betrayed him and Peter
denied him?

Before
coming to the Methodist Federation for Social Action, I spent more
than 7 years as a manager for Cokesbury, the United Methodist
bookstore. While there, I got to meet seminarians and clergy and lay
people who were hungry to share their faith with others. One of the
most curious books I came across during those years was a children’s
book with plastic relief faces on the cover. The title was “Jesus
and the 12 Dudes Who Did.” I can’t remember what the book
actually said, but I remember the cover and the title with great
clarity. “Jesus and the 12 Dudes Who Did.” Placed alongside
today’s Gospel reading, I think the author got the title exactly
right. The Disciples saw themselves as do-ers, part of the in-crowd,
doing stuff, doing things, because they were going to be front and
center on the right side of history.

But
when Jesus says “the first will be last…and the last will be
first” – he’s making a bold theological statement.

When
Jesus says “the first will be last…and the last will be first”
he’s saying that good works are fine, but they aren’t the be-all
and end-all of God’s message.

When
Jesus says “the first will be last and the last will be first,”
he’s stating that it’s not about the ACT of selling your
possessions and leaving all you have that will help you gain eternal
life. It’s about the transformation, the re-orientation, the
newness that comes when your life is turned toward God more fully.
It’s about loving God with all your heart and mind and soul.

When
Jesus says “the first will be last and the last will be first,”
he’s making the most basic theological statement: “God’s grace
is available to all.”

This
is an interesting conundrum for those of us progressive,
socially-aware, engaged United Methodists.

The
Protestant work ethic did a number on most of us. We work hard to
make the world a better place and provide for those who go without
and challenge the powers that be. We put in hundreds of volunteer
hours, we give money to organizations working to change the world
(thank you). And if Jesus came back, he’d say, that’s all well
and good – BUT…

*You
are already good enough.

That’s
all well and good – BUT…

*God
already loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

And
here’s the scandalous part of Jesus’ parable. God loves everyone
else, too.

*Your
annoying colleague at work. God loves them.

*Your
oblivious, unaware neighbor who always parks too close to your
driveway. God loves them.

*Your
racist, homophobic cousin. God loves them.

And
there’s nothing you can do about it, except welcome them as they
are. And show a little love.

Because
the reality, friends, is that we are, as Martin Luther once wrote,
simul Justus
et Peccator.

Always,
at all times, we are somewhere in-between saints and sinners– in
the same body, at the same time. We never fully embody godliness,
and sometimes – OK, a lot of times – we are as oblivious as those
twelve disciples.

You
see, the human condition, is not, as pure Calvinists would say, one
of total depravity.

Instead
it is one of always being in-between.

Scripture
reminds us of this again and again.

We’re
in-between birth and death.

We’re
in-between fear and safety.

We’re
in-between chaos and community.

We’re
in-between joy and sorrow.

We’re
in-between what has been and what could be.

For
many of us, we know that it means to live in-between.

Some
of us live in-between as exiles – either forced upon or chosen.

Some
of us live in-between because the culture that formed us is different
from the culture in which we reside.

Some
of us live in-between because it’s how we must balance our
overlapping and multiple identities.

I
grew up along the Ohio River in a town that was in-between
Pittsburgh, PA and Columbus,OH and Charleston, WV. In Appalachia, we
always seemed to be in-between one place or another.

In-between
a mountain and valley.

In-between
jobs.

In-between
a pay day.

In-between
illness, or a mining accident, or a chemical spill.

When
I came out of the closet as a gay man in 1995, no one would have
expected a United Methodist-related college in the middle of small
town West Virginia to be a place of acceptance and welcome. For many
of my friends who grew up as good Methodists, my coming out forced
them to think about sexual orientation in a new way. And for my
friends who are LGBTQ, my faith has forced them to think about
religion in a new way. Being queer and Christian is an in-between
place I have learned to inhabit – and could only do so, not by any
acts of good works, but by God’s grace. Grace, which on this
National Coming Out Day, allows me to say boldly to those struggling
to reconcile their faith with their sexual orientation or gender
identity, “You are not alone!”

And
that’s what I do every day at the Methodist Federation for Social
Action. But not just for the LGBTQ communities, but for United
Methodists across our connection who are seeking ways to live into
their baptismal vows “to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in
whatever forms they present themselves.”

One
way we do this is through our involvement with the Love Your Neighbor
Coalition, the work of 12 United Methodist caucuses spanning
racial/ethnic, progressive, and LGBTQ caucuses within The United
Methodist Church. I’ll be talking a little bit more about our work
after this service, but I want to encourage everyone here to go to
www.lyncoalition.org –
I’ll give you time to write it down and repeat slowly. Check out
our vision for The United Methodist Church and add your name as a
supporter.

Because
this work isn’t done for extra jewels in our crown, it’s not done
to show Jesus how much we love him. We do this work because we know
the importance of lifting up the voices of those who find themselves
in-between: in-between the powers that be and loving our neighbors;
in-between justice and injustice; in-between hope (and fear) for the
future.

The
work of the Church must be to continue sharing the message of God’s
love and grace for all people.

It’s
that simple. And yet, you and I know, it’s that difficult, too. I
call it “Living in the Land of Maybe.”

Because,
just like the rich young man, and just like the disciples, and just
like the faithful saints and sinners who have composed the Church for
almost two thousand years. Sometimes we get it wrong. And sometimes,
just sometimes, we get it right and we get a glimpse of the world as
it is and can be. A world that is chaotic, and messy, and downright
beautiful, and loved by God, not because of what you or I have done,
but because we have decided to participate in God’s world.

Brazillian
feminist theologian, Ivona Gebara, imagines God’s hope for the
world in this way:

“Men
and women will dwell in their houses; men and women will eat the same
bread, drink the same wine, and dance together in the brightly lit
square, celebrating the bonds uniting all humanity.”¹

This
is no works righteousness folks, but this is to say that we can
partake in the presence of grace and love in the world.

And
every now and then, we get to join in the dance where we can proclaim
together “you are not alone,” to a world in-between injustice and
righteousness, in-between fear and hope, in-between saints and
sinners.

Won’t
you join me in the dance?

1
Gebara, Ivone. “Women Doing Theology in Latin America,” in
Feminist Theology from the Third World, Ursula King, editor,
Orbis Books: Maryknoll, NY, 1994, 59.

Sermons

“Gold and Honey, Meat and Bread” based on Numbers 11:4-6,…

September 27, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

We have completed two weeks of the Young Adult study on Genesis, which by our process means we’ve gotten through 4 chapters, and I have learned a lot. We have Study Bibles and we have commentaries, and there is a lot to be gleaned from all of them. Rather excitingly, they rarely agree.

Last week, the Jewish Study Bible made a fantastic contribution to our study. It pointed out that in Jewish culture, salvation is understood to come from the study of the Torah. The Torah is the first five books of the Bible, shared in both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. They are the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The study of the Torah is the goodness of life in Judaism. Historically this was what adult men did, if they could, every day. In Judaism the study of the Torah is much more about the questions than the answers, and all the cumulative study has lead to truly great questions.

The Jewish Study Bible suggested that the Jews aren’t looking for a Messiah to save them because they have the study of the Torah to making meaning in life, and they didn’t need saving. I have some reasons to argue with that premise historically, but I’m going to refrain from it because I think it has value and deserves to be heard. Furthermore, if their claim had been “some Jews” or “most Jews” I wouldn’t even have an argument, so let’s go with that. Most Jews are not and have not been looking for Messiah to save them, because they have the study of the Torah and that’s enough!!

It certainly makes sense out of the Psalm, which is praising the Torah. It may be helpful to remember that what is called in Judaism the Torah has usually been called in Christianity “the law.” Hear again the beginning of our reading from Psalm 19:

The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; the decrees of the LORD are sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the LORD is clear, enlightening the eyes; the fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever; the ordinances of the LORD are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb. (Psalm 19:7-10)

That text is SERIOUSLY in favor of the Torah, isn’t it? It even sounds like an understanding of the Torah as a source of salvation, if you think of salvation as being about life, wisdom, joy, enlightenment, truth, righteousness and goodness. That would fit most people’s idea of salvation.

I once taught a Bible Study on Deuteronomy, mostly because no one I knew had studied it before. With the guidance of Walter Brueggemann’s commentary, we discovered that we loved the book! It set out a vision for humanity that was attainable and yet remarkable. The vision wanted to keep everyone out of poverty, and did so by preventing the acquisition of wealth. The vision wanted to eliminate harm done to widows, orphans, and foreigners, (cumulatively “the vulnerable”) and set up systems to care for them. The vision wanted to ensure that people were attending to good living, and set up a way to support a priesthood so some people’s job could be working out how life could be lived well. It is an enthralling vision. Fair warning though, if you go to read it, don’t try that without Brueggemann’s commentary, and preferably a group. The Bible can be convoluted at times and horrifying at others, without the right resources to guide the conversation.

Deuteronomy is a part of the Torah, and in some ways it is a summary of the other 4 books. I’m with the Psalmist about the wonder of the Torah, and I love the Jewish idea of salvation via engagement with these profound texts, but there are some rather surprising things that would happen if one took that idea seriously. For instance, you’d be taking stories like the one we read from Numbers as salvific. And the Numbers reading isn’t exactly about perfect human living.

In fact, the Numbers reading is an example of how awful people can be. The people have been brought out of slavery into freedom and they are being cared for by God’s own self. (Sometimes you have to just go with the story to hear what it has to say on its own terms, before you fight with it.) They’re whining. They’re whining about how great they had it back in the day when they were slaves. They’re whining about how great the food was. “We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.” For nothing!?!?! They were slaves. While they likely didn’t pay for food, they also didn’t get paid for their labor, and they were given food in order to keep them alive so they’d keep working.

So, the people who have been brought out of slavery and are being given manna to eat in the desert are whining about the lack of diversity of food. Moses and God find this annoying, which seems rather reasonable. But before God can get too upset it, Moses takes his anger out to God in prayer, and starts whining about what a heavy burden it is to deal with this annoying people. This puts God in the place of having to be the fixer, instead of getting upset. In this narrative, whining, complaining, and nagging work on God. Just saying. It hasn’t ever worked for me, but it works in this narrative.

Some of the text gets skipped in our reading, but it basically says that God responds “You want meat? I’ll give you meat until it comes out of your noses.” God is very personified, huh? In the meantime the authority of Moses got shared with 70 others (which was really significant as a leadership number in the ancient priesthood), who have a funny one-time prophesy experience. And the prophesying includes the 2 guys who were picked to be part of the 70 but played hooky. Then Joshua gets upset with them because they’re stepping on Moses’ toes by doing his thing among the people. But Moses assures him that he’s happy to share.

If you were going to pick a piece of scripture for the purpose of guiding people toward life, wisdom, joy, enlightenment, truth, righteousness and goodness, would this be it?

I’ve been pondering that all week, and I can’t decide. On the one hand, this text is incredibly honest about humans beings and how we operate. It points out how easy it can be to idealize the past. It gives Biblical precedence for the 21^st centuary word “hangry” which is about being cranky/angry when we’re hungry. It examines the challenges of leadership, and it even does a great job with presenting the value of shared leadership and joint responsibility. And it is interesting. There is a lot that can be gleamed from this passage. There are a lot of truths in it. Whether or not it happened, it is really real.

Yet, on the other hand, this is a weird text. God and Moses are in a fight over who has it worse, nagging works on God, the people are simply awful, and the man who is about to take over from Moses is an idiot. There are not suggestions about how to live a good and meaningful life, and the lessons that could be derived from the text would be equally likely to be problematic as to be helpful.

And that, as far as I’ve experienced it, IS the beauty of the Torah. While there are parts of it that are long lists of laws and rules, most of the Torah is made up of stories that tell deep and profound truths about humanity (and our relationship to God) but require a lot of work and mining to get there. The Torah isn’t linear. Even the rules and laws require digging, mining, and contemplation in order to bring meaning out of them. Often there are conflicting versions of the same story, or of the same event, or of the same law! And the conflicts get to just sit there next to each other begging for some examination. Collectively, over millennia, conversations about the stories and nuances have enlightened the generations. They have provided life, wisdom, joy, enlightenment, truth, righteousness and goodness. They have made meaning out of life and therefore made life worth living.

The idea that the study of the Torah might be salvific excites me in two ways. The first is obvious. I’ve spent a lot of my life doing that sort of examination in Bible Study and it has consistently enlightened me and improved my life. The second is a bit more exciting though. It opens up the door to consider other possibilities for salvation.

A few weeks ago I preached about salvation, and I made a very strong claim about how wonderful communal salvation is and how dumb I think the mainstream Christian view of personal salvation is. I ended up, presenting alternative routes to full and abundant living. I was not explicit about these being means to God, and therefore means of individual salvation.

Two of you took the time to present alternative viewpoints to me, which – in the vein of great Bible Study – were great guidance to me. I had claimed that I didn’t know where the idea of personal salvation came from anyway, and one of you said “Um, Jesus?” He was right. The gospels do present the idea of individual salvation.

Secondly, someone offered me another alternative way to think about individual salvation. She said that for her, individual salvation is knowing that God loves her, as she is, and she’s not alone. That was super helpful to me, because I think that’s the starting point for everything in faith. I just forgot that it wasn’t obvious, and I loved using that idea as the concept of what salvation means for individuals. That’s the starting point for both healing and for abundant living within this Jesus-following way of life.

Then, if individual salvation is about knowing God loves you, what gets you there? For some people, it comes rather directly through Jesus, and for many through his willingness to face death in order to share God’s love. For some people, it comes from the utter miracle of a sunset. For some people it comes through the wonder of worship and the beauty of music. For some people it comes from the study of Torah (or the Gospels.) For some people it comes from the wonder of being able to contribute to the lives of others. For some people, it comes from having loved ones gathered in one’s home. Likely, for must of us, it comes through many factors that intersect and interplay during our lifetimes.

So, what helps you know that God loves you? That is, what fills you up so that you are able to share love in the world? Do you need more filling up? How can you receive it? Do you have enough love to share? How else can you give it away? The door is open for consideration, examination, and further questions. Have fun!

For wonderful questions, we give you thanks O God, our rock and our redeemer. 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

September 27, 2015

Sermons

Untitled

September 20, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

At Game Night, there was a description of our Hebrew Bible lesson this morning. Namely, “A virtuous woman as defined by old Jewish men.”¹This description is funny because it is true.² As a woman working on gay rights issues in Myanmar put it this week, “The perspectival bias in biblical hermeneutics is unquestionably patriarchal, and gender discrimination has been traditionally derived from the Bible — written by men, for men, with little consideration given to the lives of women. Likewise, same-sex behavior receives marginal attention in the Bible; when mentioned, the primary concern is to protect the prerogatives of males, for whom any experience of “effeminization” undermines their status.³ Therefore, a description of a “capable wife” found in the Bible is likely to have a gender bias. The woman is a paragon of perfection, and she’s successfully made the rest of us feel guilty ever since they dreamed her up.

Luckily, there is a lot more going on in this text than initially meets the eye. Scholars don’t think that “capable” is a great translation in the opening line “A capable wife who can find?” (Proverbs 31:10a) According to Dr. Kathleen O’Connor, professor emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, the description of the woman “is more literally a ‘strong woman,’ a ‘woman of worth,’ a ‘warriorlike woman.’”⁴ And there are some strange things going on with the poem, ones that might lead to some big questions. O’Connor says, “Proverbs 31:10-31 is an acrostic poem, arranged in alphabetical order, each line beginning with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The presence of the acrostic, combined with language repeated from earlier poems about personified wisdom, suggests that this woman is more than the average mortal.”⁵To be more direct, the poem is at least about a woman who is living out Wisdom. It is more likely about Wisdom as personified as a woman. At most Wisdom is, like Logos, an aspect of the Divine personified. The so-called ‘capable wife,” O’Connor says, “may not be God in this poem – a much debated point – but she works for her followers as if she were.”⁶

OHHHHH. This much quoted text about the perfect woman might be about the PERFECT woman, the embodiment of God as a woman. I feel less guilty already, and I’m not even a wife. There are some little clues that may support this theory. O’Connor says, “Rather than the woman praising her family, her family praises her, thus reversing gender expectations of the ancient world.”⁷ Praise is most frequently due to God in Biblical literature. The praise itself also sounds extraordinary, “Many woman have done excellently, but you surpass them all.” (Proverbs 31:29). Not just anyone can be the very best. There is the obvious factor that no human being could do and be all that is suggested, and the fact that the woman described is quite unusually wealthy and powerful, and her care for the poor and vulnerable, and her wisdom. She is described as “more precious than jewels” (Proverbs 31:10b) which is interesting when the Bible tends to think God is the being of highest value – as in God’s decrees are more precious than gold in Psalm 19:10. And, quite curiously, her physicality is given no description. All of those lean us toward one of the interpretations that suggest that this woman is “more than just a woman.”

As she is either Wisdom as woman or God’s Wisdom as woman, she is NOT the standard against which other women are to be judged. Another scholar suggested, “it is not likely that all of these admirable traits, characteristics, and accomplishments will be found in one person…[what] looks like the portrayal of a single wonder woman is actually a composite of some of the ways that women make a difference.”⁸ I slightly disagree with him though. If we want to take this Wisdom-God-Woman as a composite, then wouldn’t it be of all people? Wouldn’t this be a Hebrew Bible version of what becomes for Christians the Body of Christ? It is a description of what all of us are capable of being when we work together for God and therefore also a description of what God is up to in the world.

How does sound then? God at work in the word is: trustworthy, hardworking, focused on feeding her people, thoughtful, strong, prepared, generous, well-dressed, empowering of others, able to create beautiful things of great value, dignified, full of laughter, kind, joyful, and worthy of praise! Yep. That sounds like God, and what we are able to do together at our best! That suggests that each of us is meant to provide one or a few of the aspects of this Wisdom-God-Woman as our gift to the world, but NONE of us are meant to provide all of them.

If this interpretation is true, however Wisdom and God and the “capable wife” are interrelated, the text is unexpectedly female-positive. There are other places in the Bible where God is compared to a woman, but I don’t know of any texts that are such an extended metaphor of God conceived in the feminine. It is a rather profound upheaval of expectations about how God is understood. Women were not of high value or power in those ancient times, and comparing God to a woman either weakens God or strengthens women. I’d hope it is the latter!

When I bought my house last year I made a joke that as a white, adult, landowner there was only one thing that would have kept me from being able to vote when we became a country (my gender). I’m glad to live today. My humanity is recognized and accepted and I have powers in the world that my sisters from previous generations would not have deemed possible. The idea that only wealthy white men could vote in our country (for a LONG TIME) sometimes hurts my head, but it also makes sense out of the battles we’re still struggling with. When we became a country full humanity was only granted to wealthy white men. Thanks be to God that the definitions have changed, and culture is going to catch up eventually!

Biblically, this went a step further than it did in early US history. A man’s household was his property: his wife, his children, his servants. In the Gospel, Jesus starts playing with the ideas and roles of servants and children. Rev. Dr. Sharon Ringe is a professor of New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary, and a contributor to Feasting on the Word. She says succinctly, ”Competition for power, wealth, and prestige infected all cultures included in the Roman Empire.”⁹ (Which makes it part of the world as I’ve known it.) According to our text, the disciples were people who existed in a pretty normal culture and all wanted to be the best! After all, following an religious/moral teacher can become a source of pride. It could lead to one thinking one is better than others who don’t follow one’s teacher. And if one’s teacher is Jesus directly, it seems reasonable one might want to feel good about it, and then even feel most justified than then next disciple.

There is a lot to be said for being the best in most cultures! Yet the entire Gospel lesson today suggests that following Jesus is NOT about being the best. This is why it is particularly helpful that we’ve eliminated the need to be the “best” woman/wife with our work with Proverbs. In the text Jesus stakes a claim of having a unique role with God when he says he is the “Son of Man” but he then explains that his unique role is going to get him killed. It may be a good time to remember that the Jews had been awaiting a Messiah for 5 centuries or so, and they expected him to bring them political, social, military, and financial status. He wasn’t supposed to go and get killed. That in and of itself is reversal of the type that might be understood as the first being last.

Jesus’s responses to the disciples fighting of their greatness continues the same theme. Ringe writes, “The words translated in the NRSV of verse 35 as ‘servant’ is diakonas. While that word came to refer to a person in ministry, in the Greek of Jesus’ and Mark’s day it meant someone who served meals. The person who was ‘servant of all’ was the lowest in rank of all the servants – the one who would be allowed to eat only what was left after everyone else had eaten their fill.”¹⁰ Isn’t that an interesting take on ministry itself? Soon there after there is a strange transition from the disciples being expected to be servants to them being expected to be like children. This is another case where translation fails us. The word for servant and the one for child are very similar. Ringe continues, “Mark’s audience would have heard the word ‘child’ as referring to someone like the servant who served meals to everyone else in the household, in that both were seen as without ‘honor’ or high social standing.”¹¹Then, “Not only is Jesus himself said to honor and welcome a mere child (v. 36), but the saying in verse 37 equates one’s welcome of such a child with welcoming Jesus himself.”¹²

That is, according to Dr. Martha L. Moore-Keith of Columbia Theological Seminary, “Jesus first calls the disciples to emulate the child, thus renouncing social status; he then calls them to welcome the child, to make space for those with no social status, since to do so is to welcome Jesus himself- and the One who sent him.”¹³ It works quite well as a continuation of the idea that they are to be like servants, doesn’t it? The entire Gospel lesson is a set of inversions about what it means to be great. The first shall be last and the last shall be first, indeed. Children, and servants come first. Jesus and the disciples are last.

When we add in Proverbs, we see that the standard of perfection isn’t intended to be met by human beings. The best and perfect wife is an expression of Wisdom and/or God. She isn’t the best, she’s out of the competition. She’s isn’t the goal. She’s the expression of what we can all do together.

God doesn’t seem too interested in our definitions of who or what matters. Isn’t it great? It gives us a lot of freedom: to care about what really matters and not what is “supposed to matter”, to let go of the quest for perfection and leave that for God, to get on with the work of living and helping others live, to do our own parts of the work of the Body of Christ and trust that others will do the same and God will build it up toward good – that is, to let go of trying to be first and just be! With God, we aren’t in a competition. Thanks be to God! Amen

___

1 “A Game for Good Christians.” Expansion Deck: Wisdom Literature.
2 All humor is funnier when it has to be explained, right?
3 Molly T. Marshall “Religios Freedom and Human Rights” published September 25, 2015 by Baptist Global News. Accessed athttps://baptistnews.com/opinion/columns/item/30483-religious-freedom-and-human-rights on September 19, 2015.
4 Kathleen M. O’Connor, “Exegetical Perspective on Proverbs 31:10-31” 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 75.
5 O’Connor, page 75.
6 O’Connor, page 79.
7 O’Connor, page 79.
8 H. James Hopkins, “Homiletical Perspective on Proverbs 31:10-31” inFeasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009)., page 77.
9 Sharon H. Ringe, “Exegetical Perspective on Mark 9:30-37”, 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 95.
10 Ringe, page 95
11 Ringe, page 97.
12 Ringe, page 97.
13 Martha L. Moor-Keish, Theological Perspective on Mark 9:30-37, 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 96.
–
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

“Powerful, Tempting Words” based on James 3:1-12 and Mark…

September 13, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I used to have a game called “True Colors.” It consists of a set of questions, and voting boxes. Questions were something like, “Who is most likely to talk their way out of a speeding ticket?” or “Who makes their bed every day?” Each player is assigned a color, and then the players vote on who among them best fits the description. The scoring of the game required players to assess each question and determine if they would get “all”, “some,” or “none” of the votes on that question. Thus, the game existed to answer the advertised question, “Do you see yourself as others see you?”

Jesus’ questions in the gospel lesson today made me think of that game. He asks two questions: Who do THEY say that that I am and Who do YOU say that I am, but the gospel writer seems to use them to introduce the questions “Who did Jesus think that he was?” and “Who did God think that Jesus was?”

The game True Colors, doesn’t really do what it says. It CLAIMS to ask “Do you see yourself as others see you?” But it really asks, “Do you know how others see you?” or “Do your self-judgments fit other people’s judgments of you?” The answer is often, “no.”

I once heard a story of a woman who saw herself very differently than others saw her:

“An Asian traveller to Iceland joined a night-long search operation for herself after she failed to recognize her own description in details of a “missing woman”.

The woman was declared missing from a party touring the Eldgja volcanic region in south Iceland after getting off the party’s bus to freshen up, the Daily Mail reported.

She hopped off the bus briefly, but had also changed her clothes — and her fellow travellers did not recognise her when she climbed back on again to continue the party’s journey. Soon the search began for a woman described as Asian, around 160 cm, in dark clothing and speaking English well. When the details of the missing person were issued, the woman reportedly didn’t recognise her own description and unwittingly joined the search party for herself.

After a night-long operation involving around 50 people, the “missing woman” eventually realised she was the source of the search and informed the police. The search began on Saturday, but was called off at around 3 am (local time) on Sunday morning when the woman realised she was the subject of the frantic efforts.”

This woman did not know how the others on her tour bus saw her. Quite possibly, the others the on the tour bus didn’t really see her, if a change of clothing was that confusing for them.

For some of us, it is easy to be pulled into spending all our time worrying about how others see us and it is easy connect our self-worth with how others judge us. If we were to ask the questions that Jesus asked, “Who do they say that I am?” and “Who do YOU say that I am?,” life could get really difficult. It happens naturally enough. Positive judgments from others feel good – at least at first. Negative judgments from others feel bad – at least at first. Most human language is laced with judgment, and it has powerful effects on our understandings of ourselves. To make things even more challenging, not all judgments come from the outside. Many of the most powerful ones are self-judgments, and they are often HARSH.

Judgments are so pervasive that they’re sometimes hard to identify. Studies of people texting while driving have established that there is a reason people do it! Namely, there is little, tiny rush of endorphins that comes every time we get a text message or a response on social media, and the rush of endorphins can become addicting. The endorphins (good feeling hormones) indicate, to me, that most of us interpret texts or social media responses as a sort of praise – someone cares enough to respond to us! And we’re so hungry for praise, which is positive judgment, that we seek it out – as a whole culture.

James seems to obsess over judgments. He says he is talking about the power of words, and he is, but it seems a little bit bigger than that. Our tongues are as powerful as the rudder of a ship, or the campfire that starts a forest fire, he claims. But then he gets all flustered that blessings and curses can come out of the same please. He says, “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so.” (James 3:10) but the even better part is when he objects to the whole idea of cursing, saying that with our tongues “we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God.” (James 3:9) First of all, he has a great point. Much 1 John says, “Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” (1 John 4:20) Since all of creation is created by God, or at perhaps all of creation is IN God, to curse anyone or anything is to curse God.

Now, I proposed a few weeks ago a new definition of blessing, a blessing is anything that is being used for building up the kin-dom. I wonder what that does in this passage, when James talk about speaking a blessing! Would that mean that he’s talking about words that are useful for building up the kin-dom? I suspect so. And then curses word be words that keep the kin-dom from being build up! The reason I suggested that James is more upset about judgments than just about words, is that I think the thoughts we have and the judgments contained in them can do as much damage within us as the words spoken out-loud can do damage to others.

Blessings and curses may not even sound much like we’d expect them to. Some curses may be couched in flowery praise language, but be used to manipulate someone to do something not good for them! Blessings may come out in hesitant, halting language, seeking to name a truth a person has to share without even a mention of good things to come!

In any case, James is on target with the power of language, and how it impacts both the speakers and the hearers. The ways we use language, and the goals we use it for, form us and our communities.

Given all that, the questions Jesus asked strike me as dangerous! He was ASKING for judgment. Different people judged him differently. The answers the disciples gave were very different. He was told that some people thought he was john the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets, and yet another group said he was the Messiah – the one they’d all been waiting for. That seems to be the answer he was looking for, or at least the answer the Gospel writer wanted placed in people’s minds. We aren’t told how Jesus understood himself, nor why he wanted to know what people were saying. The text seems to suggest that while the Messiah that the people expected was to be the new King of Israel, the Messiah they got was one who would be killed for that very claim.

Rev. Monty Brown, a United Methodist from West Virginia has answered the most important of the questions for all of us, Jesus included I’d say. Who does God think that I am? God thinks that I am a “beloved child of God, precious and beautiful to behold.” Who does God think that you are? God thinks that you are “beloved child of God, precious and beautiful to behold.”²

Unlike the roller coaster of other people’s judgment, this God based identity is steady, sturdy, and consistent. What does it mean to be beloved of God? A friend of mine says that to love someone is to acknowledge that your well-being is intertwined with theirs. To love someone is to acknowledge that your well-being is intertwined with theirs. That is to say that their happiness brings you joy and your sadness brings them sorrow…. that it is hard for you to be fully happy if they are sad. It seems like a very good description of what love looks like.

And not just on the human level. What does it mean to be beloved of God? It means that God’s well-being is intertwined with ours…. when we hurt God hurts with us and when we celebrate, God is filled with joy.

Now, if we ponder that for a moment, and we consider what it means to love God… God intertwines us with everyone else, at least a little bit. When we say we love God, it means that our well-being is intertwined with God’s well being – which is intertwined with everyone else’s well being! God does best when things happen that are a net good for all people, and God is most hurt when deep harm is done. Maybe that’s why it actually feels bad to get revenge, or to hurt another person – because if we listen well, we hear the ways it hurts us too. And maybe that’s why the best feelings in life tend to come when we’re able to help another person – because we get a bit of the joy back.

Now, being a beloved child of God, precious and beautiful to behold is our fundamental identity – all of us. But if you notice, that doesn’t mean everything will go well. Right after the conversation about who Jesus was, he talked with his followers about what kind of trouble that was going to cause in his life. That’s another place that the power of language is visible. Peter offers him advice: be smart, save yourself! And Jesus must be tempted, because he responds, “Get behind me, temptation.” Putting to words something Jesus wanted anyway made it harder for him to turn it down. The words Peter spoke were powerful and tempting. Many words are. There is a lot be said for taking words (even words that aren’t spoken, words that stay thoughts) very seriously. When we are at our best, we can take the judgments of our thoughts, our words, and our world, and examine them for the nuggets of wisdom within.

That’s one of the coolest things I’ve learned this summer studying non-violent communication. Judgments have nuggets of goodness in them, showing us what we need and what we want and thereby helping us get there. Peter’s judgmental rebuke of Jesus contained within it the nugget of joy in his connection to Jesus and wonder at his teaching a desire to have his meaningful life continue. Jesus’ responsive rebuke of Peter revealed his shared desire to continue his life and ministry, and his commitment to being authentic. He knew others were out to get him, but he refused to change the way he acted out love in the world. Listening to the values people have in stories makes the stories much richer.

Listening the needs and values we have in judgments can take the sting out, and leave life enriched. May our powerful words be used to tempt ourselves, each other, and those we meet into enriched lives. Amen

1 http://www.deccanherald.com/content/275838/tourist-joins-search-self-missing.html Accessed September 12, 2015.

2 Monty Brown, Free Us For Joyful Obedience: A Primer on Pastoral Caregiving from a Pastor’s Heart (AuthorHouse, Bloomington IN: 2006) Location 680 in Kindle edition.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

September 6, 2015

Sermons

“Gratitude in Action” based on Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23 and…

September 6, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Four years ago last week, Hurricane Irene wrecked unprecedented damage in New England as well as in Schoharie and Middleburg and communities in this area. Four years ago this week, Tropical Storm Lee followed and with ground water and rivers already full, dumped another foot of water in 24 hours to the town I was living in. The damage was also unprecedented. Waters went 17 feet above flood level.

It rained on a Thursday. That Sunday was the 10 year anniversary on September 11^th, 2001. We’d planned an ecumenical service to be held at a neighborhood church. We canceled because we had no water, no electricity and the church we’d planed to use was instead being used as an emergency Red Cross shelter.

That morning, those of us who could, gathered in the Narthex of the church I was serving because there was more natural light there. We sat in a circle and checked in each other, and on those whose well-being we knew about. There was shock in our midst. There was also a lot of uncertainty. People just didn’t know what to do.

I was among them, horrified and shocked and uncertain how to help. We sang a bit and discussed some scripture, but mostly we talked. Eventually one of the church members who was also a volunteer fireman said, “Can anyone come to the firehouse this afternoon? I have an idea, but I don’t have time to implement it.” It turned out, I was the one who could.

His idea was simple: there were people who needed help and there were people who wanted to help, and someone needed to match them up. The firehouse had a generator, and by Sunday it had dry ice and water (but nothing else yet). It was the place people came to, and so it was the perfect location to match people up.

People desperately wanted to help, it was natural in the face of that much destruction to want to do something, but they didn’t know what to do! By keeping a running list of things they could do, and sending them out in an organized fashion to help their neighbors, they were able to do something that mattered. They were SO grateful to me (and the team that emerged to work with me) for helping them know what to do. People whose homes had been flooded were overwhelmed. They didn’t know what to do, or where to start. When others came to help, it lifted the burden and made things seem possible again. They were so grateful for the help, and they ended up thanking ME. I just sat there and got thanked, for months.

(I would like to make it very clear that I didn’t lift anything heavier than a pen, nor get dirty at any point during the flood recovery. I had the easiest job of all, and I had a church who believed that the work of organizing flood recovery counted as my job.)

The gratitude, both to me and in general, was humbling. It was especially humbling to hear the gratitude of the people whose homes had been flooded. People would say, “Oh, we’re lucky, it was just a few feet in my basement.” (Truthfully, people who had less than a few FEET of water in the basement didn’t even mention it.) Others would say “Oh, I’m lucky, it didn’t reach the first floor.” Then, I heard, “Oh, we’re lucky, the second floor wasn’t even touched.” And, I kid you not, multiple people who had lost everything they owned and their home as well said, “We’re so lucky! We have friends who took us in and people are willing to help us clean up.”

Some of this was perspective, people knew others who had it worse, or had imagined it being worse. But a lot of it was actually just surprise at the generosity of those who helped them. I think many people expected to be on their own in recovering from an utterly overwhelming disaster. (Lest anyone think that gratitude was the only emotion, let me share a tiny story. There was a road that has been flooded at both end points, and two houses on it had burned to the water level because the fire trucks couldn’t get through. The rest of the people on the street were a bit jealous of those whose homes had burned because it was easier.) Any way and all ways that people helped and came together exceeded people’s expectations. They were relieved, they were held up, they were supported, and they were grateful. Things weren’t as bad as they might have been.

It was interesting how differences between people became trivial. Churches that didn’t usually talk to each other, or necessarily recognize each other’s existence worked together. Or, to be more forthright about it, I was sort of shocked that churches that preached against women in ministry still took orders from me 😉

Initially no one had water, nor electricity. The church I served realized that those who had electric stoves couldn’t heat dinner, so they started a free pasta dinner every night for anyone who wanted to come. People working on cleaning out their homes, those working on helping others clean out homes, those who were just lonely, those who were hungry, and those who just wanted a hot meal came together with no distinctions between them. The barriers of society: race and age, wealth and political view points just ceased to matter. People were just people for a bit.

Proverbs says, “Those who are generous are blessed, for they share their bread with the poor.” Sharing has its own rewards. It has its challenges too. Simeon Weil was known to say, “It is only by the grace of God that the poor can forgive the rich the bread they give them.” There is not a lot of dignity, usually, in our society, in needing or asking for help. Those who don’t have enough money to make it on their own are told in innumerable ways by society that they’ve failed. This isn’t new. James hits the nail on the head when he calls out communities of faith for treating people differently because of wealth or status. Jesus very clearly aimed his ministry at the people in his society who had the least. Yet throughout the ages Christianity has struggled to follow. James. Marcus Borg dates the book to somewhere in the 70’s or 80’s, that is, after the Gospel of Mark was written but before the Gospel of Matthew was written.¹ We’ve been struggling with wealth for a while.

Actually, that’s not even fair. The Bible as a whole is obsessed with justice, by which it means being certain that people who are wealthy don’t get their way over people who are poor just because of money. Proverbs is part of this obsession. Saying, “Do not rob the poor because they are poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate; for the LORD pleads their cause and despoils of life those who despoil them.” (Proverbs 22: 22-23) Remember that the gate is where transactions occurred. That means that there is something OLD in humanity about treating people with wealth (or maybe just power) differently. We have hierarchy in us. Walter Wink thinks this is only a 8000 year old story, and not universal. I hope he’s right. But the roots of our Bible and of my ancestors is in this differentiation and hierarchy, despite the attempts to change it.

But during the flood, those who received help weren’t shamed by needing it, and that made it a lot easier to be grateful for receiving it. Similarly, there wasn’t a differential between the people who needed help and those who gave it. They were neighbors, whether or not they knew each other. Some happened to live in a localized low or closer to normally dry creek bed. The rich and the poor had a lot in common: their homes were flooded, their water wasn’t safe, their food was spoiled, and there no supplies to be found. It made it a lot easier to follow James’ commands and Proverb’s advice. (Until UMCOR showed up. Thanks UMCOR.)

What was so startling about the gratitude was that it felt so very much out of context. Isn’t gratitude for wonderful things and sadness, anger and horror for terrible things like losing everything you have and your home too? Recently I’ve been able to come up with a theory of what was going on. Nonviolent Communication has this fantastic list of universal human needs (https://workcollaboratively.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/wc_needs-feelings-inventory.pdf) and some amazing insights about them. For instance, the theory suggests that everything we do is an attempt to meet one or more need, although not everything we do is effective in doing so. Furthermore, there are actually a whole lot of human needs, and they’re not all going to be met at the same time.

BUT at any given moment, some of them are being met. So, the people I was getting to know during the flood had some really important and serious needs that were inherently not being met by during that time: for shelter, for safety, for order, for stability, for space, and often for rest. Yet, many needs that often go unmet WERE being met (and while these were clearly different for different people, I’m going to make some guesses): for community, for compassion, for interdependence, for support, for understanding, for celebration of life. The overwhelming gratitude wasn’t the only emotion going on (and as time went on, other emotions took more precedence), but it was terribly authentic. There were ways that the days and weeks right after the flood met people’s needs that often went unmet.

One of the harshest realities of our current society is that it isolates people from one another and from being a part of community. (This is one of the greatest needs that church is able to meet.) There is a myth that good people are self-sufficient and that independence is an appropriate life goal. The truth is that none of us are self-sufficient, in large part because we are social animals and we need each other in order to be full – and have our needs met!

I think it is possible to replicate some of the amazingly good things that I saw in the recovery from the Great Flood of 2011 without needing the Great Flood of 2011. While the gratitude I heard then was natural and authentic, I think it is also nurturable. If in any situation some of our needs are going to be met and some of them are not, then we CAN choose to pay attention either way. Sometimes it is really helpful to figure out what needs are wanting to be met, so that we can find a way to get them met! But sometimes we have a choice to change our focus. Instead of fussing, fuming, and building up resentment by telling and retelling ourselves stories of what is wrong (I’m sorry, is that just me? I didn’t THINK it was just me.) we can choose to pay attention to what is right. If people can do it in the flood, we can do it anytime we want.

And gratitude, I think, changes more than just our attitude. It is more like a muscle that can be built up with use. I hear people who are very strong in gratitude, and they’re rather enjoyable to be around! It is very important to be aware of injustice and brokenness in the world so that we can help change it. But it is just as important to be aware of beauty and wonder in the world so that we can enjoy it! Finally, I think gratitude is the great motivator! It turns out that obligations drain us, but when we act out of gratitude we are able to give without losing any part of ourselves. Gratitude is a game changer.

And there is a lot to be thankful for. Thanks be to God! Amen

1Marcus Borg Evolution of the Word: The New Testament in the Order the Books Were Written (HarperOne, USA: 2012), 193.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady
September 6, 2015

Sermons

“John Wesley v. Self Help Books: Salvation” based on Jeremiah…

August 30, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

There are two MAJOR examples of God’s salvation in the Hebrew Bible. One is the Exodus story, when God saves the people from the bondage of slavery in Egypt, and they move into the Promised Land. The second is found in the story of restoration, when God acts to save the people from bondage of slavery in Babylonia and they return to and restore the city of Jerusalem in the Promised Land. There are big stories, narratives which play out in big and small ways throughout the entirety of the Bible. Both are salvation. God saves the people.

Our text today is text of promise, that was given to the people while they were in exile, and slavery (the second time), promising salvation, healing, wholeness, return, and restoration. The words are gorgeous. The promise is uplifting. And, history tells us, it was fulfilled. The people returned. They wept with joy, the nation did not die off after all.

What I cannot figure out, given this profound history and foundation, is how the heck we got from salvation being about God’s acts in saving the people – together- to something that I’m told is called “personal salvation.” (I seriously had to look this up. I tried calling it “individual salvation” because that made sense to me as a counter to “communal salvation”, but Google soon informed me that people don’t say it that way.) Personal salvation is the most anti-Biblical, and anti-God idea I’ve ever heard. I say this recognizing that it has been a significant theme in Christian history for most of Christian history. And, furthermore, that when I say “significant” theme, I should probably admit “this is what most people think Christianity IS.”

Nevertheless, I’m holding firm. The idea is an atrocity. From what I can surmise, it goes like this. “There are good people in the world and there are bad people in the world. Good people follow God’s rules, as defined in the Bible. Bad people don’t. God, like a human parent, punishes the bad people for being bad and rewards the good people for being good. Therefore, because of mistakes made on earth bad people will suffer for eternity while good people will enjoy the presence of God in heaven for eternity. The utterly unclear line the sand between good people and bad people is drawn by God and is thus fair. After-all, the rules are the rules.”There is also a variation, rather popular, that suggests that the difference between good people and bad people is “declaring your faith in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.” Salvation, in this understanding is the act of being picked as one of the good people.

I was raised in a rather “normal” United Methodist Church in the suburbs. By the time I went to seminary I had separated myself from the “Good People Salvation” narrative by focusing on God’s nature as love. I would say at that point that if “nothing can separate us from the of of God (in Christ)” then no human action or inaction would be sufficient for God’s condemnation. Therefore, I surmised, I was a “universal salvationist.” When I got to seminary and people were talking about “salvation of all creation, of the entire universe” I was GENUINELY confused. However, I was also embarrassed because I was sure that all of my classmates were better Christians that I was, and knew more than I did, and I kept my mouth shut. (Most of them had double majored in religion and philosophy, and my math major didn’t initially feel like a good background for seminary.)

After a few days though, it all seemed to clear up. Of course salvation is about this life! What a silly idea to think that all that is, all this wonder of creation, all the depth of this life are insignificant!!! And of course it isn’t limited to humans – creation is more than just humans. God’s work to heal and bring wholeness – God’s work with us to more creation into more completion – would apply to everyone. I had thought I was supposed to think salvation was about afterlife, but having another option felt like freedom. Salvation as healing, as wholeness, as God’s work in the world to move creation to completion just made more sense! I haven’t looked back, other than with some horror.

Five years ago, I read John Shelby Spong’s “Eternal Life: A New Vision (Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell.” I remember it being rather painfully slow for the first 2/3^rd and then like an brain explosion for the final 1/3^rd. I’ve recently looked back at the book and I actually marked the point of transition with a note in the margins that says “start of new ideas.” These five years after I first read this book, it is no longer all that shocking, and now it is a lot more convincing.

The new ideas section started with this, “Perhaps the personhood we have ascribed to God is really our own, projected onto God. God might then be conceived not as a being, but as the process that calls us into being; not as a person, but as the process that calls personhood into being.”¹ For those who studied math in excess like me, this sounds like the first time I met a “function.” My textbook didn’t seem to describe it ways that made sense to me, but I finally figured out that the function is “what you are going to do to the variable.” It is the process. This seems to me like the suggestion that God is function, the process, and we’ve been confusing God with the output.

Spong goes on to make sense of this new understanding of God:

“Human beings need to understand that we must reconcile the biological drive to survive, which is present in every living thing but achieves self-consciousness only in human life. With the creative thought, emotional feelings, and ability to love others even at the sacrifice of ourselves which are the things that self-conscious creatures alone can choose to do or to have. That is the challenge of humanity. It is in the recognition and reconciliation of this tension that we discover that the way to what human beings have traditionally called God is not through some external projection of our needs, but through entering the depth dimensions of the human experience. The divine we have always sought turns out to be a dimension of the human. Religion ultimately becomes not an activity in which we explore the meaning of God, but an activity through which we explore the meaning of the human.Religion is not a journey into the external deity, but a journey into the heart of our humanity, where we break out of our separation fears and enter the meaning of transcendence, oneness, timelessness, and finally eternity.” ²

When I read these words again, I squealed with joy! YES! YES! This IS what it is about! This isn’t what religion, especially Christianity has been, but it is what it CAN BE! He says later, “The more deeply I live, the more God becomes identified with my life.”³ and “The more deeply I am able to love, the more God becomes part of me.”⁴ This is the point where the radical and wonderful postmodern theologian John Shelby Spong intersects once again with the “merry little theologian” of nearly 300 years ago, John Wesley. Wesley, amazingly enough, rarely mentions afterlife but talks extensively of salvation. He speaks of it AS the process of letting God’s love grow in us into fullness. Or maybe we can go back to Spong’s words, “Jesus is not absorbed into the holy. Jesus is rather alive with the holy.”⁵ If so, then we are to do the same. “Our ultimate destiny was never to be religious human beings, as once we thought; it was simply to be fully and totally human.”⁶

The question then, is: what helps us be fully and totally human? As far as I’ve experienced it, there are two intersecting aspects to the answer. One is relational. We love each other into being, and no one becomes human or whole by themselves. We are communal animals, formed by each other. The second is relational too, but in this case self-relational. We are simply people, right? By our cultural myths we are composed of body, mind, emotions, and spirit/soul, but the greatest of these is mind! Yet we are not just our minds. To become fully and totally human is to live in our bodies, to listen to and care about our emotions, to pay attention to the needs of our spirits and find the way to feed them – and to help others do the same. For me, that’s easiest to accomplish through the process of Nonviolent Communication – shameless plug: stick around for the 2^nd hour on September 13^th and for an Adult Education series this fall. Learning empathy for myself and others is helping me become more fully and totally human.

The intersections of Nonviolent Communication and faith intrigue me and they seem to fit into one of Spong’s new definitions, “The task of religion is not to turn us into proper believers; it is to deepen the personal within us, to embrace the power of life, to expand our consciousness, in order that we might see things that eyes to not normally see. It is to seek a humanity that is not governed by the need for security, but is expressed in the ability to give ourselves away.”⁷

This full, total humanity, this way of living and loving with abundance for ourselves and others, is eternal in that it is so deeply connected to the divine. He says, “True worship has little to do with saying words of praise, but is rather identical with having the courage to be all that I can be. True worship is a process that suggests and celebrates the fact that the more deeply and fully I can be who I am, the more I will make God, understood as being itself, visible.”⁸ Others have suggested this before him, and it is a beautiful idea. Eternal Life can simply life with the Eternal One, opening up the possibility that the lives we live now, which are lived in and with God are united with eternity. And maybe even are a way of being open to the transition from this life to whatever comes next. He says, “For God is ultimately one, and that means that each of us is a part of that oneness. ‘My me is indeed God.” … I am finite, but I share in infinity. I am mortal, but I share in immortality. I am being, but I share in being itself.”⁹

Most self-help books are trying to help people become fully human! In that way they are terribly good. However, I don’t know that many of them pay attention to the intersecting human needs of relationships with self AND others! They’re focused on “personal salvation” thought about in new ways. The Bible is hyper focused on “communal salvation,” because we are only whole when we are whole together. Any time the balance is out of wack – too far to the individual and missing the communal or too far to the communal and ignoring the needs of the individual, we are not fully human. Salvation is the healing of the whole universe. All of us together and each of us individually. We participate by becoming fully human, and by giving ourselves to each other. To go back to Jeremiah, God promises,

“They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion,
and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord,
over the grain, the wine, and the oil,
and over the young of the flock and the herd;
their life shall become like a watered garden,
and they shall never languish again.
Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance,

and the young men and the old shall be merry.
I will turn their mourning into joy,
I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.” (Jeremiah 31:12-13

God’s work is salvation – and it is beautiful!

Finally, I was told last week that if I didn’t answer the question about “Would John Wesley drive a Prius?” then I’d be guilty of false advertising. Apparently, “It was just a good title” got me no where. I spent most of this sermon series thinking that John Wesley would drive a 20 year old Corolla because he’d want to save money to give away and he’d like the reliability, but I’ve changed my mind. Would John Wesley drive a Prius? No. He’d take the bus. It is more eco-friendly, it is more economical, and it is more relational. And, after all, this is a man who was famous for reading books on horseback. I think we can easily imagine what he’d do while waiting at the bus-stop. He’d read John Shelby Spong ;). (Amen)

1John Shelby Song Eternal Life: A New Vision (HarperOne: USA, 2009), p. 155
2Spong, 155-6.
3Spong, 161.
4Spong, 161.
5Spong, 167.
6Spong, 207.
7Spong 185.
8Spong, 162.
9Spong, 209.

–

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

August 30. 2015

Sermons

“John Wesley v. Amazon.com: Blessing” based on Genesis 12:1-4 and…

August 24, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

If
you spend too much time thinking about blessing, as I have done this
week, it becomes clear why there is a book called, “When Bad Things
Happen to Good People.”¹
(Which, if you haven’t read it, is a great book.) By dictionary
definitions, a blessing is “God’s favor and protection.”²
There are actually a whole bunch more definitions, as it is a noun
and a verb, used both for what we do and say and what God does… but
that’s the important definition from which all the others flow.
“God’s favor and protection,” or if you’d like, Wikipedia adds a
bit of nuance when it defines it this way, “A blessing is the
infusion of something with holiness, spiritual redemption, divine
will, or one’s hope or approval.”³
The root words that became “blessing” in English were the words
for “blood”/”mark or consecrate with blood” that eventually
got influenced in meaning because it was used to translated the Latin
word benedicere ‘to praise or worship.”⁴

This
seemingly sweet, gentle, kind, inoffensive little word has a lot
going on. It is reasonable to assume, including from Biblical
stories themselves that from ancient times, the concept of blessing
had a lot to do with: fertility (of animals, crops and people) and
winning at battle. All of which were life or death issues, to large
degree out of control of the people participating in them.
Therefore, they were looking for supernatural help along the way
to stay alive. Those who had many children, or got rich, or won
in battle were thought to be blessed.

The
Bible also contains a counter-narrative. While much of the Bible
says that God’s favor and protection made people healthy, wealthy,
and happy while God’s disfavor and lack of protection made people …
sick, poor, or dead… it isn’t the only perspective. The book of
Job offers a strong objection! So does Jesus. The Sermon on the
Mount claims that the poor, the hungry, and the mourning (etc) are
the blessed people. That’s counter to the basic understanding of
“God’s favor and protection.”

It
seems like there is a big debate happening, even within the Bible
itself, about the nature of God. One side is reflected in our
dictionary definitions, and it is far and away the more popular side.
It is the side of traditional theology, where God is understood as
being like a supernatural parent – punishing and rewarding children
as God sees fit. Many people will talk about things that happen in
life saying, “everything happens for a reason” or “God has a
plan” and when the things that happen are terrible things, they
explain that “God is teaching a lesson.”

But
along with Job, and the Sermon on the Mount, and the rest of the
minority report, I think these concepts of God are outdated and
unhelpful. Spong names it this way, “We once saw God as the prime
mover in the issues of sickness and health.”⁵
“We once saw God as the source of the weather, and we interpreted
drought, floods, storms, hurricanes and tornadoes as expressions of
the divine will.”⁶
“We once thought that God led our nation into battle, defeating
our enemies or, if our faithfulness to this God had been badly
compromised, allowing us to taste the Divine wrath in defeat.”⁷
“Yet I do not define God as a supernatural being. I do not
believe in a deity who can help a nation win a war, intervene to cure
a loved one’s sickness, allow a particular athletic team to defeat
its opponent, or affect the weather for anyone’s benefit.”⁸

That
seems to reflect the beatitudes and Job in terms of understanding
God. In this conception, God’s favor or protection aren’t
particularly meaningful concepts. That’s good news! If God plays
favorites, I’m not impressed. If God protects only some, I’m not
impressed, and if God is protecting all of us, God is a lousy
protector. I’d like to propose an alternative definition for
blessing, one that I think fits the Hebrew Bible lesson today.

Abraham
is told he is chosen, favored, uniquely blessed. But in the same
thought he is told that the reason he is blessed is so that he can be
a blessing. It is through him that all people in the world will be
blessed! Blessing, then is a useful sort of thing. It is a
contribution to the goodness of life, not just for one’s self, but
for the good of the whole.

Now,
the good of the whole is something called the Kin-dom, and most
scholars agree it is the whole point of Jesus’ ministry and the
ministry of the followers of Jesus since his death. The Kin-dom is
the time when all people will have enough to thrive! There will be
deep peace, and wholeness, cooperation, connection and love. The
Kin-dom is when all the people treat each other as kin, and no one is
outside the circle. (If you haven’t heard about this before, you
may be more familiar with the words “kingdom” or “realm of
God”, the choice to just use kin-dom is the choice to take out the
hierarchy from the old language. It may also be important to note
that the traditional language is that the kin-dom is “breaking into
the world” meaning that it is here in moments and in parts, but
coming in completion.)

My
proposal is that a blessing is anything that is being used for
building up the kin-dom. So a blessing might be a great book or
a wise teacher, a profound work of art, a gentle smile in the midst
of a hard day, a fantastically fun song, a time of prayer, a
challenge, a coat, or a cup of coffee – for example. That is, many
of the things that have traditionally gotten labeled blessings still
get to be under the new definition. It is just that we don’t think
we have “blessings” because God loves use more, or protects us
uniquely or functions like punishing and rewarding parent. Instead
we are freed to pay attention to the many wonderful things in life
that can be profoundly useful for ourselves and others in making the
world more fair, equitable, just, wonderful, joyful, healed, and
whole.

Now,
it seems like time to get around to John Wesley, who is quite famous
for getting into a huge fight over blessing. I’m amazed, frankly,
that enough people cared about this to make an international argument
happen, but I apparently lack sufficient angst over it. John Wesley
developed a concept of “second blessing.” It worked like this:
the process of coming into relationship with God is a blessing itself
but the process of becoming loving like God is was a SECOND blessing.
Wesley suggested that these could be instantaneous experiences or
long-term growth experiences. The first was justification, the
second sanctification. If I’m being honest, he thought of the first
part as coming to know your sinfulness and experiencing forgiveness
for sin and the second as learning to sin no more.

People
were SERIOUSLY upset by this. Having done the research on their
arguments, I’ve concluded that it REALLY doesn’t matter. While
believing in the capacity of people to grow deeper into love and let
love and grace define their lives is important, defining how and when
this process happens just … doesn’t.

I’m
more interesting in examining if the word “blessing” here. If we
use the traditional language, if blessing is God’s favor, and coming
into relationship with God is a blessing, then only those whom God
favors are in relationship with God? (And God has favorites, and you
can identify them because they’re the ones who proclaim a
relationship with God.) That’s circular argument spun so tightly as
to make my head spin.

What
would it mean if God chose some people to have faith and others not
to? What would it mean if only some of us were favored with the
chance to become more loving? God’s protection and favor equate to
favoritism, and in essence blaming the victim!

To
make it worse, there are supposed to be two blessings in this. OYE.
But, if we remove the bad theology from the definition of blessing,
and try out the new definition, things change. If blessings are
anything being used for the building up of the kin-dom, then
certainly relationships with God and deepening love are blessings.
It doesn’t make the argument about the timing and order matter, but
it does justify the use of the word!

The
new definition also makes space for the ritual of the shared
communion table as a potential blessing. It seems obvious to me that
the sacraments are meant to be blessings that build us up so that we
are blessings in the world. That is, they remind us of our identity
and purpose so that we can be useful for the building of the kin-dom.
I recognize that this is how things are “meant to be” and saying
that communion is a “potential blessing” was intentional. There
have been times in my life when receiving a little portion of a loaf
of bread and a sip of grape juice has filled my entire being with
wonder, connection, and grace. There have been a whole lot more
times, though, when bread and cup have been perfunctory. Most of the
time, the actual elements of communion pale in comparison the feeding
I get from being with the people I receive the gifts with. People,
it is clear, can be blessings. (And you don’t have to be perfect to
be one!) We are useful in building each other up, we contribute
toward the kin-dom when we treat each other as kin. This is a place
potential can become reality.

So,
Amazon.com, you ask? Well, I’ve heard people call it a blessing
because they really like getting things they order quickly. If they
are referring to “God’s favor and protection” in enabling
consumerism, that’s terrible! I’ll concede, though, at times, that
physical items can be useful for building up the kin-dom. John
Wesley’s second blessing versus amazon.com? I’m not willing to give
either one the win. But redefining blessing to empower us and
relieve God of undue insults? I’m giving that the win! Thanks be to
God for our blessings!! Amen

1 Rabbi
Harold Kushner.
2 Apple
dictionary. “Blessing.
3 Wikipedia
“Blessing” accessed on August 20, 2015.
4 Apple
dictionary. “Blessing.”
5 John
Shelby Spong A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional
Faith is Dying and How a New Faith is Being Born
(HarperSanFrancisco, 2001) page 22.
6 Spong,
22.
7 Spong,
22.
8 Spong,
3.

—————–

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

August 23, 2015

Sermons

“Wesley v. Social Media: Sanctification”based on Romans 12

August 17, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

In
high school, a friend of mine remarked, “I think perhaps the
stories in the Bible show us the way that humans grow in
understanding God. We couldn’t do it all at once, so we have to go
through stages.” Or, at least she said something like that, it was
a while ago. We were in the midst of an intense year old Bible
Study, and we were trying to figured out why the stories in the Bible
often depicted God in ways that we couldn’t believe.

Her
thought has been with me while I’ve been bemoaning the inflexibility
of the church at large – both The United Methodist Church and The
Church Universal. Hopeful people have been approaching me over the
past month, delighted to be able to ask, “Hey, now that the Supreme
Court has made same-sex marriage legal in the whole United States,
the UMC will have to follow, right? Isn’t that great?”

It
would be great, if it were true. I’ve watched peoples’ faces fall as
I’ve replied that The United Methodist Church isn’t bound by US laws,
and that things aren’t going to get better in 2016, in fact they are
going to get worse. The nearly universal response has been, “Well,
then what WILL happen to the church?” My profoundly unhelpful
reply has been, “It will become less and less relevant.”

On
the hand, no one has ever come up to me hopeful about the fate of
Christianity, so I haven’t had to burst any bubbles there. That, in
and of itself, is sort of interesting, but interesting in a very sad
way. The Church has been The Keeper of a very specific set of
truths, a set that it decided and a set that it declared itself
protector of. Unfortunately, the set of truths that has been
protected hasn’t been allowed to grow, change, adapt, and become as
humanity has continued to develop. Truths that made sense before
germ theory don’t all work now. Truths that made sense before we knew
that our sun was just another star don’t all work now. Truths that
made sense before the creation of effective birth control don’t all
work now. Just as truth has been hardened and left to die in the
face of human knowledge, the closed cannon of the Bible struggles to
meet the needs of modern people. Now, most of you know, I have a
very strong love/hate relationship with the Bible, and I’m not ready
to throw it away yet! Yet, the Bible is full of stories of people
trying to make sense of life, of God, and of relationships. If we
want to continue to engage that process, it needs to continue to
reflect the struggles of humanity. Our Bible tells stories that are
said to range for about 1500 years, written down over the course of
700 years. But it stopped 1900 years ago. A tradition that stops
developing will die. A way of understanding the Divine that relies
only on ancient information can’t be relevant.¹

This
church, and now I’m speaking very specifically, First United
Methodist Church of Schenectady, is one of the very few churches who
don’t need to cling to ancient understandings of God and the
world. As I’ve experienced you, you are a people eager to find more
meaningful ways of knowing, in particular to find ways to integrate
the knowledge you have of the world with the ways you could
understand the Divine Energy that binds us all together. This sermon
is the start of a 5 week sermon series entitled “Would John Wesley
Drive a Prius?” trying to consider how Wesley’s concepts, ideas,
and even just his words fit into our lives today. It is an attempt,
at the very least, to keep the nearly 300 year Wesleyan tradition
alive by dragging it into the 21^st century.

The
word of the day is “sanctification.” Literally it means, “to
make holy.” As mentioned in my Spire Article this month, I would
give it a bit more flavor, saying “sanctification is the process of
becoming perfect in love.” John Cobb (famous Process Theologian
and United Methodist clergy person) goes a little bit less formal
when he says, “sanctification is spirituality.”²
But, surely, if we’re going to talk about John Wesley, we can let
him define his terms? John Wesley says that to be sanctified is “To
be restored in the image of God ‘in righteousness and true holiness’
(Ephesians 4:24).”³

Definitions
are nice and all, but we should probably start at the beginning.
John Wesley and others at his time shared a thee part understanding
of grace, which we can delve further into during the sermon on grace.
The key for now is that God’s grace (meaning God’s unconditional
love for us) is experienced in 3 different ways, depending on the
person’s relationship to God. “The grace that comes before”,
previenent grace, is God’s love for a person who does not know or
acknowledge God. Justifying grace is God’s love for a person as a
person comes to acknowledging God.⁴
Then, sanctifying grace is the way that God’s love works in and with
a person in from that point onward, and that process is called
sanctification. The end goal is perfection in love – to act out
the Love of God for each person in every word and action.

Sanctification
is the process of faith development that enables a person to become
ever more loving by connecting every further with love. Rev. Dr.
Carothers used to talk about the point of the church being “to
establish and maintain connections of mutual support in an ever
widening circle of concern” which I think is yet another definition
of sanctification, this time with an inherent communal bent. Now
that, I think, we have a clue what it is, the question is: does it
still matter??? Is this a term that reflects something relevant and
real in our lives today, or is a reflection of an argument from 300
years ago that has proven itself useless with time? At least for me,
the answer isn’t immediately obvious. Yes, growing in love is still
pretty much the point. Yet, it seems that the biggest questions are
around how that happens than if it should.

I
want to poke around in our text today for some clues from even longer
ago. Paul suggests that those seeking to live like Jesus needed an
open mindset in order to figure how how to act in ways that are good
and “perfect.” Hmmm. It requires humility, Paul says, and an
awareness that we’re interconnected and each of us are dependent on
the abilities of the whole. Paul then gives some specific
instructions. “Let love be genuine,” which is definitely lovely
although perhaps not particularly easy to apply. “Hold fast to
what is good; love one another with mutual affection, outdo one
another in showing honor.” The list goes on, but it is a very
tangible description of ways that people might act if they are
seeking to live in ever greater Love.

The
precedent for sanctification is in this text, as well as in others.
As we will continue to see, John Wesley’s ideas are solidly based in
scripture. Obviously, continuing to grow into greater love is a
great description of the goal! The goal of of faith development, or
human maturing, or progress, or church or whatever you want to call
it. We’re aiming to continually grow into a greater capacity to
love. The question is HOW we do so! Wesley had answers for that
too, called the means of grace. In updated language, his answer was
that we become more loving by a combination of 4 balanced factors:
personal spiritual development, communal spiritual development, by
living kindness in our individual lives, and by seeking justice in
our communal lives.⁵
The idea is that if any of the 4 were missing things would get out
of whack.

The
problem, of course, is that these categories still leave a lot to be
desired in terms of definition.
There are particular examples of each of them, i.e. for personal
spiritual development the traditional list includes, “reading,
meditating and studying the scriptures, prayer, fasting,
regularly attending worship, healthy living, and sharing our
faith with others “ while for communal spiritual development
it is, “regularly share in the sacraments, Christian
conferencing (accountability to one another), and Bible study”⁶

This
is the place where I think it is reasonable to break with tradition.
While nothing is necessarily WRONG with the lists as given, they also
aren’t particularly RIGHT. They don’t really reflect the ways that
things have changed over the past 300 years or so, and I don’t know
that they really make space for us to have a different understanding
of God than was normal then. If you were here in January, you might
be thinking, “but Sara, you preached on this in January and said
the lists were fine!” I did. I don’t anymore. Thinking about
growing in love today, with a particular Jesus flavor, those are not
the lists I would make. Um, a stagnant understanding of God and the
world is dying, so its OK if I change my mind?? 😉

I’m
approaching sanctification from a new angle now, one that I’ve never
looked at it from before. It comes from the continuing education
I’ve done this year and the books I’ve been reading and what has been
working in my attempts to become more loving. Right now, it seems
that the task of becoming more loving in the world requires finding
ways to love the parts of myself that hard hardest to love: making
peace with their existence, listening to their wisdom, growing into a
fuller sense of myself by being all that I am all together at once
instead of trying to hide away parts of myself. It sounds a little
bit like Paul’s body metaphor brought back to the body! Perhaps
that’s a big piece that’s been missing from traditional
understandings of growing in love – it isn’t about jettisoning
pieces of ourselves because they are “bad.” Rather, it is about
learning that love applies to all parts of ourselves and all parts of
others, and figuring out how to learn from all parts what love can
be! In finding ways to accept myself as I am, I make space to do the
same for others, and to let go of the fear that comes as I see pieces
of others that I haven’t accepted in myself. Please note though,
this is an idea that is still in development.

Another
thought on 21^st
century sanctification comes via John Cobb who points out that in
Wesley’s writing “entire sanctification is depicted not as a
continuing state but as a matter of moment by moment life.”⁷
That is, it breaks in a moment first. We don’t become entirely more
loving all at once. But there are moments when we manage to act in
love and then with time and practice they come more frequently. This
means we can practice growing in love in even the most mundane of
21^st
century activities. That is, when we tween or text, facebook post or
snapchat, instagram or linkin, or EVEN just if we talk to each other
for a moment face to face, we have the chance in that interaction
with other people to have a moment of sanctification. We just need
to have a moment when all we act out is love, and it is allowed to be
brief! It can be sort of instant gratification. John Wesley didn’t
think of that though 😉

There
isn’t a sermon talk back today, but I’d like to hear what really has
worked. If you are willing, however you want to get back to me,
would you let me know: what has helped you grow in love in your life?
And what has broken open barriers that were previously closed to
love in your life? We can learn from each other,, and that would
lead us all down the road to Wesley’s probably not outdated concept
of sanctification. May it be so! Amen

1 None
of this is a quote. But my thinking was clarified by reading John
Shelby Spong’s “A New Christianity For a New World” which is a
truly fantastic text that finally put into words many of the issues
I’ve been freed to struggle with since coming to this church. And
my clarified thinking via the book made it seem important to
footnote for two reasons: 1. Attribution is appropriate and 2. Read
the book!!! And if you’ve read it, talk to me about it!
2 John
B. Cobb Jr, Grace and Responsibility: A Wesleyan Theology for
Today (Abingdon Press:
Nashville, 1995), p. 100.
3 A
Perfect Love: Understanding John Wesley’s ’A Plain Account of
Christian Perfection’
Modern Language Version and notes by Steven W Manskar (Discipleship
Resources: Nashville, 2004), p. 33.
4 This
is a heck of a soft-pedal. We’ll get to it in a few weeks.
5 For
the geeks who want to know more, from
http://www.umc.org/how-we-serve/the-wesleyan-means-of-grace
Works
of Piety
Individual
Practices –
reading, meditating and studying the scriptures, prayer,
fasting, regularly attending worship, healthy living, and
sharing our faith with others
Communal
Practices –
regularly share in the sacraments, Christian conferencing
(accountability to one another), and Bible study
Works
of Mercy
Individual
Practices –
doing good works, visiting the sick, visiting those in prison,
feeding the hungry, and giving generously to the needs of
others
Communal
Practices –
seeking justice, ending oppression and discrimination (for instance
Wesley challenged Methodists to end slavery), and addressing
the needs of the poor
6 ibid
7 Cobb,
111.

______

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