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Sermons

“An Audacious Gift” based on Deuteronomy 15:1-18 and Mark…

  • April 2, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Before
we can examine this story of a woman anointing Jesus’s head, we have
to separate out what the story is from what it isn’t.  Much like the
Christmas stories of Luke and Matthew being subconsciously melded
(FYI: Luke has shepherds, Matthew has magi, no one has both!), the
multiple versions of this story have been conflated into a rather
confusing whole.  Each gospel tells of Jesus, at a meal, interrupted
by a woman giving him an extravagant gift.  Each gospel indicates
that someone(s) is horrified by it, and leads to Jesus responding,
“The poor you will always have with you” and informing us that
her story has now become an intricate part of his story.

Matthew
and Mark tell the same story, so there are three stories get
conflated.  Here are the relevant pieces:  in LUKE, and only in Luke,
the woman is named as a sinner; in JOHN, and only in John, the woman
is Mary (sister of Martha and Lazarus); in Luke and John Jesus’ feet
are anointed whereas in Matthew and Mark his head is anointed; the
whole wiping his feet with hair and tears thing is unique to Luke;
the objector is Judas in John while it is the pharisees in Luke, some
people in Mark, and the disciples in Matthew; and in Luke an extra
parable is thrown in as part of Jesus’ counter objection.

As
the Jesus Seminar puts it, “In all probability, the story of a
woman intruder anointing Jesus during a symposium (dinner or males)
took various forms as it was related in the oral tradition,”1
and “The Fellows of the Jesus Seminar were of the opinion that the
original form of the story is beyond recovery.”2

Which
is to say, there are three stories based on something that might have
happened, which are each told to make their own points.  Today we’re
looking at Mark’s story, and we’re going to derive meaning from
Mark’s story.  One of the great benefits of having various versions
of a story is that we can assume they’ve each developed to offer us
different – and necessary – points of view and lessons.

In
Mark, Jesus’ head is anointed.  According to The Jewish Annotated New
Testament, “Jesus is anointed; the
action could be either that of anointing a king or of preparing a
body for burial.  Mark’s principle of irony would suggest both.”3
The story comes 2 days before Passover in Mark, giving an easy
connection to the need to anoint his body before his burial
(especially since it wouldn’t be anointed after his burial).
However, that also means that it comes after the Palm Sunday parade
in which Jesus’ actions claim the kingship of Israel.  Thus it fits
well as an affirmation of his role as Messiah, a symbolism very
important to the early Christians who would have passed this story
along.  I agree with the Jewish Annotated New Testament, I think the
implication is very intentionally both and: kingship and burial.

Now,
this unnamed subversive woman broke into an all male dinner party,
one to which she was inherently not welcome.  She broke in to offer
an extravagant and intimate gift to Jesus.  The alabaster jar of a
very costly ointment of nard was likely imported from the Himalayas,4
and was more commonly used a few drops at a time.  I’m guessing, sort
of like a new car, that once the jar was opened the value decreased
significantly.  This unnamed woman opened the jar and poured it ALL
onto Jesus’ head.  Mark says that this is a gesture made with
fragrant ointment worth about $15,000.

As
Pheme Perkins puts it in the New Interpreter’s Bible,
“The
expansive gesture, breaking and pouring out the entire vial of
expensive ointment rather than using a few drops, forms a foil to the
cheapness of Jesus’ life in the eyes of those who seek to destroy
him.”5
SNAP. Wow. This unnamed woman is presented as understanding Jesus’
ministry, passion, purpose, and value.  In particular, she’s
presented as understanding what the disciples do not.  Perkins says,
“The
nameless woman’s gestures shows that Jesus’ followers still do not
grasp the necessity of his passion.”6
(The passion in this case being the more formal definition of his
suffering and death.) She stands in contrast to the men.  Her action
indicates a profound understanding of what is happening, while they
remain in denial.  Their RESPONSES to her action indicate exactly how
deep that denial runs.

They
respond with objections, suggesting that her action was an
inappropriate use of resources.  I don’t believe them.  I think they
were jealous of her wisdom, or infuriated at  her audacity in
breaking into their dinner, or ashamed they hadn’t thought to respond
with such vulnerability, or just annoyed with the drama, or maybe all
of it.  I think they were displeased with this woman, and her
presence at their dinner, and her grand gesture and they found some
justification from their displeasure and projected it.  I think this
because I’ve been human for a while now, and I know that’s how I
work, and my reading suggests I’m not alone!  We feel things, and
then we justify them.  The disciples with Jesus that night did it.
They felt annoyed, jealous, ashamed, or something uncomfortable and
they justified it by condemning this woman’s profound and generous
gesture and proclaiming that she was acting unrighteously.

They suggest that the vial
should have been sold and the money given to the poor.  This is how
we know they really didn’t get it.  Jesus has been teaching them
about kin-dom values for quite a while, but they still stand in the
normal values of the world.  They see the expensive ointment and
assign to it a monetary value.  The woman looked at resource she had,
and used it for the best possible use.  Here’s the thing, at some
point, if it is not to be wasted, an expensive container of perfumed
ointment will be used, right?  I mean, it is possible that it could
be bought and sold for years or decades on end, and I suspect it
would eventually even lose value in aging (who knows, I could be
wrong), but in the end the purpose of it is to be USED. So, if it was
going to be used someday, what better day and what better person than
Jesus?

The
unnamed woman uses what she has to acknowledge his importance
(anointing of kings), to respond to his faithfulness (which would get
him killed), and to prepare him for burial (a gift he received only
from her).  By using it on Jesus, she implies that there is no higher
purpose for this gift than to anoint Jesus.  By using on Jesus, she
implies that she understands that the time of his death was
impending, and she wanted to ease his terrible journey.

It is a profound gift.  Selling
the ointment so that someone else had it and could use it some other
day for some other person, even to give the proceeds to the poor,
would have valued Jesus less.

The
disciples were still in denial about the imminent death of Jesus, I
think that’s the core of why they responded so poorly to her action.
They didn’t want it to be true.  However, this woman – whoever she
was – was willing to face reality.  When Jesus speaks of her, and
says her action will be told, there is another irony.  Her action is
told, but her name is not.  As The
Jewish Annotated Bible
puts it, “The
anointing will be told in remembrance of her,
but her name is not given.  Perhaps the omission of her name is
ironic: the unnamed ‘everywoman’ understands him, while the named
disciples, the authority figures of old (from the author’s point of
view), do not.”7

Now,
the named objection
to her action is in the care of the poor, and commentators believe
that Jesus’ answer was a reference to Deuteronomy 15:118,
a portion of the text we read this morning about the Sabbatical year
which was aimed to prevent generational cycles of poverty.  It says,
“Since
there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore
command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your
land.’”  Perkins takes this a bit further, saying, “Jesus
points out that the Law (Deut 15:11) makes everyone responsible for
helping the poor. If the poor are in desperate need, then this
woman’s failure to donate the cost of the ointment is neither the
cause nor the cure.”9
I would agree.  The whole of society was aimed at enriching the
already wealthy and powerful on the backs of the poor and powerless.
One charitable action would not have transformed that system.  On the
other hand, she guided Jesus on his way to death, and his death and
resurrection have been significant in transforming society (even if
the process is still ongoing).

I’ve
always struggled with that one line in this story, about the poor
always being with us.  It has felt like a contrast to the vision of
the kindom, and the values of the Sermon on the Mount.  It has felt
like giving up on the world as it should be.  However, the referenced
verse, in context, sounds much different.  Instead of passively
accepting poverty as a part of the economy of the world, the
Deuteronomy passage aims to minimize extreme poverty, AND AT THE SAME
TIME admits that no system will be perfect.  Thus it calls for
compassion and generosity as well.  The whole of the Torah seeks to
create a just society, in particular by giving each family access to
land the freedom to benefit from its wealth.  However, it knows that
widows, orphans, and foreigners will not benefit like everyone else,
and so it finds ways to care for them too.  In this context, it
sounds more like Jesus saying, “life will never be totally fair,
and some people will always be on the bottom, but create a fair
system anyway and take care of those who struggle in that system
too.”  Its a bit different than the verse I’ve tried to make sense
of for all these years.

To
return to this profound, subversive, audacious, and compassionate
woman, I wonder what it would be like to follow in her footsteps.
She listened well, and maybe not even to Jesus.  We don’t know that
they’d met.  It may simply be that she knew the ways of the world and
could read the signs of the days and could tell what was coming.  But
she listened, even to the unpleasantness, and she found a way to
respond.

I
think some of us are more like this woman than we are like other
Biblical characters.  The most likely explanation for her having a
very expensive container of perfumed ointment is that she was
wealthy.  Like many generous donors around here, she choose to use
some of what she had because it was exactly what was needed at that
moment.  Unlike in his response to the “wealthy young man,” Jesus
doesn’t ask for all that she had, he simply accepts the gift that she
gives.  

She
uses what she has for the kindom of God, and the vision of Jesus.
Its value in her eyes is its usefulness to Jesus, not the resale
value!  What a wonderful way to think of our resources – both the
physical ones and time, energy, passion, and labor we have to give.
Whatever the market value of them may be, the most important
usefulness of them is in loving God and loving our neighbors.
Figuring that out may not be simple, linear, or obvious, but will
always be wonderful.  May we figure it out! Amen

1Robert
W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar The Five Gospels:
The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA,
1993), 115.

2Funk
et al,  116.

3The
Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible
Translation,
edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 88.

4The
Jewish Annotated New Testament, 88.

5Pheme
Perkins “Mark” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. 8
(Nashville: Abingdon Press,
1995), 698.

6Perkins,
698.

7The
Jewish Annotated New Testament, 88-89.

8Funk
et al, 116.

9Perkins,
699.

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

“Taking Her Seat” based on  Isaiah 58:1-12 and Luke…

  • March 5, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

In
all the times I’ve studied – and preached on – this little story
from Luke, I’ve never paid attention to where it falls in the Gospel.
I suspect I’ve  been too busy trying to justify Martha or emulate
Mary to attend to such a basic factor.  It turns out that the story
of Mary and Martha comes RIGHT AFTER the Parable of the Good
Samaritan.  That’s a pretty significant location.  The Parable of the
Good Samaritan is especially potent and it seems very likely that the
brilliant writer Luke would use the story that follows it to
strengthen and emphasize it, right?

Right.
They are meant to work together!

As
the Jesus Seminar puts it, “Both the Samaritan and Mary step out of
conventional roles in Luke’s examples.  This is Luke’s reason for
placing the story of Mary and Martha in tandem with the parable of
the Samaritan.  The Samaritan for Luke illustrates the second
commandment (“Love your neighbor as yourself”), Mary exemplifies
the fulfillment of the first commandment (“You are to love the Lord
your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your
energy, and with all your mind”).”1
Other commentators point out that where the Samaritan “sees” in
the way Jesus wants his followers to see, Mary “hears” as a model
for how his followers should listen for God and hear Jesus.  The two
characters complement and complete each other.  

Alan
Culpepper in the New Interpreter’s Bible explains the two stories
together in this way:

“In
it’s own way, the conjunction of the stories about the good Samaritan
and the female disciple voice Jesus’ protest against the rules and
boundaries set by the culture in which he lived.  As they develop
seeing and hearing as metaphors for the activity of the kingdom, the
twin stories also expose the injustice of social barriers that
categorize, restrict, and oppress various groups in any society
(Samaritan, victims, woman).  To love God with all one’s heart and
one’s neighbor as oneself meant then and now that one must often
reject society’s rules in favor of the codes of the kingdom – a
society without distinctions and boundaries between its members.  The
rules of this society are just two – to love God and one’s neighbor
– but these rules are so radically different from those of the
society in which we live that living by them invariably calls us to
disregard all else, break the rules, and follow Jesus’ example.”2
(NIB, 232)

It
seems this story may pack quite a punch!  So, while remembering to
keep the Good Samaritan story close, let’s look at this text again.
Both stories are set in the beginning of Luke’s story of Jesus
traveling to Jerusalem, a journey that will be concluded on Palm
Sunday.  This is part of a journey narrative.

For
some here today this is a new story, and for others it is very
familiar.  Often, I hear people talk about which sister they identify
with, this is one of the stories people use to make sense of their
own lives!  It is sometimes tempting to make the story overly
symbolic, but there are reasons to refrain from that temptation.
John Fitzmyer in the Anchor Bible Series says, “To
read this episode as a commendation of contemplative life over
against active life is to allegorize it beyond recognition and to
introduce a distinction that was born only of later preoccupation.
The episode is addressed to the Christian who is expected to be
contemplativus(a)
in actione.”3

The challenge of keeping this
story in perspective is that we are easily drawn into
particularities.  Jesus likely traveled WITH a large group of
followers and Martha was thus expected to prepare a large meal for
all of them, in this case without help.  We want to wonder if she was
trying to be too elaborate, or if Jesus was simply taking the side of
Mary because Martha triangulated, or if Mary was usually “lazy.”
It is easy to find ourselves in this story, but that makes it harder
to hear this story.  This is a story that KNOWS that faithfulness to
God requires learning AND action.  This is a story about Jesus, who
called people to change their whole lives.  It isn’t about who is
stuck doing the dishes, even though we know that story well.  And for
today at least (we’ll get to Martha in the future), it isn’t about
Martha at all!  Today is all about Mary 😉

Mary appears deceptively passive
in this story.  She doesn’t speak, she’s simply spoken about.  In
fact, all we really know is that she sat and listened.  Well, that
and her sister didn’t appreciate it.  Is sitting and listening really
so radical?

Yes.

It is radical because sitting at the feet of a teacher, a rabbi, was
the position of a disciple.
And in that time, women were not usually allowed to be disciples.
As the IVP Women’s Bible explains, “In
the first century women usually had no part in organized education.
Few were literate.  Their education was confined to domestic and
family matters.  Thus the considerable evidence that women were
followers of Jesus and played a significant part in the disciple band
is in contrast to the accepted practices of the day.”4

Mary’s
action isn’t just reflective of her radical choice because it wasn’t
one that she could take on her own.  Her action reflects the radical
inclusion of Jesus.  Back to the IVP Women’s Bible, “Jesus welcomed
many different women as learners (Mary of Bethany, Luke 10:39, 42)
and encouraged them to engage with him in his theological
conversations (Martha, Jn 11:21-27; Canaanite woman, Mt 15:24-28;
Samaritan woman, Jn 4:7-26).  This was in contrast to the rabbinic
practice of excluding women.”5
Throughout Luke, Jesus offered instruction in synagogues, homes, and
in personal conversations to WOMEN.6
Jesus was a radical teacher willing to accept many kinds of
students, and a radical student willing to claim her spot no matter
what others thought of her!  

I’m
told that Jesus taking on abnormal disciples extended well beyond
Mary and the teaching of women.  Most rabbi’s took on only the
brightest and best pupils and nurtured them from their childhoods to
be excellent scholars.  Jesus took on adult men who had been making
livings as fisherman, thus clearly not the perfect pupils another
rabbi had snapped up.  Jesus refused hierarchies – EVEN the ones
that might have been seen as reasonable and helpful!!  

The
writers in the Women’s Bible also pointed out that Luke’s account of
Mary and Martha seems to reflect a slightly later Christian
tradition.  By the time of Acts, it was common for evangelists to
travel around preaching and teaching in the name of Jesus.  They were
often hosted by women, who were then responsible for two tasks:
hospitality AND discernment.  Clearly if a wealthy woman was going to
use her resources to support a traveling preacher, she needed to be
able to tell if the preacher was worth learning from!  The radical
inclusion of women extended into the early church.  The Women’s Bible
explains it this way,

“In
accounts of the early church we are made especially aware of the
women who revived traveling evangelists into their homes (Acts 16:15;
40; 18:2-3).  More often than those of men, we are told the names
women in those houses the early churches met (Acts 12:12; 16:13-15;
40; Rom 16:3-5; 1 Cor 16:19; Col 4:15).  Theirs was the
responsibility not only to provide food and housing of the itinerate
missionary but also to assess the message that was brought (see2
John; 3 John).  This required that the women must be carefully taught
and possess a strong understanding of the fundamentals of the gospel.
… The story before us presents a paradigm of the attitude and
activities of women who opened their homes for gospel ministry.”7

Thus,
in this story, Mary IS doing half of the work – she is learning and
listening so that she will be able to discern who is worth listening
to in the future!!

I
really appreciate this idea that the women who offered hospitality
also had to be careful about whose perspective they empowered.  I
like the reminder that hospitality, and extending one’s home, is a
powerful and important action that these women played a curating
role in who got to talk!!!  I also think it is helpful to think
of Mary as listening, learning, and sitting AT THIS MOMENT in time so
that she would be of GREATER USE later.  This is often how I think of
YOU.  FUMC Schenectady’s identity statement is, “We
are a church that loves to learn and yearns to be a gift from God to
our communities.”  These are two connected statements.  This church
loves to learn because this church loves being useful in building the
kin-dom and in being a gift from God to our communities.  This is a
church who cares enough to do things WELL, and that often means
slowing down and listening before acting.

For
Mary, like for us, listening precedes service so that service can be
done well.  And that’s imperative.  Simply following our instincts
often means doing more harm than good.  Those who created “Indian
Missionary Schools” and those who taught in them meant to do GOOD,
but they did harm that has been passed down through generations!!
They didn’t listen to those they were trying to help.  In the past
few years I’ve been part of a group trying to rethink the global
structure of the United Methodist Church to eliminate colonialism and
become true partners around the world.  A few weeks ago I got to talk
to members of the UMC from Africa and in one succinct sentence they
proved to me that the plan was fundamentally flawed.  We didn’t
listen to the people we were trying to include!

Listening
and learning is an imperative first step to any acts of service.
Transforming the world, or loving our neighbors with the love they
really need, or responding to the needs of people around us, or even
finding the ways to be whole and peace-filled people whose presence
is a gift of grace requires listening and learning first – to God,
to ourselves, AND to others.  The Hebrew Bible lesson today suggests
that the people of God were not listening to what God needed nor to
what people living in poverty in their midst needed.  Listening
and learning are of equal value and importance to action and service.
Together Mary and her sister show us what it can look like, just as
together Mary and the Good Samaritian show us what it is like to see
and hear.

Mary
listened.  Mary learned.  It was radical and subversive of her to sit
at Jesus’ feet as a disciple, and it was radical and subversive of
Jesus to teach women alongside men.  Yet Jesus defends Mary’s right
to listen and learn, claiming that it is a good way to be in the
world.  As important as action and service are, rushed action that
comes before listening and learning is often more harm than good.
May we leave this place open to the experiences of listening, and may
we sit down to learn from those are good and worthy teachers.  May we
listen, like Mary.  Because she sat, let us learn to sit and listen.
Amen

1 Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover,
and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the
Authentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), 325.

2 R.
Alan Culpepper, “Luke” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. IX
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), 232.

3
Joesph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV,
(Doubleday and Co.: NY, NY,  1985) p. 892-3.

4 Catherine
Clark Kroeger and Mary J. Evans, editors, The IVP Women’s Bible
Commentary (InverVarsity
Press: Downers Grove, Illinois, 2002), p 571.

5 Ibid

6 The
Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible
Translation,
edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011),124.

7 IVP
Women’s Bible Commentary, 574.

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

“The Bible’s Only Self-Description of a Woman” based on…

  • February 27, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

I
find it truly exciting that the only time a woman describes herself
in the Bible she describes herself as “black and beautiful.”1
The joy comes from both a woman describing herself as beautiful –
which I find incredibly subversive on its own – and the fantastic
inversion of our messed up culture that she is dark-skinned AND
beautiful.  It is a lovely match for Black History Month.  And then,
on top of all that, Song of Songs is a book of erotic poetry in the
Bible!   Its very existence flies in the face of the ridiculous
Christian prudishness that has done such great harm for so many
centuries.

Thus,
I’ve been really excited to preach this sermon for weeks.  However, a
few problems have emerged. Song of Songs has humbled my prowess as a
scholar.   I’ve done some my most significant Biblical study on Song
of Songs.  Yet, when I came to the important questions related to
preaching this text I found that I had NO possible way to discover
their answers.  What I would really like to know is (1) how radical
it was for a woman to say “I am beautiful” in that time and place
and (2) how radical it was for a woman to express sexual desire in
that time and place.  There are a few impediments to knowing.  First
of all, the black and beautiful woman is the only woman in the whole
Bible describing herself AND the only woman in the Bible naming her
sexual desire, which means that there is no one to compare her to.  

Secondly,
there are the incredible complications of the text itself.  This book
is very, very difficult to make assertions about.  To begin with, you
may know it as Song of Songs or Song of Solomon because its OPENING
LINE is difficult to translate and no one is sure which one is more
accurate.  That’s only the beginning of the complications.  There is
also the issue of determining when it was written, and time ranges
are especially wide on this.  Scholars claim anything from 960 to 200
BCE.  That’s 760 years of difference.  It is possible that the ways
that women’s voices were heard, the expectations of beauty, the
sexual norms of the day, and how much humility a woman was expected
to express might well have varied wildly over 760 years.  For
instance, it might be worth considering that many of those things
have drastically changed since 1257, and even since 1957.

This level of unknowing makes it
hard to determine anything about how subversive this woman’s words
and actions really were.  I think that there have been cultures in
world history where it would not have been particularly radical for a
woman to claim her own beauty nor her own sexual desire.   As a
whole, Judaism has been more sex-positive than Christianity,
including in having an understanding that part of the role of the
Sabbath was for love-making.  That may suggest that ancient Judaism
may also have been more openminded than (say) medieval Christianity
and that, in particular, a woman’s expression of sexual desire would
not have been all that surprising.

On
the contrary, though, if this were so normal we might expect to hear
it in other parts of the Bible.  Also, we do know a lot about
patriarchal cultures and we know ancient Israel was one of those for
all of those 760 years.  In those cultures, women’s voices aren’t
often heard, nor free.  Finally, if a woman expressing her desire
were so normal, it would be reasonable to expect that interpreters
through the ages might have commonly interpreted the text literally
and not allegorically, and that’s FAR from true.  Most historical
interpretations of this book have been allegorical and or
metaphorical, taking the male character as God or Christ and the
female as the church, Israel, or Israelites.  

It
is only relatively recently that this erotic text has been
interpreted as being primarily about eroticism.  In the nineteenth
century, a German scholar named Johann
Gottfried Heder
analyzed the Song and
found it to be, “a collection of pleasingly erotic love-poetry.”2
 Further research in the early twentieth century connected the Song
to similar Egyptian and Canaanite poetry.  In 1990, Roland Murphy (an
American Catholic scholar who taught Biblical Studies at Duke) wrote,
“Any broad agreement among contemporary critical scholars that the
literal text of the Song marvelously portrays the passions and
yearnings of human lovers is a recent phenomenon.”3

Roland Murphy himself says it is notable that Song of Songs is not
only about sex, but it’s erotic and nonjudgmental about sex. (You
might be amazed to note that the text does not say that the lovers
are married, and in fact rather suggests that they aren’t!)

I
suspect that interpretations of the book Song
of Songs
are more reflective of the culture reading the text than they are of
the book itself!  Since we don’t know how it was understood in its
first few centuries, so we lack the capacity to know how radical it
was then!  It is POSSIBLE that the original meanings of the book were
lost along the way to allegory and metaphor.  Additionally, the book
Song of Songs is exceptionally difficult to interpret.  

“The
vocabulary of the Song of Songs is also unusual in the proportion of
words unique or rare elsewhere in Scripture… In the brief span of a
little more than a hundred verses there are almost fifty hapax rarely
found elsewhere in Scripture.”4
(A hapax is a word found only once in Scripture, making them harder
to translate.) Many commentators identify frequent double entendre
within the Hebrew as well, making it very difficult to render in
English.  Furthermore, the love poetry of other parts of the Near
East and the mythology of the Near East offer deepened understandings
of many parts of the text.  All of this serves to allow interpreters
and commentators a lot of leeway in their claims, and adds to the
variety of understandings of the text.

If
the text is a drama, the number of speakers in the Song of Songs is
debated. Claims range from man and woman; man, woman, and lecher;
even to man, women, and some eight other characters plus choruses.
Others claim it isn’t even a drama.  It is clear the Song of Songs is
written in poetic language as opposed to prose. It is also clear that
the poetry speaks about love.  However, claims have been made that it
is constituted by as many as 30 separate poems, yet editorial work
allows for the poems to form an ambiguously meaningful whole.  The
Song is not the only love poetry from the Ancient Near East, although
it does have unique elements. Murphy explains,

“As our earlier survey of
Egyptian and Sumerian sources indicated, there is no reason to doubt
that the biblical Song is indebted, at least indirectly, to older
traditions of Near Eastern love poetry.  Nor need one quarrel with
the likelihood that some of these antecedent traditions had
specifically sacral significance or that they otherwise witness to
the reciprocity of imagery depicting divine and human love.”5

Thus,
although the Song of Songs is very distinctive in the Bible, it does
fit somewhat into the genre of Ancient Love poetry.

You
may wonder why I’ve had to spend SO MUCH time explaining all of this
to you, especially given that I think you are very intelligent people
with a strong grasp on the Bible and history.  In the suggested
readings of the church, the three year cycle of “lectionary”
readings, only 6 verses of the book Song of Songs show up.  Then,
they’re most often skipped over by clergy who find it easier to
preach on the Gospel (or any other part of the Bible) than on the
Song, despite the fact that they’re among the mildest verses one
could pick from the text!  So, I don’t think most people, including
those who have been attending church regularly for their whole lives,
have had much exposure to this book and I’ve had to start with the
basics.

All
of this brings me back to the beginning: there is very little that
can be said for certain about the Song of Songs and that makes it
very hard to make firm claims about it.  I would really LIKE to say
that it was radical and subversive to have a heroine who speaks of
herself as beautiful, because it would be in our culture and I think
that’s a a great thing to strive for, but I’m not CERTAIN that it
really was radical then.  Perhaps in the time of the writing the
culture she lived in was so body-positive that most people thought
they were beautiful??  Isn’t that nice to ponder? Similarly I think
it is radical that she named her own desire, but I don’t KNOW.

The
projection onto this book of the Bible is non-trivial.  I’ve found
that most commentators speaking of the line “I am black and
beautiful” find it necessary to explain how such a line is
possible.  They seem to forget that Western Culture’s obsession with
light skin is relatively new and thus doesn’t appropriately fit into
Biblical history.  Many, many commentators believe that the black and
beautiful woman is apologetic about her skin tone. Renita Weems, a
womanist theologian and author of the Song of Songs section of the
New Interpreter’s Bible, responds to those assumptions with 3 pieces
of context:

“(1) The word ‘black’ appears
five times in the emphatic position suggesting that the woman’s tone
is confident and her posture assertive – not apologetic. (2)
Throughout the poem the woman’s physical beauty is both praised and
celebrated, not only by her lover but also by the maidens of the
city, which means that others regard her as indisputably attractive.
(3) Although the Song of Songs and Lamentations (and other portions
of Scripture) suggest that a ruddy complexion was prized in men, the
same does not automatically apply to women, since women were commonly
judged by a different standard of beauty.”6

If
you are like me, you might appreciate knowing that “ruddy” means
“having a healthy reddish color.”  Since the text does not say
who her parents or clan are, Weems points out “We are left to take
heart in her bold act of self-assertion and description: She speaks
up for herself; she is the object of her own gaze; she is, by her own
estimation, black and
beautiful.”7
For many cultures in many places and in many times, such a statement
is radical in its positivity and self-affirmation.  I wish there were
more space made for people to make such comments in our time, space,
and culture now.

Instead,
we live in a society in which women are barraged with messages about
how inadequate their bodies are in order for corporations and their
shareholders to profit off of those feelings of inadequacy.  In
everything from the immediately obvious clothes, shoes, make up, and
diet industries to the also insidious tanning salons, self-help
books, beauty magazines, and even the wedding industry; wealth is
extracted from women by making them  feel inadequate and not
beautiful enough.  In
such a society, it
seems truly subversive to LIKE yourself.  

Throughout
the Song of Songs, both lovers celebrate each other.  The woman’s
capacity to find herself beautiful and her capacity to celebrate her
lover’s beauty are correlated.  Instead of struggling under a pile of
self-hatred, she was able to live freely in love.  Her ability to
like and love herself enabled her to live and love another, and I
choose to believe also enabled each of them to expand their circles
of love into the world.  Consumer culture teaches us to find
ourselves INADEQUATE, but
this ancient, dark-skinned, beautiful woman teaches us to savor the
goodness of life.  In
the use of her voice, in the way she describes herself, and even in
her willingness to name her own desire, she offers us an alternative
way of life.  She offers us the freedom to ENJOY rather than wallow
in life.  May we follow in her lead, each of us as we are able, and
find the freedom of God in beauty itself (even our own!)  Amen

1 Renita J. Weems “The Song of Songs: Introduction, Commentary and Reflections” as found in the New Interpreter’s Bible Vol V (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), 383.

2
Roland
Murphy, The
Song of Songs: A Commentary on the Book of Canticles or The Song of
Songs
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990) 39  .

3
Murphy,
40.

4
Marvin A. Pope “Song of Songs” in The Anchor
Yale Bible Commentaries (Doubleday: New York, etc, 1995), 34.

5
Murphy,
97.

6 Weems, 382-383.

7 Weems,
383.

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

February 26, 2017

Sermons

“Nevertheless Delilah Persisted” based on Judges 16:4-20

  • February 19, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

I’m told that back in the day, and the day wasn’t so
long ago, the town of Hanover NH had a coffee shop called “The
Perfect Woman.”  The sign for the shop featured a woman’s
silhouette, without a head, implying that the perfect woman was a
body existing for male pleasure without a voice with which to express
herself.  The coffee shop had been named during a time when Dartmouth
had only male students and that reality created a hyper masculine
worldview around those parts.  The store name and sign reflected the
values that attracted customers at that time.

Sometimes the Bible has a hyper masculine worldview too,
and one of the most blatant expressions of hyper masculinity is found
in the narrative of Sampson.  Sampson’s story is complex, it has
clearly been retold over the years so that Sampson is at the same
time supposed to be one particular man, all the judges in the Hebrew
people’s history, AND the nation Israel itself.  There are layers
upon layers of meaning, and most of them express distrust of the
power of women.

In order to start to make sense of any of this, I think
I better start by explaining “what is a judge?”  You may remember
the story of the people of God being enslaved in Egypt and then led
to freedom by Moses.  After they had wandered around the desert for a
few generations and Moses died, Joshua led the people into the
Promised Land.  

Once the people got into the Promised Land they didn’t
have a king and they didn’t always have a unified leader.  Instead,
for several centuries, there was a pattern of events.  Things would
be going pretty well and then one of the neighboring countries or
tribes would want to take over Israel.  A leader would emerge
(assumed to be the leader God wanted) and lead the people in a
military victory over the aggressor.  The military leader would
continue to have the respect of the people and offer leadership to
the 12 tribes until his or her death at which point the tribes would
go back to functioning on their own.  The next time an aggressor
showed up a new leader would emerge.  Those leaders – the military
generals who gained power through winning battles and kept the power
for their lifetimes without creating dynasties – those were called
the judges.

So now you know.

Sampson is the last judge, and that has resulted in his
story also being used to reflect on the era of the judges as well.
It may be worth remembering the stories of the Hebrew Bible were
written down after centuries of oral tradition around the time of the
Babylonian exile.  Thus they were written down more than 400 years
after King David and even longer after the judges.  They were written
down in a time when the people were trying to answer the question
“why did God allow us to be defeated by the Babylonians?” and the
particular ways that the stories got told were formed by trying to
answer that question.  In that way, he’s the nation Israel too.

Sampson is presented as supernaturally strong, I mean
Superman strong.  I don’t say this to make any sense of it, just to
help you understand the story.

Sampson is a Nazirite.  That meant that he was a holy
man set apart from others by his devotion to God.  Generally
Nazirites avoided alcohol and anything unclean (like dead bodies) and
didn’t cut their hair.  In the beginning of Sampson’s story his
barren mother is told to avoid alcohol even during her pregnancy to
set him up for the work God had for him.  I say that GENERALLY
Nazirites did this stuff because Sampson broke every rule other than
the hair one well before this story.  However, the ANGEL who came
down to speak to his BARREN mother about her upcoming conception is
meant to get our attention about the greatness of the man who would
be born as well as to remind us of the matriarchs in Genesis –
creating the symbol of Sampson as the nation itself who was born
because those barren women gave birth.  The angel who spoke to his
mother told her that “he would begin the deliverance of Israel from
the hands of the Philistines.” (13:5b)

So, Sampson’s mother is the madonna of any madonna-whore
complex, she is faithful, pure, and subservient.  Sampson is really
attracted to non-Israelite women.  Women are his downfall.  First he
laid eyes on a Philistine woman and decided that he had to marry her.
His faithful parents objected, indicating that if he was going to
lead the Hebrew people it would best if he married a Hebrew wife.  He
refused to listen, and he married the Philistine woman.

Why do we care, you ask?  Well, we may not.  But his
parents did because the Philistines were at the time the aggressors
who were trying to take parts of the Israelite land and engaging them
in battle and having the leader of the Israelites marry one of them
just didn’t seem like it would help.

It didn’t.  The story is too weird to summarize well but
the Philistine wife ended up manipulating Sampson by indicating that
if he didn’t do what she wanted he didn’t love her.  Then she
betrayed him, so he left her.  Then, in order to appease his rage the
Philistine’s killed her and her father.  

At some point later Sampson saw a woman he liked so he
slept with her, she was a Philistine prostitute, and the Philistines
tried to kill him while he slept afterward, but he got away because
of his supernatural strength.  

Then comes this story.  This story fits well into what
we already know about Sampson: he is strong, he is rash, he is
fickle, he is susceptible to the charms of women, and his enemies are
looking for a way to take him down.  This fits all three versions of
the Sampson story, as does the perception of Delilah as an evil
seductress.  The story of Sampson as a man is the story of a man
whose Achilles heel was his attraction to inappropriate women.  The
story of Sampson as the judges is the story of leaders whose moral
character was lax, who could be distracted as easily as by a
beautiful woman.  The story of Sampson as Israel itself during the
Exile is the story of a nation of men who choose foreign women and
were ruined by the way those women led them to unfaithfulness to God.

Delilah is the symbol of temptation and seduction as
well as greed.  Her name means, “flirtatious”1
while the name of her town means “choice vine.”2
 It is intentional symbolism.  She represents all of humanities fear
of the power of sexual attraction and the way it make us lose our
head.  More specifically she represents the mystery of womanhood and
the fear that some men have about women and their different ways of
being.  Delilah could easily step in as the negative female character
in just about any simplistic movie or book.  She’s the one the hero
is attracted to, she’s the one who brings him down, she’s the
original femme fatale.  

That is, unless you look at the story from her
perspective. Sampson had taken a walk one day, seen a
woman, and married her.  That woman had no say in it.  His wife had
attempted to do right by her people, and had gotten killed for it –
along with her father.  Delilah, similarly, did not have any say in
entering a relationship with Sampson.  The text says “he fell in
love with” her.  It does not say, nor imply that the love was
reciprocated.  It does not suggest that they got married.  It
certainly seems that they were intimate, but he was so important that
he got what he wanted and normal limits didn’t apply.

Delilah would have known all this.  She knew that it was
dangerous to have Sampson in love with her, that it could end as soon
as it began, and that no one was going to help her if that happened.
We have no way of knowing if he was kind to her, but we also have no
reason to assume he was.  He isn’t presented as a man with a lot of
empathetic or listening skills.  Most of what is said about him
suggests he may have been abusive.

We also don’t know Delilah’s ethnicity.  She is said to
come from a town that is on the border, just inside Israel.  If she
was from there she may be an Israelite nor she may be a Canaanite.
But since the Philistines come to her, and since every other woman
Sampson is said to have been attracted to is Philistine, I think it
is likely that she was a Philistine.  Now, we can’t KNOW this, but
2/3 three choices mean that Sampson was not the leader of her people,
and I’m willing to take that seriously.  While the way the text is
usually read blames Delilah for selling out her man/leader for money,
it may well be that she was trying to save her people as well as her
own skin.  If she was a Philistine then what she did was patriotic!
She saved her people.  If she was a Canaanite, there was no reason
why she should have been loyal to the Israelite leader who had taken
over their land.  And if she was an Israelite (which I think makes
the least sense in the story) she at least had incentive to try to
end his life before hers got abruptly ended for her like his first
wife.

Delilah decided to seek the information she needed.  We
don’t know if the money induced her or simply gave her courage, but
she tried.  She tried a bunch of times and he seems to be playing
with her.  He certainly seems to know what she’s up to, which is why
it makes no sense that he answers her.
However, she plays the one card she has.  This is the key to this
story.  It is verse 15, “Then
she said to him, ‘How can you say, “I love you”, when your
heart is not with me? You have mocked me three times now and have not
told me what makes your strength so great.’ “  She throws
his claim of love back in his face, claiming that if he won’t tell
her his secret than he doesn’t really love her.  This was EXACTLY the
way his first wife got a secret out of him.  Apparently he found this
argument particularly convincing.

He
told her.  She did it.  It worked.  He was captured, humiliated, and
enslaved.  SHE lived.  If her people were the Philistines or the
Canaanites, then her people were better off as well.   She used her
power, which in this case was something she didn’t even want to begin
with.  The power she had was that this man said he loved her (or
maybe did love her) and she manipulated that to survive.

The
thing is that we often don’t have the upper hand in life.  Sometimes
it is like this: being a woman walking down the street in the village
and then suddenly, by force, being the mistress of the strong-man
leader everyone fears.  Sometimes we have that little power.  But we
always have SOME power.  Delilah had a little tiny bit of power and
used it.  We have choices we can make and we have the capacity to use
our words, our actions, our relationships, our trust, and our energy
to whatever end we find worthwhile. Sometimes, like Delilah, that’s
in survival.  When we’re lucky, and we’re surviving already, we can
use it to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms
the present themselves (#baptismalvows) Sometimes we get to resists
evil, injustice or oppression –  big or small.

The
power we have, as small and insignificant as it may seem, can take
down the strongest human or the most feared enemy.  Like Delilah
though, it takes persistence.  A little power goes a lot further when
it is used persistently, and even FURTHER when it is used with
other’s little bits of power – persistently.   Come to think of it,
especially this far into the Subversive Women sermon Series, maybe
there is something to being afraid of women.  However, it isn’t our
mystery nor our seduction.  It is that we, too, are humans who want
to survive and take care of those we love.  And if you get in our
way, we will persistently defy you and subvert you.  Thanks be to God
for people of all genders using their power for good.  Amen

Sermon
Talk Back

  1. To
    get into the mindset of the story, who are other “femme fatale”
    characters, and can any of their stories be inverted by taking their
    perspective seriously?
  2. What
    does conventional masculinity find frightening about femininity?
  3. How
    could Sampson be so easily manipulated?
  4. What
    stories can you think of when people with VERY little power used it
    to overthrow oppression?
  5. Where
    is God in this story?
  6. Does
    the enmity between ancient Israel and the Philistines serve to teach
    us anything today?
  7. How
    can we have that much courage and persistence without having our own
    backs against the wall, fighting for our lives?  
    1. And
      how can we do that while also living whole and balanced lives while
      we’re at it?
  8. Where
    else might we have taken this story?

1Dennis
T. Olsen “The Book of Judges” in the New Interpreter’s Study
Bible Vol II (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1998) p. 858

2Herbert
Wolf, “Judges” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary Vol 3
(Zondervan: Grand Rapids, MI, 1992), p. 475

Sermons

“Subversive Grace” based on  Job 2:7-10

  • February 5, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

This
week a clergy friend reached out with a concern about our United
Methodist Bookstore and recourse center, Cokesbury.  In the most
recent Cokesbury catalog, on page 21, listed under “Women’s
Studies” was a book entitled “Zip It” with a cover image of
women’s lips zipped closed.  He asked us to join him in expressing
displeasure.  I did.  I got a response from Cokesbury that attempted
to reassure me by informing me that I was ignorant of their intent.
The email informed me that the author, “offers
practical how-to’s meant to inspire her readers to use their words
‘to build, not to break; to bless, not to badger; to encourage, not
to embitter; to praise, not to pounce’.  Her work is very
specific to women’s group Bible study and personal devotion and
reflection.”1
Clearly the author of the book along with the author of the email
perceive this to be EMPOWERMENT of women.  You might stake a guess
that I disagree.  You’d be right.

Now,
this particular exchange was fairly trivial this week.  It was almost
nothing, except that it served as a reminder of the inherent sexism
in The Church and the resiliency of the patriarchy in the
institution.  It was just another
piece of frustration and sadness.  In the language of Parker Palmer,
it was another expression of the “tragic gap.”  He explains it
this way, “Of
all the tensions we must hold in personal and political life, perhaps
the most fundamental and most challenging is standing and acting with
hope in the “tragic gap.” On one side of that gap, we see the
hard realities of the world, realities that can crush our spirits and
defeat our hopes. On the other side of that gap, we see real-world
possibilities, life as we know it could be because we have seen it
that way.”2

Palmer teaches that much of what we struggle with in life is the
reality of the tragic gap and how to be authentic in response to it.

The
tragic gap ALWAYS exists.  For the past few weeks though it has felt
like every piece of news, as well as every time I’ve accessed social
media, I’ve been bombarded with reminders of the tragic gap.  At
times it has felt like I’ve been drowning in them.  My natural
emotional disposition tends toward happiness and playfulness (along
with overthinking 😉 ), but recently I’ve been feeling tired,
overwhelmed, and bogged down.  

Now,
it feels imperative to mention that I do not think that a publishing
foible by Cokesbury is a tragedy, it did not send me into a
depression, and it is not even OVERLY significant.  In the face of
the scope of issues today, it barely registers.   I have to say this
because the last time I acknowledged being personally harmed by the
existence sexism in the church at large I was told by Annual
Conference Leadership that I was a hysterical woman and sent to
Emotional Intelligence training.  So, now that’s cleared up.

Truth
be told though, there are so very many reminders of the tragic gap
right now that they are piled on top of each other.  There are all
the normal ones and all the exceptionally new ones.  I think it is
creating a phenomenon similar to grief: when a new grief occurs it
also serves to reawaken all the grief we have experienced before it.
No one attack on the world as it should be is the problem: they all
add on to each other and start to snow ball.  For many in my life,
I’m hearing that they are now avalanching.  Dear friends (please
note: friends, none of you, I wouldn’t share your struggles from this
pulpit) have told me this week that they are experiencing physical
symptoms of the anxiety they experience given the current depth of
the tragic gap.  I’m also hearing people are having trouble sleeping,
as well as turning to junk food and alcohol to make it through the
days.

image

As
for myself, this week I noticed that EVERYTHING I try to do is an
uphill battle.  It all just feels harder, sort of like how it does
when I haven’t taken vacation in entirely too many months.  My
yearning has been to sit on the couch, drink tea, pet my cat, and
watch West Wing and anything more than that requires steeling myself
to do what needs to be done.

I
don’t know how all of you are doing.  I hope some of you are fine and
dandy, with either sufficient coping mechanisms, sufficient hope, or
sufficient joy to counterbalance the world’s problems.  I know some
of you are really struggling, and that those struggles are often a
combination of the world around us and the personal issues that keep
coming.  Perhaps some are also in the middle: aware of the struggles
and making it.  After last week’s sermon, and the Biblical book from
which we read, many of you may be feeling anxious that I’m about to
make it worse.

I
don’t think I am.  Ironically enough, Job feels like a friendly
figure right now, and his story seems to give us reason for hope.
For those of you who aren’t inherently familiar with the story, let
me summarize quickly:  Job is presented as a truly good human.
Everyone agrees that he is “blameless and upright,” faithful to
God, and even overly observant.  He made sacrifices to God JUST IN
CASE one of his sons accidentally sinned.  He was also wealthy in the
form of enormous flocks.  He and his wife and had 10 children, 7 sons
and 3 daughters.  God is said to be proud of Job’s good heart and
faithfulness.

Suddenly
things changed: all of his wealth was either killed or stolen.  At
the same time, all of his children, who had been feasting together,
were killed when a wind knocked down the tent.  Job turned to grief
and turned his heart to God in prayer.  Then, in our text,  his
health deteriorated, with painful sores opening all over his entire
body.  He is already sitting on an ash heap and appears to simply,
calmly, pick up a piece of a broken pot to use to scratch himself.
It seems that he is already so heartbroken that the physical symptoms
barely register.  

That
seems right.  The deepest grief I have seen in my life has been the
grief of parents mourning for their children.  In the face of losing
10 children, I don’t think anything else would even register.  Job’s
wife is convinced that his death is imminent, and even in the midst
of her shared grief, she manages to register the degree of his pain.

The
meaning of her words is not entirely clear.  She says, “Do you
still persist in your integrity?  Curse God, and die.” The big
question is: does she assume he is dying already and wish to ease his
death by helping him speak words of truth on the way out; OR does she
believe his suffering is too great for anyone to handle and believe
that if he curses God, God will finally let him die?  That is, it
isn’t clear if she thinks he is dying anyway which then also makes it
unclear if she thinks cursing God will kill him.  Since this is a
book especially designed to argue against the idea that a difficult
life indicates that God is punishing you, I’m going to suggest that
the more likely meaning is the first:  she wishes for him speak out
loud of his pain to ease the suffering on his way to death.

Truly,
Job’s wife speaks with outstanding grace, especially for a woman who
is also grieving the loss of all of her children.  The capacity to
attend to anyone else’s pain in the midst of that grief is unusual –
humans are built that way.  She wants his pain to be eased, both
physically and emotionally.  She thinks he is being too stoic, and
should let go of his pride in order to find some relief.  In Bible
Study we found ourselves telling stories of the end of people’s
lives, and the grace-filled ways we had known loved ones to ease the
end of the dying person’s life.  This woman’s words reminded us of
how difficult it can be to let go of a loved one, and at the same
time how much of a relief it is when someone we love is no longer
suffering.  

Job’s
wife encouraged him to do what he could do to be at peace at the end
of his life.  He refused her, responding that his faith required him
to deal with the pain as it came.  In case you haven’t read Job, it
is interesting to note that for chapters upon chapters after this he
expresses his pain with great intensity.  However, the prelude seems
to forget those speeches.

Now,
the grace-filled response of Job’s wife has not been heard as such
throughout history.  “Chrysostom asked why the Devil left Job his
wife and answered with the suggestion that he considered her a
scourge by which to plague him more acutely than by any other
means.”3
Yep.  And he wasn’t alone, “The ancient tradition, reflected in
Augustine, Chrysostom, Calvin, and many others, that she is an aide
to the satan
underestimates the complexity of her role.”4
Most male commentators throughout history have condemned Job’s wife
for her words, seeing her as a part of the problem.  I wonder how
much of culture’s assumptions about females fed into that
perspective.  It was difficult for those of us who studies this
together to hear anything but gentleness, love, and grace in Job’s
wife’s words.  They’re subversive grace, for sure, not at all
reflecting the most common ways of showing love, but they’re grace
nonetheless.

The
book of Job explores human suffering, and asks the big questions
about how human suffering and God’s will are related.  God’s answers
to Job’s questions are in chapters 38-40 if you want to read them
yourselves.  The book of Job gives us a space to reflect on suffering
itself, and it gives us words to name the suffering.  We don’t have
to be in Job’s particularly awful position to be suffering, there are
many kinds of suffering in the world.

This
week we had a Gathering of (The) Connection where we talked about
finding peace.  We were gifted with wonderful questions: what is
peace?  What helps you find peace?  What keeps you from peace?  We
discussed the balance of righteousness anger and peace, and we
wondered about it.  As we discussed a thought started to form in me:
I think I’ve been doing it wrong.  (Or if not “wrong” than in a
less than optimal way.)

In
recent weeks, I have allowed my fears and angers to motivate and lead
me, and I am not at my best when I do that.  Certainly there is
plenty worth protesting, there are great organizations to donate to,
and imperative conversations to have.  However, if I want to be as
useful as I can be in building the kin-dom of God, then I need to
start those actions from the best motivation.  Now I’m wondering if I
can attend to centering myself in the unconditional love of God and
wonder of life and Creation – even now, ESPECIALLY now?  Can I
allow myself to slow down enough to consider where my energy belongs
and where my gifts are most useful?  Can I show up, wherever I show
up, grace-filled and at peace so that the love I have to share can be
part of what I offer in changing the world?  Can I learn how to hold
peace in such a deep way that it allows me to hold anger differently?

Please
be aware that I think grace-filled and at peace can be a reasonable
way to protest, chant, and resist!!  I’m talking about the inner
motivation and way of responding to the rest of God’s people.  When
it comes down to it, I think that the energy we bring into the world
changes it more than the words we use.  The world is desperately in
need of love and peace – and listening as well as many many forms
of resistance.  Furthermore, in the past few weeks people’s hearts
haven’t stopped breaking in the normal and awful ways human hearts
break.  There is still a lot of need around us for patience and
compassion.

So,
I’m hoping that in the face of great suffering I might be able (on
good days) to share subversive grace: to share God’s love from a
place of peace and gratitude WHILE calling the world out of the
tragic gap and into the kin-dom.  This will take times of quiet,
intentional reflection, deep conversation, and attending to hope,
gratitude and goodness.  This will take paying attention to what
brings me energy – and doing those things.  This will take a
regular practice of Sabbath, in particular Sabbath from the news
cycle.  I got one of those this week and it made all the difference.

Finally,
I hope that my journey is of use to you as well.  In the midst of her
own suffering, Job’s wife found the way to hear her husband’s pain
and respond to it with love, grace, and compassion.  That’s
especially hard work right now.  But, may God help us to treat
ourselves,  and those we love, with similar love, grace, and
compassion.  May we find our energy sources, good spiritual
practices, and  the freedom to breath outside of the news cycle.
And, with God’s help, may it lower our anxiety and fill us with some
much needed peace.  Amen

1Personal
Email, February 1, 2016.  

2Parker
Palmer, Healing
the Heart of Democracy,
p. 191.  Accessed at
http://www.couragerenewal.org/democracyguide/v36/
on February 2, 2017.

3Marvin
H. Pope, Job.  
In
the Anchor Bible Series, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co, 1965)
page 22.

4Carol
A. Newsom “The Book of Job” in The New Interpreter’s Study
Bible Vol IV (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1996), page 355.

image

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

“Speaking the Truth No One Wants to Hear” based…

  • January 29, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

I can think of no way to begin this sermon other than by apologizing: to any who have survived a sexual assault, for whom discussion of sexual assault escalates the remaining pain, I am sorry. Also, for those who have been yearning for a clergy person to acknowledge the harm done by sexual violence who have been harmed by the conversation not happening, I am sorry.

In the United States, 1 in 6 women and 1 in 33 men will experience an attempted or completed rape in their lifetimes. (Most attempts are completed.) To save you the math, 90% of rapes happen to women and 10% happen to men.1 In terms of gender that means we need to remember that women are more likely to be living with the internal scars of sexual assault than men are AND that a substantial number of men are also living with internal scars of sexual assault. We also want to remember that members of the transgender community experience sexual assault at MUCH higher rates than cisgender people. More important than the statistics however, is to remember that one rape is one rape too many.

This should never happen.

And it happens a lot. Many people sexually assault others.

The story of King David’s daughter, the Princess Tamar, is a story of sexual assault. Unlike most such stories, Tamar’s story is told. Her story reflects and shines light on many stories that never got told, as well as on the experiences of those who told their stories but were not believed. Instead of having been insulated and protected by her royalty, the story of the princess reflects the experiences of many unnamed men and women throughout history.

Phyllis Trible, a matriarch of feminist biblical criticism, has a chapter on Tamar in her book Texts of Terror. She opens the chapter with these words, “From the book of Samuel comes the story of a family enmeshed in royal rape. Brother violates sister. He is a prince to whom belong power, prestige, and unrestrained lust. She is a princess to whom belong wisdom, courage, and unrelieved suffering. Children of one father, they have not the same care of each other. Indeed, the brother cares not at all.”2

This story comes soon after the one about King David’s adultery, his use of Bathsheba without her consent, and the prophet Nathan calling him on it. David’s shame is very present in the story, including in how he responds to it. Amnon, the lust-filled rapist, is his oldest son and heir. Absalom, Tamar’s full brother, is David’s third son.

The story SAYS that Amnon “fell in love with” Tamar but I think we can easily conclude that Amnon fell in lust with Tamar. This is not what love looks like. As a virgin daughter of the king, Tamar was highly valuable property, useful to be given away to other countries and brokering deals. That meant that she was “protected property, inaccessible to males, including her brother.”3 Amnon, the princely heir, doesn’t seem to like having anything stand in his way. He finds the person who gives him the advice he wants – that he should manipulate his father into giving him access to Tamar to fulfill his lust.

I must say, Trible points out that when Amnon feigns illness and worries his father, in his request that she be sent to him, Amnon refers to Tamar as his sister. She says, “To claim kinship with Tamar at this time averts suspicion.”4 I say, UGH.

Tamar does as she’s told. She doesn’t have many degrees of freedom, and the king had ordered her to go. The servants leave, she prepares the food, she brings it to Amnon, and then he grabs her. He demands that she sleep with him, again calling her his sister. Trible goes on, “Through a series of orders, all of them obeyed, Amnon has manipulated the occasion to feed his lust. This time, however, the royal command meets objection. In the presence of a rapist, Tamar panics not. In fact, she claims her voice. Unlike Amnon’s brisk commands, her deliberations slow the movement of the plot, though they are unable to divert it. If Amnon uses the vocative to seduce her, she returns it to summon him to sense.”5

Tamar has an unusually cool head. She didn’t panic nor beg. She spoke in reasonable terms and tried to talk him out of it. She pointed out that their country is above such things, which is a great argument to make in a royal family where the country would be valued especially highly. She points out that it would shame her, seemingly thinking he was capable of empathy. He does not seem to be. She names that it would ruin him, making him appear as a fool and a scoundrel. Finally, seeming to become clear that he wanted what he wanted and wouldn’t stop until he got it, she suggests an alternative. She points out that if he asked to marry her, he’d be allowed to, thus avoiding all the other disastrous consequences. Trible says, “Her words are honest and poignant; they acknowledge female servitude. Tamar knows Amnon can have her but pleads that he do it properly.”6

That she needs to make such an offer is heart-breaking. However, even the offer to wed the man bent on raping her is ignored. He doesn’t want to hear her speak– he wants to have her subservient and as he fantasized. The text simply says, “but he would not listen to her” and then goes on to say, “and being stronger than she was, he forced her and lay with her.”(13:14) Trible says the text is worse than it first appears in English, “the Hebrew omits the preposition to stress his brutality. ‘He laid her.’”7

And then it got worse.

The violence of the rape transformed the lust into hatred, and he ordered her to “Get out.” However, even in this moment of utter vulnerability and violation, Tamar held her own. Trible says, “This abused woman will no more heed Amnon’s order of dismissal than she consented to his demand for rape.”8 She responds with “NO.” And she stops calling him her brother. Trible continues, “’No,’ she said to him, ‘because sending me away is a greater evil than the other which you have done to me.’ (13:16a) If the narrator interprets that the hatred is greater than the desire, Tamar understands that the expulsion is greater than the rape. In sending her away, Amnon increases the violence he has inflicted on her. He condemns her to a lifelong sentence of desolation. Tamar knows that rape dismissed is crime exacerbated.”9 Again he doesn’t listen. She stops speaking.

Now, this seems to be worth taking a moment to acknowledge that Tamar’s story is not entirely universal and timeless. In her day, if an unmarried woman was raped, it was expected that the man would marry her. That was the least bad option for the woman, since otherwise she was seen as damaged goods which would prevent the possibility of a future marriage and thus the possibility of a financially stable future. Tamar, like other biblical women, was taught that her value was in her capacity to wed and bear male children. This rape AND expulsion violated her body and any hope she had of a future. It was a different time. Today we hope women don’t get stuck marrying their rapists. In any case, she kept her head, her reason, and her voice. But he doesn’t listen.

After she is kicked out and the door is barred to keep her from re-entering, she tears her robe. The robe proclaims her a virgin daughter of the King, and she isn’t anymore. Trible says, “tearing her robe symbolizes the violence done to a virgin princess. Rape has torn her.”10 She also puts ashes on her head and weeps publicly. She VISIBLY proclaims that wrong has been done to her. She doesn’t hide it. She doesn’t protect her “brother.” She lets her entire body scream for her, and she makes sure it gets listened to this time.

Her brother, her full brother Absalom, speaks to her. When the words are examined deeply, they are quite powerful. He is his sister’s advocate and he offers her a safe place. In this story Absalom is the one we can look to as a moral compass and seek to emulate. (I actually think Tamar is too high of a standard, being that strong, clear-minded and articulate in the face of that violence is not something to compare ourselves to.) Trible explains, “Absalom explicitly introduces this speech with the adverb ‘attāh, ‘now’ or ‘for the time being.’ As Amnon’s pretense deceived David, so Tamar’s pretense will deceive Amnon. Further, rather than minimizing the crime, euphemisms such as ‘with you’ or ‘this deed’ underscore its horror.”11

Absalom starts by asking her if Amnon had raped her. He knows it is possible, and he acknowledges it. He also speaks the words, which means she doesn’t have to, in this case another means of grace. He is tender to her, he reminds her that they are still connected, and he comes up with a plan. He takes the harm done to his sister as real, significant, and relevant to him. She is his sister, that hasn’t changed. The text tells us he brought her into his house, since she was no longer a virgin princess living in the palace. He listened, he cared, and he made a space for her.

From the moments after the rape on Absalom takes charge. Trible suggests that it is in this moment that he supplants King David himself in the story.12 David is said to be angry – but it is not clear if he is mad at Amnon or at “what happened to Amnon”? Trible says, “David’s anger signifies complete sympathy for Amnon and total disregard for Tamar. How appropriate that the story never refers to David and Tamar as father and daughter.”13 David does nothing, which leaves Absalom alone to respond to the harm done to his sister.

In the end of the story, Tamar is “desolate.” Trible explains, “When used of people elsewhere in scripture, the verb be desolate (šmm) connotes being destroyed by an animal (Lam. 3:11) Raped, despised, and rejected by a man, Tamar is a woman of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”14 And, in response to Amnon not listening to Tamar, Absalom stops speaking to Amnon as well. (Also, eventually, Absalom kills Amnon and then after that he leads a revolt against his father. David’s failure to respond destabilizes his throne. But this is Tamar’s story and we are going to stick with her.)

Her story, such as it is, is concluded in the following chapter. Trible explains again, starting with the Biblical quote, “’There were born to Absalom three sons and one daughter; her name was Tamar.’ (14:27. RSV). Strikingly the anonymity of the sons highlights the name of the lone female child. In her Absalom has created a living memorial for his sister. A further note enhances the poignancy of his act. Tamar, the daughter of Absalom, ‘became a beautiful woman to behold.’ From aunt to niece have passed name and beauty so that rape and desolation have not the final word in the story of Tamar.”15 Tamar, who would never have a child of her own did have a namesake so that her memory lived on.

One final thought from Trible about Tamar before we end, “she was never his temptation. His evil was his own lust, and from it others needed protection.”16

Dear ones, this story tells a truth we rarely hear, and it forces us to acknowledge the all too common reality of sexual assault. The Bible holds firmly that God abhors sexual violence, and this story adds that silence from leaders in the face of sexual violence only makes it worse.  Yet, in the midst of the honest portrayal of horrific violence, the story also leaves us with hope. Absalom was an advocate for his sister and he gave her a safe-place to be. Because of those like Absalom, healing and life are possible, and violence need not have the last word.  Absalom is the brother we hope to emulate when we seek to be brothers and sisters in Christ to one another. So, as we are able, may God help us to be safe places for survivors as Absalom was for Tamar.  Amen

1RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) website, https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem, quote statistics from National Institute of Justice & Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, Prevalence, Incidence and Consequences of Violence Against Women Survey (1998). Accessed January 26, 2017.

2Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), page 37.

3Trible, 39

4Trible, 41.

5Trible, 45.

6Trible, 45-46.

7Trible, 46.

8Trible, 47.

9Trible, 48.

10Trible, 50.

11Trible, 51.

12Trible, 52.

13Trible, 53.

14Trible, 52.

15Trible, 55.

16Trible, 56.

–

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 29, 2017

Sermons

“A Defiant Aunt” based on 2 Kings 11:1-3 or…

  • January 22, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

To explain this soap opera to all of you required a lot of remedial scholarship on my part. I think I have it now. The monarchy period lasted for just under 300 years in Israel and just over 400 in Judea, and I found a handy-dandy chart on Wikipedia that helps.

Let’s start with the so-called great King named David (you may have heard of him). His son Solomon became king after him. After the death of Solomon the kingdom divided into two parts: a Northern Part called Israel and a Southern Part called Judea. That is, there was a civil war and the North, which wanted to become a separate nation did so. The Southern succession was SUPER linear, passing directly from father to son with only two exceptions: the one we read about today and the very end of the dynasty. The Northern one is much less linear and way more confusing, and we’re going to ignore most of it today.

The story we read about today is SOUTHERN, it is about Judea, but to understand it we have to start in the North. There was a Northern/Israelite King named Omri, who had been a general of another King and ended up the victor after a coup. The Bible says he was the worst king yet. His son Ahab married Jezebel. You may have heard of her. She is in the running for being the worst woman in the Bible. Jezebel was a princess of the Phoenician Empire, from which you should take that she was not a follower of YHWH.

King Ahab was a selfish, petty, and mean man who tended to follow his wife’s lead. She went on an offensive against the prophets of YHWH and tried to kill them all off so the prophets of rival god Baal could be in power.

If you take nothing else from this introduction, take this: Ahab and Jezebel were rulers who cared only about themselves and power. The Bible calls them unfaithful to YHWH, but I want us to hear that with nuance. The Bible calls leaders unfaithful when they don’t follow the laws of the Torah, and the laws of the Torah were designed to protect the poor and the powerless from the unquenchable thirst for more power and more money of the rich and powerful. Thus, any ruler who cared more for their own power than for the well-being of the people was called unfaithful to YHWH, because being faithful to God MEANT following the rules that cared for the people. Ahab and Jezebel deviated further from God’s vision for a just society than any other rulers before them. Thus they are the standard bearers of evil rulers in Kings and Chronicles. It isn’t just about believing in YHWH or not, it is about being self-serving or caring for the people AS the standard of faith.

Ahab and Jezebel, the power couple of epic evilness, had at least a daughter and two sons. Those sons also became Kings of Israel after their father, and the second of them to take the Kingship was Jehoram (of Israel). Their daughter was named Athaliah. She was married to King Jeroham of Judea. Two men, same name; Athaliah had a brother King Jeroham AND a husband King Jeroham. Eventually Queen Athaliah also the mother of the successor King, Ahaziah.

Just before we get to this little story, King Ahaziah, like several Judean kings before him, was leading military campaigns alongside the Northern Israelite King. The two separate countries were pretty well tied in together at this time (including by marriages), and the Bible seems to think that the evil influence of Jezebel was spreading widely. While King Ahaziah of Judea and his uncle King Jehoram of Israel were off fighting to keep control over vassal states, King Jehoram of Israel was injured.

The great northern prophet Elisha stepped in and anointed the general Jehu as king, to take over for the injured king!! Meanwhile, King Jehoram (of Israel) has gone off to heal in another city and his nephew King Ahaziah (of Judea) comes to visit him. Then the newly minted King Jehu (of Israel) comes and kills them both, and proceeds to go on a killing rampage to ensure that none of Ahab’s 70 other male descendants can take over for him. He also has Jezebel killed, and all the Baal worshippers. I’m telling you, they don’t make soap operas as violent as Biblical history for a reason.

Now, the deceased Jezebel and Ahab have one remaining child in power, their daughter Athaliah who has been Queen Mother to her son Ahaziah. Their male decedents in the north and all of their allies have been murdered. In the grand tradition of seeking power at any cost, the Queen Mother Athaliah has all of the other male royal descendants killed off and claims the throne for herself. This action would have completely eliminated the rest of Ahab and Jezebel’s line as well as the Southern succession. It is unclear if this mass murder involved any of her other sons (there may not have been any), but it certainly includes HER OWN GRANDCHILDREN, the princes of the kingdom.

Now, originally my goal was to discuss the subversiveness of Jehosheba, a daughter of King Jehoham and sister of King Ahaziah, but at this point I’m having trouble with clarity over which woman is more subversive: is it the woman who claims the throne for herself for seven years and is the ONLY break in the Davidic dynasty in 438 years OR the woman who subversively hid her nephew away so he could restore the dynasty?? This leads me to wonder how much are we supposed to care about the dynasty, which I really think is propaganda more than it was God’s will? In their own ways, both of these women were exceptionally subversive, although one seems significantly more evil than the other. While I admit that subversiveness can come in good or evil forms, we are going to keep our attention on the defiant aunt.

Before I started the research for this sermon series, this little story was not one I’d noticed before. It does show up twice, 3 verses each in the standard history of Kings and nearly the same verses in the alternative history of Chronicles. They tell us that there was a ruling queen of Judea, and she was the only one to sit on the throne who was not a descendant of David! She was taken down by the subversive action of another woman, one who was either her daughter or her step-daughter. The historian Josephus claims that Jehosheba was a HALF sister to King Ahaziah which means she wasn’t Athaliah’s daughter, but the text seems to imply the opposite. Generally in these stories a woman is only called a sister that clearly if she is a full blooded sister. It doesn’t really matter, but it is curious.

The Bible struggles with Queen Athaliah’s rule MOSTLY because she was not a descendant of David, and it seems to call her reign illegitimate. The New Interpreter’s Bible puts it this way, “Although Athaliah rules for seven years, the typical regal summaries are omitted in the report, for the narrator does not consider her to have been a legitimate ruler.”1Apparently, questions of the legitimacy of rulers is not new in human history. Similarly, we can tell from this entire narrative that people in power using their power to do harm to the vulnerable is a long standing tradition and that the prophetic voice exists for the sake of calling power to accountability.

Anyway, to get back to the story, this sister Jehosheba of the newly dead King Ahaziah is ALSO married to the High Priest (which is sketchy in its own right, the power is clearly shared very tightly in that society). She hides her baby nephew and his wet-nurse away in a unused room in the palace to keep him from being murdered. Later she sneaks them both out of the palace and hides them in the Temple for SIX YEARS. For all of those years, his grandmother ruled the southern kingdom of Judea under the assumption that there was no one left with a more legitimate claim to power than the one she had.

Now, its hard to tell from story itself who the mastermind was: Jehosheba or her husband the high priest (we’re going to skip over his name so that no one gets more confused and just call him the high priest). They seem DEEPLY in cahoots. Jehosheba is the one who is said to have stolen away the prince and hidden him for years, but at the end of that time it is her husband who enacts a plan to overthrow Queen Athaliah’s rule by convincing the military that the rightful son of King Ahaziah still lived and should be king instead. Perhaps it was the high priest that asked his wife to protect the baby to begin with. Perhaps it was the Jehosheba who convinced her husband to overthrow the Queen for the sake of her nephew. Perhaps they had a really great relationship and shared in both the planning and the execution of the plan. The text doesn’t tell us. But within the royal family, a princess who was married to the high priest risked her own life and that of her husband and family as well for the sake of overthrowing the Queen.

The Biblical narrative claims that the baby nephew who became King, Joash, was a good king. It seems that his high priest uncle kept in line for as long as the high priest lived, and he even oversaw a restoration of the Temple. He had a 40 year reign of following the ways of YHWH, although in the end he decided to use the Temple’s treasury to pay off a foreign king who wanted to sack Jerusalem and his servants killed him off in response. You can’t make this stuff up. I do not find it clear to what degree Joash really was in charge and to what degree his uncle (and aunt?) pulled the strings after having saved his life, but the gist seems to be that Jehosheba did a good thing for the people of Judea and for the worship of YHWH by saving that baby. Of course, she maintained the royal lineage, but she also helped provide a ruler who cared for the people.

The real question, of course, is what we can draw from these ancient stories of long dead battles for seats of power that matters to us today? Of course there is the timely reminder that the Biblical standard for good leadership is the care given to the people, with particular attention to the poor, the powerless, and the marginalized. I think there is also in Jehosheba’s story the reality that standing up to power can require great personal risk.

The book “Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed” by Phillip Hallie tells the story of a little village in France, Le Chambon, full of Huguenots who truly believed in the Biblical call to take care of all of God’s children. Those French Protestants were responsible for saving the lives of thousand of Jewish children (and adults) during the German occupation of France. They did so while taking their own lives at risk, and indeed pastor’s son was killed for being part of the resistance.  The faith of the people propelled them to take care of all God’s people.

The acts of Jehosheba, like the acts of the people of Le Chambon, were extraordinarily courageous because the power structures above them were willing to kill people in order to maintain their power. To be in the resistance sometimes requires acts of great courage and personal risk. Loving God, if and when it becomes necessary for us to take risks to take care of your people, may we prove worthy like Jehosheba and the people of Le Chambon. Amen

1Choon-Leong Seow “The First and Second Book of Kings” in The New Interpreter’s Study Bible Volume III edited by Leander Kirk et al (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1999), 227

–

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 22, 2017

Sermons

“What Do the Wise Men Mean?” based on Isaiah 60:1-6…

  • January 8, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

In April of 2002 I was studying abroad at Oxford University in England when my dearly beloved grandfather died. He passed away late on a Saturday morning, which meant I heard about it around nightfall. With the help of friends and housemates I figured out what to eat for dinner (seriously, this involved asking a friend what I liked to eat, I was beyond knowing), found a chapel to pray in (a housemate walked with me, seemingly I wasn’t trustworthy to walk a few blocks by myself), and got a plane ticket home (a friend found it for me). By the end of the night things were set: I was scheduled to leave early the next morning a bus to Heathrow airport and would get to Newark by that evening.

In those frugal college days I didn’t keep much cash on hand, and even by those standards I happened to be running low on pounds. I had dollars, but I didn’t have have pounds. For reasons that now escape me, I exchanged currency was in the back of a department store, and I certainly wasn’t thinking about the need for cash the night my grandfather died. I didn’t realize I needed money that night, and even if I had, by the time I could have pulled myself together enough to notice – the store would have been closed.

By morning I realized my error, but it was Sunday, and EARLY morning, and there was no way to solve it. (In retrospect I could easily have asked my housemates, but my deeply independent nature didn’t come up with that idea!) I got to the bus on time, with a plan. I had enough money in American dollars to pay TWICE the bus fare. I figured that would work.

It didn’t.

The bus driver was sympathetic, but unable to let me on the bus without paying the fare – in pounds. I had no pounds. I had no way to get pounds. And I had to get on THAT bus to make my flight home. Getting home to my family felt like a need. The grief for my grandfather was deep seated, and raw.

I don’t remember how it happened exactly, someone must have overheard my offer of paying twice the fare and why I had to get home, but the people on that bus paid my fare for me. Many people offered one pound each and then it was paid and I was on my way home. My independent nature was so embarrassed by that at the time that I blocked the story for years and it has only recently re-emerged.

Now, with a bit more perspective, I’m less ashamed that I wasn’t able to do everything perfectly without notice and in the midst of grief. Now, with the wisdom of another decade and a half I’m not embarrassed to have needed help anymore. Instead I am grateful for the gifts of strangers when I needed it most

I am so grateful for the chance to read Shirley Readdean’s excellent sermon from last week, and she motivated me to be playful with the text as well. The story of the magi was told to make sense of the world and of Jesus, it is intentionally metaphorical and rich in meaning, making easy space for us to explore our own lives within it.

It struck me this week that accepting gifts from strangers isn’t particularly easy – at least it hasn’t been for me. I’m told Simone Weil once said, “It is only by the grace of God that the poor can forgive the rich for the bread they give them,” which has to do with both the challenge or receiving gifts AND the issues of income inequality. This story of Matthew’s gets into all of that!

What would this experience have been like for Mary and Joseph? They were relatively young, or at least she was and he might have been! Mary certainly hadn’t known much of the world, and there is no reason to think Joseph had either. They were likely quiet provincial. By the best guesses of scholars they were poor. If Joseph made his living as a carpenter that would mean that there was no longer access to the family lands – they’d been lost to debt. Peasants living without land were worse off than those still living on it. Likely they worked very, very hard and had little time to travel. If they were from Nazareth (which seems more likely than anything else), then they knew about the Roman destruction of Sepphoris 4 miles away and about 8 years earlier. They knew oppression, poverty, and hard living. They also knew a deep faith in a God who cared about the people, and who did not want them dying of complications of poverty. I suspect it was their Jewish faith that helped them get through the day, every day. I suspect it was much easier to trust fellow Jewish residents of Nazareth than it was to trust outsiders or non-Jews, the world had taught them to be wary.

Or, if we want to take Matthew’s story at face value and put the Holy Family in residence in Bethlehem, then they were in a small village 6 miles from Jerusalem. There, too, they would learn to be cautious of outsiders, particularly the Roman Empire and their regional authorities: the religious leaders of the day. Mary and Joseph would have found it much easier to trust the Jews in their own village than outsiders, the Temple priests, or non Jews.

Wherever they originated from, as Jewish peasants Mary and Joseph would have had good reason to be hesitant about outsiders and non-Jews. Furthermore, the primarily stories of the faith included the stories of exile and return – that is, of domination from Eastern empires and their strange gods. The gospel of Matthew tells us that the the magi were from the East, and that they stopped in Jerusalem on their way to Bethlehem. That would be reminiscent of the eastern empires that had previously dominated the Jews AND a connection to the empire that currently dominated them. These magi had the power to gain an audience with King Herod, who was known to be crazy and cruel. Can you see what I’m getting at? It is possible that the magi would have been terrifying to Mary and Joseph, and for good reason. Then, to add to all the complications of their existence, these strange and powerful strangers came into their home bearing VERY expensive gifts.

How would Mary and Joseph felt? Would they have been afraid? Were they overwhelmed? If so, what bothered them the most? The non-Jewishness? The connection with their history of exile? The connection the Magi had to the power-players of the Roman Empire? The power they themselves had? The foreign language? The expensive gifts? The expectations placed on their baby son? Or was it simply the danger the strangers brought with them by declaring Jesus to be a threat to Herod’s power? Whichever of these bothered them MOST, I’m thinking that if I was in their sandals, I might not want those magi around very much.

The magi are VERY different, VERY powerful, and thus VERY dangerous.  They don’t know Jewish traditions or laws, and they are connected to the power structure of oppression. Furthermore, in basic human nature, it is especially uncomfortable to receive gifts that can never be repaid. Jewish peasants would never EVER be able to repay the gifts of the kind that the magi bought, Jewish peasants were living just BELOW subsistence level and gold, and frankincense and myrrh are EXPENSIVE. In fact, those are the kinds of gifts that aren’t given in normal human exchange – they are the kind of gifts only given to people in power (like kings) in hope of recognizing the king and winning favor. The gifts of the magi communicate that Jesus was perceived as a king, of a standard order human kingdom. Likely that’s one of the reasons the story is told, to prefigure Jesus’ kingship. However in real life, that would be AWKWARD.

The presence of the magi in the story Matthew tells helps develop the story in other ways too: it gives a reason for King Herod to know of the threat of Jesus, thereby making the journey to Egypt seem more plausible (really it exists in order to present Jesus as the new Moses); it indicates that the life of Jesus would be significant beyond the realm of Judaism; and it foreshadows the ways that the adult Jesus would threaten the power of Rome and the authority of its appointed leaders. The magi themselves, coming from East to Jerusalem, fulfill dreams dating back to the exile, as we can see in Isaiah. That dream is not just of a restoration, but of restored power to the Jewish people and international recognition. The coming of the magi in Matthew is meant to indicate that Jesus is bringing the fulfillment of the desires of centuries. Even so I still think the men themselves would be terrifying to actual Jewish peasants.

On top of it all, I still wonder what it would have been like to such receive gifts from strange and powerful men. It can be hard to receive gifts anyway, they require a certain openness and vulnerability. It is harder when the gift is one-sided and cannot be reciprocated. I think, at least for me, it is also difficult to receive gifts from strangers. I take this from the fact it has taken me nearly 15 years to tell the story I started with! Furthermore, the acts of giving and receiving a gift is a connection between people, and would be hard to build a connection with people who are frightening, strange, and powerful. Finally, and this I’ve been worried about since childhood, if these expensive gifts were given to the Holy Family before a significant journey HOW ON EARTH would they keep them safe without a caravan to protect them?

The story doesn’t go into these details at all. It just says the magi offered Jesus the gifts and then left by another road, thereby short-changing Herod. Metaphorically this suggests that being present to Jesus would change how people used their power in the world and who they trusted. That suggests that the giving of the magi’s gifts to Jesus was helpful to the magi! That’s easy enough to believe – it is a wonderful and transformational thing to be able to give a generous gift. (This may be why they’re hard to receive!)

It is with humble gratitude that I think of the people who paid for my bus fare, people whose names I didn’t know and who I have thus been unable to pay back. They have left me with gratitude for the opportunities I have to help others along the way, and gave me a more clear sense that we as humans are all in this together. That moment in time was one when I truly didn’t have what I needed, and others provided it. I am thankful to have known that need, and even more thankful to have had it cared for.

The graciousness of Mary and Joseph who let strange and powerful foreigners into their home to greet their baby and give expensive gifts is mesmerizing, even after hearing it every year. Those strange men whose very lives seem designed to frighten were actually intending to extend grace. They were the ones most changed by the experience. Part of the grace of receiving gifts is allowing the gift-giver to be transformed. Thus, may we find the grace to be open to the gifts that strangers have to offer, and receive them with openness and gratitude! Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

January 8, 2017

Sermons

“Justice-Seeking Mothers”based on 1 Samuel 2:1-10 and Luke 1:46b-55

  • December 11, 2016February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

It
has been said about Mary, “No woman in scripture is more honored,
blessed as she was ‘above all women’ (Luke 1:42), and she holds an
iconic status shared by no other woman in Christianity. Through the
accounts of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke, Mary is one of the
first biblical characters many children encounter. Along with Eve,
Mary is integral to shaping how Christians understand the nature of
womanhood and motherhood.”1
What is said is true.  Mary, along with Eve, has both shaped how
women are understood in Christianity AND the inverse: perceptions of
Mary (and Eve) are indicators of how Christianity is understanding
women.  How Mary is seen is a bell-weather for how women are seen.
Cary Gibson, the author of the opening quote, also says, “Mary is a
container into which we pour ideas of what it means to be a woman. In
turn we then draw from her image ideas about our own womanhood.”2

Most
commonly, Mary is said to be meek and mild.  Usually, it is her
subservience that sets her up as the ideal woman.  The pedestal of
womanhood that Mary most frequently occupies as the ideal woman is
the pedestal of the selfless mother, the one who exists simply so her
son can exist.  She’s faithful, sweet, and biddable.  There is,
however, one issue with this common perception Mary: it completely
ignores the words of Mary found in the Gospel of Luke.  

Now,
I’m not saying that I really think some literate scribe was following
Mary around during her pregnancy to record her insights for
posterity.  However, I am saying we have a rather long monologue
attributed to Mary that defies the way she is most commonly defined.
The meek and mild ideal does not match the actual Gospel.  The myths
around her are more about what Christian women have been told to be
than they are about the actual stories about and words of Mary.

Therefore,
it seems worth exploring the words attributed to Mary.  Whether the
words are what Mary said, or something Mary could have said, or
simply what it made sense to someone that the Mother of Jesus WOULD
have said, they are attributed to her.  Since the general perception
of Mary is based on 20 centenaries of trying to put women in their
place, and I’d prefer to get to know Mary as presented in the Gospel.
It may be that we can take a look at Mary-the-ideal-woman and get a
different answer about what it means to be an ideal woman.

For
starters, these words are not meek, nor mild.  In fact, Cary Gibson
says Mary, “voiced a defiant and righteous hope in the face of
violence and injustice.”3
 It is true.  These words express a HARDCORE faith and a great ideal
for women to seek to live up to. 🙂  Men too.  This is the sort of
faith we can all aspire to!

First
of all, Mary’s song is deeply rooted in her faith tradition.  It
echoes Hannah’s song of celebration after Hannah fulfilled her
promise and brought her son Samuel to Eli to serve him as a priest.
It also echoes with phrases from the Psalms.  The version of this
song that we have is a work of theological and scriptural brilliance
and sophistication.  Hannah’s song is powerful, but reflects a less
mature faith.  Hannah yearns for God to smash the powerful, deride
her enemies, and break the mighty.  In her mind the powerless are
lifted up BY making the powerful small.  There is violence in her
imagery, even as there is celebration of the goodness of God and of
her sense of becoming more significant in the world.

Mary’s
song, though, is not vengeful.  She also speaks of lifting up the
poor and lonely.  Like Hannah she speaks about God’s power, but she
also adds God’s mercy.  Mary speaks of lowering the mighty, but the
lowering isn’t violent or dangerous for them:  the proud are
“scattered in the thoughts of their hearts” which sounds like a
way to be more humble; the powerful step down from their thrones (but
she doesn’t suggest they’re harmed afterward); the rich are sent away
empty – as if they don’t need any more.  Hannah had the the
formerly “full”  “hire themselves out for bread.”  Mary is
interested in lifting up the lowly and removing their oppression, not
in oppressing the oppressors.  She is a actually meeker and milder
than Hannah, Hannah’s is pretty rough.  Mary is simply less violent!

Hannah
speaks of her victory, Mary speaks of being treated with God’s favor.
While both are grateful for the child they are able to nurture, and
while both express incredible gratitude to God and deep theological
reflections, they have different energies.  The insertion of material
from the Psalms into Hannah’s original poem changes it into a more
gracious piece.  One scholar found that in addition to the source
material of Hannah’s poem, the song of Mary includes 7 pieces of
different Psalms, as well as a quote each from Deuteronomy, Job,
Micah, and Isaiah.  By that scholar’s reckoning all of the words of
Mary’s song are attributable to Hebrew Bible quotations.4

Mary’s
song starts in the specific.  She is grateful to be useful to God,
humbly aware of her status as a poor woman in her society, and
attentive to the change of her status because of God’s favor.  She
attributes her life change to God’s greatness, and she praises God.
She expresses who God is: merciful,
consistent, strong, and powerful.  She talks about a God who cares
about the lowly,
and feeds the hungry with GOOD food.
Her song makes another journey outward, celebrating God’s care for
all of the Jews and then attributing God’s care to God’s merciful
nature and God’s promises.  She moves from celebrating God’s work for
her, to celebrating God’s work for the vulnerable, to celebrating
God’s work for all her people.  It is as if she is expanding her
gratitude in increasingly wide circles.

While
it is unlikely to be factual, this text suggests that Mary knew her
scriptures well enough to combine them creatively into a truly
beautiful and majestic song celebrating God WITHOUT demeaning anyone
else.  It suggests that her humility was real, but it wasn’t a form
of self-deprecation.  It says she was genuinely honored to be able to
serve God and be useful in forming the world in God’s kindom of
shalom.  She was delighted and amazed to be chosen.  She recognized
the depth of the blessing she received, seemingly without thinking
that it made her more important than others.  She said she was
blessed, and was amazed that people would remember her as blessed.
That indicates she didn’t think she’d done anything right or worthy,
it was God’s choice not her worthiness that mattered.  Her gratitude
was expansive and celebratory and still focused on lifting up the
lowly and attentive to the hungry.  She kept her head!

The
Mary of this song is wise, strong, compassionate, creative, humble,
and grateful.  She knows and celebrates a God who is a fierce
advocate of justice.  John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, in their
book “The First Christmas” point out that each of the Gospels
start with a “Gospel in miniature” (with the possible exception
of Mark which starts at a gallop and just keeps going!).  Luke 1 and
2, which likely do NOT represent authentic memories of things that
really happened, DO represent themes of the Gospel, understanding of
Jesus, foreshadowing of things to come, and ways to see how God is
known in the Gospel.  Luke pays particular attention to women – as
we can see here where Mary gets a prolonged monologue – as well as
to the poor and vulnerable.  We can also see that here in the words
Mary speaks.  The writer of Luke, and/or the Christian tradition,
and/or the editors who came later attribute these words to Mary
largely to help those of us who came later to understand her son.

Now,
I don’t want anyone to think that I’m disparaging Hannah’s song.  Her
song is FIERCE and profound, and reflects an era one whole millennia
before Mary’s.  Hannah, as well, sought justice.  She sought it for
herself and she sought it for all of God’s people. She understood God
to be one who cares about the poor, the hungry, the feeble, the
barren, the low, and the needy.  That is a reflection of the unique
tradition of Judaism, from a pretty early time.  Other ancient
peoples believed in god and goddesses.  The Israelites were unique,
however, in believing in a God who cared about how they treated each
other, and in a God who cared about the people who had the least
power and influence.  There is a constant tension in the Bible
between this belief – in a God who cares for the poor and lowly –
and the human tendency to prefer the rich and powerful.  Hannah
reflects the God who cares for the poor and lowly without being
pulled toward the rich and powerful at all.  Then Mary manages to
take it a step further and acknowledge a God who cares for everyone.
They sought justice, and believed in a God who wanted justice.  This
is our radical tradition.  This is the wonder of worshiping a God of
compassion.

Those
sons of those women took their justice-seeking natures and their
understandings of the God of Compassion, and changed the world.  We
mostly know about the mothers because of the sons.  Samuel anointed
kings.  Jesus healed the sick, fed the hungry, ate with sinners, and
told parables that still confound us today.  Both sons changed the
world.  Both mothers are presented as sources of wisdom for their
sons.  Their stories are preludes to their sons stories, and yet I am
so grateful that the Bible gives them voices and songs and stories!
They are not ONLY vessels through which their sons come to be, they
are interesting in their own right.

I
do wish for all of us to be able to be a bit like these justice
seeking mothers.  And if we are going to hold up Mary as the ideal,
then I hope it takes the form of being moved to sing our  gratitude
to God and celebrating the wonder of God’s good work in the world.  I
hope we can become so steeped in our faith tradition that we can use
it in creative ways that bring more caring, compassion, and justice
to our tradition.  I hope that we can see and name the goodness of
our lives without taking ourselves too seriously.  And I do hope that
when push comes to shove we are more like Mary than like Hannah, and
that we can hope for the transformation of oppressors – not the
oppression of them.  I hope we too can always remember the people of
God who are struggling the most, and find ways to help lift them up.
I hope we can be part of our tradition that remembers God as a God of
compassion for the least, the last, the lost and the lonely.  

If
Mary is the ideal, and she seems to be well set up to be the ideal,
then let’s seek to be like her:  fierce, grateful, and brilliant.  
Amen

1
Cary Gibson, “Mary, Jesus’ Mother” in an email from The Common
English Bible send by Abingdon Press on December 2nd,
2016.

2Ibid.

3Ibid.

4Joseph
A. Fitzmeyer “The Gospel According to Luke I-IX” in the The
Anchor Bible Series (Doubleday and Co.: Garden City, NY, 1981) p
356-357.

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

December 11, 2016

Sermons

“SILENT Prayer!?!”based on 1 Samuel 1:1-20

  • December 4, 2016February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Hannah may be the most well-behaved woman in this Subversive Women sermon series. In this story she expresses exemplary faith and devotion for God. She a common example used for the idea of “taking it to the Lord in prayer.” All in all, she feels like enough of a goody-two shoes to be the mother of the king-maker. As we see time and time again, when you hear a birth stories, you know that you are getting the story of someone important. When you hear about a barren woman in the Bible (much less a virgin 😉 ) you know you are hearing the beginning of the story of someone VERY important. The baby born to THIS barren woman will be the last of the judges, one of the great prophets, and the one to anoint kings Saul and David. This story seems designed to prove that he came from good stock.

To be honest, the Young Adult Bible study found her a little bit boring. Hannah is presented as a weeping mess, having internalizing the cultural narrative that her value was based on her ability to produce sons. She is one of two wives of reasonably wealthy man. (No poor man could afford two wives.) Their family goes to the holy place to worship once a year – not three like the really faithful families – but also not less than once. They’re moderately faithful Jews. She has a loving husband, which in and of itself makes her unusual in the Bible. She believes that God is in control of the world, and she seems to believe that a blessing by God’s priest will help her get what she wants. She makes a vow with very serious consequences: she wants a child so badly that she offers the child to God. (This is, of course, a promise she makes good on. She brings Samuel to Eli as soon as he is weaned and then sees him only once a year when she brings him new clothing.) She is a bit of a naive heroine: good, sweet, doing what she’s supposed to do, and sad because her society says she is worthless.

Despite the Young Adult Bible Study, there are a lot of interesting things going on in this story. They’re just hiding rather well! Are there any people in this room who immediately zone out when you hear genealogies – you know, like the one in the very first verse of this story? Me too. However, this one has a point! Hannah’s husband was of the clan Ephraim (one of Joseph’s sons). That is a Northern Tribe, which fits as this is a northern story set in the north.  He was of that clan, as were the 5 generations before him. Which means he was NOT AT ALL a Levite. And the Levites were supposed to be the priests and holy men. The baby who will be born will be raised as if he is a priest, but he isn’t one. He is an insert into the holy man tradition. This is particularly relevant because Eli (a Levite) has sons who are corrupt priests, but the clan of Ephraim raises up a good priest. Things aren’t going as they should be. The system is broken.

Like the genealogy, the location has some hidden interest. The story is set in the Temple in Shiloh. Which would be a pretty boring detail except for one piece of historical knowledge: there is no Temple in Shiloh. Shiloh was a worship center, and there would have been official priests working there, but there was no Temple. The Temple would be build by David, who Samuel would make King – and it would be in the Southern Kingdom. This story has the fingerprints of later Southern editors on it, ones who couldn’t quite comprehend a worship space other than the Temple.

Now I mentioned that Hannah was a beloved spouse, which was a bit unique. The expressions of adoration from her husband are totally unique. He asks her why he isn’t worth 10 sons to her – which seems to imply that she’s worth 10 sons to him! Furthermore, he gives her the “double portion” to use in sacrifice. That’s odd. The double portion is the portion the eldest son inherits, where the younger sons each get only one. Hannah’s husband treats her as if she is as valuable to him as his eldest son and heir. He values her as she’d value her eldest son. He sees values in HER. This is particularly interesting because Hannah lacks value in her society. Women were meant to bear male children. That was what they were FOR, and from which their worth was derived. And Hannah didn’t. But her husband didn’t care. He appears to love her for HER, as she is. That may be a reason for some to be jealous of Hannah, but it surely doesn’t make boring. Because being loved can be so transformative in human life, I wonder how much of Hannah strength comes from her husband’s love. She may struggle with what she’s supposed to be (and isn’t) but she also has an internalized sense of self worth. Her husband might have been part of that.

This question of Hannah’s value comes up in her interaction with Eli. But first, we need to mention a few truly subversive things that happened before and during that interaction. First of all, she entered the holy space. I don’t know for sure how the worship space was used in Shiloh, but I do know that women weren’t let very far into the Jerusalem temple. For Hannah, even entering the holy space pushed the boundaries of what women were supposed to be doing. I’m also not sure how appropriate it would have been for Hannah to wander off on her own in public space. I suspect she broke the bounds of normalcy on that too. Then there is the fact that she prays SILENTLY and without a sound passing by her lips. We can tell by Eli’s response that her silence wasn’t standard for prayer.

Now, if Hannah was trying to elicit a response from God, and her deal making surely suggests she was, then why wasn’t she participating in prayer the way it was known to be practiced? Was she simply too focused and authentic in her prayer? I don’t think so!  I think humans of any faith tradition are deeply enculturated on how to pray, and one wouldn’t be likely to break out of that in a moment of deep prayer. Instead, I wonder if she wanted to have a PRIVATE conversation with God. She went off by herself, she went into a sacred space that was mostly abandoned, and she spoke to God only in her heart. It seems possible that what she was saying was entirely too personal for anyone to know it. I suspect there was even some shame in it, as would be expected for a barren woman begging God to help her.

Hannah also makes a deal with God, which is not generally recommended, and she makes one of the more radical ones. Her family is moderately faithful. She offers her son as a livelong nazirite, which is UNHEARD OF. The holiest of holy men were nazirites for a year or two. But she offers. (And she does it! – Hannah is faithful to her promises.)

OK. So now we are on her conversation with Eli. Eli comes up and shames her for her despicable behavior – one that he projects onto her rather than one she has participated in. Hannah ANSWERED. She answered the high priest of that place, and she defended herself. She didn’t walk away in shame. She didn’t hang her head. She defended herself and her VALUE. She WAS a worthless woman by the standards she lived in. But she demands respect from the priest anyway. “‘No, my lord, I am a woman deeply troubled; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord. Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time”

“I am not a worthless woman.” Am I the only one who wants to cheer for her??? Even better it works. Eli may have failed to identify authentic prayer, yet, he is willing to be corrected!! He’s really an OK guy and a good priest, even though me misses some major memos. Eli believes her. That is huge in and of itself, but he also responds to her with a blessing. The blessing clearly matters to her, it cheers her up, and the story seems to think it has to do with her later success in getting pregnant.

Hannah names her son, “God has heard” and says she does so because “I asked him of the LORD”. She sounds a bit like Hagar, naming God, “the God who sees” (even me.) Hannah, whose society has told her that she is worthless, has a partner who believes in her worth, and even with her internal struggles finds that she believes in her worth too. Then it is affirmed. It seems to me that by the time Hannah gets pregnant, she is already sure that she is of value in the world and in the eyes of God whether or not she has a child. In the end, I think that’s what is so subversive about Hannah – that she finds the way to claim her own worth, despite society! May we follow in her footsteps because we are much more useful to God when we realize that we are valuable – and of use in building the kindom. Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

December 4, 2016

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