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February 11, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Dazzling Blackness” based on Exodus 16:15-25 and Mark 9:2-9

This week has included a delightful amount of sunlight. Which was nice because I’d almost forgotten what it was like. Several times I found myself turning my face to the sun, closing my eyes, and just savoring the wonder of warmth on my face.

The sun can feel like a gift directly from God, especially after dreary winter days, and I have realized that the delightful warmth of the sun is something I associate with the story of the transfiguration, when we’re told “And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.” I envision Jesus shining like the sun.

Which, I think is pretty much in the text.

And I think is a gorgeous metaphor.

It is an especially gorgeous metaphor in the time it comes from, when nights were unyieldingly dark and the sun was the way things were illuminated. When it was day, people could see clearly. When it was night, they could not. Then, to have Jesus shine like the sun serves to remind people of the ways God illuminates truths that are otherwise not easily seen. Its lovely.

I think, though, that is also incomplete. If Jesus shining like the sun was one single metaphor in the midst of many, it would be an important one. But there are a LOT of metaphors about God and Jesus as the Light of the World, and all together they end up creating a mental narrative that light is good and dark is bad. Right? Which fits the whole “it is easier to see things in light” idea.

Light is only half the story. I’ve been asked a lot about day and night recently, and found myself saying, “it is dark right now because the sun is shining on the other half of the world.” Light and darkness are balanced on our planet, and focusing on just one half of that whole gets us out of balance.

The total solar eclipse is seen from Charleston, South Carolina, on August 21, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / MANDEL NGAN (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

And darkness has its own profound spiritual gifts. Darkness is the space for rest and restoration. It is also the time for un-productivity. Those things you can do in the light – the planting and sowing, knitting and weaving, cooking (or gathering manna) and cleaning up – just don’t work as well in the dark. Historically nighttime was for storytelling and song, snuggling and simply being. The demands of the day couldn’t be met a night, so night had its own softer rhythm.

Slower, more about connection and joy, a time to make sense of things that had happened, a time to consider what was coming. Time for prayer, and contemplation. Time for rest – physical and otherwise.

In this “city that lights and hauls the world,” we are at the epicenter of messing up darkness by making it possible to be productive during the night! Maybe this is why the image of Jesus shining feels incomplete to me – we are used to lots of shining and seeing the value of light, but we don’t get enough darkness.

In the book “The Dark Night of the Soul” by Thomas Moore, the metaphor of darkness is expanded and used to make space for times of grief, uncertainty, and when healing is desperately needed. Moore talks of those as times when we can’t connect to God because the ways we once understood God don’t fit how we now understand things. For him, the darkness becomes a womb, a place where development is happening without being seen, a place one stays in until one is ready to leave and able to thrive outside the womb.

Which is all to say that God is found in the darkness, and not just in the light, and I fear that modern Christian faith over focuses on the light, just like modern life does. We fight back the darkness with LED bulbs, and we miss the gifts the darkness means to give us.

I also want to take this one step further, when we associate light with God we then end up associating darkness with … not God? Maybe even with evil. In our society, which is full up to the brim with white supremacy narratives, that creates big dangers. At the time of Jesus, racism wasn’t one of the issues on the table. But today, it IS. And while light and dark aren’t the same thing as light skin and dark skin, they’re related enough that when we emphasize the goodness of light, we end up supporting the narratives of white supremacy. And when we emphasize fighting back against the powers of darkness, we end up supporting the narratives of white supremacy.

Which, clearly, isn’t what we want to do.

So I want to reimagine this story in the simplest of ways. What if Peter, James, and John get to the top of the mountain and see Jesus transfigured before them, and his clothes become dazzlingly black, such as no pigment on earth could dye them? And then the story goes on like we know it, with Elijah and Moses appearing, Peter sticking his foot in his mouth, God blessing Jesus, and Jesus requesting the whole experience stays a secret.

What happens in our imagination if the clothes are dazzling black? What happens if we see Jesus transfigured and instead of the ways that light is reflected by white, what we see is light being absorbed by black? Is it less dazzling? More? Less sacred? More? Maybe just the same, but different too.

Of the many gifts of darkness, one of them is that there aren’t shadows in darkness. Jung speaks eloquently about our shadow selves, the ones we try to hide that emerge despite out best efforts. Which, really sounds like the metaphor I’m concerned about, but I think we can glean something from it. Especially because the parts we experience as “shadows” are wonderful and important parts of ourselves that we’ve denied, but are are beloved by God. But in darkness, there are no shadows. Which I think suggests that darkness makes space for us to integrate ourselves, the self we project into the world with the self we try to hide, and to simply be as a human – imperfect but beloved by God. Darkness lets us be whole, make space for our whole self, and notices the gifts of all aspects of our beings. Darkness is a place for healing and integration! What a wonderful, and needed, gift!

What if the dazzling black of Jesus’s clothes that is awe inspiring like catching a glimpse of the cosmos itself, was also an experience of profound love where Peter, James, and John realized that they were loved as they were – all parts of themselves, even the ones that they struggled to love or were ashamed of? What if the reason Peter offers to build a monument is because it is so utterly amazing to find out that God can love the whole of you, even when you struggle to do so yourself? What if the dazzling blackness is being wrapped in the story that you are already loved, just as you are, without hesitation, and without an expectation that it takes producing enough to be enough? What if our humanity is found in the meaning-making of darkness instead of in the production of light?

What if the dazzling blackness is another form of manna in the desert – a way of God taking care of the things the people need? And what if it is meant to be shared with abundance because there is plenty – of manna, of love, of darkness?

What if all we have to do to experience it is to turn out the lights?

Amen

February 11, 2024

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

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February 4, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Yet Always Rejoicing” based on Deuteronomy 15:1-11 and 2 Corinthians 6:1-10

This church has been described a church who loves to learn. Its true. We love knowledge around here. We love learning things. We especially love learning things that help us know how to build the kindom of God, but I think it is fair to say that most of us also believe knowing more will help in the long run, so we’ll take learning for its own sake too.

We like knowing how things are. We like knowing how things could be. We like knowing how to get from here to there.

I am not an exception to this, I fit right in. Maybe I’m a little MORESO than average. And the desire to learn, and to know, and to consider are things I love about this church.

It also relates to some of our shared frustrations. Because we also want the world to value learning and knowledge, and to use knowledge for good, and generally to make things better, but we look around and that doesn’t seem to happen. (Or at least not fast enough.) Worse, we look around and the values we share: love, justice, compassion, inclusion, and humility are also not shared in the world.

We look around and things are a mess and we lose hope. And I’m going to play with hope and faith for Lent, so hold on to that for a few weeks. But for now, I think maybe we need a reminder that we may love to learn, and we may be invested in building the kindom of God, but at exactly the same time, we are not God. And God is going to work for good no matter what – with us, through us, despite us, no matter what. If we know something useful, great! If we don’t, God will find a way. If we find great partners, awesome. If not, God will find a way.

We end up being taught by the world that there isn’t enough. Right? There aren’t enough good jobs, so some people some people get ones that don’t pay enough. There isn’t enough good housing, so some people don’t get it. There isn’t enough… you name it and some people get the thing and some people don’t.

But that’s the way our society works, not the way God works. With God there is enough. There is enough love, everyone is loved. There is enough food, enough for everyone to be fed well. There is enough hope, enough to get us through. And, funny enough, there is enough MONEY for everyone to actually do OK. But the ways the world deals with debt and interest gets in the way.

Shifting from the world’s scarcity model to God’s abundance model is a hard thing to do! It takes constant awareness. It takes leaps of faith. It takes a community holding the truth of abundance together. And it takes God’s willingness to give us strength and knowledge to keep moving towards the narrative of abundance.

One important piece of the narrative of abundance for me these days is the reminder that there are enough people working for the kindom, that I can trust God working through all of us and only be responsible for my little contributions. I’ve been thinking about Jesus saying “my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” It sounds a bit like “We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything. “ from our Pauline reading today.

God’s abundance is there – including the abundance of rest and joy!!

So, I’m all for us continuing to be people who love to learn. We’re good at it, it is needed, and it helps us work with God. And I’m for us continuing to listen to God’s dreams, because they are amazing and because they inoculate us against the myths of scarcity. I’m for our work of justice and advocacy and our actions of compassion because they all build the kindom of God.

Part of our job, too, is to trust that if we do our part, God works with others to do theirs, and change happens. God plants seeds that can take years, decades, centuries to grow, but boy oh boy when they do! So let’s make sure we are nurturing God’s seeds in us and in our community, and hold on to the knowledge that with the God of abundance, all things are possible. Amen

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January 28, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Changing the Narrative” based on Deuteronomy 15:1-4 and Matthew 26:1-16

I grew up in the country, and went to college in rural New Hampshire, so when I started interning as a pastor in urban Los Angeles, …. well, there was a big learning curve. I was scared of cities, because they were just new to me, and I found them overwhelming. Los Angeles is a major urban center, and like most of our urban centers it has dazzling wealth and heartbreaking poverty. Homelessness is an especially huge problem in Los Angeles because people spend their live savings to get there expecting to “make it big” by walking down the street and having a producer hire them for a major movie. Also, it isn’t cold there, so there aren’t networks of code blue shelters.

I worked at a wonderful church, the Hollywood United Methodist Church, and in ways similar to here, the congregation itself was a mixture of the housed and the unhoused, and no conversation about the church happened without awareness of their unhoused neighbors. One of the most distressing moments of my life was in getting to know the unhoused in the Hollywood Church and those who lived around it, and realizing that many of them were the same population as the people I cared for at Sky Lake Special Needs camps. That the most vulnerable among us were living the hardest lives is a lesson I’ve never gotten over. While I served there we would also go to Skid Row – the poorest part of Los Angeles – and serve meals, an experience that wiped any lingering blinders I had about the justice of unfettered competitive capitalism.

After my first year interning at Hollywood, I went on a mission trip to Cuba with Volunteers in Mission. We started in Havana, and eventually drove east to the site where we would work. After several days on the road I finally realized that I was tense all the time because it constantly felt like we were about to slip into a neighborhood like Skid Row, and I expected the punch to the stomach that I’d experienced in seeing Skid Row. But, in Cuba, everything felt like the neighborhood before you got to jaw-dropping poverty. But you never got to jaw-dropping poverty. This was 2004, and I’ve since learned that in the early years after the US embargo there really wasn’t enough enough food, but by 2004 the island had figured out how to feed and house everyone sufficiently – even though cement crumbled and drug stores were largely bare.

There wasn’t much panhandling in Cuba either. There was a little bit, in tourist spots, but our hosts pointed out that because everyone is housed and fed in Cuba, the panhandling was for extra money, not for for basics. I ended up going back to Cuba a few years later, and had very similar experiences. Like the metaphors of a fish being unable to understand water, it took leaving unfettered competitive capitalism for me to be able to see it.

This week I had the chance to attend a conversation led by the Labor and Religion Coalition on the New York State Budget. Many of us are familiar with the Federal Poverty Line, right? And we’re also familiar with it’s limitations, namely that it is abysmally low and a person or family living above that line will still be struggling to make ends meet. You may already know about the United Way measure “ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed)”, but I didn’t. (Can’t tell you if I hadn’t heard it or hadn’t retained it though. Shrug.)

ALICE is a measure of who isn’t making ends meet in society. Fabulously, United Way does an amazing amount of work with the data on Alice. For instance, in NYS 14% of people live under the poverty line. Another 30% of people are in ALICE, and 56% of people are “doing OK” and making ends meet. The numbers a bit worse in Schenectady – in our city 49.8 people live below the ALICE threshold, which is to say that HALF of the people in this city aren’t making ends meet.

What was particularly interesting in the presentation this week was the visual on recent poverty rates.

Namely, that during 2020, when the government focused on responding to people’s needs with stimulus checks, child tax credits, and expansion of SNAP benefits, people living under the national poverty line hit a 20 year LOW.

And since then, the rates have been creeping back up. The work of the Labor and Religion Coalition and their partners The Poor People’s campaign includes asking NYS to readjust it’s priorities. Stop having regressive tax laws that benefit corporations and the wealthy, and use the income gained to bring greater support for the most vulnerable.

Compared to how we have been operating as a society, this feels like a PIPE DREAM. There so many barriers, so many counter arguments, so much fear of the accusation of “raising taxes.” But then I read the Bible, and I read it with the guidance of Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis and Rev. Dr. William Barber, and God is behind that pipe dream.

Which, for me at least, means it is possible.

Which means we can dream about what it would feel like to live in a society where everyone is housed, and housed adequately. Archaeology suggests that in the first 400 years of Ancient Israelite society – the years before kings – all the houses were about the same size. Which means that society was organized around mutual care for each other and sharing of resources. I’ve been shocked to learn from the book “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow that MANY ancient societies were really egalitarian like that, including ones with major urban centers, including ones that were stable for many centuries. The ancient Hebrews weren’t an outlier.

The Hebrew Bible, though, gets really clear on what is needed to create a society where people care for each other. Everyone needs access to resources – in their case land. Did you know that in Hawaii the native people divvied up the land like really narrow pieces of pie because they knew every group of people needed access to the resources of both the land and the sea? God has worked with peoples in so many times and places to take care of each other, and that means it is possible. Liz Theoharis sufficiently mentions the other rules, “forgiving debts, raising wages, outlawing slavery, and restructuring society around the needs of the poor.”1 That’s what we hear in Deuteronomy today. That’s what Jesus reflect on in the gospel.

I’m struck by her clear statement that “charity will not end poverty.” It reminds me of the Simone Weil quote, “It is only by the grace of God that the poor can forgive the rich the bread they feed them.” As long as we have a society that makes some people rich BY making other people poor we’ll have lots and lots of opportunities for charity, but nothing will change.

Our work, I believe, is the work of “narrative takeover.” For us, it may take some time. There is a lot in this unfettered competitive capitalism that we’ve been trained not to see, or to think is necessary, or acceptable, and the work we’re doing with “We Cry Justice” this year helps us reframe the narrative.

What IS the purpose of a society? If it is to fulfill “there will be no need among you,” then we know what direction to turn in, even it it will be a long journey to get there. It is funny, isn’t it? That people know the quote “the poor you will always have with you” but they don’t know that the implication of it is “as long as you fail to follow what God is asking of you.”

So I invite us to this dream. What would it be like to live in a society that houses people well, where everyone had enough nutritious food, where healthcare can accessed? Can you even dream it? What are the implications? I think life would be easier for teachers – because so many barriers to learning would be eliminated. If those who spend their lives fighting to make ends meet were able to focus there gifts elsewhere, what could they offer? We would be able to offer great care to those who are aging, those who are young, and those with special needs – none of which we’re doing now. People fighting to survive might then have energy for art, music, gardening, and other wonderful things that would enrich their lives and the lives of those around them! I suspect mental health would increase, because the fundamental fear of falling through the safety net wouldn’t keep people up at night, and because there would be less stress, and more time for people to connect with those they love. Lives would probably get longer, violence would decrease, ERs would be less crowded, I think there might even be less litter and faster scientific progress. OH, and just that quick reminder- studies say that housing everyone, and feeding everyone, and getting healthcare to everyone would COST US LESS AS A SOCIETY THAN HOW WE DO IT NOW.

Kinda makes you wonder who benefits from how we do it now, doesn’t it?

OK, that’s probably about as much fish trying to see the water as we can take for a day. But I’d love to hear from you what else WILL happen when we make God’s dreams a reality…. let’s keep on building that narrative for each other, until we can see the dream clearly and then see the ways we are most gifted at moving towards it. May there be no need among us. Amen

1Liz Theoharis “1: Is Ending Poverty Possible?” in We Cry Justice, ed. Liz Theoharis (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021) used with permission.

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 28, 2024

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January 21, 2024
by Sara Baron

“I Am Thine” based on Jeremiah 31:31–34 and Matthew 25:14-30

Historical Background of Covenant Renewal Service.

This service comes to us through John Wesley, the founder of our Methodist theological tradition. For him what it meant to be a mature disciple of Christ was the joining of believers in a covenant “to serve God with all our heart and with all our soul.” He urged his Methodist followers to renew, “at every point, our covenant, that the Lord should be our God.”

On August 11, 1755, Wesley refers to an occasion when he conducted a service that provided opportunity for persons to make or renew that covenant with God. Listen to this account from his daily journal:

“I mentioned to the congregation another means of increasing serious religion, which had been frequently practiced by our forefathers, namely, the joining in a covenant to serve God with all our heart and with all our soul.

I explained this for several mornings and on Friday many of us kept a fast to the Lord, beseeching him to give us wisdom and strength, to make a promise unto the Lord our God and keep it.

On Monday, August 11, I explained once more the nature of such an engagement, and the manner of doing it acceptably to God.

At six in the evening we met for that purpose. After I had recited the tenor of the covenant proposed all those who desired to give testimony of their entrance into this covenant stood up, to the number of about 1,800 persons.

Such a night I scarce ever saw before. Surely the fruit of it shall remain forever.” 1

This became something traditional to do at the beginning of each year, a fact I didn’t know until our Bishop asked us to engage in a service of Covenant Renewal sometime this January. At the end of December a window closed for churches to decide to leave The United Methodist Church but keep their buildings and assets. The churches that remain, remain in connection and covenant with each other to love God, love God’s people, and work together for the building of the kindom. So as we remember and renew the vows of our baptisms and the commitments we make to each other, we also remember the ways that The United Methodist Church holds us together in sacred covenant.

Sermon

I’m gushy about baptisms. The promises made are so sacred, and the experience of including a new person in the Body of Christ are so powerful. I have favorite parts of course. I really like asking if people “accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms the present themselves?” I like the water part, and the prayer over the water, and while it still feels a little strange, I like passing on the Holy Spirit too.

But the most important part of baptism for me isn’t explicit. It is that when we baptize someone, we celebrate their very existence and thank God for them, and while we are thanking God for them, our gratitude for their very existence, becomes the way in which we welcome them into the church and promise to teach them about God and grace. I try, at every baptism, to remind all the people present that this wonderful celebration of the person or people being baptized is also a reminder of the same celebration for them. That each and every human life is sacred, that God delights in each one, and that at some time, the church took time to celebrate YOU too. (And if it hasn’t, it will if you are willing.)

The church makes promises at baptism, for today they’ve been adapted to be mutual rather than specific to the baptized, which is right for today and a good reminder for every day, “By teaching and example we will guide each other to accept God’s grace, to profess faith openly, to demand justice in all places, to love freely, and to build the kindom of God on earth.” (#nopressure)

I cannot help but think that the parable of the talents is a description of the world as it is, rather than being about God’s kindom. In the world as it is, having gets you more, interest works for the wealthy, and the powerful can be terribly frightening. The church is meant to be something different. We are people defined by being loved by God, and formed by love in community. At our best, we are signs of love and hope in the midst of a world that is terrified and has far too much hate.

The words of the Baptismal Covenant call us back to ourselves, to our commitments to God and each other, to the ways that we are doing something different than the world’s competition, accusation, and inherent violence.

A piece of today’s worship that is not a part of our traditional baptismal covenant is the “Covenant Prayer in the Wesleyan Tradition.” I have no idea how familiar this is to you – it maybe be the foundation of your faith (it has been to many people I know) or completely new. It is a prayer of humility, and I think a prayer of community. It puts the needs of each of us as individuals second to the needs and dreams of God for the whole. I find it hard to pray, because it is truly terrifying what God might do. But then I remember that I’m not actually afraid of God. God is seeking goodness, and for each of us and all of us at the same time.

When I sit with God and try to listen, I always expect God to add things to my to do list – to sound a lot like my internal voices. Those voices that chide me for not having done things yet, or better, or for the things I have done, or for wasting time, or not … well, for what I do and what I don’t do. But when I actually listen to God, it turns out God isn’t the source of all that internal judgement. That’s all me. God is the one saying, “Hello love, you can stop planning to optimize your day, and just be. You are enough as you are, and I’m not asking more of you.” This might sound different for you, probably because your internal voices are different. But God is the one saying things like, “I love you, and you are already good enough.” “I love you, and you don’t have to earn it.” “I love you and see you as you are, you don’t need to be any more special for me to love you.” “I love you, and you don’t have to know enough to count for me.” “I love you, and I’m here supporting you.” “I love you, and I’m with you always no matter what you face.”

Really, these are the things we try to convey at baptism, and we promise to teach the baptized: that each one is loved by God, defined by that love, and enough as they are.

What a joy to remember that we are a community committed to and defined by God’s love. Holy One, I am thine – and I’m going to trust you to take it from there. Amen

1Adapted from http://wesley.nnu.edu/john-wesley/covenant-service-directions-for-renewing-our-covenant-with-god/wesley-covenant-service-1998-jeren-rowel/

Photo Credit: Dana Carroll.

Baptismal Remembrance Design: Karyn McCloskey

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 21, 2024

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January 14, 2024
by Sara Baron

“The Beloved Way” based on Acts 2:43-47

This week I had a routine dental appointment. Our dentist, selected carefully by the measure of being covered by our dental insurance, having opening for new patients, and being a woman of color (my first choice when available) turns to have incredible an generic suburban office.

So I’m lying there, having my teeth cleaned, and staring at the florescent lights and ceiling tiles and suddenly I start thinking about the impact of this office on the world. The ways that routine preventative dental care subtly but profoundly impacts peoples’ lives. The wonder that is dental care when a tooth is aching, and someone can help. The life-changing reality of dentures. It becomes sort of amazing, thinking about this one small office in the midst of a maze of medical offices, and the difference it makes it people’s lives.

It was actually awe-inspiring, maybe because I never before thought about the utter wonder that is a modern, first world dental office and its impact. Wow. The only times I’ve come close to thinking about this is when I hear from or consider the work of our missionary, Dr. Belinda Forbes whose life work has been in offering dental care in Nicaragua where there are so few dentists that there is only one dentist for every 20,000 people. Listening to Belinda talk about training health volunteers to teach tooth-brushing, and to engage in tooth extraction always reminds me how imperative dental work is, but somehow this all still felt like a revelation to me.

(Dr. Forbes)

Dental work is an imperative part of the kin-mod of God. We can’t be holistically well if our teeth ache or if we can’t eat good food.

The wonder of all this for me was that this dental office is just there, quietly doing its work of caring for its patients, just like many others in our region, providing imperative care to people, and being a part of building the kingdom of God whether they know it or not. Now, I’m not saying dental care is perfect. Right? Some offices overcharge, some offer subpar care, systemic racism is at play there like everywhere else, and worst of all there are far too many people in our country who can’t afford to access dental care. It isn’t perfect.

But it is good. And it is a very good starting point for the kind of dental care the kingdom needs. Which is really, really nice because there is no need to start from scratch on that one, just expend access and increase justice.

And, the truth is that there are lot of pieces of our society that are like this – already people all over the place are doing foundationally good work, that matters to other people, and holistic well-being, and the kingdom of God, and …. wow!

When I read from Rev. Dr. King, I’m always struck by the depth of his faith. He had a clear-eyed view of the impacts of racism, poverty, cycles of violence, and the military industrial complex. His analysis of them and the ways they interplay is outstanding. Yet, it was his faith that he brought to his work, and his faith that led his work. He worked from a position of hope. He believed that the people working together could bring change, that love could overpower hate, that the evils of the world wouldn’t have the final say. His belief in God extended to belief in people, and our capacity to overcome the brokenness and actually build the beloved community. And he thought we got there by shared nonviolent direct action – which sounds like Jesus to me. It should, right, he was a Christian clergy person with a doctorate from a United Methodist Seminary (just saying). But I’ve noticed not all Christian clergy people pay a lot of attention to the power of nonviolence in the life of Jesus and his followers.

The Beloved Community was for him a realistic, achievable goal that could be attained by a critical mass of people committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence.

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

Dr. King’s Beloved Community was not devoid of interpersonal, group or international conflict. Instead he recognized that conflict was an inevitable part of human experience. But he believed that conflicts could be resolved peacefully and adversaries could be reconciled through a mutual, determined commitment to nonviolence. No conflict, he believed, need erupt in violence. And all conflicts in The Beloved Community should end with reconciliation of adversaries cooperating together in a spirit of friendship and goodwill.1

I often speak of this as the kingdom of God, but I think it is good to remember there are other ways of talking about it, in including “the beloved community” like Rev. Dr. King said or “the way” the early Christians spoke of.

Rev. Dr. King’s philosophy of nonviolence has been broken down to 6 principles, I’ve shared some of them with you in the past. Today I want to share the 6th:

PRINCIPLE SIX: Nonviolence Believes That the Universe Is on the Side of Justice.

The nonviolent resister has deep faith that justice will eventually win.
Nonviolence believes that God is a God of justice. 2

That’s what I mean by being struck by the depth of his faith. He saw the problems, but he believed that God will win.

When I read Acts 2, I’m overwhelmed. The space between the radical nature of the early church in selling all they had and living in complete inter-dependence and the way faith is practiced today seems impossibly far. But it turns out that there are so many things actually going right, things that we may not see or might take for granted, things that need a little bit of adjusting to be better, but are already working for good. There are lots of them, if we look. This week I saw one, I hope this coming week you see two. There is reason for hope, for faith, and there is a lot of need for nonviolent love in this world. Thanks be to God who is our source of hope, faith, and love. Amen

1 https://thekingcenter.org/about-tkc/the-king-philosophy/ – “The Beloved Community” accessed January 11, 2024.

2Ibid., Dr. King’s Fundamental Philosophy of Nonviolence.

January 14, 2024

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

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January 7, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Seeing God” based on Exodus 1:8-22 and Matthew 2:1-18

In theology there is something called “the problem of evil.” It may not be what you’d think. You might think that this would be the problem that there IS evil in the world, which I think is the most reasonable interpretation of the words. Instead, it is the question of WHY there is evil in the world, and how one balances that reality with their conception of God.

Because, if you believe in an all-powerful God, and you notice that evil things happen, then you have to figure out why it happens. There are overly simplistic answers for that: 1. God prioritizes free will 2. God doesn’t actually care 3. What we think is evil isn’t and God has a “plan” that we can’t see.

Process theologians, who trained me, solve it a different way. They say that God is the MOST powerful being, but not ALL-POWERFUL. Therefore they can hold firm that God is all-loving without having to answer the question of why evil things happen.

I’m with them on that, several years of reflection on the ideas they present got me there, despite the rather difficult work of giving up on the idea of God as all-powerful. However, while process theology has good critiques of every other theology’s answer to to the problem of evil, I have never thought they’ve adequately answered the question either.

There are a lot of easily accessible answers I also dislike: 1. humans are fundamentally evil; 2. Humans are just animals and animals are vicious; 3. Souls are good but bodies are bad and in trying to protect and care for bodies people do evil. None of these work for me. I don’t think people are evil, I rather think people are naturally good – or at the very least neutral. I don’t like ANYTHING that disparages nature or claims that it is evil because I think the natural world is fundamentally sacred, and that includes BODIES which I desperately believe we need to re-affirm as sacred and good.

Our scriptures today point to evil. The Pharaoh, in his fear, enslaves the people – evil. The Pharaoh, in his fear, orders babies murdered – evil. King Herod, in his fear, ordered the massacre of infants – evil. The world today tells us of evil too, it doesn’t require looking very hard to find it. I, for one, had a meeting this week for the Annual Conferences on how we are going to fund the lawsuits related to accusations of child sexual abuse in the church and evil doesn’t feel far away at all.

Sometimes I hear people “solve” the problem of evil by claiming it is all the fault of one of the traditional sins: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony or sloth. I think you can hear in what I’ve already said that if pushed I might say that evil emerges out of fear. But at the core, I really actually just agree with Old Turtle1. I think that people forget that they are “a message of love from God to the earth and a prayer from the earth back to God.” I think the answer to the problem of evil is simply that we sometimes forget the most important things.

Apparently, my answer is a common one in Celtic Christianity, which is a tradition of God-knowing that I believe I’ve always been taught but without being told where it came from. In John Philip Newell’s book “Sacred Earth Sacred Soul” tells of the 2nd century teacher Irenaeus who saw “Christ as respeaking the sacred essence of the universe, re-sounding the divine that is at the heart of all things. This was to see Christ as reawakening in humanity what it has forgotten.”2

A few centuries later Pelagius “taught that grace was given to reconnect us to our nature, which was sacred and made of God. Divine grace is not given to us to make us something other than or more than natural. It is given to us to make us truly natural, to restore us to the sacred essence of our being.”3

A few centuries later, John Scotus Eriugena taught “Everything is sacred…but we live in a state of forgetfulness of what is deepest in us and in everything that has being. The more we forget our true identity, the less we treat one another as sacred. We suffer from ‘soul-forgetfulness.’ But Christ, he says, is our memory, our ‘epiphany.’ He comes to show us what we have forgotten, that we are bearers of the divine flow. He reawakens us to our true nature and the true nature of the earth, that we are and all things are in essence sacred.”4

The problem is that we forget, and then the real answer is to learn how to remember.

I love the midwives in Exodus, Shiphrah and Puah. They are said to remember God, and therefore they have the courage and resilience to resist the authority of the king himself. I wonder, sometimes, if they were able to do that because they were two. What might have been overpowering to one – the power of the direct command from the king – couldn’t stand up their shared sense of what was right. I think part of the gift of God in helping us remember is the gift of each other. People with whom we make sense of the world, people with whom we decide which laws are unjust, people who remind us that everyone and everything is sacred and should be treated as such. Part of remembering is each other.

Tammy Rojas, in We Cry Justice, comes to a similar conclusion:

The only way we can change the system of oppression we live under is for all of us to come together. WE may be taught division, but we can unlearn it. We can fight back against it and show that love of all people will be what saves us.

…

God dwells within the walls of closed rural hospitals and pours onto the streets with those demanding health care as a human right. There are midwives saying no to the injustice of killing babies and midwives saying no to the denial of health care. It is through nonviolent direct action that we can overcome the empire.”5

Which, I think, gets us to our gospel lesson of the day. Funniest thing, calls for nonviolent direct action to overcome the empire OFTEN reminds me of the gospel.

The magi are said to have an epiphany, right? I mean, that’s why we CALL this Sunday epiphany. I’m not quite sure which thing counts though. Is the epiphany the experience of God’s loving presence that they experienced in meeting Jesus? Or is the epiphany simply a reference to the dream telling them not to return to Herod? I believe they both count, and maybe today should be called “Epiphanies.” Anyway, the radical action we see in the midwives refusing the order of the Egyptian king we ALSO see in the magi returning home by another route. They were outsiders, foreigners, who had been given access to the country with an agreement that they would return to the king with the information he wanted in order to strengthen his power. But they didn’t. They went home by another way.

God, whether as seen in Jesus, or in a dream, reminded them. They made the choice to honor the sacred life of the baby, and went home by another route. That’s another way we can remember – simply by the grace of God. Sometimes we can simply see the love of God shining in the world and it reminds us. Sometimes we have a dream, a vision, a sudden insight, and we are reminded. Thanks be to God for those epiphanies.

The gospel does indicate that evil still exists, right? The courageous actions of those who are reminded of the sacred power of love matters, but it doesn’t erase evil. The king still forgot, and his power was still magnificent. To be fair, we don’t have a record of a massacre of babies in that time, and we would because records were decent. This story is told to name Jesus as the new Moses, to connect one king’s paranoia to another, and one baby’s miraculous life to another’s.

The problem is that while babies weren’t killed there and then, they have been. They are. So while the story “isn’t true” it also is. And it is never the full story. When we see the evil things of the world, and the natural disasters, we can usually find some midwives in their midst too. Doctors without Borders, World Central Kitchen, UMCOR – people organized to respond to horrors by caring for the sacred people who are hurting the most. Evil is real, but so is goodness.

It is IMPERATIVE that we remember the sacredness of the world, of its creatures, of humanity. Forgetting that sacredness has created so many of the problems we see around us every day.

So, how do we remember? We remind each other, like the midwives. We are given glimpses of insight, like the Magi. We come together to worship, like communities of faith around the world throughout time, to remember who God is and what God loves and soak up God’s values and dreams to inoculate ourselves from the forgetting around us. We pray, and find ways to connect directly to the Divine, to soak up God’s love for ourselves so we can see it reflected in others.

And, we pay attention. We look for signs of the sacred around us. The unique beauty of each snowflake. The hope of seed catalogs. The wonder of clean water. The sounds of children. Smiles of greeting between friends. Snuggly mammals. Delicious food. Flight patterns of birds. The Holy One is with us, all around, reminding us of the sacredness of God and creation and each other all the time in infinite ways. The Good News of God’s love is EVERYWHERE when we look.

There are reminders everywhere – which is good because we need a lot of them. Dear ones, take note of the signs of God’s goodness, of the sacredness of the earth and of life. Epiphanies are everywhere. Then, when you see them, remind each other. That’s a core part of what it means to be people of faith, and when I look around at the world, I believe we are desperately needed as reminders to all of God’s people. Amen

1Douglas Wood, Old Turtle (Mexico: Scholastic Press, 1992). If you don’t have this book, you can watch it be read here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om1Wemm3a1U

2John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul (USA: HarperOne, 2021, p. 28.

3Newell, 30.

4Newell, 89.

5Tammy Rohas, “45: Midwives Who Say No” in We Cry Justice, ed. Liz Theoharis (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021) p. 196-7, used with permission.

January 7, 2024 – Epiphany

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

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December 17, 2023
by Sara Baron

“Yearning for Joy” based on Micah 6:6-8 and Luke 1:67-80

I was in a “non-violent communication” workshop one time, which is a place that teaches about human emotions and how to have them without judging yourself for them. So, we’re in this workshop and someone takes the MOST obvious of teaching moments, something that would almost make you groan except that in this case, I didn’t KNOW the thing she was teaching so I was grateful that she made it so obvious.

We’d just come back from lunch and we were asked how we were doing, with the request that we respond with how we were feeling. It was practice with using feeling words. The co-teacher responded, “I’m feeling torn. I’m excited to be teaching this group, and at the same time I’m concerned about the two students who aren’t back yet.” There I was, in my 30s, and I’d just learned that it was VALID to hold MORE THAN ONE EMOTION at the same time. Which was helpful, because I’d done that plenty, but somehow I hadn’t known it was OK.

(This is why I often share really simple stuff about emotions with the rest of you – it was late in life learning for me and its been really significant. I dearly hope most of you already knew this, but when I look around at our society, I’m not sure who would have taught you.)

So I learned that when I take my feelings seriously, both on their own, and as flags pointing me to things I care about and value, I am allowed to feel more than one emotion – even seemingly contradictory ones. This knowledge has been very helpful for me, particularly in moments in my life when my life and the world as a whole were doing really differently. Like when Trump was elected and there was fear of what his presidency would look like – and I was newly in love and wedding planning at the same time. Or when there was a global pandemic and the country was locked down and everything was hard and confusing and – oh – I finally got to become a parent.

Which is all a long introduction to say: this is Joy Sunday, and heavens that can be confusing in the midst of sadness, anger, fear, and exhaustion. There seem to be plenty of reasons to skip joy – grief and heartache, violence and injustice for example.

And yet, none of that negates joy. In fact, oddly enough, making space for any emotion can make space for others too. It is possible to be deeply sad and deeply joyful at the same time. They don’t cancel each other out, sometimes they even harmonize.

Micah 6:6-8 is one of my favorite texts, and I know that’s true for many of you. “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” We try, really hard, to live this. But sometimes, I can get off kilter. I can get so focused on trying to do justice, that I forget to notice I’m also supposed to love and savor kindness. I also can forget that God is God and I’m not, and the responsibility for the whole world is NOT on my shoulders.

In recent months I’ve been hearing nudges from God to make more space for joy. It has been interesting to notice my own resistance to it. There are biases in me that worry about making space for joy. They tell me that I was born with rose colored glasses, and being an adult member of society requires me to see the injustices of the world clearly. They tell me that joy is trite, and not very serious, and I should be serious. They remind me of the things that break my heart, and suggest I worry more about those and less about trivial stuff. Basically, there is this whole narrative within me that says I’m supposed to be a mature, responsible human, and that means I should just attend to the hard stuff of life.

And that’s all really interesting because I KNOW BETTER. I believe that God wants all people to be well, to survive and thrive, to experience joy and wonder. I don’t think that anyone is excluded from that, so I believe we are honoring creation and connecting with the Divine when we experience joy.

I know that joy is resistance, that there are parts of our society that try to create anxiety, and sadness for personal gain, and it is useful have joy to repel that. I also know that joy creates internal resistance, making it possible to do the hard things when they come because they aren’t the only thing.

I know a God who calls us to Sabbath- away from consumption and productively and into connection- and I know connection to be a great source of joy. That is, I believe God sets aside time for just joy so that we don’t get confused into thinking life is just about work and hardship.

I also have the honor of being with people at the end of their life, and being with loved ones after a person has died. I know which memories are savored, which things are regretted, and how meaning is made of a life – and it all ends up calling us towards joy.

Finally, and this one may seem backwards – when we mourn unfair and early deaths, a lot of what we grief is the lack of space for the person to continue to have joy in their lives. That would seem to tell us that those who love us want us to life and find joy and savor it! JUST LIKE GOD DOES.

I know all that, I can expound on it for a lot longer than this, and I still find it hard to let myself do it. Some people are better at this than others, and maybe some roles in life hold emotions differently than other roles. I don’t know. I kind of hope this is one of those sermons that doesn’t resonate easily.

Some of the ones who are wise about God suggest that goodness, wonder, and joy lie at the heart of all things, and if you can just see them at the right angle, everything positively sparkles with joy. Other wise ones about God say that it is a mark of true faith to have deep joy.

Which is all to say, if there is some resistance to joy in you – be it your own struggles, or seemingly conflicting emotions, or some narratives that tell you that joy isn’t right for you – I invite you to push back. God wants joy for you, and requests that you stop squelching it. Joy is for everyone, that’s actually the thing we’re doing. We’re working with God to build the kin-dom of God, and one of the ways we’ll know when we get there will be the abundance of joy. And one of the ways we get there is to stop getting in the way of joy!

So, a final story. When I was in college, I had a fairly significant fight with a friend because I’d shared that cookie cutters brought me joy and he maintained that was simply ridiculous. I argued I had a right to feel how I felt, he maintained that … well, basically it seems he said all the stuff I internalized as a narrative about what it means to be a mature adult. Hmmm, I thought I won that fight!! Anyway, there are sugar cookies available with coffee hour today, cut with cookie cutters and decorated with too many sprinkles, and I hope they bring you joy – you deserve it. Thanks be to God for that, 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 17, 2023

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December 10, 2023
by Sara Baron

“Yearning for Peace” based on Isaiah 10:1-4, 20-27

This week we were asked not to light the candle of peace on the Advent wreath. It was a request we took seriously, as it came from The United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries as a request to be in solidarity with the lack of peace in Israel and Palestine. Now, I wouldn’t want to spoil the ending for you on this or anything, but we have already lit the Advent Wreath, and we DID light the candle of peace. So you now how this ends. Except, we didn’t light the normal 2nd candle, the second of two purple candles. Instead we lit an Amnesty International Candle.

I should go back to the beginning, right?

This is the second week of Advent, the week when we traditionally light the candle of peace, to add to the candle of hope. The one small light fighting back against the darkness suddenly becomes two, which isn’t a whole lot of light but is double what the wreath previously held.

And we know there isn’t peace on earth, there hasn’t been peace on the full earth at any point since Jesus was born, but we yearn for peace nonetheless, and we know God as a source of peace, and Jesus as the Prince of Peace, and just like last week we connected with the Hope of God, this week we are meant to connect with the Peace of God and move a little bit more into it.

And, peace, in Biblical terms is more than just the absence of violence – although that would seem like progress right now. Peace in the Hebrew Bible is Shalom, a word that combines individual well-being with communal well being and thinks about the well being of the body, mind, emotions, and spirit – all while thinking about having access to enough resources to thrive. It is holistic. One can not be at peace if one’s neighbor is not.

In recent years I’ve learned that in many parts of Africa, our siblings in faith use the world “ubuntu” to say a lot of this. Archbishop Tutu explains:

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

Then we get a request that says:

Our Christian colleagues in Bethlehem tell us that this Advent and Christmas in Bethlehem the lights that normally adorn the birthplace of Jesus will remain unlit in memory of those who have been killed in the current conflict. The patriarchs and heads of churches in Jerusalem have noted that the traditional festive services in the Holy Land will be somber in nature due to the ongoing war.

The second candle on the Advent wreath represents peace, and in some traditions is known as the ”Bethlehem candle.” This Advent, we invite Methodist churches across the globe to do something out of the ordinary and refrain from lighting the Advent candle on the second Sunday in Advent (Dec. 10) and on subsequent Sundays. (GBGM)

Now, we took this request really seriously. It got passed around, Worship Committee read it and discussed it in our meeting, we found ourselves discussing the root meaning of the candles. We all care deeply about peace, about the impact of violence and war, the grief and trauma in the Holy Land, and those who have been killed there. The request came from our siblings in faith who are THERE, and we tend towards solidarity around here, right?

But, the idea of NOT lighting the candle felt so very, very wrong. Curiously wrong, actually, we had to figure out why it bothered us so. I think I heard us land on the idea that we light the candle to honor peace, to seek peace, to connect with peace, and we just couldn’t handle NOT lighting it when it is needed so badly. But nor could we just ignore the request. That didn’t seem acceptable either, especially when the symbolism requested was to honor those who have died in this horrible war.

Thank God for committees, because together we come up with better ideas than any of us could alone. Today we lit an Amnesty International Candle instead of the normal purple one. “Amnesty’s trademark is a candle wrapped in barbed wire. The candle represents:

The light of public attention that Amnesty members shine on the hidden abuses (the barbed wire) of human rights violators.
The spark of public pressure that Amnesty members create in order to bring about positive change in people’s lives.
The beacon of hope and solidarity for people who defend human rights, often at great personal risk, and for the many who become”2

So we lit a candle of acknowledgment of those killed, a candle of peace and yearning for peace, and a candle of solidarity with all at once. It still isn’t the perfect symbol, I’m not sure one exists, but we did it with great care. And now you are caught up.

After the conversation, Eileen Deming shared this quote from Howard Thurman:

“I will light candles this Christmas.

Candles of joy, despite all the sadness.

Candles of hope where despair keeps watch.

Candles of courage where fear is ever present.

Candles of peace for tempest-tossed days.

Candles of grace to ease heavy burdens.

Candles of love to inspire all of my living.

Candles that will burn all the year long. ”

None of this is to say that the original ask of the Board of Global Ministries wasn’t valid!! It was! The ask made space for us to really think about what we’re doing and why, and what feels like our response to an important request.

Now, every time we talk about peace, I hear in my head a simple truth, “if you want peace, work for justice.” I fear the consequences of this current war are not only the heartbreak and horror of Oct. 7th and the heartbreak and horror SINCE October 7th, but the grief, trauma, and fear of today will be the seedbed for conflicts for decades to come.

And that difficult reality also brings my thoughts closer to home. In the devotional from We Cry Justice for this week, Dr. Charon Hribar discusses the laws in New York City that create a particular injustice for those who are homeless. In New York City, there are 5 times more spaces in vacant buildings and lots than there are homeless people who need them. Or at least this was true 2 years ago, I suspect the basic truth remains even if the statistic doesn’t hold with the influx of migrants. Even more so, the vacant lots and buildings are usually located in exactly the same neighborhoods where homelessness is the highest. Why? Because those buildings and vacant lots are “good investments” to hold for a few decades and see if those neighborhoods gentrify. They’re held by shell corporations for unknown corporate prospectors. Meanwhile, the acquisition of the investment properties ends up kicking people out of their homes, creating ever more homelessness. And, of course, these facts aren’t neutral, they are created by the laws of the country, state, and city, which prioritize the wealth accumulation of the land prospectors over the lives of the homeless.

To be clear, New York City isn’t the only place such priorities are in place.

In addition to being blatantly inhumane, I fear such policies are the exact opposite of “if you want peace, work for justice.” What story are we telling people who fall through our safety net? That society is just? That they should seek the well-being of the whole because it will help take care of them too? That people see their pain? Alas, no. They’re taught by societal action and inaction that no one cares, they are on their own, their lives and their pain don’t matter. And that, dear ones, doesn’t lead us towards peace.

The prophet Isaiah sounds like many other prophets when he warns that the injustices of Ancient Israel will bring its downfall. Isaiah claims the downfall is God’s punishment, I tend to think it is natural consequences. In any case, in chapter 10 Isaiah outlines the ways that Ancient Israelite society is profoundly unjust – which we read – then how that’s true of Assyria too (we skipped that). Isaiah says they’ll both be wiped out as punishment, but that God’s love is such that the punishment will not wipe out all of Ancient Israel, there will be a remnant with which to rebuild. With God, hope is never wiped out.

Dr. Hribrar ends her devotional saying:

We are taught to obey the law, under the assumption that the social structure in which we live is just. But when the economic system and the policies that protect it are designed to put corporate profits before people’s lives, we, like Isaiah, must call out the policy violence that is taking place. We must be wiling to proclaim that these laws are moral and wrong.3

It is the way towards peace. It is also the way of Jesus. Among the most profound teachings of Jesus was the way of nonviolence. The premise of the Empire of Rome, the superpower in the time of Jesus was “first violence, then peace.” The response of Jesus seems to have been, “first peace, then peace.” You can’t wipe out violence with violence. It won’t work. You can’t build peace with violence. As followers of Jesus we know that neither violence nor injustice get us to peace.

But peace and justice do. Each time we call out an unjust law, we move towards peace. Each time we offer a gift in love to pick up someone who is otherwise unseen in society, we move towards peace. Each moment we find peace within creates more peace in the world. Each little way we seek to create more justice creates the space for more peace in the world. Each time we choose peace, and each time we choose justice, we bring along the work of God and Jesus… the work towards a nonviolent kindom of peace. May it come – soon. Amen

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

2 https://amnesty.ca/what-you-can-do/youth/start-up-kit/amnesty-101/

3Charon Hribar, “41: Who to You Who Pass Unjust Laws” in We Cry Justice, ed. Liz Theoharis (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021) p. 179, used with permission.

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 10, 2023

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December 3, 2023
by Sara Baron

“Yearning for Hope” based on Job 24:1-11, 22-25

Today we re-start the Christian Year, the liturgical cycle of waiting, celebrating, growing, waiting, celebrating, growing. We are now back in waiting. I think I fall deeper in love with Advent every year. The more commercialist Christmas pushes red and white, the more I find myself retreating the Advent colors of purple and pink. The more commercialism pushes secular carols, the more I find myself retreating into the quiet of the sanctuary and the integrity of Advent Hymns. The more commercialism pushes sales and deals the more attention I give to Alternative Christmas.

While secular Christmas has its bright, cheery, feel-good energy all around us, Christian Advent calls us to slow down, reflect, savor. Today we lit the candle of hope, one small light in an ever expanding darkness, one small light that will prove to be enough.

Now, I’m not against secular Christmas, I rather like it, but it feels disconnected from the one Christian one. This fall we did a Bible Study on the Christmas Stories in the Gospels, and we compared and contrasted them with our Christmas memories, our Christmas delights, and even the meaning we make from Christmas. (There is a poster in the back inviting you to do the same.) For most of us, Luke’s story of Christmas fit our faith the best, and made the most sense of it all. We also discovered that reading Luke 1 and 2 together made Luke 2 a whole lot more delightful. Luke centers on women, and on the disenfranchised, and the good news to all people. It fits who we seek to be as a church.

But for now, we’re still waiting, right? We’re waiting, and the description of the world being terribly wrong from the Bible’s most depressive abused character (Job) is doing its job of settling us into waiting. The description Job offers is of the world as it is and we YEARN with all our beings for the KINDOM of God where those descriptions no longer apply.

This Christian Year, the Worship Committee has taken seriously a request from the Intersectional Justice Committee to focus together on the book “We Cry Justice” put out by the Poor People’s Campaign. It is a book in 52 parts, meant to be read devotionally, and no matter how many times our Book Club tried, it didn’t become a readable book. It is a devotional book, so they asked if we could incorporate it into worship, and Worship Committee and I thought that was a wonderful idea. We have completed our year with “A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church,” which was a gift from God via Dr. Wil Gafney, and there is space for a different focus.

The Poor People’s Campaign is a group of amazing activists who decided it was time to pick up the mantle from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr who was himself leading a Poor People’s Campaign at the time of his death. We have been lightly involved with the modern campaign for years, and we have KNOWN that it is one of the ways God is at work in the world, and yet we haven’t quite given it our attention, until now. The book “We Cry Justice” is intentional Biblical interpretation with an eye towards the injustices of the world towards people in poverty. When I wrote them asking for permission to use prayers and quotations in worship they got back to us immediately granting it!

So this year as we settle to wait, our waiting is really defined by our waiting for JUSTICE for the vulnerable and those living in poverty. This fits the life this church particularly well, when I think about what we focus on in mission, while it hasn’t even been a decision exactly, the goals seem to be to lighten the burdens of those living in poverty. We see in our neighbors, our fellow members and worshippers, those dear to us, and quite ourselves the struggles of trying to live in a world that values the creation of capital over the well-being of the vulnerable.

I don’t know about you, but it breaks my heart.

Over and over again.

Actually, I kind of do know about you. I know that this is a community of faith whose belief in God and God’s dreams for the world include knowing that what is just and right in the world is for people to have access to food that is nutritious, delicious and plentiful; to housing that is safe, mold-free, and affordable; and to healthcare that is caring, effective, and doesn’t require declaring bankruptcy. That we are people who believe that God’s desires in the world are for people to live full abundant lives, and we know what is impairing that.

I expect that what I just said was so ridiculously obvious that you don’t know why I’m bothering wasting my breath on it. Thank you for that, because, dear ones, what is clear and obvious here isn’t in the world at large. Our society as a whole is at peace with people being hungry or we would expand SNAP benefits to cover the WHOLE month, expand access to SNAP benefits to everyone who really needs it, and … oh, let’s talk about reality, we wouldn’t have had our federal government cut $22 million from funding for regional food banks that are the last-gap measure between those who are struggling and hunger. (THIS is why we have to go to the store for meat, because the Food Bank can’t afford to get it anymore.) Our society as a whole is at peace with homelessness, or we’d prioritize safe, accessible housing in our budgets and our legislation. Our society as a whole is at peace with people not have access to healthcare, or not being able to afford to access healthcare, or going bankrupt from accessing healthcare or – wait for it – we’d have a different way of providing and funding healthcare.

And when I’m out in the world, listening, a shocking number of people think that those living in poverty should just try harder, or suffer a little because they deserve it, or …. well, basically the assumption is that poverty is the fault of the individual and poverty is the punishment someone deserves for not “succeeding” in capitalism.

Thank God, we see people as beloved children of God worthy of good things and abundant life, and not worthy of being punished because the game is rigged and they can’t win.

Thank God we know a God who is defined by universal love, grace, and mercy. It turns out that matters a lot in what we think justice looks like.

So, here we are on this first Sunday of Advent with one candle-flicker of light in our sanctuary reminding us to hold on to hope. And we have that while we heard words from Job that tell us how the world really is. In “We Cry Justice” Aaron Scott reflects on this Job reading saying:

I see countless tents, tarps, and shacks lining freeway underpasses – up one day, then disappearing the next, removed by cities desperate to keep up appearances instead of keeping up with justice and mercy. I see signs turning parking lots and stoplights across the country into hostile territory: “No Loitering,” “No Illegal Shopping Carts, “No Panhandling.”

And last week while our social worker Sylvester worked to find housing for God’s beloveds who had shown up last week, he confirmed counties in the capital region are buying people bus passes to other counties to avoid the cost of housing them.

The world as it is.

But, dear ones, we aren’t waiting for more of the same. We are waiting for God’s Kindom on earth. And this year, I have noticed something terribly obvious. We aren’t just waiting with our ancestors in faith who also yearned for justice and God’s dreams. I believe we are waiting with God’s own self, God who yearns to see us make different choices and offer better care for God’s vulnerable beloveds.

A challenge of faith today is to look at all the brokenness, all the injustice, all the heartaches, and hold hope. And yet, dear ones, there is plenty. There is hope because God seeks justice. There is hope because this is a community of faith that sees the injustice around us and calls it “immoral.” There is hope because there is a whole Poor People’s Campaign out there working on it! There is hope because God and we, and others along with us, will never concede that this is good enough. There is hope because at the deepest core of reality, there is goodness (God’s goodness) and it is going to break through eventually.

There is hope in this darkness. And the yearning for hope, the yearning for better, the yearning for the kindom is some of the hope itself. Thanks be to God. Amen

December 3, 2023

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

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November 19, 2023
by Sara Baron

“Seeing the Daisies” based on Psalm 89:1-8, 14 and John 2:1-11

Christianity has a weird relationship with food. In the abstract, with the Communion Meal at the center of our shared worship history, you might think we’d be especially great at seeing the sacredness of food. I think it is fair to say that you’d be wrong.

Before the Christian Testament of the Bible was even complete, we have letters from Paul to various communities saying, “please pay attention to each other when you gather for Communion and Worship.” Because, apparently, the rich people were bringing feasts, the poor people were bringing what they had, and ALREADY they weren’t actually sharing. The inequality of the world was coming to the Communion Table, and Paul was displeased.

I’ll also note, that I’m not delighted with his answer to this conundrum. Instead of urging sharing, he told people to eat at home in advance rather than feast in front of hungry others.

After the letters of Paul, but before Christianity really got its foothold in the world, much of the tradition was carried on by the Desert Fathers and Mothers. This may be news to you, I hadn’t heard of them until seminary. These remarkably faithful humans felt a calling by God to devote their lives to prayer, and went out into the desert so as not to be distracted by the drama of human life. Quite often others came to them seeking their spiritual wisdom. The ones who gathered around these desert wisdom teachers eventually became monastic communities. Cool. One of the problematic little nuances to this though, was that many (most? all?) of the desert fathers and mothers in their zealous pursuit of God and rejection of things of humans, were known for not eating and claiming to be sustained simply by the love of God.

Now, I’ll say that these desert parents look a lot more like John the Baptist than Jesus to me, but still, our faith probably wouldn’t have made it without them, so they’re in our religious DNA.

This underlying hostility to food can still be found in a lot of Christianity, it was striking to me last week as I gathered together readings about the sacredness of food and other “pretties” in life, that books I thought would have some delicious bit of reflection on the profound wonder of reading a ripe apple instead recommended abstaining from the joy of food and considering eating a necessary evil. FACEPALM

Now, we insert our Gospel lesson into this conversation! So that we can hear this while also holding among ourselves compassion for those who struggle with addiction, it probably helps to remember that water in those days in that part of the world was not safe for drinking, and wine was what was commonly consumed. It was a lot less potent than what people drink today, and I think the focus here is on abundant provision rather than specifically on wine. We aren’t celebrating drinking, but rather the continuation of a meal where people celebrate – which today can happen with all kinds of drinks.

Jesus is a guest at a wedding, where they are running out of wine which would have been embarrassing to the hosts and likely cut off the party, but didn’t fall under the responsibilities of Jesus. There is no consensus on why Mary intervenes. Perhaps the wedding hosts were her extended family. Perhaps she was ready for him to get on with his ministry. Perhaps this whole story is used by John as a foreshadowing of the later feeding narratives. I can’t tell you.

What I can tell you is that this story is in the Gospel of John, and is considered by Christian tradition to be the “first miracle of Jesus” and what he actually does is make a ridiculous amount of really good wine that enables a wedding feast to continue and the wedding hosts to save face.

When we look at the problems of the world, this one seems pretty small. It does, indeed, initially seem beneath the attention of Jesus – at least the Jesus of the Gospel of John who is a human who has amazing powers like making water into wine.

But perhaps the idea that this miracle is beneath Jesus comes out of that anti-food and anti-drink part of Christianity. The part of our faith that is AGAINST the world and its pleasures. But, friends, I tend to prefer the part of our faith tradition that is FOR the world, and reminds us to attend to and savor and enjoy the pleasures of life.

Jesus gets accused of being a drunkard and a glutton. Jesus’ followers are accused of breaking the sabbath by munching on some wheat while they walk through a field. Jesus horrifies the faithful by eating with the “sinners.” One of the VERY few narratives in all four gospels is the feeding of the multitudes. And, we have this story, Jesus turning water into wine.

Whatever our tradition may say, we follow Jesus who was into food and getting food to people. He did NOT tell people that it was holier to be hungrier. I think he thought of food as a God given gift of abundance that should be shared between God’s beloved people. And based on Jesus’ fairly excellent social analysis, and his capacity to see the blight of the poor, he knew better than to claim being hungry was GOOD. Because hunger was killing people.

Bill McKibben in Deep Economy says, “for almost all people throughout history (and for most people still today) ‘the economy’ is just a fancy way of saying ‘What’s for dinner?’ and ‘am I having any?”1 That’s the world Jesus lived in, and the one we live in.

So, if you’ll allow it, I’m going to add a little bit of imagination to the text. I don’t think it takes too much. Jesus and his family may have been very poor, at the very least they were landless when land usually meant sustainability. And they were near a lot of Empire violence, which doesn’t tend to bode well for already vulnerable people.

Because Mary intervenes, I think it is mostly appropriate to read this story as if she’s related to the hosts. Worrying about each other’s problems is a family thing. And if Jesus and his family were poor, and this family hadn’t been able to provide enough wine, it seems like we can pretty easily imagine that they too were poor. And maybe we can even consider that many of the wedding GUESTS would also have been people living in poverty. The exact kind of people who didn’t get a lot of invitations to fancy dinner parties put on by rich people – like in some parables.

So, Jesus – a materially poor guy – is at a party with a lot of other people who don’t have an excess of calories or luxuries, and he is asked to help prevent some embarrassment by providing some wine. And he does. He keeps the party going. The people get to connect with each other longer. The hosts are relieved.

The story says that he provided BETTER wine that what they’d all started with.

For me, today, that’s the crux of the story. Jesus wants good things for people, in abundance. The amount of wine said to be produced was actually a bit obscene 😉 It isn’t carefully proportioned, it isn’t “just good enough.” It isn’t leftovers from someone else’s fancy party. It is the good stuff, in abundance, because everyone is worthy of good food and drink. Because Jesus is a person of God, the one who made the world of abundance and asked us to distribute the goods so that everyone gets what they need! And it is ALL the good stuff.

Many of us will sit down at tables this week to savor a feast. If you don’t have other plans to do so, please come to the Spaghetti feast on Friday at lunchtime! It also promises to the be the good stuff in abundance.

Whatever table you sit at, with whatever company you will be keeping, I hope you will take the time to savor every bite as a gift from the God of Abundance who wants us to receive good things.

As our poem said today:

We walk on starry fields of white
And do not see the daisies;
For blessings common in our sight
We rarely offer praises.2

The good stuff is all around us, in food and in beauty. We’re called to notice. We’re called to savor. We need the chance to say thank you to the Holy One for the good!

Of course, there is always a next step, the one where we keep working for God’s vision of a world where those resources of good and abundant food are accessible for everyone. But, first, dear ones, first eat and savor. John says Jesus first gave a gift of abundance to a people who didn’t expect it, but enjoyed it. We are fed to feed, blessed to be blessings, loved so we can love. Receive what you are given, and enjoy it. It is the Jesus way, even if Christianity can’t always seem to remember that! Amen

1Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2007), p. 47.

2Ella Wheeler Wilcox “Thanksgiving” https://poets.org/poem/thanksgiving-1

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

November 19, 2023