“Quiet Resurrections” based on Jeremiah 31:1-6 and Matthew 28:1-10

April 4, 2021
by Sara Baron

It is really easy to
miss the point of Easter by focusing too much on what happened ~2000
years ago. There is extensive debate among people who debate such
things about what FORM Jesus’s body took after resurrection, which is
a clear indication that a lot of people miss the point. However it
was that Jesus’s disciples transformed from the frightened men who
ran away from the cross to the leaders of the developing church who
faced their own persecution with courage, and continued Jesus’s
ministry in their own lives – that thing that happened was
resurrection. They talked about it as Jesus returning to them,
meeting with them, guiding them, explaining things to them. I have
no idea where the line between metaphor and reality, memory and
presence was in that, nor do I think it matters.

I think it matters
that they became convinced that not even the Empire’s power of death
– they greatest power the Empire had – held any sway over them.
I think it matters they moved from self-protection to courage. I
think it matters they moved from scattering to consolidating their
relationships. I think it matters they moved from the amygdala
response of “danger! Protect self!” to the pre-frontal cortex
questions of “how do we tell the stories of Jesus so others can
hear them?” and “how do we distribute food fairly despite
cultural differences?” and “how much do we take on and how much
do we train other people to do?” They, themselves, moved from the
fear of death to the fullness of life. That’s resurrection.

And the key to all
of it, is that the power of resurrection that moves us from the fear
of death to the fullness of life is a CONTINUAL gift from God that
enriches ALL of our lives, and empowers us in our darkest moments.

Truth be told
though, given the rather hugeness of the original story, everything
else can pale in comparison. And because of that, I think we
sometimes miss the power of resurrection in our lives, because we’re
looking for things that are bigger and flashier than how God mostly
ends up working. So, I offer this example from my own life, of what
I’d like to call a “quiet resurrection.”

When I was a kid, in
gym class, we were expected to test for the “Presidential Fitness
Test” every year, and every year I failed the running portions.
Alas, I told myself, “I’m no good at running.” As I got older, I
continued to fail every running test my physical education teachers
put in front of me. Eventually my narrative switched to, “I’m just
not in good shape.” Sure, I did lots of physical activity all the
time, but CLEARLY I was failing, and CLEARLY that was an indication
that I was “not in good shape.”

That story stuck
with me. By seminary I jogged regularly, but since it was slowly,
and since I still got winded, I told myself “I’m just not in good
shape.” Later, as I’d climb mountains with friends, I’d be
noticeably the most winded and make jokes about “being in bad
shape.” It had become part of my identity.

Five years ago,
after Easter, I got a cold. Truthfully, this is common enough for
pastors and church workers. The intense work of trying to make Holy
Week and Easter meaningful experiences for our churches means a drop
in adrenaline at the end of it, and then people get sick. That time,
the cold became a cough. Normal enough. A month later I went to the
doctor because the cough just wouldn’t subside. Sure enough, I had
bronchitis. But that wasn’t the whole story. When the PA was
listening to my lungs, “something sounded wrong, more wrong than
just bronchitis.” After a serious of tests, my doctor named what I
experienced as “exercised induced asthma” and gave me an inhaler
to use before cardio exercise.

At first, this just
felt like a new way of saying I was broken, because I was so deeply
in that frame. But, what followed was, for me, miraculous. Suddenly
my workouts were… productive. I got BETTER. Also, I could
breathe! And ever so slowly it occurred to me that the issue hadn’t
been my own failure, a lack of exercise, or not trying hard enough –
even though I’d been telling myself that for decades. It was simply
physiological. In fact, it hadn’t even been that I’d been “out of
shape” for all those years. Rather, I had an undiagnosed condition
that impaired me.

It has taken a
shockingly long time for all of this to penetrate my self talk. I’d
gotten so used to thinking of myself as an utter athletic failure,
that I’d failed to notice that the goal of adult fitness is to have
ways to move your body that are FUN and also promote health. When it
comes to that standard, I’m pretty good at being athletic. (Huh,
never said THAT before.)

I’ve heard from many
other people over the years about the impact of diagnosis that feel
similar to this, including in mental health. Varieties on the theme
of “oh, it isn’t just because I wasn’t trying hard enough” or
“there is a NAME for what I’m struggling with” or “other people
find this hard too, I’m not alone.” (Of course, not all diagnoses
feel this way, of course. But some do, and that’s what I’m talking
about.)

So, maybe for some
of you, it will make sense when I say that for me, having a little
inhaler open my lungs so I can exercise, and having that experience
free me from a hurtful narrative about myself, was a significant
experience of resurrection. It freed me to be try more things, be
more playful, enjoy life more! Those things matter.

The stories we
tell ourselves about ourselves can be impediments to the rich full
lives that God wants us to live, and they can be impediments to our
responses to God’s calls on us to build the kindom. Easter is
the story of resurrection, the story of God’s power of LIFE over
death. We’re so busy telling ourselves and God that “I can’t”
based on stories that aren’t true, that we miss God responding, “Oh
honey, you CAN.” (God may use different endearments with you.)

Many times in life a
skill or story is important to getting us through a moment – but
the SAME skill or story becomes an impediment to growth later on.
Switching around the way we see something can change our whole
experience of it. Reframing an experience, or a story can make space
for God’s transforming work in our lives.

The challenge quite
often is that we don’t see our own framing, which makes it hard to
notice it and consider adapting it. This is one of the reasons that
therapists are so useful, they’re particularly trained to noticing
and pointing out dated framing. This is also a reason why we talk to
friends and family – because outside perspective can make a huge
difference in helping us see! And, I think this is a reason why
contemplative prayer is such a gift in people’s lives. As we develop
the skills to be quietly present to God and ourselves, as we
disengage from the frantic pace of life, as we allow our thoughts to
slow down – we are MAKING SPACE for grace to move and show us new
ways.

These little, quiet
resurrections may not seem like enough, but that’s only from a human
perspective. When God is part of one small thing, and another small
thing, those two small things together add up to more than their
parts. (Aka, God is willing to override the rules of math in God’s
commitment to grace and the kindom.) When many little resurrections
are added together, lives become more whole, and as lives become more
whole there is more and more space for that abundant life to expand
to more and more people, and more and more of the kindom is built.
What God is up to is definitely enough.

After all, it was
only one resurrection 2000 or so years ago, and we’re still seeing
the rippling effects. Thanks be to God. Amen

April 4, 2021

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

Sermons

“A New Thing” based on Isaiah 65:17-25 and Luke 24:1-12

April 21, 2019February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Years ago I asked my boss for a computer password. He responded, “You should know this. Its is the most obvious answer. We are a ____ people.” Now, I’ve had a lot of church related jobs, but I didn’t think this was obvious. I thought there were a lot of possible answers. We are a loving people. We are a Jesus-following people. We are a gracious people. We are a beloved people. After a while, I tried “We are a resurrection people” and that got me close enough that I was informed the password was “Easter.”

I’ve thought about that every since. For my boss, it was SO obvious that “Easter” was the sort of people we are. For me, there are a lot of questions about what that means, and how we live it out. I yearn for the sort of certainty he had in thinking I could guess the password.

Every month I ask a question of the Church Council as a start to our meeting. I’m known for asking difficult questions, and this church is full of thoughtful, intentional, … strong-willed…. opinionated people. (I wouldn’t have it any other way.) Thus, I ask a difficult question, people offer a variety of different answers, I have a better sense of what people are thinking and we move on.

For the first time, after nearly 6 years, this month the Church Council found an ANSWER to my question. It started like normal. I asked, “Where are you seeing resurrection?,” and people offered many and varied answers. But then a pattern emerged, and was named. The most profound way people are seeing resurrection is in the restoration of relationships, and as a corollary, in the miracle of life-giving relationships themselves.

I thought this was a profound answer, a good way of knowing what it is to be Easter people, so I ran it by the Confirmation class. You would be delighted to know that our Confirmation class is very reflective of this church. The students are thoughtful, intentional, strong-willed, …. opinionated people. They have no patience for irrationality, and even less for exclusion in any form. Last week I ran this idea by them. We talked about resurrection, what it does and does not mean, and how we make sense of the metaphor for our lives today. I wasn’t sure that “restored relationships” would be as meaningful for teens as for those who had experienced brokenness in relationships for decades. It turns out, I was wrong.

They thought that “restored relationships” and “hope where it seems there is no hope” sounded both meaningful and valid as ways of understanding Easter.

Thus, I’m trusting the Church Council and the Confirmation class to be good tests of the pulse of this community, and I’m going to keep on preaching about restored relationships AS resurrection.

For those who aren’t quite with me yet though, I want to play with that wonderful line from Luke’s first Easter Story, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” (v. 5) Within the story it functions to emphasize the empty grave, but it also seems well phrased for metaphorical contemplation. When else have we given up something “for dead” when there is still life in it? When have we discounted a possibility, including of a restored relationship, when God wasn’t done with it yet? What does it mean to be people looking for the living among the living, rather than among the dead?

Last week I quoted John Dominic Crossan’s assessment of Jesus’ teaching, namely that Jesus taught “that God has given all human beings the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God’s power, rule, and domination are evidently present to all observers.”^¹That left us questioning how to live our lives being guided by that wisdom. Parker Palmer is a wisdom teacher, who teaches people how to find the power of life within themselves. It seems to me that his book his book “A Hidden Wholeness: A Journey Toward an Undivided Life” takes off where John Dominic Crossan off.

Parker Palmer believes in the power and wisdom of the soul, and since the word soul isn’t one I find easy to explain either, I’ll let him say what he means by that:

“Philosophers haggle about what to call this core of our humanity, but I’m not stickler for precision. Thomas Merton called it the true self. Buddhists call it original nature or big self. Quakers call it the inner teacher or the inner light. Hasidic Jews call it a spark of the divine. Humanists call it identity and integrity. In popular parlance, people often call it soul. … it is the objective, ontological reality of selfhood that keeps us form reducing ourselves, or each other, to biological mechanisms, psychological projections, sociological constructs, or raw material to be manufactured into whatever society needs – diminishments of our humanity that constantly threaten the quality of our lives.”²

I’m going to take it a step further and say that the soul is the source of the wisdom that Dom was talking about, “the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God’s power, rule, and domination are evidently present to all observers.” Our souls KNOW, we know, but to know we have to listen to our souls.

Throughout Lent we’ve been talking about spiritual practices. One might also say we’ve been talking about practices of listening to the Divine, to our own souls, and to each other’s souls. None of this is particularly easy, but Parker Palmer is the teacher who is focused on exactly that. He thinks most of the time we’re led by ego and by fear, which leads us to be divided from the wisdom of our own souls, “Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the ‘integrity that comes from being who you are.’”³ He calls us to wholeness, but cautions us that, “Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.”⁴

Isn’t THAT an interesting idea to consider on Easter? On this day when we think about resurrection, about restoration, about new hope and the power of life; what does it mean to think about wholeness as requiring acceptance of brokenness? Do we tend to think of resurrection as … perfection? I suspect we do. But that misses the point. God’s work in the world towards restoration doesn’t require nor create perfection. Perfection isn’t a part of life, and resurrection is about restoring LIFE. HOWEVER, God’s work in the world is always towards wholeness, and wholeness requires seeing, accepting, and making peace with brokenness.

Parker goes on to explain how we TEND to deal with this, “A divided life is a wounded life, and the soul keeps calling us to heal the wound. Ignore that call, and we find ourselves trying to numb our pain with an anesthetic of choice, be it substance abuse, overwork, consumerism, or mindless media noise. Such anesthetics are easy to come by in a society that wants to keep us divided and unaware of our pain – for the divided life that is pathological for individuals can serve social systems well, especially when it comes to those functions that are morally dubious.”⁵ Then he explains how to get OUT of that cycle, and the answer is both individual and communal. Palmer is a Quaker, and he believes there is a lot of power in silence, in quiet, and in listening. He encourages people to make space for silence in their lives, but he also says, “But we cannot embrace that challenge all alone, at least not for long; if we are to sustain the journey toward an undivided life. The journey has solitary passages, to be sure, and yet it is simply too arduous to take without the assistance of others. And because we we have such a vast capacity for self-delusion, we will inevitably get lost en route without correctives from outside of ourselves.”⁶

A few years ago I did an intensive training in the teachings of Parker Palmer. Much of what Palmer offers is based in the Quaker tradition. In living out these ideals in community, I discovered there was A LOT of power in them. We were taught to ask open, honest questions of each other, and to sit in silence especially when it was uncomfortable. We were invited to play with poetry and art, journaling, and conversation. We were taught that the soul is wise as all get out, but also shy and needing time, space, and metaphor to share its wisdom. We were taught to hold space for each other’s souls, both because souls are inherently precious, but also because every time a glimpse of a soul is seen, we learn about our own soul too. It is an unspoken part of Palmer’s worldview that souls are unique reflections of the Divine.

I have one more of his insights I want to share today: “All of the great spiritual traditions want to awaken us to the fact that we cocreate the reality in which we live. And all of them ask two questions intended to keep us awake: What are we sending form within ourselves out into the world, and what impact is it having ‘out there’? What is the world sending back at us, and what impact is it having ‘in here’? We are continually engaged in the evolution of self and world – and we have the power to choose, moment by moment, between that which gives life and that which deals death.”⁷ Isn’t that the question of Easter? How do we choose life? How do we work with God who chooses life in choosing life?

How do we live lives that REALLY show “that God has given all human beings the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God’s power, rule, and domination are evidently present to all observers.”^⁸How do we participate in and build community that loves people, and their souls, into a fuller wholeness; under the premise that whole people are a gift to the world? How do we build communities that reflect God’s goodness, wholeness, hope, and the power of God’s commitment to LIFE rather than death?

How do we allow God’s love, life, and wholeness into our lives so that we, and our relationships, can be restored? John Dominic Crossan believes that Jesus taught us we already know what we need to know, we already have the wisdom. Parker Palmer says that wisdom is in our souls, and to access the wisdom we need some quiet, and we need others who also trust in the wisdom of our souls.

This is what we know: God is a God of LIVE, not death; the wisdom you need to lead a transformed life is already with you; there are people who trust in your wisdom and are willing to help you find it; silence is a valuable asset in listening to the soul; metaphor, art, and open-honest questions matter too; AND… this is a community that has been and will continue to love people AS THEY ARE. That love then means that people can safely let their souls out to play, and grow further and further into who God calls us to be. We are a safe place for souls, and that means we are a safe place for LIFE. Maybe, after all, we are an Easter people. May it ALWAYS be so. Amen

1 John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Stories of The Death of Jesus (USA: HarperSanFrancisco: 1995) 47.

2 Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward the Undivided Self(USA: Josey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint, 2004), 33.

3 Palmer, 4.

4 Palmer, 5.

5 Palmer, 20.

6 Palmer, 10.

7 Palmer, 48.

8 John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Stories of The Death of Jesus (USA: HarperSanFrancisco: 1995) 47.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

April 21, 2019

Sermons

“Why Galilee?” based on Acts 10:34-43 and Matthew 28:1-10

April 16, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I tried to start writing this
sermon on Thursday (my normal sermon writing day). This is one of
the challenges of Holy Week: in order to prepare worship services and
sermons you have to be out of sync with experiencing it. On Thursday
we remember Jesus’ last night with his disciples. In Matthew, Mark,
and Luke (the “synoptic gospels”), Jesus adds symbolism to the
Passover meal during in the Last Supper, which is the model for our
communion. In John, Jesus instead washes the feet of the disciples,
modeling for them the behavior he hoped would define their
relationships after his death: that they would be known by how
lovingly they treated each other.

Truly, I love remembering those
stories in Holy Thursday worship. There is a stillness to our
celebrations, a knowing of what will come next, that I suspect
pervaded the actual night Jesus sat with his disciples, but primarily
there are blessings.

On this Holy Thursday, as I sat
to write an Easter sermon, the news was shouting about the “Mother
of All Bombs” being dropped for the first time in history. It was
a shocking amount of violence. I was still recovering from the shock
of not quite a week before when 59 bombs had been dropped, and from
the chemical weapons that had been used days before that on
civilians.

It wasn’t just the direct
violence though. As I sat to write on Thursday, I was thinking about
the vulnerable people in the world and their struggles. Many in this
church have been actively advocating for the care of our immigrant
sisters and brothers, and yet I keep hearing of young families torn
apart. As many in this church have helped the clean up in Middleburgh
after horrible floods, I was part of the clean up in the Southern
Tier in 2011. The increase in extreme weather has already impacted
so many lives, and yet in the midst of this crisis for human life on
earth, our country is doing less and less to prevent it. Lives
continued to be lost and impacted by floods and droughts, mudslides
and major storms.

There was more, all piling on
top of each other on Holy Thursday. I love our breakfast program and
SUSTAIN ministry (I think they embodies the command to be known by
how well we love), but I hate that they are necessary! I’m so
grateful to serve a church willing to discuss white privilege and
racism, but I’m sick and tired of white privilege and racism. I’m
tired of fighting for fair and equal funding for Schenectady city
schools, which like most schools with mostly brown and black students
in New York gets the short end of the stick. I’m exhausted fighting
for LGBTQIA lives in The United Methodist Church, and just annoyed
that homophobia still defines our church at large. I am grateful for
my co-teachers in confirmation teaching about sexual harassment this
week, but as we’d reiterated how common it is, I was horrified but it
all, all over again. That is to say, the pile of problems I was
attending to, while trying to write an Easter sermon, was pretty
large.

That may explain why on Holy
Thursday, when I sat to write and I asked myself the question “what
does Easter mean today?” in the depth of my mind I heard a small
and terrified voice ask “is even Easter enough given the
brokenness of the world?”

It is very hard to write an
Easter sermon on Holy Thursday. Luckily I had to put it down to go
the Maundy Thursday service we shared with Emmanuel Friedans. My
roles included reading the story of foot washing from John 13 and to
inviting those present to allow me to wash their feet. The foot
washing story is the narrative example of the command to the
disciples at the end of chapter: that they would be known by how
lovingly they treated each other.
It is a defining moment differentiating the ways of the
world from the ways of Jesus.
While “important” people in the world are served by those said
to be “less important” than they are, in the Jesus movement all
of us are asked to love and serve each other. Instead of dominating
others, Jesus used his life to support them, and he asked us to
follow in his ways.

Having heard the foot washing
story explained when I was 13, I desperately wanted to be a part of
it! It started my call to ministry, this desire to be a part of
turning upside down the values of the world and what it looks like to
live a life that matters. I wanted to be part of a movement that was
known by how lovingly it treated its own members (and beyond). I was
drawn in. Foot washing is one of the stories that grounds me in my
faith. So, while in the most hidden parts of my brain I was
wondering if Easter was enough, I stood at microphone and the story
out loud, and everything clicked back into place.

Sure, things aren’t great right
now, and many of God’s beloved people are hurting. Then again,
that’s how it was during Jesus’ time too. The vast majority of the
Jewish people living in Judea and Galilee were struggling to survive.
The peasant class was about 95% of the population, and they tended
to die young, after a life of hunger and hard labor. Families were
torn apart by poverty and debt, because family members were sold into
slavery so that the remaining members could eat. Things REALLY
weren’t going well for the people, back in Jesus’ day. The system
existed to make the rich and powerful more and more wealthy, on the
backs and the lives of the peasants. The narrative of the Empire was
that they were the peace bearers, and yet the reality was that they
were the oppressors who kept fighting at a minimum because of the
power of their military might, and kept their military mighty by
paying them from the profits they reaped from the peasants.

Jesus’ life and ministry was
with the peasants in Galilee (although he did take some side trips to
Judea and Samaria). He saw the humanity of the peasants, listened to
them and ate with them. His healings were for them, and his
teachings designed to teach them. He was known as a great teacher
and healer, but the stories in the gospels also indicate that his was
a ministry of presence among the people. He loved the people with
God’s love for them. He showed them they mattered to him by being
present with them.

The peasants were seen by the
Empire as a means of wealth production, and at the same time as a
potential threat to the famous peace. They were seen by Jesus as
beloved children of God worth his time, energy, and passion. As
his fame grew and his ministry became well known, he continued to
spend his time with the people living in poverty. His life showed
that the people the Empire found expendable, God finds worthwhile.
It may be that the most powerful piece of the story isn’t in any one
of the parables, healings, or teachings, but rather that they
happened primarily among the peasants, reiterating God’s care for
all people. One of the most significant pieces of Jesus’ ministry
was his presence.

Each Gospel tells a unique
Easter story, and Matthew is no exception. The piece of Matthew’s
story that strikes me this year is that he suggests that the women
continued Jesus’ ministry of presence for Jesus at the end of
his life. They were at his crucifixion (27:55), they were at his
burial (27:61), and they were there on Easter morning. They held
vigil. They stayed, even when it was too late. They weren’t there to
change things. They were just with him. Based on how clear the
Gospels are about the women being present, I suspect that in
retrospect the disciples were grateful to the women for staying and
being present when they had run away. Jesus wasn’t alone in his death
and his body was cared for afterward, because the women continued
his ministry of presence,
a form of loving Jesus as Jesus had loved them.

And then, in the midst of their
ministry of presence, they are greeted by the angel. As if that
wasn’t awesome enough, immediately afterward they experience the
presence of Jesus again! The NRSV says that Jesus “met them.” It
means both that he “joined” them and “accompanied” them.¹
His presence was returned to them, and the Christian story ever
since is that the presence of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, has remained
with us.

Both the angel at the tomb and
Jesus ask the women to convey to the male disciples that he’ll meet
them again in Galilee. This is especially significant. First, it
reiterates that the presence of Jesus has returned. Secondly, when
Jesus says it he calls the disciples “his brothers.” They had
denied and abandoned him, and nothing that they had yet done had
changed that reality. They hadn’t repented, or apologized, or shown
back up. Yet Jesus calls them his brothers, which was an upgrade
from their previous titles. As it often is in the Bible, grace and
forgiveness come from God’s nature alone. As Eugene Boring says in
the commentary in the New Interpreter’s Bible,
“The women become not only missionaries of the resurrection
message, but also agents of reconciliation.”²
It would be the words of the women that would call them back together
and start the process of the disciples living the ministry of Jesus
in the world.

Finally though, there is the
duplicated message to the disciples about going to GALILEE. Why
Galilee? Jesus was killed in Jerusalem, in Judea, where the final
phase of his ministry had occurred. He was killed in the place he’d
rode into on a donkey, by the authority of those who saw his
indictment of the Temple. His body was placed in a tomb in Judea,
near Jerusalem. Why were the disciple to meet him back in Galilee?

It
seems like there are three possible answers. First, they were to go
back to the people Jesus had been in ministry with and continue the
ministry of presence among the most vulnerable people. (Those in
Galilee were even more vulnerable than those in Judea.) Secondly,
Galilee was more DIVERSE than Judea, and in Matthew Galilee is
referred to as Galilee of the Gentiles (4:15). It was home to Jews,
and to the Gentiles. This is one of Matthew’s references to the
universality of Jesus’ message, and that Galilee was the place to
expand God’s love beyond its traditional boundaries with the Jews
into all the world. Third, and finally, to go back to Galilee was to
go back to the beginning. It was home, for Jesus as well as for the
disciples, and it was where his ministry started and grew.
Easter marks the transition point, what had once been the ministry of
Jesus supported by the disciples becomes, on Easter, the ministry of
the disciples supported by Jesus.
They go back to Galilee to go back to the beginning and start the
story again, to be God’s presence to the people once again. They
went back to continue the ministry of Jesus, the ministry of
presence, that the women had held up in the meantime.

The ah-ha moment I had in Maundy
Thursday worship was really pretty simple. It is one I’ve had
before, even, I just had to remember. The brokenness of the world is
very real indeed, and unconscionable things are happening. But
instead of negating Easter, the brokenness of the world reminds us
of how much we need Easter! Easter is, as Marcus Borg puts it,
“God’s yes to the world’s no.” Easter affirms the life of
Jesus, who loved the people and was present to them, and Easter
affirms the commandment that the disciples continue his ministry and
be known by how lovingly they treated each other.
Easter is the explosion of the ministry of Jesus from one life
to many, the expansion of love from one human to many.

The world, like the Empire of
old, teaches us things that do harm. It teaches us that there isn’t
enough for everyone, so we have to compete and we have to hoard. The
world teaches us that some lives matter more than other lives, and
that since their isn’t enough we should take care of the lives that
matter first. The world teaches us about borders that aren’t allowed
to be crossed and separations that aren’t allowed to become
connections. The world teaches us to be afraid, and to be careful,
and to distrust those around us. The world teaches us that the
economy matters most, and keeps us alive. The world teaches us to
take care of ourselves and “ours” first.

Easter is God’s yes to the
world’s no as well as God’s NO to the world’s YES.. Easter denies
the world’s fallacies and offers us alternatives. Easter is a
resounding YES to the life and teachings of Jesus. In the Gospel of
John, Jesus teaches us to be known by how lovingly we treat each
other. In Easter, the
message of Jesus is passed on and expanded, given to us to live and
teach.

It doesn’t mean that we can make
everything OK, at least not over the short run. It doesn’t stop
weapons in in midair, reunite families, or reverse climate change.
But it does mean that we have received the command to be known by
lovingly we act, and that being present to God’s beloved people is
now our work (supported by Jesus). Doing that will be plenty to
change the world. Easter, it turns out, is more than enough. Thanks
be to God. Amen

1M.
Eugene Boring, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VII: Matthew
Leander E. Keck editorial board convener (Nashville: Abingdon Press,
1995) 500.

2 Ibid.

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

April 16, 2017