“What IS this baptism thing?” based on Acts 19:1-7 and…

January 14, 2018February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

This week, statements were made that said that some people are more important than other people, and some places have people that matter while others don’t. The statements made this week were a moral atrocity. While this was exceptionally direct and overt, unfortunately, such statements are made on a regular basis, most often in budgets.

This past Tuesday I went to the NY statehouse to advocate for fair funding of New York State schools. New York state schools are THE most segregated in the United States (you heard me correctly). While New York spends rather a lot on its public school systems, it does not spend that money equitably. Because of the hard work of education advocates (and multiple lawsuits), in 2007 New York State created a “foundation aid formula”. The formula was meant to counter two pieces of inequality: the reality that school district’s primary funding comes from property taxes which can vary GREATLY between wealthy and impoverished communities; and that the needs of students can vary greatly between wealthy and impoverished communities.

The formula, carefully created, has never actually been funded. Instead, already wealthy (and usually white) school districts get a higher percentage of the money than average, while already impoverished (and particularly schools with many minority students) get a lower PERCENTAGE of the money than average. To get to particulars, the Schenectady City School District is underfunded by $44 MILLION according to the foundation aid formula, like many upstate cities’ schools are. That is, the New York government has an education budget that is as offensive as the language spoken in the Whitehouse this week.

Similarly, the United Methodist Church also FUNCTIONS as if some people matter more than others. I’m not just talking about the history of the Central Jurisdiction (if this is news to most of you, we’ll do a second hour on it later), or pay gaps for clergy on the basis of race and gender, or any of the other multitude of issues within the United States. I’m not even ONLY talking about the discrimination of LGBTQIA+ people in the church. There are ALSO issues with how the church functions as a global church. Namely, our constitution differentiates power between churches and conferences in the United States and those in the rest of the world, and the church as a whole functions as if the churches outside the United States are our colonies. While we do have some United Methodists in Europe, the vast majority of United Methodists outside of the United States are in Africa and the Philippines. This means that global colonization history AND racism continue to impact our church in every day of its life, and the colonization AND racism are WRITTEN INTO OUR CONSTITUTION.

To put it bluntly, we are not yet living the dream that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. offered us.

But, we are still dreaming it. Within the church, the dream is powerfully held and advocated for by the Love Your Neighbor Coalition, methodized as “LYNC.” LYNC consists of: all of the racial ethnic caucuses in the United Methodist Church, 4 groups organizing around LGBTQIA+ rights in the church, MFSA, Fossil Free UMC, and the UM association of ministers with disabilities. It is an amazing, profound, and inspiring group! LYNC looks and feels like the church as it should be – it is still messy with a lot of view points – but it is loving, respectful, and capable of growth. LYNC has JUST released a statement about the church it dreams of being a part of. LYNC’s current work is centered on the African concept of “ubuntu, and early in the statement, it explains “ubuntu” by quoting Achbishop Desmond Tutu:

The first law of our being is that we are in a delicate network of interdependence with our fellow human beings and with the rest of God’s creation… [Ubuntu] is the essence of being human. It speaks of the fact that my humanity is caught up and inextricably bound up in yours. I am human because I belong. It speaks about wholeness: it speaks about compassion. A person with ubuntu is welcoming, hospitable, warm and generous, willing to share. Such people are open and available to others, willing to be vulnerable, affirming of others, do not feel threatened that others are able and good, for they have a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that they belong in a greater whole. They know that they are diminished when others are humiliated, diminished when others are oppressed, diminished when others are treated as if they were less than who they are.¹

I want to read you the abstract of LYNC’s statement, because I think it is profound, because I think it dreams the church as God does, and because I think it contains truth beyond the bounds of the United Methodist Church. It isn’t short, exactly, but it is as concise as a dream can be:

The United Methodist Church is in the midst of a once-in-a-generation opportunity. A harm has been named within the body and brought to light. How we respond will define our future. There are responses that will promote healing, restore relationships, restore our ubuntu, and lead to this struggle being remembered as a restorative struggle. And there are other responses that will amplify the pain. It is time to banish this period of legislated discrimination to the dustbins of our history.

Therefore, the Love Your Neighbor Coalition calls upon the Commission on a Way Forward and the Council of Bishops to develop a plan that maintains the UM connection and removes all forms of language that discriminates against LGBTQ persons from the Book of Discipline.

We call upon the delegates to the 2019 special session of General Conference to act to maintain the UM connection and remove all forms of language that discriminates against LGBTQ persons from the Book of Discipline.

Furthermore, we call upon all United Methodists to join together in love, grace, and compassion, to recognize “us” reflected in each other, and to work to strengthen our relationships and our United Methodist connection and restore our ubuntu, regardless of where we stand on the theological or political spectrums.

Finally, as we look beyond the 2019 General Conference, we call upon those who become delegates to the 2020 General Conference and upon all United Methodists to careful examination of other ways in which we harm our ubuntu, other ways in which we perpetuate new and historic injustices against one another such as sexism, racism, misogyny and colonialism, and to join together to work toward our continuing restoration and sanctification in those regards as well.

(Amen) It is a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere, to dream and work with LYNC. In fact, I think it is a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere, to dream with God and work towards the kindom.

The good news is, our baptisms calls us to seek a just (and anti-racist) world. Baptism not only welcomes us into the church, with its radical love and inclusion, but it welcomes us into the work of creating the kindom and working with God to fulfill God’s dreams.

In our Acts passage, the newly baptized are said to prophesy. As Rev. Dr. Ruthanna B. Hooke, explains, “in Luke’s gospel and Acts, to prophesy is to speak about the present; it is to speak God’s name on behalf of God’s work in the world.”² She goes on to say, “The gift of prophesy calls us to proclaim what God is doing even now in our world, and to do so with boldness. This Spirit moves us to proclaim God’s good news to the poor and liberation to the captives. This gift empowers us to ‘speak truth to power,’ confronting the ‘rules and authorities’ of this world with the revolutionary message of the gospel, and trusting that when we are called up on to offer this witness the Holy Spirit will gives us the words to say.”³ From that definition, the baptized are CALLED to prophesy, even when the truth we speak is uncomfortable for others to hear. We are CALLED to seek justice, including with our words. Of course, the more difficult part is finding the words, and the time, and the way to speak. Those are the struggles of day to day life of faith. The blessing here is the promise that God is working with us and through us to help us find the ways to speak!

In Mark, we hear a story of Jesus’s baptism. The New Oxford Annotated Bible says of the passage, “Jesus himself is baptized into the renewal movement that began before him.”⁴ This is a very important statement! First of all, Jesus was a Jewish man baptized by a Jewish man, and the first meaning of the ritual was found in their shared Jewish routes. Secondly, John the Baptist was leading a renewal movement in hopes of helping the people be freed from oppression. By the best work of scholars, we think that Jesus was baptized by John as a ritual of becoming a disciple of John’s. It is so helpful to remember that he was learning from a person already in the movement, even as he eventually became the teacher. In that way, Jesus is like the rest of us: both a learner in and a teacher in the movement we’re a part of.

This baptism thing is an entrance into the work of the Body of Christ – the work of dreaming with God and building God’s kindom. It is work that decries racism, sexism, homophobia, and all other claims that one human is more important than another. The final statement of our Gospel passage is, “This is my child, the beloved, with whom I am well-pleased.” We, as disciples of Jesus, believe those to be INHERENT to God’s nature – a blessing God has spoken over each and every human being. It is our life-long goal to learn to treat each other as such – both individually as as parts of our society and church.

As LYNC says, may we remember that we are called to “careful examination of other ways in which we harm our ubuntu, other ways in which we perpetuate new and historic injustices against one another such as sexism, racism, misogyny and colonialism, and to join together to work toward our continuing restoration and sanctification in those regards as well.” May we use our voices to prophesy whenever a statement is made – directly or indirectly – that fasley claims that some people aren’t beloved by God. Because, dear ones, we are ALL God’s children, and as such, beloved. Thanks be to God. Amen

1Archbishop Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope For Our Time (Doubleday, 2005).

2Ruthanna B. Hooke, “Pastoral Perspective on Acts 19:1-7” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 1 edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008) 230.

3Hooke, 234.

4Richard A. Horsely, “Mark” in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Third Edition, edited by Michael D. Coogan (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 58 New Testament.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

January 14. 2018

Sermons

“Infuriating Plumb-Lines” based on Amos 7:7-17

July 10, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

This poem is entitled “Allowables” and it is by Nikki Giovanni:

	I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn't
And she scared me
And I smashed her

I don't think
I'm allowed

To kill something

Because I am

Frightened¹

And yet, so many people are dead because others were afraid. We, as a country, are frightened.

The fear lives in us in many ways. We have anxiety for our own futures and for the futures of those we love, particularly of younger generations. We are afraid of the world that is becoming, particularly with regard to: Global Climate Change and the ways it is destabilizing the world; the global refugee crisis and the millions of humans left without a place to call home; and the global economy, still slumped in many ways and still biased to producing wealth for the rich by continuing to devalue the lives of the poor.

We are afraid, as well, of the prevalence of violence. Violence also comes in many different forms to keep us afraid. Around us there is domestic violence (emotional, physical, and sexual), violent crime, mass shootings, bombings, terrorism, and of course war – both declared and undeclared. Violence is terrifyingly common!

We a country that lives in fear of violence and death for ourselves and our loved ones. Most of us are afraid of not having enough to survive – no matter how much we have right now. We are afraid that we too could become refugees. We are afraid that our government and way of life could collapse under us (or is collapsing under us.) We are afraid of what another single person could do out of their fear or anger.

I watched the videos of the shootings that were perpetrated by police this week. I didn’t want to, but I did because it didn’t feel responsible to stick my head in the sand. It was clear that the officers were responding to their fear, and not to the actual events occurring around them. It is not yet clear what motived the police shootings in Dallas, and what we hear indicates that it was motivated by hatred. Yet, I suspect there is fear under that as well.

The fear itself is not the problem, although it is nearly epidemic. The problem is how the fear gets dealt with. It get denied, repressed, and projected – rather than admitted to and faced. That makes it stronger and less rational. Furthermore, the projection usually means that fear gets placed on people perceived to be “other”. That’s when fear gets dangerous. This, however, isn’t a new phenomenon.

In fact, I think what we see in our society today is also reflected in what Amos was calling out in his society in the 750’s BCE. Amos’s life as a prophet occurred during the reign of King Jeroboam II, who was the most “successful” king in the history of Israel. He was successful militarily, economically, and politically. He restored the kingdom to its largest known boundaries, brokered deals with other leaders, and the nation prospered. Well, like it goes, the wealthy prospered. Amos was from Judah, so the other country from whom Israel had succeeded in a civil war. Amos describes himself as a simple farmer, called by God to speak what others would not.

As Rev. Dr. Thomas Mann eloquently put it in my reading this week, “Prophesy is the gifted ability to see what other people cannot or will not see. Prophets focus primarily on the moral and spiritual conditions of a nation; they do not simply predict future events but warn of consequences to injustice.”² The nation of Israel was “successful” but as we’ll hear next week, Amos accuses the wealthy and the king of “buying the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals.” (Amos 8:6) The cost of “success” was oppression. Amos was calling out the upper class for what they did to the lower class – and if you are patient, I’ll get to how that has to do with fear.

When people are oppressing others there are two interconnecting ways that they have to dehumanize the people they are oppressing. First of all, to choose to oppress someone requires creating a narrative that says that the other person or people matter less than you do. That can be done lots of ways: via race or gender or age or economic status or SAT score or position or whatever. Secondly though, to choose to oppress another person or people is an inherently terrifying act. When you are an oppressor, you have to be aware (at least subconsciously) that YOU could be the oppressed instead of the oppressor. Given that reality, it becomes imperative to continue to dehumanize the other, to oppress them further, to keep as much separation as possible between your full humanity and their partial humanity. Also, you have to make sure that they will never rise up and oppress you.

This was a significant piece of our history as a nation that engaged in racially “justified” slavery. There was a narrative – the race theory- created to justify dehumanizing people. There was a constant fear of slave rebellion, and there was a terror of slaves wanting to do harm to their masters like the harm done to them. The cycles of violence against people of color were deep, as was the fear of white people of being treated the way they treated their slaves. Both the violence and the fear live on. At the Schenectady Black Lives Matter march on Thursday someone made a sign that said “This is the new genocide of Black People.”

Race, of course, is not the only marker used to justify oppression. Any “otherness” will do – real or imagined. Often the marker has been economic – although the definitions of who gets to be wealthy and who doesn’t has changed with place and time. In Amos’s time, some of the poor in that society were poor by position: widows because they had no male protection nor access to land, orphans because they had no male protection nor access to land, and foreigners because they no male protection that counted nor access to land. Some would have been poor by circumstance – because of bad harvests or because there were too many male children in a generation or because they were the youngest sons of youngest sons.

There were people living in poverty, and the policies of those in power was to add to their struggle with oppression, rather than to lighten their load with policies of support. The vision of the Torah is of a nation where the widows, orphans, and foreigners are provided for, and where it is not possible to slip into generational poverty. By this time though, the people who claimed the vision of the Torah were acting more “normally.” They were participating in systems that used the labor of the poor to enrich the wealthy and strengthen the power of the already empowered. As Mann says, “For Amos, the primary failure is injustice,”³ and injustice is prevalent.

Amos doesn’t think God likes the injustice of Israel, nor the way it found its “success,” one little bit. He expresses it by suggesting that justice is not found in the nation, and God is so upset as to abandon the people. That’s the role of a prophet. The role of “those in power” is played in this story by Amaziah, the priest of Bethel. According to Mann, “Bethel is something like northern Israel’s ‘national cathedral.’ The collusion of religious and political institutions is blatant when Amaziah says to Amos, ’[Bethel] is the king’s sanctuary.’ One would have thought it was God’s.”⁴ In particular, the name “Beth-el” means “house of God” so the suggestion here is not overly subtle.

Amaziah wants Amos to GO AWAY, because he is upsetting the kingdom by speaking the truth. Then Amos basically predicts the exile of the Israel, which will happen Assyria in a single generation. The important pieces of this passage for me today are: that the role of the prophet was to speak uncomfortable truths, that the man understood to be speaking for God was calling for justice for the least empowered, and that those in power desperately wanted the one calling for justice to HUSH.

Often prophets, however, have to point out not only what injustice looks like but what consequences it has. Amos pointed out that the “success” of Israel was unstable and could lead to its demise. As people of God, prophecy is some of our work. We end up having to say that unless this country turns itself around and faces its own racism as well as its ridiculous gun laws, the violence we experience now will only continue to escalate.

There is such fear in our society because there is such oppression, and those of us who benefit from it live in fear that it will turn around and oppress us. (Because life and society are complicated, almost of us benefit from it in some ways and are oppressed by it in others.) Injustice anywhere is not ONLY a threat to justice everywhere, is it a source of our anxiety and fear, and thus a piece of the violence of our society itself.

There are many intersecting issues in our country today, and I’m expecting that many of you who are listening have already done many of the things that can make a difference. I’m going to remind us all of them again though, because in the midst of fear it is a good reminder that we can do things that matter.

We take courage from each other and from the God we know so that we can acknowledge our fears without repressing them nor letting them rule our lives.

We continue to educate ourselves about our past and present as a nation with racial oppression, to destabilize the myths of racism and thereby change them.

We can speak up about gun access.

We name injustice and oppression wherever we see it, and we participate in actions to change them. We do this even when it infuriates others.

We love all of God’s people as much as we can as often as we can and as well as we can, and trust that God will use our love to build the world as God would have it be.

We trust that if we work together, and act out of faith, hope, and love, even the brokenness of our country can be fixed.

May it be so, and may the God of justice use us to help heal our country, even if it means infuriating others with our calls for justice. Amen

1“Allowables” a poem by Nicki Giovanni, in her book Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid, page 109.

2Thomas W. Mann in “Exegetical Perspective on Amos 7:7-17” found on page 221 of “Feasting on the Word Year C Volume 3” edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2010).

3Mann, 221.

4Mann, 225.

–

Rev. Sara E. BaronFirst United Methodist Church of Schenectady603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady