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Sermons

Untitled

  • September 8, 2019February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

We’re
currently looking at 3 different worldviews: Moralistic Therapeutic
Deism, the Christian-Right, and (for lack of language that is better)
“Jesus-Following.”   “Moralistic
Therapeutic Deism” was identified by sociologist through a large
research project with US teens, and is the actual belief system of
most teens, despite any religious tradition they claim.  Furthermore,
as teens are most heavily influenced by their parents (No!  Really!)
when it comes to faith, we have reason to believe that a rather large
segment of the population actually believes “Moralistic Therapeutic
Deism.”  So, we are looking at it, and finding where it does and
doesn’t match our actual faith tradition.

“Moralistic
Therapeutic Deism” has 5 salient points:

  1. “A
    god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human
    life on earth.”
  2. “God
    wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in
    the Bible and by most world religions.”
  3. “The
    central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.”
  4. “God
    does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when
    God is needed to resolve a problem.”
  5. “Good people go to
    heaven when they die.”

This
week we are going to take a closer look at the second of the them:

“God
wants people to be good, nice, and fair to
each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.”

Unlike
last week, where I directly contrasted Moralistic Therapeutic Deism
with the perspective of the Christian-Right and then both with
Jesus-following, in this case I think Moralistic Therapeutic Deism
and the Christian-Right largely overlap.  I don’t see a noticeable
difference, other than perhaps in the degree of openness to other
faith traditions.

The
difference from both is in how Jesus-followers see our tradition,
including in our Micah passage today.  That passage claims that what
God wants is for us “to
do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

For
some people, what Micah says and “be good and nice” may look
similar at the outset.  That’s what makes it so dangerous!

Now,
obviously, I take no issue with the last bit, where the Bible is
conflated with other faiths.  When it comes to the basic moral
principles of the world’s religions, there is enough agreement to
speak in such terms.  The issue, rather, is what a moral life looks
like!

The
first statement is that God wants people to be “good.”  That’s
not particularly controversial at this point, but it is circular
logic!  What does it mean to be good?  Isn’t this a statement about
what being good means?  Then simply saying, “being good is being
good” doesn’t help us figure things out much does it?  That means
we have to decide from the next two words what this goodness looks
like.  

This
is where we get “nice.”   “God wants people to be nice.”  In
fact, if you take out some words, this statement could read, “God
wants people to be nice, as taught in the Bible.”

Here
is the problem.  It doesn’t.  The Bible doesn’t tell people to be
nice.  

Actually,
the Bible does not include the word NICE.  And I mean AT ALL.  Its
not there.  It doesn’t show up.  And I don’t think its an accident or
a mistranslation.  I think its not there ON PURPOSE.  What is nice
anyway?  We use the word so much that we easily lose its meaning.
Apple dictionary defines it this way:  “Nice”
pleasant;
agreeable; satisfactory.”  I think the most important part of that
definition is “agreeable.”  The word “nice” has very serious
connotations of “don’t rock the boat!”  A nice person doesn’t
argue, doesn’t disagree, doesn’t tell you when you’re wrong, doesn’t
tell you when you are harming another person.  A nice person doesn’t
name injustice, doesn’t upset the status quo, doesn’t willingly
engage in conflict.  A nice person is always pleasant, even when
things are profoundly wrong.  To be NICE is to take the path of least
resistance.  

Our
Micah passage says that God wants us to do justice, to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with God.   For clarity’s sake, I offer 3
different translations of this verse for you:  

NRSV:
 He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
 and what does the
Lord require of you
 but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with your God?

NIV:
He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD
require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly
with your God.

Message:
But he’s already made it plain how to live, what to do, what God
is looking for in men and women. It’s quite simple: Do what is fair
and just to your neighbor, be compassionate and loyal in your love,
And don’t take yourself too seriously – take God seriously.

Now,
there is something in there about loving kindness or showing mercy.
They aren’t the same thing as “be nice.”  Now, the definition of
kindness, “the
quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate”,
helps, but I think its in the definition of mercy that we really see
the difference.  Mercy is compassion
or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one’s power to
punish or harm.  WHOA.  That’s so not the same thing as agreeable.
Its so much STRONGER!  

Jesus
says that the greatest commandments are to Love the Lord Your God
with all you heart, all your soul, and all your mind – and to love
your neighbor as yourself.  In fact he suggests they aren’t so
different.  This Micah passage is another way of saying it.  To
love mercy is to love your neighbor as yourself, ESPECIALLY when you
have the power and reason to do otherwise.  

Now
its time to go back to the rest of Micah’s claim.  To do justly, to
love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.   I will admit that its best
the Moralistic Therapetic Deism’s claim that God wants us to be
“fair” is entirely true, and I suspect that its a similar
articulation as the theme of Justice throughout the Bible.  It seems
clear, Biblically speaking, that God is OBSESSED with justice.  There
are all sorts of commandments that have to do with making sure that
the justice system is fair – and that it doesn’t benefit the rich
more than the poor, men more than women, natural citizens more than
outsiders.  There
is a deep awareness that left to its own devices, a society will bend
justice toward power so that the powerful will constantly become more
powerful and the powerless more powerless.  God’s commandments are
meant to prevent this!

Justice,
and judgement, and the judicial system even are all there to make
sure that things are FAIR for people no matter who they are.  You
might remember the story of the prophet Nathan telling a sob story to
King David … the story is that a very very wealthy man with many
herds noticed that his very poor neighbor had a very nice lamb, and
so, he stole it!  David’s was so angry at this rich man, and Nathan
pointed out to him that HE was the wealthy man in the story.  The
prophets were the ones making sure that people didn’t forget about
justice!

Justice
often demands the opposite of niceness.  While niceness is the
path of least resistance, justice often requires being part of active
resistence.  The demands of justice in the world may require
upsetting the social order, upsetting other people, upsetting the
institutions of power and privilege.  Those fighting for women’s
rights were told they weren’t being NICE.  Those fighting to end
slavery weren’t NICE.  Those fighting to end segregation weren’t
NICE.  But…. they were just, and they were merciful.  

In
the best case scenario, if “fairness” is given all the power and
energy that it deserves, then YES, God does want us to be fair, but
note that it isn’t some fairness that has mostly to do with trivial
matters – it is a fairness that has to do with everyone having a
fair opportunity to LIVE and THRIVE.  That’s where the Leviticus
passage comes in.  It does, of course, include “love your neighbor
as yourself” but it seems to also be pretty explicit about what
that looks like.  In this passage, loving your neighbor as yourself
means leaving a means of livelihood for the poor rather than
enriching yourself.  In this passage, loving your neighbor as
yourself means telling the truth in order to produce fairness and
justice.  This passage worries about the disempowered, and tells
those who have power to act responsibly with their power: to give
wages when they’re earned, to refrain from doing harm simply because
it can be done.  Loving your neighbor as yourself means creating a
JUST justice system, impartial to power and wealth, and to refrain
from profitting from violence.  This is some PRATICAL and real stuff.

It
isn’t “nice” stuff.  It is “just” stuff.  

That
tiny Micah passage includes, as well, that God wants us to “walk
humbly with our God.”  This is not paralleled at all in Moralistic
Therapeutic Deism, and from my understanding of it, that is not
accidental either.  People following that way of thought do not
believe that in spiritual practice or discipline. They see prayer as
a way of manipulating God into giving them what they want.  For the
most part, they do not read the Bible, or reach out to others as a
way of sharing God’s love.  They think of God as existing for THEM,
rather than thinking of themselves as existing to do God’s work in
the world.  Its an enormous switch!  

This
may be one significant place where the Christian-Right and
Jesus-followers align.  Our Tradition teaches us that we are the Body
of Christ – we are gifted and blessed so that we can be a blessing
to others.  We exist so that God’s love can spread.  We are the
continuation of the ministry of Jesus himself.  We are part of God’s
transformation of the world, and our work in that includes
significant time studying and praying and worshipping and discussing
so that we might BEST use our lives for the goodness of all.  

Micah
tells us to be humble before God.  That is, to remember that God is
God and we are not!  That the purpose of life is not that God serve
us, but that we serve God.  And that in serving God we are both
blessed and a blessing!  That our lives AND the lives of those we
meet are improved!  

You
see, our Tradition is not all about us, it is about everyone.  It
is DEFINTELY not about “ME”!  Micah reminds us with simple words
about humility – which are put next to justice and mercy in their
importance!  Those THREE things are what it means to be a “good”
person, if you listen to the Bible.  Justice, mercy, humility.
They’re balanced, and they push us beyond ourselves to being truly
good neighbors to those we meet.

So,
my friends, despite the the apparent similarities, again we find that
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is a mistranslation of our faith.  Our
tradition does NOT teach us to be nice.  In many ways it teaches the
opposite.  It teaches us to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with our God.  May we do what we are taught.  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

September 8, 2019

Sermons

“Indictment of the Temple”based on Deuteronomy 6:4-5; Leviticus 19:18;…

  • March 20, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Home Missioner Kevin M. Nelson and Rev. Sara E. BaronFirst United Methodist Church of Schenectady603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305http://fumcschenectady.org/For
us, the primary question is, “Why did Jesus overturn the tables in
the Temple?”  We were both raised with one explanation, and have
come to believe another one entirely!

A
man named Rabbi Hillel was said to live an extraordinarily long life,
born around 110 BCE, about a century before Jesus’ birth, and lived
into Jesus’ early years, around 10-20 CE. His primary rival
in thought was Shammai.  Once, they say, a Gentile approached Hillel
and Shammai and challenged them to explain the Torah to him while he
stood on one foot. Shammai dismissed the man. Hillel accepted the
question but gently chastised the man by responding, “What is
hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole of the
Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”1
If this brings to
mind anything Jesus said, I don’t think it is a coincidence.  

The
Gospel of Mark records an episode that rings similar to that
experienced by Shammai and Hillel. This happens during the testing of
Jesus’ teachings and authority in the days that followed the Temple
episode that my mother-in-law, Joan, read a few minutes ago. In it,
Jesus was asked which commandment is the greatest. Jesus answered
that the Shema ( this
morning’s Deuteronomy passage—love God with all your heart, soul,
mind and strength) is the
greatest, and loving our neighbor as ourselves
(this morning’s Leviticus passage read by my mother, Elizabeth)
is the second greatest.

These
commands are at the heart of how Jesus understood God’s nature; one
of love, justice and compassion, and they are central to the
individual and collective ways in which we are to live out our lives.
They are also going to be central to why Jesus was at the Temple on
the last Monday of his life. In order to explain this, let us provide
some more context.

Jesus
lived from around 4 BCE to around 30 CE.  He was raised in Galilee,
an area that had been re-colonized by faithful Jews and was an
impoverished backwater of the Roman Empire.  In particular, he grew
up in Nazareth, a tiny village that was 4 miles from the CITY of
Sepphoris.  Sepphoris had been part of a revolt against the Roman
Empire in 4 BCE, in response to the death of Herod who had brutally
oppressed everyone under his reign.  In response, the Empire had sent
in legions of troops to reconquer the city, leveling much of it, and
selling those who had led the revolt into slavery.2

Did
you hear that?  Approximately the year Jesus was born, the city under
whose shadow he was raised, was leveled by the Empire.  It is even
likely that his father’s work was in rebuilding the city.  The
revolt, and its aftermath, would have infiltrated his consciousness
in ways similar to kids born in 2001 in New York City.

The
Roman Empire was an empire in all of the traditional ways that
empires are empires.  It existed to extract wealth from the people it
conquered in order to give the wealth to powerful elites.  In his
book, “Jesus:
Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious
Revolutionary,” which
was chosen by the Intersectional Justice Committee for the January
book discussion, Marcus
Borg refers to the Roman Empire as a preindustrial agricultural
domination system.  Domination systems emerged about 5000 years ago
when humans figured out how to produce metal and domesticate animals
(at roughly the same time).  Domesticating animals enabled larger
scale agriculture and thus agricultural surplus and larger scale
societies. Surplus also meant enabling the existence of wealth,
which, when combined with larger societies, led to motivation for
domination, at a larger scale.3

Preindustrial
agricultural domination looked something like devising systems
through which taxation enabled wealth to flow upward, thus causing
people to live on the edge of subsistence and not just poverty, but
indentured servitude and slavery. In other words, virtually everyone
who wasn’t part of the elite, was a peasant. Agriculture, and thus
land, was a family’s primary source of productivity. A bad year for
crops could lead to debt, and in a subsistence world, it was all but
impossible to produce enough to pay off debt
once a family fell into debt. As little as one
bad year for crops could lead to debt, potentially loss of your land
and indentured servitude in which you were working the same land but
now someone else owned it and gained the productivity from the
land and your labor.
As
little as two or three
bad years could lead to loss of land and slavery.4

In
the system Jesus lived under, wealth was thus derived from farming
and the wealth flowed up to the ruler and his aristocrats.  In fact,
between ½ and 2/3 of all
production ended up in the hands of the elite 1-2% of the society,
making them VERY wealthy.  They used some of this wealth to maintain
armies in order to keep the wealth, and the role of religion was to
legitimate the concentration of wealth by claiming the ruler as
ruling by Divine will.5
Some of this should sound familiar from either history class or the
newspaper. 😉

In
this system, the poor, who comprised at least 90% of the population,
worked very hard and died very young.  Those who survived childhood
lived to an average age of 30.  The production they engaged in
benefited the elites who tended to live to an average age of 70.  
Now, the Roman Empire wasn’t unique at all.  This was exactly the
same domination system that the proto-Israelites had encountered in
Egypt and from which they had experienced God leading them into
freedom. This was also the same domination system that their own
kings had often attempted to implement, although their kings were
kept a bit in check by the prophets CONSTANTLY calling them out.  

This
system was well known, but it stood in marked contrast with the world
as envisioned by God, shared by Moses, articulated by the prophets,
and sought by the people.  The vision laid out in the Torah starts by
giving each family access to their own land to farm.  It is designed
carefully, intended to prevent any system where a group of people
could economically dominate any other people, and THUS intended to
prevent a situation where a peasant class could exist and be
dominated.  The vision of God in the Torah involved each family
having access to land AND being able to reap its benefits.  The
vision of God in the Torah requires making food accessible even to
widows, orphans, and foreigners – the only ones who wouldn’t have
access to land.  The vision of God in the Torah requires sharing 10%
of food production in order to BOTH feed the priests AND feed the
hungry.  The vision of God in the Torah aims to keep society level so
that no one dominates and no one is dominated.  That is the faith of
the Jews.

That
is the faith that the Temple was built to support.  The Temple stood
as a symbol of that faith, as a way to remember that faith, and as a
way to enact that faith.  The Temple stood near but APART from the
King’s palace, with an intention to keep powers separate and
accountable.  

The
Roman Empire preferred to keep local leadership in place when it took
over new areas.  However, it made the leadership accountable to the
Empire and required that the leadership do the work of gathering up
the wealth of the people to “pay its taxes.”  Furthermore, it
replaced “local” leadership as it deemed necessary to maintain
stability and keep the money flowing upward.  To be clear, this means
Rome appointed the high priest, and the appointment lasted only so
long as Rome was pleased with him. From 6 CE to 66 CE, Rome appointed
18 high priests.6
The Roman Empire wasn’t stupid.  It knew that the real power in
Israel by the time of Jesus was in the Temple – there hadn’t been a
monarch in centuries.  The power that the Temple derived from its
function and symbolism as the centerpiece of living out God’s vision
for a JUST society was thus co-opted for the sake of the domination
system and its insatiable hunger for greater wealth.

Thus,
the Temple that stood as an emblem and reinforcement of God’s
justice and compassion was co-opted by the preindustrial,
agricultural domination system of the Roman Empire.

The
Temple, meant to function as an equalizer, a seat of prayer, and the
home of the priests who taught about God’s vision was – by the time
of Jesus – being used to extract wealth from the peasants for
benefit of the already wealthy.  Jesus, after his upbringing as a
peasant near the aftermath of a revolt, had a particularly high
awareness of this system and its brokenness.  He was interested in
breaking the PERCIEVED power of the Temple which would decrease (or
break) its usefulness to those in the domination system who would
abuse it. And that brings us to today’s story.


Many
Christians, when they think of the seminal moment in Jesus’ life
and career, probably think of the Resurrection. In contrast, I
understand this
story, the story of the indictment of the Temple, to be the seminal
moment of Jesus’ career.

In
the version we read in Mark, Jesus and his followers enter the Temple
and begin what I would recognize as a disruptive act. They knock over
the tables and throw out the vendors
and the money changers. For most of our lives, we have probably heard
this story in a way similar to a summary provided by biblical scholar
N.T. Wright in his book, Mark
for Everyone.
“Many people have thought that Jesus was simply protesting against
commercialization. On this view, he only intended to clean up the
Temple—to stop all this non-religious activity, and leave it as a
place for pure prayer and worship.”7

In
Borg’s book he reminds us that the courtyard of the Temple was 40
acres!  This simple fact gives us reason to question the narrative
we’ve been taught.  To create a notable disruption within a space
that large would require intentionality, a plan, and many people!
Thus, this can’t have been a temper-tantrum response to commercial
activity.  That opens up the question even wider: why did Jesus PLAN
a disruption at the Temple?  

But
first, was this REALLY a disruption? Through Sara’s subversive
women of the Bible sermon series, we’ve been talking about
subversive actions for months, and this is classic subversive
activism 101—staging a disruption. Mark affirms this by sandwiching
this episode in between the two halves of the fig tree story, using
the fig tree as a symbol
for the Temple. In that story, the morning before the Temple
episode, as Jesus and his followers are on their way to the Temple,
Jesus notes that a fig tree has not produced any fruit and curses it,
never mind that figs were out of season.
The NRSV version of the Bible titles the concluding section, “The
Lesson From the Withered Fig Tree.”  In it, when
they pass by that fig tree
the
morning after the Temple disruption,
the tree is already dead.

N.T.
Wright explains, “But Mark makes it clear, by the placing of the
Temple incident within the two halves of the fig tree story, that he
sees Jesus’ actions as, again, a dramatic acted parable of
judgment. This was Jesus’ way of announcing God’s condemnation of
the Temple
itself and all that it had become in the national life of Israel.”
Jesus judges the tree and it dies.  Jesus judges the Temple to kill
its power, in particular its power to dominate.

So,
why did Jesus plan a disruption at the Temple? It was so Jesus could
indict the Temple, knowing that between this action and his Palm
Sunday entrance the day before, it would likely result in his death.
Indeed,
it is within the Temple passage that
the author of
Mark notes for the first time that the chief priests and scribes
decided to kill Jesus and began plotting to this effect. The author
of Mark illustrated Jesus’ plan through the fig tree, but a
contemporaneous audience would also have recognized it through Jesus’
own reported words. “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called
a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den
of robbers.” Marcus Borg helps us to better understand these
references, explaining them as a combination of Isaiah 56:7 (the
Temple as a house of prayer for all nations) and Jeremiah 7:11. The
latter is part of what is called Jeremiah’s “temple sermon,” in
which, according to Borg, Jeremiah “warned that it would be
destroyed unless those who worshipped there began to practice
justice.”  Earlier, the text reads

,
“If you truly amend your ways and doings, if you truly act justly
one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan and the
widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go
after gods to your own hurt, then I [God] will dwell with you in this
place.” (Jeremiah 7:5-7)

Borg
goes on,

Then,
still speaking in the name of God, Jeremiah said, ‘Has this house
[the temple], which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in
your sight?’ The phrase in Hebrew suggests not just thievery, but
robbing with violence. In what sense had the temple become ‘a den
of robbers,’ a cave of violent ones? In Jeremiah, the meaning is
apparent: it was a ‘den of robbers’ precisely because it had
become the center of an oppressive system that did not practice
justice, but exploited the most vulnerable in society. It was an
indictment of the powerful and wealthy elites of his day, centered in
the monarchy and temple. Their everyday injustice made them robbers,
and they thought of the temple as their safe house and place of
security.

Thus,
when Jesus called the temple ‘a den of robbers,’ he was not
referring to the activity of the money changers and sellers of
sacrificial animals. Rather, he indicted the temple authorities as
robbers who collaborated with the robbers at the top of the imperial
domination system. They had made the temple into a den of robbing and
violence. Jesus’ action was not a cleansing of the temple, but an
indictment of the temple. The teaching explains the act. Indeed, it
was the reason for the act.”

This
was why Jesus planned a disruption of the temple.  This is why it was
worth it to him to accept the consequences of having publically
indicted the Temple and its authority.  

We
don’t live in a preindustrial, agricultural domination system
anymore.  Obviously.  Now we live in a post-industrial,
non-agricultural, domination system.  The rules are both different
and the same.  The work of the many is still used to enrich the few,
although we have new ways of blaming the many for not being wealthy
themselves.  Our domination system is dependent on racism, sexism,
transphobia, heteronormativity, xenophobia, and all kinds of other
ways of dehumanizing God’s beloved people.

The
system falls apart when we look at each other, no matter the
differences, and see another human being, a beloved person of God,
worthwhile and worth listening to.  However, it is not just that we
are called to do this individually.  Like Jesus, we need to pay
attention to how our institutions (including faith traditions) are
being systematically used as part of the domination system. Then,
like Jesus, we need to disrupt the system.  It turns out this Temple
cleansing is NOT, as many of us thought, the one counter-example to
an otherwise calm and loving Jesus.  This story is the epitome of
Jesus loving God’s people, it is Jesus loving God’s people enough to
upset the system to give them a chance, even when it would inevitably
lead to his own death.

Today,
we are similarly called to disrupt. It may or may not involve
dramatic
acts
of disruption. However, when we see actions of thievery, of
state-sanctioned robbery, of oppressive political systems
that do not practice justice and
instead
create legal structures for the exploitation of the most vulnerable
in society—we are called to indict the powers that do such things
and to seek ways to disrupt these actions. Look for the ways in which
you can step outside of your normal behaviors in order to dramatize,
shed light on, injustice
and indict the powers behind it. Look for the ways in which you can
step outside of your normal behaviors and activities in order to
advocate for the vulnerable, the marginalized and exploited. Look for
the ways in which you can work collectively and organize in order to
address the systems that marginalize and exploit the vulnerable.
Imagine these actions and others like them. Sit with whatever
discomfort these thoughts may bring. Pray over how you are called to
respond. Then, join with others to do. As Jesus did. Amen.

1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_the_Elder
accessed
March 14, 2017.

2Marcus
Borg, “Jesus:
Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious
Revolutionary” (USA:
HarperOne, 2006) page 89-93.

3
Borg, 79-80.

4Borg,
79-80.

5Borg
81-82.

6
Borg, 90.

7N.T.
Wright, Mark
for Everyone,
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), p. 151.

Home Missioner Kevin M. Nelson and Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

“A Powerful No” based on  Esther 1:1-20

  • November 13, 2016February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

In 1802 a heterosexual, white, protestant couple got married – and the church freaked out. You want to know why, I promise. They freaked out because she…wore….a red coat! The couple was Abigail and Daniel Harkness, and Daniel was a part of the Society of Friends. They officially censured him for marrying her, both because she wasn’t a part of the Society of Friends and because of her coat (which they said made her a “worldly woman”). She refused to give up her coat. He refused to apologize for her coat. So they became Methodists.

Thank goodness they did. I sometimes have some feelings of envy for the peace-loving Quakers, but that one action they did all those years ago was really good for Methodists. Abigail and Daniel’s great-granddaughter was fond of telling that story, and made it a part of her story of formation. Their great-granddaughter was Georgia Harkness, the first woman to be a full professor at a theological school in the United States of America, a feat she accomplished as an active Methodist theologian. She was, truth be told, the first RECOGNIZED female theologian, and she was a member of the Troy Annual Conference. She had local ordination, but fought for women’s full ordination rights in the Methodist Church.

I do not have enough time to tell you Georgia Harkness’s full story today (I’m still learning it), but there are a few other details you need to know. She graduated from Cornell in 1912, after which she taught high school in Schyllerville and Scotia for 6 years (yes, OUR Scotia), but she got restless. After reading an advertisement in The Christian Advocate she went to Boston University (also a Methodist school) for her masters degree and then a PhD in the philosophy of religion. She then taught at Elmira College for 15 years. In 1939 she was hired by Garrett, breaking the stained glass ceiling. She was part of the movement toward full ordination rights for women in the Methodist Church, the social gospel, the creation of the World Council of Churches, and was eventually a General Conference delegate from the Troy Annual Conference (although Junice tells me this happened while she was a professor at Pacific School of Religion in CA and not everyone was thrilled about it.)

While she was teaching in Scotia, she was very active in her “local church” teaching Sunday School and working with youth groups. We haven’t yet verified which church was that was. Most likely, Scotia UMC, right? Given our history though, maybe it was us. (We’re looking!) In any case, a Methodist Church in the Albany District and Schenectady County sent Georgia Harkness off to her graduate education and to change the face of Methodism, academia, and the world.

Dr. Georgia Harkness attributed her courage to her great-grandmother, Abigail. When women graduate from Garrett-Evangelical Theological school, a United Methodist Seminary north of Chicago, they wear red shoes. They do it to remind themselves of their place in the world as courageous, outrageous women and to celebrate the rich tradition of female scholarship at Garrett-Evangelical.”1 They do it because of Abigail Harkness.

Abigail Harkness refused to do what was asked of her, and in doing so she inspired great change. Her courage laid the foundation for Georgia’s. I think Abigail Harkness was to Georgia Harkness what Vashti was to Esther. Now, let me be clear. The book of Esther is a work of fiction. It was written down (no oral tradition) as a work of fiction, for the purpose of encouraging Jews living in the Persian empire to have hope and stay faithful. This story did not happen. History knows too much about the era. This is intentional historical fiction! As Sidnie White Crawford (professor of Classics and Religious Studies at University of Nebraka Lincoln) puts it in The New Interpreter’s Bible, “This is also a hopeful message to Jews living in diaspora; the status quo is never such and things can always change.”2

John Dominic Crossan likes to help people understand the Bible by saying, “Emmaus never happened, Emmaus always happens,” by which he means that he doesn’t think that there was an actual embodied living Christ who walked with the disciples to Emmaus and explained the Jesus movement to them and then disappeared as he became known in the breaking of the bread at dinner. Rather, he believes that it is in reflecting on history that we come to understand our present, and it is in the communion table that Christ is known. The literal pales beside the metaphorical. Similarly, the book of Esther didn’t happen, and yet Esther tells truths of humanity that keep happening.

White Crawford says, “The book, which was written for Jews living in exile, consistently lampoons their Gentile overlords. Ahasuerus is less an awe-inspiring ruler than an easily manipulated buffoon.”3 Obviously the Jews living in ancient Persia were the only people in the history of the world who need to make fun of their ruler to feel safe in the world, so we can’t understand it, but we can try ;).

The story starts out describing the excessive opulence of the King’s palace and grounds and his outrageous 6-month party for all of his officials. Granted, travel was harder in those days and he was king over a really big empire so you might want to take advantage of opportunites to be together, but who can really afford to both stop their government for 6 months AND have a ridiculous party at the same time? Clearly, he could! And he thought it was worth it. He was clearly very excited to show off his power and wealth.

Now, the author is very wise and quite intentional. The attention to detail wasn’t an accident. White Crawford says, “Through the description we get a glimpse of the Persian character: ostentatious, showy, unbridled. This is in direct contrast to the usual Jewish values of modesty and self-restraint (see Prov 11:2-4). Although disapproval is never directly voiced, the message is clear: Such opulence, while immediately awe-inspiring, hides an empty and probably corrupt core.”4 So, after this showy 6 month party, the King decides that he needs a new audience to show off to, and he invites everyone in the city to come to a 7 day party.

It is very clearly stated that at this party people were allowed to drink how they wanted, because usually the expectation was that everyone drank when the king drank. “The author is letting the reader now that everything in this court, including drinking, proceeds according to the whim of the king,” including allowing people to drink as much (or as little) as they wished!5

So, 187 days in to a drunken stupor, the king calls for his wife who is throwing a party of her own with the women. This isn’t particularly historical, but it does work for historical fiction! We’re told that, “Historically Persian women and men could eat together, but the women left when the drinking began. It suits the purposes of the author to have the men and women separate when the story begins.”6 It fits the story, because then the king can call for Vashti.

She is told to show up in her crown. She isn’t told what else to wear. Assumptions have long been that she’s not supposed to wear anything but her crown. So, the story sets it up: the king has has been having a six month long drinking party to show off all his wealth, his wife is with her female companions, and he beckons her to come out naked to be shown off before all of the officials of the land and every man in her city.

Now, we don’t know a darn thing about Vashti (mostly because she never existed) but I want to play with this idea a little bit. I have, at times in my life, been in the exclusive company of women. During those times, if a particularly inappropriate “request” were to come to one of those women from a man, a certain amount of shared indignation would erupt. The woman who received the “request,” who might have simply hung her head in shame and complied if she were alone, would be motivated to respond differently in the presence of other women. The atrocity of the “request” would be named. Other options would be raised. An assessment of the risk involved in refusing vs. the risk involved in responding would be done. Perhaps, if there were some, particularly powerful women in the group might offer their own resources as protection.

That is to say, that when oppressors make horrible demands of members of oppressed groups, they’re less likely to have their dictates followed when the demand comes to the individual while the individual is supported by other members of the oppressed group. Um. Duh. But, the king is presented as an idiot. So, he doesn’t know that. And I’m not trying to be subtle here. I’m encouraging all of us to act like the women that Vashti was with – naming injustice when we see it, assessing damage, coming up with alternative plans, using our resources for the vulnerable, and supporting whoever needs the support. I’m reminding us all that there is power in being together, and not in allowing anyone to be isolated. I’m particularly encouraging stand together in the face of unreasonable decrees by unjust rulers.

Vashti says “no.” The story doesn’t REALLY tell us what happens to her. She’s said to be banished. For most of history that’s thought to include being killed. However, I’ve had a hard week and I’m going to claim that some of those women she was with in her banquet took her in and she lived a lovely life of freedom and access to great books in her exile. It IS a work of fiction after all, and this is my fan-fiction addition for the sake of having some darn hope. 😉

However, before she gets banished a few things happen. First of all, her husband who just spent 187 days showing off his power and wealth can’t figure out how to respond her “no” and convenes a war council to try to figure out how to respond. The king’s councilors are also freaked out and horrified that once the story gets out (which it WILL when all the women were present to hear her “no” and all the men were present to see her not show up) all the other women in the empire won’t obey their husbands either. (May. It. Be. So.) The scholar reminds us, “the character’s reactions to events lead the reader to laugh. For example, Vashti’s refusal to obey one order is thought to threaten the stability of the empire and leads to a decree declaring, of all things, that husbands should rule in their own houses and speak their own languages.”7 Which happens. The greatest mail service ever known on the face of the earth to that time was put to the task of telling men to be the masters of their houses – in a society that was already a patriarchy – because the men were so freaked out that one woman would say “no.”

That’s a powerful no.

It also set up Esther to replace Vashti as queen and save her people from genocide. Vashti and Esther didn’t know each other, but we can guess that Esther knew Vashti’s story, and learned from it. She did her subversiveness in different ways, but she learned from the one who came before her. Vashti set up Esther to succeed. Abigail Harkness set up Georgia to succeed. Even the failures of one woman who seeks power can inspire the next woman to succeed.

And, beloved people of God, like Vashti and Abigail, we are not powerless. We have the power to say “no” to things that are wrong, and “yes” to opportunities for justice. Furthermore, we can act like the women at the banquet in counseling each other toward courageous acts and outrageous refusals of unjust demands. We are powerful. God is powerful. We can, and we will continue to move the world toward good. NOTHING and NO ONE, not even a narcissistic power-hungry “king” can stop us. Thanks be to God. Amen

1“Red Shoes” by “preacher mom” http://preacherparents.blogspot.com/2010/05/red-shoes.html, accessed 11/10/2016

2Sidnie White Crawford “The Book of Esther,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. 3 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999): p. 858.

3Ibid, 858

4Ibid, 880.

5Ibid, 879.

6Ibid, 880.

7Ibid, 858.

–

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 13, 2016

Sermons

“How Not to Treat the Family Idols” based on Genesis…

  • October 16, 2016February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

The
characters in this story don’t emerge from a vacuum.  Their story has
been going on for quite a while by the time we get to this part of
Genesis.  Jacob, you may remember, was the second born of a set of
twins who infuriated his brother by stealing both his brother’s
birthright and their father’s final blessing.  In order to avoid
being murdered by his twin brother, and at their mother’s advice, he
went to live with her family.

The
first person he encountered when he arrived was a beautiful woman at
a well (which is Biblical foreshadowing for …. marriage) who
happened to be his cousin Rachel.  Her father Laban was his mother’s
brother.  This is not presented as an issue.  Jacob wants to marry
Rachel, and Laban says he has to work for him for 7 years in order to
pay off her bride-price.  So, besotted, Jacob does.  After seven
years there is a wedding and a wedding night, and when he wakes up in
the morning Jacob discovers that it is Rachel’s sister Leah in his
bed.  He objects – rather strongly.  Laban comes up with some weak
explanation about not being able to marry off the younger sister
first and then suggests that Jacob can marry Rachel too, if he’ll
simply spend one week with Leah first and agree to work for him for
another 7 years.

It
turns out, in case you couldn’t figure this out yourself, that
sisters make super terrible sister wives.  I bet you were able to
figure that out on your own though.  Leah and Rachel spent years
trying to fight with each other for Jacob’s attention, and that
included a fairly elongated “baby war” in which each tried to
outdo the other in producing offspring for Jacob.  If you wanted to
know, Leah won, although Rachel remained Jacob’s favorite.  After the
next 7 years of labor had been completed, Jacob made a deal with
Laban to stay on for a while longer in order to leave with some herds
of his own.  At that point both Laban and Jacob did everything they
could to trick each other into getting the worst possible deal.
Jacob was a trickster, Laban was a trickster, and neither of them
treated each other well.  On the whole, Laban treated Jacob more
roughly than Jacob treated him.  

Finally,
about 21 years after arriving on his uncle’s doorstep – and
apparently while his uncle was as far from home as possible, Jacob
packed up his wives, his children, his herds, and his possessions and
headed back home (uncertain about if his brother still wanted to kill
him).  

So
now we’re caught up – as long as we remember that when they packed
everything up to leave, Rachel took the family idols with them and
Jacob didn’t know about it.   What were the family idols?  Well,
they’re also called the family gods.  They were physical
representations of gods used in some sort of ritual worship, usually
at an at-home altar.  In addition to being items to which one
directed one’s prayers, they were also thought to protect the family
and its good fortune.  That is, if they were lost or stolen, it was
assumed that the LUCK of the family went with them.  While the Bible
suggests that Jacob and Laban prospered because God was with Jacob,
Rachel may not have shared that assumption.

In
the story that precedes this one in Genesis, Leah and Rachel discuss
how their father cheated them by not giving them their portion of
their bride prices, and it is also possible that Rachel just took the
idols to counteract that, or to bother her father, or because she was
scared and wanted their protection, or maybe she was just greedy.  I
do think, on the basis of the stories of Genesis and what they say
and what they don’t say, that Laban was probably an abusive parent
and employer.  Furthermore, by the story Genesis tells, Jacob himself
isn’t really converted to YHWH worship yet.  That will happen on this
journey back into the land, on the night when he is said to have
“wrestled with an angel” and gets renamed Israel.  It thus seems
unlikely that Jacob’s wives would be monotheistic at this point, and
whatever other reasons Rachel had for taking the household idols,
likely she thought they’d be a source of protection for their family.

Laban
was furious when he found out and he brought a war party with him to
go after the family.  It isn’t clear if he would have gone if it were
not for the family idols, but it sort of sounds like he is most upset
about the idols and not the loss of his children and grandchildren.

The
story gives us just enough geography to know that the place Jacob,
Leah, and Rachel were staying was INSIDE the boundaries of what would
one day be ancient Israel. It was just far enough inside that the
place Laban slept the night before he caught up with them was inside
too.  This is significant because it tells us this is both an OLD OLD
story and one that got edited as they years went by.  In the early
development of understanding YHWH, there was a time when it was
assumed that YHWH’s powers only existed within the boundaries of the
Promised Land.  Genesis tells us that Jacob had a dream involving a
message from God on his way out of the land, and Laban has one right
after he crosses into it.  It is as if God is limited by those
boundaries.  The understanding of where the boundaries would BE
however was defined by political boundaries that existed centuries
later, and the clues the text gives us imply those boundaries.  Isn’t
the Bible fun?

OK.
So Laban has a dream in which he is warned not to speak harshly to
Jacob which is most significant because it reminds us that people
used to think that God had boundaries.  Although, let’s be honest.
People still think that.  It is remarkable how people think about
churches and other places of worship as more “holy” or more
“filled with God” than other places.  When he does catch up with
the next generation of his family, Jacob is HORRIFIED as his
accusations and responds with surety that no one has done what he is
accusing them of.  That is, Jacob thinks Laban is falsely accusing
them – with good reason based on their history – and grandiosely
offers a death penalty for the one who has the idols because he is SO
SURE they don’t have them.

This
is a problem for Rachel.  Nothing of her motivation is explained in
the text but it seems clear that she decided she didn’t want to die.
She thinks fast and she comes up with a plan,  she enacts it, and it
works.  She lives, her father goes home, and all is well, except
maybe for the idols.  The plan itself, however, is proof of how
little power she otherwise had.  She used what she had – her
femininity and how it was treated in her culture – to save her own
hide.

The
plan was super simple: she put the idols underneath her and she told
her father she was menstruating.  Was she?  That’s completely unclear
and likely irrelevant.  However, she SAID she was.  By the customs of
the time, no man shouldn’t have been in her tent while she was
menstruating, and he violated that cultural expectation by examining
the rest of her tent.  He wasn’t going to push any further though,
and he left.  By putting the idols underneath her AND coming up with
a valid reason not to get up, Rachel saved her own life and got to
keep the idols she’d wanted to begin with.  She used what she had –
fear of menstruating women and an assurance that no one would check
her on that – to subvert the power of her father.

However,
she also desecrated the idols.  It sort of doesn’t matter if she
actually was menstruating on them or not, the implication is enough.
It may be that this story has multiple intentions and denigrating the
power of idols is one of them.  By the time this story was written
down the people knew the Ten Commandments, including the one about
not making idols.  It was clear that YHWH was not to be represented
in physical form, and Walter Brueggemann says that this is so that
people can’t pick up the idol, move it around, put it where they want
it, and have the sense that they control YHWH.  YHWH is not a God who
is controlled by humans.  This story, which discusses menstruating on
idols seems like a very effective reminder to those who weren’t YHWH
worshippers about the relative weakness of their gods.

The
story also functions as a story about the formation of the national
boundaries.  It claims that the Eastern boundary of Israel was first
created by a covenant between Laban and Jacob, and that as such it is
almost inherent.  

It
is also a good story – it keeps our attention pretty well.  Sadly
though, this is the last interaction that Leah and Rachel have with
their father.  Rachel is left sitting alone in her tent while the
covenant is formed and her father leaves again.  While Jacob and his
family are safe, and while Laban was likely an awful father, there is
some lingering sadness at the end.

The
biggest clue in this story that something is WRONG isn’t that Jacob
decides to leave while Laban is far away, and no one in the household
tells Laban for THREE DAYS.  That would indicate they thought they
were protecting the vulnerable from the one who was doing them harm.
Jacob got Rachel and Leah, as well as his family, out of an unsafe
home for them.

Rachel
tried to take something with her for protection along the way, and it
became the excuse by which her father almost killed them all.  In
that moment Laban sounds like an abusive partner who will kill their
partner rather than let them leave, and Laban’s dream is the only
thing that held him back.  Rachel survived, and likely they ALL
survived, because of her quick thinking and willingness to use what
she had.

Many
women throughout history have been used and abused by powerful men.
Furthermore, many PEOPLE throughout history have been used and abused
by those with more power than they had.  Some, like Rachel, use
everything they have, everything in their power, every subversive
action in the world to get out.  Sometimes they succeed.  May God
continue to guide those who seek safety, and may those who need
safety keep Rachel’s wits about them!  Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hershttp://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

October 16. 2016

Sermons

“Allowing the Boys to Live” based on Exodus 1:8-22

  • October 9, 2016February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the people are reminded that they were once slaves in Egypt. It is used to explain the Sabbath, or maybe just to explain why servants get to have Sabbath too in Ancient Israelite society. It is used in the commandments to take care of the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner as well. Basically, the people are reminded time and time again to have compassion for the vulnerable because they were once a vulnerable population.

However, there aren’t many stories about the people being enslaved in Egypt, this is one of the few. The ones that exist all revolve around Moses, and this story is the prelude to the story of Moses’ birth. It is very difficult to tell if there is any authentic memory underneath this story, because it is an old enough story that there really shouldn’t be and yet there are such epically profound truths in it about what it means to be an oppressed people and what subversiveness looks like from within oppression that it feels more true than most stories in the Bible. This story may not be a factual accounting of a particular incident in history, but because it contains so many larger truths, I’m going to treat it as if it is, and let it speak for itself.

According to the end of Genesis, the descendants of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob had all moved down to Egypt during a famine after Joseph had become the right hand person to the Pharaoh. Joseph had urged them to come down, where he could ensure that they would have sufficient food and land to be safe. The story explained that Joseph had interpreted the Pharaoh’s dream and predicted 7 years of excellent harvests followed by 7 years of famine. Pharaoh was so pleased that he elevated Joseph to the 2nd highest office in the land, and while there Joseph reigned over an agricultural policy that completely impoverished the entire nation and brought their wealth into the Pharaoh’s hands. The people ended up selling their livestock, their land, and then themselves for access to Joseph’s grain stores.

So the same guy who “saved” his family did so while utterly destroying the people of the nation he was – supposedly – serving. The new Pharaoh “didn’t know Joseph” (the Bible suggests this story happened 400 years later, so that would be reasonable). However, it is a bit ironic that the Hebrews were enslaved by the people who one of their forefathers had masterminded enslaving.

Perhaps that suggests that oppression breeds oppression, and oppressors should be careful. In any case, by the premises of this story, by this time the Egyptians were in full fledge oppressor roles and the Hebrews were enslaved by them and oppressed by them.

In our Bible Study we were struck by the similarities between the story in Exodus and the experiences of slaves here in the United States. There is something universal about this story, and it strikes cords through the eons.

Puah and Shiphrah are midwives who are given an immoral order. They are to kill all the baby boys of their people. The names Puah and Shiphrah are classically Hebrew names, and the text reminds us that they’re Hebrew as well as mentioning twice that they are in awe of God. (The “awe” is often translated “fear” but “awe” is a much better translation.) We are not supposed to miss that they’re Hebrew, or that they’re being ordered to kill the boys of their own ethnic group.

It took me entirely too long to figure out why the boys were to be killed. I was thinking of males as especially strong laborers in the fields, and wondered why you’d want to have fewer of them. If you wanted fewer descendants, I thought, why not kill the girls who have the babies and leave the workers? Our Bible Study participants responded that the death of the male babies meant that the females would be sexually available to the Egyptians, and they’d presume that as half-Egyptian – the next generation would be more pliable and “better.” The participants in the Bible Study figured this out by considering American slave history.

We also noticed the language of fear created around the oppressed group, and the dehumanization of them. The Hebrews are called “powerful” and “numerous” and the myth is that they would do harm for the Egyptians, a myth used to justify enslaving them. It is suggested that they could be spies, or fight against Egypt in a war, or abandon their posts of much needed labor. Therefore, the myth of the oppressors says, we must enslave them and double down on the harm we do to them to keep them below us.

Oppression is very powerful, and human oppressors are capable of extensive harm, but there is a resiliency to life itself, and it fights back when life is oppressed. This story says that the more the Hebrews were oppressed the more they multiplied. I think we’re supposed to believe this was God’s hand at work; I think it is more the myth of the Egyptians continuing to justify evil. In any case, both the Hebrews of this story and the African American slaves oppressed in the United States suffered great losses as a community – losses of life and identity, language and culture, dignity and hope. Yet, the communities found ways to fight back, reform, and try again and again. This story suggests that the power to do so came from God, as do many of the songs and stories that remain from the American slave era. God supports the experience of the oppressed in overcoming oppression.

The midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, were unusual women. It doesn’t seem reasonable that only two midwives could have been sufficient for all the births of the Hebrew women, so more likely they were the LEADERS of the midwives. It may even be that they were also midwives to the Egyptian women, as they imply they know the difference between each set of women giving birth. They are BRILLIANT, DEFIANT, and seemingly FEARLESS (although I’d stake a bet that they were terrified even while they kept their cool.)

They are given a direct order by the most powerful man in their country to kill the baby boys of their community and they don’t! If it is true that they were the leaders of the midwives, they give counter instructions. In any case, the voices of all the midwives are united in the shared voices of Puah and Shiphrah, and their voices respond to this immoral command with “no.” They just don’t! It makes me wonder how they had been formed as humans, and what empowered them to know better. The text says it was that they knew God, and I hope it is true for all who know God that our relationship with God empowers us to refuse to follow unjust orders, but I’ve seen it go other ways. How is it that knowing the Holy One can form us into people who more deeply believe in the sacredness of life? How is that being present to God helps us overcome our fears of the powers of the world? How were the midwives able to be so brave? I wish I knew, but for now I’ll accept the premise that God can help us overcome our fears and resist the power of oppression.

Did the midwives refuse the Pharaoh because he was Egyptian? Because the order was so atrocious? Because someone had already been training them on resisting oppression? Was it about who gave it, how terrible it was, or about who they were? How were they strong enough to simply refuse? And how were they wise enough NOT to say “no” to the Pharaoh (who would have killed them and replaced them with someone who would do what he said) but instead to simply not to it? I’d love to know, but for now I’ll accept the premise that God helped them overcome the power of the oppressor.

When they get called back to account for the live baby Israelite boys, they have a crafty answer in hand. They give a compliment to the femininity of the Egyptian women while using the fear of the Hebrews and assumptions about them to their benefit. They respond along the lines of “your women are more feminine and fragile while ours are more like animals.” To be precise, they say, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” You see? The answer they give manipulates the Pharaoh by complimenting his ethnic group and denigrating theirs, and it is believable to him. They save their boys. To do it they have to imply terrible things about the lack of humanity of the women they were related to, and they did because it was totally worth it.

Puah and Shiphrah aren’t the only ones in history who have played the assumptions of oppressors against the oppressors to gain freedom for the oppressed, but they did it as well as anyone.

Now, the incredible actions of these subversive women to save the lives of Israelite boys ended with things worse off than they started – sort of. The midwives had been told to kill the babies, the tactics then were supposed to be somewhat hidden and covert. Their actions forced his hand to make the death sentence to baby boys OVERT and visible. He continues to order the death of the baby boys, and he makes everyone responsible for it, since he hadn’t been able to control the midwives. In the short term, that meant more babies died.

But in the long term, it meant that the Hebrews lived. The overt action of the Pharaoh led to more subversive actions – by Moses’ mother and sister – and by Pharaoh’s own daughter. The fear of Pharaoh that led to his orders for murder resulted in Moses being raised in his own house – an Israelite boy who he had ordered killed. When Pharaoh raised the stakes it ended up backfiring on him and he eventually lost all his slaves.

It seems important to take note of how it must have felt to be Puah and Shiphrah in the moment when Pharaoh ordered the Hebrew babies to be thrown into the Nile. It would have felt like failure, right? They took risks with their own lives and likely the lives of those who worked with them to save the babies. They took morality and the love of God more seriously than the power of the Pharaoh/King. They fought with their wits about them for the well-being of their people and they won…

Until the Pharaoh made it worse and raised the stakes. They tried to save those baby boys and allow them to live, and then Pharaoh orders everyone to kill the baby boys and the organizational methods of the midwives can’t protect the babies anymore. Puah and Shiphrah must have been dismayed. Yet, the tactics they used ended up in one generation with the freedom of their people – instead of the death of the males of a generation and the rape of that generation’s women. Yes, things got worse. That’s what happens when you fight back against oppression. The oppressors make things worse first. Which means that when women – and men – are forced to use subversive tactics they have to be prepared for things to get much worse before they get better.

In The United Methodist Church right now, things are getting worse. The many brave people who have refused to follow unjust rules in the church have upset the status quo. Those who are committed to excluding LGBTQ people from full participation in the Body of Christ are furious that they can’t make people follow the rules. As they double-down on exclusion and tightening rules and punishments, they push the UMC toward schism. This weekend in Chicago a group of 1700 people deeply committed to exclusion gathered, and formally launched a para-Church structure they are calling the Wesleyan Covenant Association. Their first demand is that the Church end the resistance to exclusion once and for all. Since we all know that the progressives fighting for inclusion will not be silenced that is not possible. They suggest, that if resistance can’t be silenced that a plan needs to be developed to divide the denomination. Things are getting worse.

That means we are on the road to ending oppression. Thanks be to God for the midwives and all those willing and able to follow their lead. What a joy it is, in God’s holy name, to be part of ending oppression in any form. 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

October 9, 2016

Sermons

“Persistent” based on Luke 18:2-5

  • October 2, 2016February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

I recently heard a story,
it was the story of the person who told it to me, but it struck me
that it was also  many peoples’ story.  There was much to celebrate
in the story, and also a lot to be frustrated by.  The person who
told me the story was someone who lacks access to sufficient
financial resources.  That is, in the colloquial – he is poor –
although I think poverty is more complicated than that!  The man is a
father, and his daughter got into a VERY good college, despite the
challenges the family faced and the challenges their school district
faced.  As you might hope, the very good college offered this young
woman a financial aid package to make it possible for her to attend
the school.  However, when the young woman got the financial aid
package and read it over carefully, she realized that the loans she
was being offered were predatory loans that would be verging on
impossible to ever be able to pay back!  She contacted the school.
They ignored her.  She kept pestering.  They kept ignoring her.  Her
father started calling, and he started calling up the chain of
command.  He was told to stop calling.  When I heard the story,
that’s where it ended – they were unsure if the young woman would
attend the very good college because she was WAY too smart to do so
at risk to her financial future.

She sounds like the
persistent widow.  I’ve been told that the persistent widow is a very
strange character with which to start a sermon series on subversive
women – and not just because the Bible presents her as fictional.
The bigger issue is that her subversiveness isn’t very obvious.  To
the naked eye, she just looks like an annoying nag!  Actually, even
that may be projection.  This is a SHORT story, there isn’t that much
to it!  

In our study of the text
though, we found a lot to discuss about this short-storied,
fictional, persistent widow.  It is helpful to remember that the
Torah, the laws of community life that the Jewish people understood
to have come from God, were very clear about the care for widows,
orphans, and foreigners.  That would be, people who did not have the
protection of an adult male who was a member of society and were thus
vulnerable.  The system was designed so that even the vulnerable
could find ways to survive.  The Torah was also very clear about the
threat to society created by an unjust justice system, and
articulated frequently, in no uncertain terms, the need to have
judges who made rulings based on JUSTICE and not on who had more
money or influence.  

That is, the persistent
widow is stuck in a situation she shouldn’t be in.  She should be
cared for.  She isn’t!  It is likely that her “opponent” is the
person who should have been taking care of her and providing for her
livelihood, and wasn’t!  The justice system was supposed to help her
find a way to justice.  It didn’t.   She was stuck in a situation
which was untenable for her survival without a means of recourse
because of the immorality of the judge.  There was no other means by
which she could get justice.  The system was closed to her, and the
only option left to her was to agitate the system.

The judge is presented
very simplistically.  He doesn’t care about justice, people, or
God… and it sounds like he just does what he wants to do.  He is a
negative caricature of a person abusing power or authority, someone
who isn’t easy to move toward justice.

The persistent widow won
though!  I suspect that she could have taught the courses I took this
spring on non-violent direct action!  Jesus says that the judge
thought to himself,
“because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice,
so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” (v. 5) The
persistent widow didn’t have much power to use in the world, and she
didn’t have ANY power that could be used without being annoying.  So
she used what she had.  She was annoying.  She didn’t give up.  And
she annoyed him into doing what was right!  

That’s
what I think is so subversive about the persistent widow.  She can’t
have been the only widow in that city who was impoverished by a lack
of justice, she likely wasn’t even the only one to bring it to the
judge’s attention.  MANY of the widows might have been in similar
situations.  However, in cases like that, most people give up.
That’s what people are counting on, and that’s part of why injustices
sometimes win out.

I
think about that young college bound woman, and how carefully she
read the details of her financial aid package to determine that the
offer wasn’t fair.  How many other people in the same situation come
with some trust that the college they want to go to won’t do them
harm, don’t read the package, or don’t yet have the math skills to
interpret the implications?  How many people would decide to take the
package and hope for the best?  How many people would try to call and
ask if there was another loan, but give up easily?  I don’t know how
many people would get as far as the young woman I heard about, and
consider giving up their dream school, but I do know that her
persistence is NOT what the predatory loan company is counting on.

The
predatory loan company is expecting people not to pay attention, to
trust, to take a leap of faith, not to run the numbers, and to sign
on the dotted line – no matter how high the interest rate turns out
to be.  The predatory loan company is able to get away with their
loans because few people are as persistent as that young woman. The
college, as well, choose to work with that predatory loan company,
and in doing so to keep this young woman and those in similar
situations IN poverty, while pretending to help them out of it.  It
makes me wonder what they might be getting out of it.

Keeping
our eyes open to see
the injustices of the wold and REFUSING to be quiet about them once
we do is wildly subversive.  I’m claiming the persistent widow was
subversive because she was a nag, and she didn’t stop nagging until
justice was found.  It isn’t the wildest story in the Bible by any
means, but it may represent the most frequently successful mechanism
of accessing justice: refusing to give up!

One
of the challenges of acting like the persistent widow, though, is
that there are a lot of injustices in the world and none of us can
give attentiveness to all of them.  That level of nagging can’t be
multi-tasked!  This is one of the reasons I am so grateful for the
image of the Body of Christ.  I come back to it time and time again,
reminded that if I do my part faithfully, and trust the rest of the
Body to do their part (and God to do God’s part), the whole world
gets better.  Most often justice comes through collective action
(think Montgomery Bus Boycott, Women’s Suffrage, blocking the
Keystone XL pipeline), but sometimes they’re smaller or individual as
well.  On occasion we can successfully seek justice alone, but no one
of us can seek ALL justice.  If any of us try to
all the work of the Body of Christ, nothing gets done
at all!  

My
college thesis was on John Conway’s “Game of Life,” which is a
set of rules governing a grid.  On the grid, at any given moment,
each cell is “alive” or “dead” and then, from there, things
change.  The status “alive” or “dead” is represented visually
by two different colors, and those statuses are able to change with
time, based on the relationships they have with other cells who are
also “alive” or “dead.”  

One
night, deep in the trenches of trying to write up my thesis and
struggling with a decision about where to go to seminary, I went down
to the river to pray.  I sat on a dock and watched the water flow by.
As might make sense if you’d spent as many hours and months staring
at colored boxes on a graph as I had, I started imagining the river
as the graph – and imagining the graph spreading out to cover all
the water of the world.  I’d stared at colored boxes for a LONG time,
and I was tired 😉  Then, as I continued to pray, ponder, and be
overwhelmed, I started imagining one of those boxes as representing
MY life.  To my horror, the box that represented my life was
blinking!  I took this to mean that sometimes my life was
contributing to the well-being of others, but sometimes it WASN’T!  I
found myself sitting on that dock on the Connecticut River, aware
that sometimes I wasn’t benefiting the kin-dom of God and wishing
with all that I was that I could ALWAYS be good.

It
was at that point that another thought entered my mind, one that was
outside of the particular ways my thoughts tend to cycle around.
That process has been one I’ve associated with the Divine, and I have
since thought of that prayer time by the river as a vision of sorts
-but I’m also giving you the details to consider it so that you can
assess how you’d like to think about it.  The thought that entered my
mind, seemingly from beyond me, was that if I could manage to be a
blessing that contributed to the well-being of the kindom 51% of the
time, that was ENOUGH for God to be able to expand the goodness out
into the world and to be a net gain to the kin-dom.  

It
was certainly a new thought to me then, I’d leaned more towards
perfectionism than toward an idea that offering more good than bad
was a net gain!  It is a thought I’ve gone back to in the years
since, particularly when I’ve found myself being extra rough on
myself.  It helps me to consider that God is able to make things work
with what we’re able to offer.

If
we do our best, and especially if we are able to offer a bit more
good into the world than harm, then God can use what we offer in
combination with the rest of the Body of Christ.  The world becomes a
safer, fuller, more just place.  The kin-dom becomes.  We don’t have
to do all the work!  We can’t!  We’d burn out.  That means that
sometimes we have to work through the process of figuring out which
things are ours to do and which things we leave for the rest of the
Body of Christ.  Together, each of us offering the love, compassion,
and persistence that are our gifts from God, we can follow the
widow’s course and create the world that the Torah dreams and God
wants – the kin-dom of God!  And it doesn’t even require perfection
😉  Just persistence.  Thanks be to God.  Amen

  • Rev. Sara E. Baron

    First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

    603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

    Pronouns: she/her/hershttp://fumcschenectady.org/

    https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

    October 2, 2016

    Sermons

    “Shewdly” based on Luke 16:1-13

    • September 18, 2016February 15, 2020
    • by Sara Baron

    Most Biblical scholars are utterly perplexed by our Gospel parable of the week, they tie themselves in knots trying to make sense of a story they perceive to be a moral out-lier. The ones who are able to make sense of it do so by making it sound a bit like this little story. The story MIGHT be true, and it goes like this:

    Henry Ford made a trip to Ireland to visit the place of his ancestry. While he was there, two trustees from the hospital in the town he was visiting came to him asking for a donation. He agreed to give them five thousand dollars, which at the time was no small gift. In the paper the next morning, Ford saw the headline proclaiming that the generous American philanthropist Henry Ford had given fifty thousand dollars to the local hospital. As you can imagine, Ford was shocked and called the hospital to track down the two trustees he had met with. When they got to his hotel, he confronted the men about the massive mistake printed in the paper. The trustees apologized, and said they would be calling the paper immediately to correct the mistake and print a retraction, letting everyone know that Henry Ford had not given not fifty thousand, but only five thousand. Instead, Ford promised to give them another forty-five thousand. But, he gave them a stipulation: that a marble arch be erected at the hospital entrance with a plaque that read, “I was a stranger and you took me in.”1

    To be fair to most of the scholars, today’s text is complicated: it is a confusing story, it is a convoluted passage, and it has many layers of meaning. The author of the gospel of Luke – who for the sake of ease from this point forward we’ll call Luke- creates some issues for us. According to the Jesus Seminar, Luke merged together a combination of source material: 1) a parable Jesus is highly likely to have stated (vs. 1-8a); 2) a saying that probably comes substantially from Jesus’ lips (vs. 13)–neither of which is repeated in any of the other gospels; and 3) explanatory material provided by the Luke, which includes further statements placed on Jesus’ lips (vs. 8b-12, and 14).

    That is, the parable likely ends with “And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly”. The Jesus seminar puts the parable in RED, indicating that they think it was likely authentic to Jesus. They put the final saying, “No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.“ in pink, thinking it likely reflects something Jesus would have said. They distrust it a bit because of the way that Luke is using it. The stuff about trusting people to be honest in small and large matters, and using ill-gotten gains are all LUKE. It is OK to hear things from Luke, I love Luke, but it is important to separate out what Jesus was likely doing with this parable from what Luke was.

    In order to understand what Jesus was likely talking about, it would be helpful to understand more about the laws and economic systems in Roman Palestine. Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh in Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels help us out with this and win the prize as our favorite commentators of the week! They say, “Rich landowners frequently employed estate managers (often a slave born in the household) who had the authority to rent property, make loans, and liquidate debts in the name of the master …”2The manager in the parable was such an estate manager. We’re figuring he wasn’t a slave, since he has to worry about where he’d live after he loses this job. It also seems worth pointing out that the landowner is TOLD that the manager has been mismanaging, but we don’t get any evidence of the truth of the statement, nor is the manager given the chance to defend himself. It could be hearsay, but the manager is vulnerable to the accusation and now has to fend for himself.

    Back to Malina and Rohrbaugh, “Traditional Israelite law provided that an agent was expected to pay for any loss incurred by his employer for which he was responsible. He could also be put in prison to extort the funds from his family. If the dishonesty of the manager became public knowledge, he would have been seen as damaging the reputation of the master. Startlingly, however, in this story he is simply dismissed.”3 That is, the landowner is being unusually generous with the manager. Remember this because we’re going to come back to it. The commentators make it clear that the timing was IMMEDIATE, “In the case of the dismissal of an agent, this dismissal was effective as soon as the agent was informed of it, and from that time forward nothing the agent did was binding on the person who employed him. The plan worked out by the manager thus had to be enacted before word of his dismissal got back to the village.”4 The manager had to act with the element of surprise as well as with haste.

    And act he does! He gives away A LOT of money!! Malina and Rohrbaugh suggest one amount saying, “The size of the debts involved is extraordinary. Though such measures are difficult to pin down, they are probably equivalent to 900 gallons of oil and 150 bushels of wheat.”5 The Jesus seminar translated this as 500 gallons of oil and a thousand bushels of wheat.6 In any event, it was a tremendous amount. Malina and Rohrbaugh continue, “Storytelling hyperbole may be involved or, as recent investigations have suggested, the debts are large enough that they may be the tax debts of an entire village. The amount of debt forgiven, though different in percentage terms, is in both cases approximately 500 denarii.”7We know from other parables and stories of Jesus that a denarius was a day’s wage for a laborer, so we’re talking about each of these amounts being 1.5 years worth of a laborer’s wages, or about $28,000 based on today’s minimum wage in New York.

    The manager IS shrewd. He doesn’t panic at the idea of being homeless and without resources, whether or not he was guilty of the dishonest management he was accused of. He uses the landowner’s softness against him, and for the common good! Back to our commentators, “Having discovered the mercy of the landowner in not putting him in prison or demanding repayment, the manager depends upon a similar reaction in the scheme he cooks up. It is a scheme that places the landowner in a particular bind. If he retracts the actions of the manager, he risks serious alienation in the village, where villagers would have already been celebrating his astonishing generosity. If he allows the reductions to stand, he will be praised far and wide (as will the manager for having made the ‘arrangement’) as a noble and generous man.”8Now do you see how it is like the Ford story? The rich man ends up being far more generous than he intends to be, in large part because he couldn’t easily take back claims others made of his generosity.

    In vs. 8a, Jesus reflects the landowner praising the manager, “And his master commended the dishonest manager because he acted shrewdly.” By extension, Jesus was praising the actions of the manager as well–actions that brought debt relief to an entire village. The first listeners would have had an easy time identifying the themes of mercy and debt jubilee in the story, and knowing what Jesus was praising. Still, the praise given to the manager for his shrewd (and likely illegal) actions would have made the parable challenging. Jesus praises someone for tricking someone else out of a large some of money. The common good was met, but standard economic thinking suggests the landowner was cheated. Perhaps it is worth noting the the softness of the landowner, his preference for his employee, made space for his unintentional generosity. It might suggest that God is able to work with whatever softness we do have to create greater good!

    Given the social-science context for the story, it sounds a lot like others of Jesus’ parables! In fact, it sounds a lot like the instruction to turn the other cheek (which happens to be the saying of Jesus that the Jesus seminar MOST believes to be authentic.

    Luke records that saying this way, “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also”. Scholars have taught us that this was a fantastically subversive action. Superiors hit inferiors with a backhand, while a front hand slap was indicative of hitting an equal. Because the left hand was used to wipe in ancient times, only the right hand was used for everything else. To turn the other cheek was not to become a doormat – it was to requires that if another hit happened, it was one that acknowledged you as an equal! It rejected the system of oppression.

    It seems that the “parable of the shrewd manager” is another expression of this philosophy of rejecting systems of oppression (here including undue tax burdens and interest) and creatively turning them on their heads!! The shrewd manager found a way to care for himself, take care of his village, and make his former boss look good. Talk about a win/win! However, it took disregarding some rules/laws to make it happen, and the greater good was worth it. That’s what we think Jesus was trying to communicate with this passage. We are still left with the question of what Luke was trying to communicate with this passage–not just with the parable but with the passage as a whole.

    According to Joseph A. Fitzmeyer, commentator in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, an important contextual piece to be aware of is that Luke was likely writing to a wealthy Greco-Roman Christian audience. Likely Luke-Acts was written to and for his patron, Theophilus, named at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke. In this part of the narrative of Luke-Acts, Jesus was attempting to teach his disciples and followers all that was most important for them to know before his “date with destiny"in Jerusalem.9    

    Vs. 8b-14 speak to Luke’s interpretation of this parable. A key theme in this interpretation is money/wealth and the wise use of it, which is so central to Luke’s understanding of Jesus that it shows up no fewer than 8 times in the Gospel.10 This was raised by Alan Culpepper who wrote the brilliant commentary on Luke in the New Interpreter’s Bible.11

    This was an audacious message for Luke to deliver to his benefactor and his benefactor’s rich friends. To the end of making a fateful choice about whether or not to follow Jesus, Luke pushed them hard on the use of their wealth. Luke challenged them in a way that we don’t often get today. The line about not being able to serve two masters tends to either get ignored by modern day audiences when they have wealth or misinterpreted by others to mean that accumulation of money is inherently sinful. On the contrary, Luke’s audience was challenged into decisive, bold, creative actions–not a theological position on whether money is good or bad.

    Unlike perhaps most of us, they were more likely to identify with the landowner and his experience of being manipulated into generosity. Luke pushed them to consider the steward, who in our parable faced not only the loss of his position but of his livelihood! He acted decisively, boldly, and creatively!    He acted in a way that would have brought mercy and jubilee to an entire village and love to his master, while costing his master a LOT of money.    Luke’s audience faced a situation that required bold, decisive, creative actions: whether or not they would follow the way of Jesus. This choice was encumbered with life-altering implications for how they used their wealth. Hanging onto it meant rejecting Jesus, rejecting God, and rejecting eternal life. Following Jesus meant something more and other than just giving their money away. It meant using wealth as a tool for mercy and jubilee, for bringing about God’s kin-dom on earth. It meant upending an economic system of usery and exploitation. It meant upending the fabric of the existing social contract.

    Today, we face the same choice. Today we are relentlessly bombarded with messages about being consumers and needing to shop now and later today and tomorrow and every day so we can consume and needing to work in the highest paying jobs possible so we can support that consumption. Our society and economic system compel us into lives built on the exploitation of the poor, the marginalized and of this planet until they have nothing left to give us. The myths of our society are designed to silence objections: the cries for relief of the poor are said to be class warfare, global climate change is called a “theory”, the well-being of the economy is used as a proxy for the common good, and – of course – we’re told that any real change to our economy or the abuse of our planet would cost jobs, bankrupt businesses, and waste hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. That is, we’re told in many ways (large and small) that we can’t afford to be a just society because it would upend our society as we know it. This misses the point that not only can’t we afford to continue life as we know it, and upending society is going to have to happen to create an actually just society, but we are called to a higher way of being and a higher way of living in relation to each other.

    Are we bold enough to follow Jesus?    Are we willing to rock the boats of stability that keep the oppressed down?    Are we decisive enough to follow Jesus?    Are we willing and able to differentiate between the desires of consumerism and the needs of the kin-dom?    Are we creative enough to follow Jesus?    Can we see through the claims the economic system makes clearly enough to see how the system steals from the poor to give to the rich?

    Finally, are we shrewd enough to follow Jesus? Given the broken systems that oppress, are we shrewd enough to mess them up? Jesus praises the shrewd and rewards bold, decisive, creative action. Let’s go and do! Amen

    —

    1Story told by Nichole Torbitzky in “September 18, 2016-Proper 20 (Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost)” on the website “Process and Faith”http://processandfaith.org/lectionary-commentary/september-18-2016-proper-20-eighteenth-sunday-after-pentecost/” accessed on 9/17/16.

    2Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) “Textual Notes: Luke 16:1-16” p. 292.

    3Malina and Rohrbaugh, 292.

    4Malina and Rohrbaugh, 292.

    5Malina and Rohrbaugh, 293.

    6Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Autthentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), pp. 557-9.

    7Malina and Rohrbaugh, 293.

    8Malina and Rohrbaugh, 293.

    9Joseph A. Fitzmeyer, “Luke-Acts, Propaganda for World Mission: The Church’s Internal and External Relations” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, edited by Howard Clark Kee, et. al. (Cambridge University Press: USA, 1997) pp. 519-523.

    10Jesus denounces the greed of Pharisees in Luke 11:39-41. A rich fool forfeits his soul in 12:13-21. Jesus speaks of a prudent steward in 12:42-48. Jesus tells a parable in which the outcasts are called to a great banquet in 14:15-24. Jesus speaks of the cost of discipleship and giving up all possessions in 14:33. And finally, the parable of the prodigal son in 15:11-32 immediately precedes today’s reading.

    11R. Alan Culpepper, “Luke” in Leadner Keck, ed. , The New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press: 1995).

    –

    Rev. Sara E. Baron and Kevin M. Nelson

    First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

    603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

    http://fumcschenectady.org/

    https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

    September 18, 2016

    Sermons

    “Utterly Ridiculous Actions” based on Luke 15:1-10

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

    I’m
    going to start by answering Jesus’ presumptive questions, because I
    know the answers. It is really exciting to know the answers to
    questions Jesus asks, because they are usually trick questions, but I
    have these. “Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one
    of them. Does he not leave the 99 in the open country and go after
    the lost sheep until he finds it?”  

    NO.
    – What are you crazy?  Have you met sheep?  They are seriously the
    dumbest creatures God ever created (ok, fine, they are tied with
    deer).  If you leave 99 sheep behind while you go look for one that
    got lost, when you come back, you’ll have 70, if you are lucky.  I
    mean, I was a camp counselor, and we went over the “lost camper
    plan” and step one as a counselor is that you STAY WITH THE CAMPERS
    YOU STILL HAVE.  (The support staff looks for the lost camper, you
    work on not losing another.)

    NO,
    you don’t go after that sheep.  Not unless you have a really good
    team backing you up, and it doesn’t sound like you do.

    Next
    question?  “Or what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses
    one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search
    carefully until she finds it?  When she has found it she calls
    together her (female) friends and neighbors …”  Um.  No one.
    Because a silver coin is a days wage for a laborer and it is
    basically enough to buy half a loaf of bread, and no one can afford
    to throw a party for their neighborhood because they just found a
    coin that would cover 1/20th of that cost.  I’ll agree
    that she’d search for the coin, it is after all 1/10th of
    her life savings, but NO she wouldn’t throw a party.  Are you nuts?

    These
    two parables feel like Jesus is doing a really bad Childrens’ Time
    with all of us, waiting for us to object with the most basic of
    reasoning, and then laughing at his presumed stupidity.  

    The
    problem is that I’ve been preaching regularly for 10 years now, and I
    know not to trust it when Jesus appears to be an idiot. I’ve learned
    that he only plays dumb to get our attention.  So, what is really
    going on here?  It seems that the key to understanding Luke 15 is in
    paying attention to the opening paragraph.  “Now
    all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him.
    And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This
    fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’“ (Luke 15:1-2,
    NRSV)

    Curious.
    The New Testament seems to assume that some people are sinners and
    others aren’t.  Modern Christianity seems to assume that all people
    are sinners (although if we look at actions and not just words, there
    is an assumption that some people are WORSE sinners than others, but
    no one cops to that).  What did it mean to call some people sinners
    in those days?  R. Alan Culpepper, who wrote the commentary on Luke
    for the New Interpreter’s Bible says “Those designated as ‘sinners’
    by the Pharisees would have included not only persons who broke moral
    laws but also those who did not maintain ritual purity practiced by
    the Pharisees.”1
    I’m mesmerized by the idea of sin being finite enough that many
    people wouldn’t qualify as sinners.  It might take some of the guilt
    off of life if, at least once in a while, we “weren’t sinners.”

    The
    so -called sinners are set up in contrast to the Pharisees and
    scribes, people who were religious insiders.  (To be precise,
    Pharisees weren’t religious insiders at the time of Jesus, but they
    were when Luke was writing his gospel, so we’re going to live with it
    for today.)  The religious insiders were concerned about the access
    the religious OUTSIDERS were getting.  

    I
    chose to use this text this week because I didn’t understand it at
    all, and I took a leap of faith that some commentators would be able
    to help me with it.  Sometimes life works out exactly as planned, and
    I discovered AMAZING work in the commentary series Feasting on the
    Word by Charles Cousar (Professor Emeritus of New Testament at
    Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia.) and Penny Nixon
    (Senior Minister at Congregational Church of San Mateo, United Church
    of Christ).  The rest of this sermon is indebted to their genius, and
    largely to their words 😉

    “Often
    this parable unfolds in a way that emphasizes the redemption of the
    ‘lost,’ but it is the ‘already found’ that the parable is meant to
    bring to repentance.”2
    Issues arise because in verse one the tax collectors and sinners are
    coming near, and the ones who think they have an exclusive right to
    be there are getting antsy.  Jesus seems to respond that the ones who
    are “lost” are already a part of the flock.  They are lost out of
    the flock, or in the house.  They already count.  

    The
    two parables are the same idea, they repeat for the sake of getting a
    point across, or maybe because it is fun to have God as both a
    shepherd (hated by Luke’s time) and a woman – and make most people
    anxious at once.  The Pharisees and scribes are said to be mad
    because Jesus ate with sinners, which according to Luke he’s done all
    of once by this point.  They’re annoyed, “especially because the
    sinners are ‘hearing’ Jesus.  ‘Hearing’ for Luke is a sign of
    repentance and conversion.  Like the prophet Jonah in the Hebrew
    Scriptures, the Pharisees and scribes do not take kindly to
    the possible repentance of those who lie outside their definition of
    the redeemable.”3

    I
    fear they’re not the only ones who feel that way.  Have you
    heard about the Wesleyan Covenant Association?  They’re an emerging
    group within the United Methodist Church who are trying to take
    Luke’s “Pharisees and scribes” as their models for behavior.
    Emerging as in their initial meeting is in October in Chicago.  Their
    stated goals start with “Connect
    evangelical, orthodox United Methodists with one another in a common
    ministry of the gospel,” and culminate with “To uphold and
    promote biblical teaching on marriage and human sexuality.”  (You
    might be shocked to learn that they don’t actually mean “biblical
    teaching on marriage and human sexuality” as  I understand it.
    They mean excluding the LGBTQ community from the Body of Christ.) The
    Wesleyan Covenant Association is designated to be an alternative
    structure that can become a new denomination, based on the litmus
    test of believing that excluding God’s children from the church is
    the best way forward.  That is, they
    do not take kindly to the welcome of people who lie outside of their
    definition of worthy of God’s love, and they are willing to break a
    denomination over it and define themselves by it.

    4

    Unfortunately,
    the Wesleyan Covenant Association is NOT the only group of people who
    immediately come to mind as trying to mold themselves after the
    scribes and Pharisees rather than after Jesus.  On this 15th
    anniversary of the attacks of September 11th,
    2001, we live in a country where many people are calling for the
    exclusion of Muslims, the registration of Muslims, and closed doors
    to the refugees of the world.  We have a repeat of the ideology that
    existed before World War II and kept many Jewish families from
    receiving the welcome they needed to stay alive, except this time
    with Muslims.  Instead of learning the lesson that violence begets
    violence and the world needs food, peace, and hope from the attacks
    of September 11th,
    we have people calling for greater violence, less humanity, and
    thereby the creation of more and more desperate people willing to
    join extremist groups.  Our sisters and brothers in faith who know
    God through the teachings of Mohammad are particularly vulnerable
    today, as they grieve with the rest of America.

    Getting
    back to the deceptively complicated parables, both the sheep and the
    coin are passive.  As one commentator explains, “A
    lost sheep that is able to bleat out in distress often will not do
    so, out of fear.  Instead it will curl up and lie down in the wild
    brush, hiding from predators.  It is so fearful in its seclusion that
    it cannot help its own rescue.  The sheep is immobilized, so the
    shepherd must bear its full weight to bring it home.”5
    Furthermore according to Cousar, “Neither a sheep nor a coin can
    repent.  The issue of the
    two parables, therefore, is not to call sinners to repentance, but to
    invite the righteous to join the celebration.”

    Let
    me say that again.  “The issue of the two parables, therefore, is
    not to call sinners to repentance, but to invite the righteous to
    join the celebration.”  He goes on to quote Alan Culpper who said,
    “’Whether one will join the celebration is all-important, because
    it reveals whether one’s relationships are based on merit or mercy.
    Those who find God’s mercy offensive cannot celebrate with the
    angels when a sinner repents. They exclude themselves from God’s
    grace.’ The Pharisees and the scribes put themselves outside of the
    circle of divine grace by the way in which they grumble at Jesus’
    fellowship with tax collectors and sinners.  There is no joy or
    celebration, no partying or delight, among Pharisees and scribes.
    Even though invited to the reception given in behalf of the joyous
    shepherd/woman, they cannot bring themselves to come; thereby, like
    the elder brother (15:25-32), they are exposed.”6
     Indeed, when Amy Jill Levine was in Schenectady speaking on the
    Parable of the Prodigal (which immediately follows these parables),
    she said that the point of the parable is the question of if  the
    older brother will accept grace or reject it after all.  It therefore
    raises the question about ourselves as well.

    *Cough*
    Wesleyan Covenant Association *Cough*  (Seriously, this is so easy I
    feel guilty about it.)

    I
    have one more gem to share with you from these wise commentators.
    Nixon asks about the sheep and the coin, “Is it a search to save or
    to welcome?  It is one thing to ‘save’ and another to ‘welcome.’
    Religious insiders are more comfortable with saving the lost than
    welcoming those whom they perceive to be lost.  Saving is
    about power, whereas welcoming is about intimacy.
    Saving is primarily focused on the individual, whereas welcoming is
    focused on the community.”7
     *SNAP*

    These
    texts present God as the hound-dog of heaven, searching out anyone
    who would for any reason believe they are not welcome or not worthy
    and proving that person wrong!  All we are asked to do is
    celebrate with God when goodness transforms the lives of those
    who desperately need it!  All we have to do is rejoice with God!  And
    apparently, sometimes, that’s too hard.  It is easier to think of
    people as needing to be saved (and assimilated into our way of doing
    things), and harder to make space to truly welcome all of God’s
    children and allow them to impact our lives in deep ways.

    But
    that’s the call: to be welcoming and open to intimate friendship and
    relationship with all God’s children, and to rejoice when the welcome
    is received.  May God’s grace guide us to be the ones who are able to
    rejoice!  Amen

    1R.
    Alan Culpepper, “Luke” in Leadner Keck, ed. , The New
    Interpreter’s Bible     (Nashville:
    Abingdon Press: 1995), 9: 295.

    2G.
    Penny Nixon, “Homiletical Perspective on Luke 15:1-10” in
    Feasting on the Word, Year C Volume 4,
    edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Westminster
    John Knox Press: Louisville, Kentucky, 2010) p. 69.

    3Charles
    B. Cousar, “Exegetical Perspective on Luke 15:1-10” in Feasting
    on the Word, Year C Volume 4,
    edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Westminster
    John Knox Press: Louisville, Kentucky, 2010) p. 69.

    4http://www.wesleyancovenant.org/purposebeliefs
    accessed on 9/10/16.  The access date is especially important as the
    wording has already been known to change without notice 😉

    5Helen
    Montgomery Debevoise “Pastoral Perspective on Luke 15:1-10” in
    Feasting on the Word, Year C Volume 4,
    edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Westminster
    John Knox Press: Louisville, Kentucky, 2010) p. 70

    6Cousar
    (quoting Alan Culpepper in “Luke” in the New Interpreter’s
    Bible, 1995).

    7Nixon,
    71.

    –

    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

    September 11, 2016

    Sermons

    “Love-vines” based on Isaiah 5:1-7

    • August 14, 2016February 15, 2020
    • by Sara Baron

    I’m told it takes years to build a vineyard, and it takes pretty choice land as well. Vineyards need sandy or loose soil, they need lots of sun by day and dew at night. Israel exists in a desert climate so building a vineyard there means that access to enough water would be imperative too. The work of building a vineyard is physically demanding, requiring people to work together. In Israel, big boulders need to be moved (they’re a regular feature of the land), walls and towers have to be built to to protect the space from predators and thieves, and a ditch had to be dug around the wall. The land needed to be hoed by hand – plowing wouldn’t do, and that was hard work too! Wine presses had to be made as well, and in Biblical times they were made by hewing out those large boulders!1 (Imagine!) And then, grapevines don’t produce fruit until their 3rd season.

    Vineyards are hard work, and big investments. Both now, and in Biblical times, not just anyone can afford to support land that wasn’t producing for 3 years, not to mention paying people to do the heavy lifting and hard labor in the meantime! The act of domesticating the land in order to produce domesticated grapes is intense.

    From the earliest examples of literature, vineyards and gardens have been used to talk about fertility, love, and sex.2 The metaphors are pretty easy to follow, and I’m guessing you don’t need explanations.  Furthermore, grapes are a common symbol of fertility – likely the threefold combination of the clusters of grapes themselves giving expression to the idea of MANY, the impact of drinking wine, and the human eye’s enjoyment of curvy things all had impact in that!  The Bible regularly uses vineyards as metaphors of sexuality as well. (The Bible also regularly acknowledges the horror of planting a vineyard and not being around to enjoy the fruits of your labor!)

    It is interesting, though, isn’t it? Vineyards and gardens are intentional growing places, domesticated to allow for optimal growing conditions and care. That they become common symbols and allegories for human fertility is a bit ironic, as most of the mysteries of human fertility were unknown to the ancients and many are still unknown to us. The choice of the symbolism itself suggests humans wanting to have more control over sexuality and fertility than they do!!

    Let’s look at a few of the places that the Bible intentionally connects the ideas of fertility/sexuality and vineyards. One comes from Deuteronomy 20:5-7:

    Then the officials shall address the troops, saying, “Has anyone built a new house but not dedicated it? He should go back to his house, or he might die in the battle and another dedicate it Has anyone planted a vineyard but not yet enjoyed its fruit? He should go back to his house, or he might die in the battle and another be first to enjoy its fruit. Has anyone become engaged to a woman but not yet married her? He should go back to his house, or he might die in the battle and another marry her.”

    While these are three separate ideas, they are also three interconnected ones, and I believe the order is intentional. The metaphors are most striking in Song of Songs:

    My mother’s sons were angry with me; they made me keeper of the vineyards, but my own vineyard I have not kept! (1:6)

    My beloved is to me a cluster of henna blossoms in the vineyards of En-gedi. (1:14)

    Catch us the foxes, the little foxes, that ruin the vineyards— for our vineyards are in blossom.” (2:15)

    Let us go out early to the vineyards, and see whether the vines have budded, whether the grape blossoms have opened and the pomegranates are in bloom. There I will give you my love. (7:12)

    Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon; he entrusted the vineyard to keepers; each one was to bring for its fruit a thousand pieces of silver. My vineyard, my very own, is for myself; you, O Solomon, may have the thousand, and the keepers of the fruit two hundred! (8:11-12)

    There is a lot of vineyard imagery in this relatively short book, isn’t there? Now, I should have been clearer about the metaphor, the vineyard/garden is usually used as a reference for FEMALE fertility.

    Which is why the opening line of today’s passage is so very interesting. It sounds like a female voice to begin with, her beloved’s vineyard might first be assumed to be HER. “Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill.” Love and vineyards, not only do they classically work well together, they create a well-known direction to start off this passage. It is a love song with a vineyard motif. That’s a genre anyone can follow. It would be reasonable for the hearers to assume that we are going to get into some more Song of Songs like stuff!  

    The text goes on to explain that all the appropriate care has been given to the vineyard: all the hard work has been done. Boulders were cleared, vines were planted, a watch-tower was built, the wine press was dug out of stone itself, and it is implied that even the wall had been built. But the vineyard didn’t produce what was expected. With all that work, the vineyard owner would be expected some great wine – and, um, love.

    Instead, only very seedy, un-juicy wild grapes emerged, perhaps the same kind that were growing the vineyard before the work was begun. That’s wrong! It isn’t supposed to go that way. All the hard work is supposed to produce something! In fact, it is supposed to produce something wonderful: domesticated grapes! Which are good for food directly, for food as raisins, for a sweetener AND for wine. After all, that’s why people go through all the work of the vineyard building: it is supposed to be worth it.

    In this metaphor, supposedly about love, the vineyard owner decides to give up, and allow the wild to reclaim the vineyard. Connecting it back to the opening verses, it seems possible the “vineyard owner” is divorcing his wive because of her lack of fertility with him. The act of domestication had failed in this vineyard, and the vineyard owner isn’t intending to put more effort into it. No more work! The wall and the protective hedge will be destroyed. No more weeding! No more pruning! No more hoeing! And no more rain….

    Which is the point when we are supposed to figure out this isn’t just a weird story about the wrong crop growing up. Normal vineyard owners don’t control the rain. This is when it becomes clear that this metaphor is about God and the people. This is when the text gets super confusing about who the one who calls God her beloved is too, but I don’t have a single answer for that. (Feel free to come up with your own answer.)

    The final line of our text is the prophet Isaiah interpreting the song/story that has just been told. It feels a bit like a parable of Jesus that comes along with interpretation. The prophet explains, “For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!” (5:7)

    Now, the explanation doesn’t go quite as far as the metaphor does! The story ends with a suggestion of destruction, leaving us waiting for a declaration about exile! Yet, the interpretation just explains how the Israelites were supposed to be different, and aren’t. They were meant to be God’s dream for goodness in the world, but they’re just like the rest of the wild grapes. They have been domesticated: tenderly cared for and loved, but that hasn’t impacted what has grown from them. Instead of behaving with God’s justice and extending God’s love by caring for the poor, the widows, the orphans, the foreigners, and the vulnerable, the people of God have refused to participate in justice. They’ve rejected mercy for each other, and can’t call themselves righteous. The text talks of cries and bloodshed, suggesting that the ways people were being mistreated weren’t trivial: they were matters of life and death. The lack of justice meant the most vulnerable people were dying.

    The people of God were acting like the wild grapes, the ones that hadn’t known tender love and care. They were receiving what God gave to them, but not letting it impact how they treated others.

    This wasn’t God’s dream for the people. God planted justice and righteousness, but it didn’t grow. Rev. Paul Simpson Duke, currently copastor of First Baptist Church of Ann Arbor and Campus Minister for the American Baptist Campus Foundation at the University of Michigan, along with his wife, Stacey wrote in a commentary, “Any good news? Well, it is a love song. It ends badly. Has God stopped planting vineyards or restoring ruined ones? The bad news is that we can still be useless and a lethal danger to the world and to ourselves. The good news is that Someone still sings, plows, plants, guards, and looks for good fruit. In this is enough hope to set us humming bits of the song at least, and living toward its true ending, Love’s own harvest, sweet justice, festive righteousness, a cup of joy in the lifted hands of all.”3

    It turns out that the use of the vineyard imagery wasn’t accidental, nor was the opening line claiming to be a love song! The love song part seems a little bit Country-Western, in talking about how the beloved did the person wrong, but it is still a love song. In truth, historically, there was an exile, but there was also a return. The vineyards around Jerusalem were destroyed, and later rebuilt. God’s work in the world certainly continues, even if it is a source of IMMENSE frustration to God that we KEEP ON missing the memos on justice, righteousness, and treating each other like we matter! “Someone still sings, plows, plants, guards, and looks for good fruit.“  God may well be tempted to give up on us every once in a while, but as we are told again and again, “God’s steadfast love endures forever.”

    God is One with a long-view – longer even than than the person who thinks to start planting a vineyard. God still thinks we are fertile soil, capable of producing justice, righteousness, and a world of peace and love. May we take the ministrations of God – the planting and pruning, the protections and the watering, the hewing, and the watching over – and allow them to transform us into ever more fertile soil that may produce exactly what God wants: justice, righteousness, and love. Amen

    1To my horror, the things I thought I knew about vineyards were affirmed here: Fred Wight, “Manner and Customs of Bible Lands” chapter 20http://www.baptistbiblebelievers.com/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=TGctIUL-BsY%3D&tabid=232&mid=762. 1953, Accessed 8/11/16

    2 C S Lewis, Allegory of Love Oxford (University Press 1936).

    3Paul Simpson Duke, “Homeletical Perspective on Isaiah 5:1-7” found on page 345 of “Feasting on the Word Year C Volume 3” edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2010).    

    –

    Rev. Sara E. Baron

    First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

    603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

    http://fumcschenectady.org/

    https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

    August 14, 2016

    Sermons

    “Teaching Ephraim to Walk” based on Hosea 11:1-11

    • July 31, 2016February 15, 2020
    • by Sara Baron

    The imagery of God as a loving parent in this text is particularly beautiful. However, one commentator suggested that it creates a problem for preachers: if we present God as a “father” we’re continuing the damage done by lifting the masculine above the feminine; if we present God as the generic “parent” it feels cold and distant; and if we present God as a nurturing mother we conflate nurturing with motherhood and do damage to nurturing men, women who are not mothers, and people whose mothers were not nurturing.

    I’m going to have to go with the idea that these are not all EQUAL problems. While I do think it is possible to reclaim the neutral “parent” as close and connected, I think that the world is more in need of a counter image to God-as-Father. That being said, the concerns about God-as-Nurturing-Mother are worth acknowledging. So, please, know this: not all us have (or have been) the healthy sort of mothers that we would want; there are incredibly nurturing men, and we are grateful for the ways that their forms of nurture benefit the world; AND there are a lot of ways that women contribute to the well-being of the world beyond motherhood. Finally, feminine does not equal nurturing. Duh. There. That being dealt with, let’s look at this amazing text of Hosea!

    Did you hear the verbs attributed to God? I loved, I called, I taught, I took them up in my arms, I healed, I led, I lifted, I bent down, I fed. These are tender, sweet verbs. They describe a loving, nurturing parent who wants the very best for their child. There are a few places where the description tends to sound more feminine and maternal. The images, “I taught Ephraim to walk”, “I took them up in my arms”, “I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks”, “I bent down tot hem and fed them” all sound like a mother caring for a baby or a toddler. The love between the mother and the child is tangible – even as the text acknowledges that the beloved child is currently acting like rebellious teenager!

    Did you catch that part? “The more I called them, the more they went from me”, “They did not know that I healed them”, “they have refused to return to me”, “they are bent on turning away from me!” Just in case you are confused about language, the “child” or “son” in this passage is variously called “Ephraim” and “Israel” which mean exactly the same thing in this case. Hosea was a northern prophet who was speaking to the northern kingdom of Israel in during the last kingship of Israel before it lost in battle to Assyria and was exiled. The terms Ephraim and Israel were used interchangeably sort of like we say “America” and “The US”. The text is believed to have been edited, rather strongly, by the southern kingdom after their exile AND return. The southern kingdom seems to have heard truth in the words and wanted to claim them for themselves, particularly that the God’s love wouldn’t run out on them.

    There are, however, some theological challenges to this passage. Most interpreters hear punishment in the text, and then hear it resolved through God’s loving nature. I have yet to be convinced by anyone or anything that God actually punishes people, so I find that problematic. I do believe that most of the people who lived in Biblical times and who wrote and edited the words of the Bible believed that God punished, so that certainly explains why it might show up like that.

    However, I don’t THINK this text actually says that God punishes! I think people are so used to text that do, that they project it onto this one. Listen carefully: “They shall return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria shall be their king, because they have refused to return to me.” (Hosea 11:5 NRSV) It doesn’t say – or even imply – that this is a punishment. It could just as easily be a consequence. Because of their actions, particularly the political choices of their leaders to make alliances with Egypt against Assyria, things would go wrong. Their schemes were going to lead to destruction.

    Now, I really like my interpretation of that bit of the text – consequence instead of punishment – but it creates a problem soon thereafter. In verses 8-9, the words attributed to God are, “How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” Now, if we’d stuck with the idea that God was going to punish the people, then we’d have the easy way out here: God is a God of mercy and while God could justly punish the people, God chooses to follow God’s nature and be merciful instead. (Mercy IS “compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm.”) That’d be grand – other than assuming that when bad things happen to us it is because God is punishing us and making God a really abusive parent.

    However, if we go with MY theory that God is simply pointing out the consequences of their actions, then this part of the text suggests that God is deciding whether or not to interfere with the people’s free will. Furthermore, after some serious soliloquy, God decides TO interfere and change the course of human history. Sometimes fixing things makes them worse – and that definitely applies to trying to draw good theology out of the Bible!

    There are good things here though, and I still think they are worth fighting for. Those last few verses make the fantastic claim that God is not like mortals, and what makes God holy is God’s capacity for mercy. That’s worth hearing, particularly if we are trying to be holy like God!

    Having written myself into a corner, as I often do, now is the time you get to watch me wiggle back out of it! Now, as I often do, I’m going to suggest taking the text VERY seriously. What if the prophet is proclaiming things that are true: that God is like a tender mother who adores her children, that God’s people are like rebellious teenagers, that the actions of God’s people are going to cause them a whole lot of trouble, that like any good parent God is going to struggle to decide how much God should help out the teenager for the trouble they got themselves into, and that in the end God really really want to help the beloved child – sort of like an overly compassionate mother? That doesn’t HAVE to imply an invasion of free will…. it could just be a decision of how much help to OFFER!

    Then we come to a new question! When we as a people get ourselves stuck in really bad situations, how is it that we think God helps? Does God change reality and the physical properties of nature around us? Does God interfere with our free will? Does God change the hearts of other people around us – and thereby interfere with THEIR free will?

    Or is it more subtle? Does God simply stay with us in the bad times and make sure we aren’t alone? Does God help us by guiding us to creative solutions? Does God help us by giving us the courage to admit our mistakes and ask those around us for mercy and help? Does God help us by encouraging those willing to listen to offer us love and compassion?

    The more I think about it, the more I think the beginning of this passage fits with its middle and its end. Israel is presented as variously a baby, a toddler, and a teenager. Those are all people that are allowed to make mistakes, to not know, to need some guidance. They are even people – at least the toddler and the teenager- who are EXPECTED to rebel. Often as grown-ups we’ve bought into the story that we aren’t supposed to make mistakes anymore, and that we are now supposed to know things. It makes it much harder for us when we are stuck in difficult situations to get out – because sometimes it feels like admitting that we are imperfect is the same as admitting that we are failures. Unlike the grace given by healthy parents to children, we sometimes forget to give ourselves grace when we make a mistake! Israel is presented like a child making a mistake, and God is presented as righteously angry – and gracious nonetheless.

    I have told you this story before, but it is the best one I know, so I’m going to tell you again.

    Julian of Norwich was a 14th century mystic in England who wrote the potent little book, “Revelations of a Divine Love” based on a mystical experience she had while desperately ill, and decades of prayerful reflection on it afterward. She tells one of my favorite stories, intending to clarify the relationship between people and God. This is my synopsis of it:

    A servant dearly loves their ruler. The ruler asks the servant to go run an errand, and the servant is THRILLED to get do so something to help the ruler. The servant, however, so dearly loves the ruler than even while hurrying away to do the ruler’s errand, the servant keeps looking at the ruler, loathe to let the ruler out of their sight. In this awkward form of movement, the servants doesn’t notice a hole, and falls right into it, all the way down to the bottom.

    The hole is deep, and there is no ladder. The servant is trying to scratch their way back up, to continue the errand, all while berating themselves for their stupidity, “I should have watched where I was going, I’m of no use to the ruler now! How could I have done this! The ruler will be so disappointed! I’ve messed everything up again! Isn’t that just like me!”

    The servant, trying again and again to climb out and failing, berating themselves silently, fails to look up and notice that the ruler is at the top of the hole, smiling kindly, and offering their hand to the servant.

    God is often the one standing at the top of the hole in which we are berating ourselves, offering us a way out. Sometimes our own guilt, or the ways we berate ourselves, keep us from hearing God’s possibilities for our lives. In my own life, I have found that I really believe that God is capable of forgiving everything I do – but I’m not! Many times, instead of asking for God’s forgiveness (which I think comes automatically), I’ve had to ask God to help me forgive myself, so that I can move into the creative solutions that God offers.

    This may be all the more important in community. The harms that we have done to one another in the past are imperative to recognize, but guilt rarely helps move anyone toward healing! Learning to acknowledge our individual and communal failings without dwelling in guilt and shame is another way of learning to walk – in grace.

    Some of the work of learning to walk in grace is the work of self-forgiveness, and it is pretty important to make space for the goodness that God offers each of us. Truly, God is patient in teaching the people to walk – in grace. May we be patient with ourselves and each other in this process. Amen

    –

    Rev. Sara E. Baron

    First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

    603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

    http://fumcschenectady.org/

    https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

    July 31, 2016

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    • First United Methodist Church
    • 603 State Street
    • Schenectady, NY 12305
    • phone: 518-374-4403
    • fax: 518-374-6060
    • alt: 518-374-4404
    • email: fumcschenectady@yahoo.com
    • facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady
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