“Gold and Honey, Meat and Bread” based on Numbers 11:4-6,…

September 27, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

We have completed two weeks of the Young Adult study on Genesis, which by our process means we’ve gotten through 4 chapters, and I have learned a lot. We have Study Bibles and we have commentaries, and there is a lot to be gleaned from all of them. Rather excitingly, they rarely agree.

Last week, the Jewish Study Bible made a fantastic contribution to our study. It pointed out that in Jewish culture, salvation is understood to come from the study of the Torah. The Torah is the first five books of the Bible, shared in both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. They are the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The study of the Torah is the goodness of life in Judaism. Historically this was what adult men did, if they could, every day. In Judaism the study of the Torah is much more about the questions than the answers, and all the cumulative study has lead to truly great questions.

The Jewish Study Bible suggested that the Jews aren’t looking for a Messiah to save them because they have the study of the Torah to making meaning in life, and they didn’t need saving. I have some reasons to argue with that premise historically, but I’m going to refrain from it because I think it has value and deserves to be heard. Furthermore, if their claim had been “some Jews” or “most Jews” I wouldn’t even have an argument, so let’s go with that. Most Jews are not and have not been looking for Messiah to save them, because they have the study of the Torah and that’s enough!!

It certainly makes sense out of the Psalm, which is praising the Torah. It may be helpful to remember that what is called in Judaism the Torah has usually been called in Christianity “the law.” Hear again the beginning of our reading from Psalm 19:

The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; the decrees of the LORD are sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the LORD is clear, enlightening the eyes; the fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever; the ordinances of the LORD are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb. (Psalm 19:7-10)

That text is SERIOUSLY in favor of the Torah, isn’t it? It even sounds like an understanding of the Torah as a source of salvation, if you think of salvation as being about life, wisdom, joy, enlightenment, truth, righteousness and goodness. That would fit most people’s idea of salvation.

I once taught a Bible Study on Deuteronomy, mostly because no one I knew had studied it before. With the guidance of Walter Brueggemann’s commentary, we discovered that we loved the book! It set out a vision for humanity that was attainable and yet remarkable. The vision wanted to keep everyone out of poverty, and did so by preventing the acquisition of wealth. The vision wanted to eliminate harm done to widows, orphans, and foreigners, (cumulatively “the vulnerable”) and set up systems to care for them. The vision wanted to ensure that people were attending to good living, and set up a way to support a priesthood so some people’s job could be working out how life could be lived well. It is an enthralling vision. Fair warning though, if you go to read it, don’t try that without Brueggemann’s commentary, and preferably a group. The Bible can be convoluted at times and horrifying at others, without the right resources to guide the conversation.

Deuteronomy is a part of the Torah, and in some ways it is a summary of the other 4 books. I’m with the Psalmist about the wonder of the Torah, and I love the Jewish idea of salvation via engagement with these profound texts, but there are some rather surprising things that would happen if one took that idea seriously. For instance, you’d be taking stories like the one we read from Numbers as salvific. And the Numbers reading isn’t exactly about perfect human living.

In fact, the Numbers reading is an example of how awful people can be. The people have been brought out of slavery into freedom and they are being cared for by God’s own self. (Sometimes you have to just go with the story to hear what it has to say on its own terms, before you fight with it.) They’re whining. They’re whining about how great they had it back in the day when they were slaves. They’re whining about how great the food was. “We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.” For nothing!?!?! They were slaves. While they likely didn’t pay for food, they also didn’t get paid for their labor, and they were given food in order to keep them alive so they’d keep working.

So, the people who have been brought out of slavery and are being given manna to eat in the desert are whining about the lack of diversity of food. Moses and God find this annoying, which seems rather reasonable. But before God can get too upset it, Moses takes his anger out to God in prayer, and starts whining about what a heavy burden it is to deal with this annoying people. This puts God in the place of having to be the fixer, instead of getting upset. In this narrative, whining, complaining, and nagging work on God. Just saying. It hasn’t ever worked for me, but it works in this narrative.

Some of the text gets skipped in our reading, but it basically says that God responds “You want meat? I’ll give you meat until it comes out of your noses.” God is very personified, huh? In the meantime the authority of Moses got shared with 70 others (which was really significant as a leadership number in the ancient priesthood), who have a funny one-time prophesy experience. And the prophesying includes the 2 guys who were picked to be part of the 70 but played hooky. Then Joshua gets upset with them because they’re stepping on Moses’ toes by doing his thing among the people. But Moses assures him that he’s happy to share.

If you were going to pick a piece of scripture for the purpose of guiding people toward life, wisdom, joy, enlightenment, truth, righteousness and goodness, would this be it?

I’ve been pondering that all week, and I can’t decide. On the one hand, this text is incredibly honest about humans beings and how we operate. It points out how easy it can be to idealize the past. It gives Biblical precedence for the 21^st centuary word “hangry” which is about being cranky/angry when we’re hungry. It examines the challenges of leadership, and it even does a great job with presenting the value of shared leadership and joint responsibility. And it is interesting. There is a lot that can be gleamed from this passage. There are a lot of truths in it. Whether or not it happened, it is really real.

Yet, on the other hand, this is a weird text. God and Moses are in a fight over who has it worse, nagging works on God, the people are simply awful, and the man who is about to take over from Moses is an idiot. There are not suggestions about how to live a good and meaningful life, and the lessons that could be derived from the text would be equally likely to be problematic as to be helpful.

And that, as far as I’ve experienced it, IS the beauty of the Torah. While there are parts of it that are long lists of laws and rules, most of the Torah is made up of stories that tell deep and profound truths about humanity (and our relationship to God) but require a lot of work and mining to get there. The Torah isn’t linear. Even the rules and laws require digging, mining, and contemplation in order to bring meaning out of them. Often there are conflicting versions of the same story, or of the same event, or of the same law! And the conflicts get to just sit there next to each other begging for some examination. Collectively, over millennia, conversations about the stories and nuances have enlightened the generations. They have provided life, wisdom, joy, enlightenment, truth, righteousness and goodness. They have made meaning out of life and therefore made life worth living.

The idea that the study of the Torah might be salvific excites me in two ways. The first is obvious. I’ve spent a lot of my life doing that sort of examination in Bible Study and it has consistently enlightened me and improved my life. The second is a bit more exciting though. It opens up the door to consider other possibilities for salvation.

A few weeks ago I preached about salvation, and I made a very strong claim about how wonderful communal salvation is and how dumb I think the mainstream Christian view of personal salvation is. I ended up, presenting alternative routes to full and abundant living. I was not explicit about these being means to God, and therefore means of individual salvation.

Two of you took the time to present alternative viewpoints to me, which – in the vein of great Bible Study – were great guidance to me. I had claimed that I didn’t know where the idea of personal salvation came from anyway, and one of you said “Um, Jesus?” He was right. The gospels do present the idea of individual salvation.

Secondly, someone offered me another alternative way to think about individual salvation. She said that for her, individual salvation is knowing that God loves her, as she is, and she’s not alone. That was super helpful to me, because I think that’s the starting point for everything in faith. I just forgot that it wasn’t obvious, and I loved using that idea as the concept of what salvation means for individuals. That’s the starting point for both healing and for abundant living within this Jesus-following way of life.

Then, if individual salvation is about knowing God loves you, what gets you there? For some people, it comes rather directly through Jesus, and for many through his willingness to face death in order to share God’s love. For some people, it comes from the utter miracle of a sunset. For some people it comes through the wonder of worship and the beauty of music. For some people it comes from the study of Torah (or the Gospels.) For some people it comes from the wonder of being able to contribute to the lives of others. For some people, it comes from having loved ones gathered in one’s home. Likely, for must of us, it comes through many factors that intersect and interplay during our lifetimes.

So, what helps you know that God loves you? That is, what fills you up so that you are able to share love in the world? Do you need more filling up? How can you receive it? Do you have enough love to share? How else can you give it away? The door is open for consideration, examination, and further questions. Have fun!

For wonderful questions, we give you thanks O God, our rock and our redeemer. 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

September 27, 2015

Sermons

“John Wesley v. Self Help Books: Salvation” based on Jeremiah…

August 30, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

There are two MAJOR examples of God’s salvation in the Hebrew Bible. One is the Exodus story, when God saves the people from the bondage of slavery in Egypt, and they move into the Promised Land. The second is found in the story of restoration, when God acts to save the people from bondage of slavery in Babylonia and they return to and restore the city of Jerusalem in the Promised Land. There are big stories, narratives which play out in big and small ways throughout the entirety of the Bible. Both are salvation. God saves the people.

Our text today is text of promise, that was given to the people while they were in exile, and slavery (the second time), promising salvation, healing, wholeness, return, and restoration. The words are gorgeous. The promise is uplifting. And, history tells us, it was fulfilled. The people returned. They wept with joy, the nation did not die off after all.

What I cannot figure out, given this profound history and foundation, is how the heck we got from salvation being about God’s acts in saving the people – together- to something that I’m told is called “personal salvation.” (I seriously had to look this up. I tried calling it “individual salvation” because that made sense to me as a counter to “communal salvation”, but Google soon informed me that people don’t say it that way.) Personal salvation is the most anti-Biblical, and anti-God idea I’ve ever heard. I say this recognizing that it has been a significant theme in Christian history for most of Christian history. And, furthermore, that when I say “significant” theme, I should probably admit “this is what most people think Christianity IS.”

Nevertheless, I’m holding firm. The idea is an atrocity. From what I can surmise, it goes like this. “There are good people in the world and there are bad people in the world. Good people follow God’s rules, as defined in the Bible. Bad people don’t. God, like a human parent, punishes the bad people for being bad and rewards the good people for being good. Therefore, because of mistakes made on earth bad people will suffer for eternity while good people will enjoy the presence of God in heaven for eternity. The utterly unclear line the sand between good people and bad people is drawn by God and is thus fair. After-all, the rules are the rules.”There is also a variation, rather popular, that suggests that the difference between good people and bad people is “declaring your faith in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.” Salvation, in this understanding is the act of being picked as one of the good people.

I was raised in a rather “normal” United Methodist Church in the suburbs. By the time I went to seminary I had separated myself from the “Good People Salvation” narrative by focusing on God’s nature as love. I would say at that point that if “nothing can separate us from the of of God (in Christ)” then no human action or inaction would be sufficient for God’s condemnation. Therefore, I surmised, I was a “universal salvationist.” When I got to seminary and people were talking about “salvation of all creation, of the entire universe” I was GENUINELY confused. However, I was also embarrassed because I was sure that all of my classmates were better Christians that I was, and knew more than I did, and I kept my mouth shut. (Most of them had double majored in religion and philosophy, and my math major didn’t initially feel like a good background for seminary.)

After a few days though, it all seemed to clear up. Of course salvation is about this life! What a silly idea to think that all that is, all this wonder of creation, all the depth of this life are insignificant!!! And of course it isn’t limited to humans – creation is more than just humans. God’s work to heal and bring wholeness – God’s work with us to more creation into more completion – would apply to everyone. I had thought I was supposed to think salvation was about afterlife, but having another option felt like freedom. Salvation as healing, as wholeness, as God’s work in the world to move creation to completion just made more sense! I haven’t looked back, other than with some horror.

Five years ago, I read John Shelby Spong’s “Eternal Life: A New Vision (Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell.” I remember it being rather painfully slow for the first 2/3^rd and then like an brain explosion for the final 1/3^rd. I’ve recently looked back at the book and I actually marked the point of transition with a note in the margins that says “start of new ideas.” These five years after I first read this book, it is no longer all that shocking, and now it is a lot more convincing.

The new ideas section started with this, “Perhaps the personhood we have ascribed to God is really our own, projected onto God. God might then be conceived not as a being, but as the process that calls us into being; not as a person, but as the process that calls personhood into being.”¹ For those who studied math in excess like me, this sounds like the first time I met a “function.” My textbook didn’t seem to describe it ways that made sense to me, but I finally figured out that the function is “what you are going to do to the variable.” It is the process. This seems to me like the suggestion that God is function, the process, and we’ve been confusing God with the output.

Spong goes on to make sense of this new understanding of God:

“Human beings need to understand that we must reconcile the biological drive to survive, which is present in every living thing but achieves self-consciousness only in human life. With the creative thought, emotional feelings, and ability to love others even at the sacrifice of ourselves which are the things that self-conscious creatures alone can choose to do or to have. That is the challenge of humanity. It is in the recognition and reconciliation of this tension that we discover that the way to what human beings have traditionally called God is not through some external projection of our needs, but through entering the depth dimensions of the human experience. The divine we have always sought turns out to be a dimension of the human. Religion ultimately becomes not an activity in which we explore the meaning of God, but an activity through which we explore the meaning of the human.Religion is not a journey into the external deity, but a journey into the heart of our humanity, where we break out of our separation fears and enter the meaning of transcendence, oneness, timelessness, and finally eternity.” ²

When I read these words again, I squealed with joy! YES! YES! This IS what it is about! This isn’t what religion, especially Christianity has been, but it is what it CAN BE! He says later, “The more deeply I live, the more God becomes identified with my life.”³ and “The more deeply I am able to love, the more God becomes part of me.”⁴ This is the point where the radical and wonderful postmodern theologian John Shelby Spong intersects once again with the “merry little theologian” of nearly 300 years ago, John Wesley. Wesley, amazingly enough, rarely mentions afterlife but talks extensively of salvation. He speaks of it AS the process of letting God’s love grow in us into fullness. Or maybe we can go back to Spong’s words, “Jesus is not absorbed into the holy. Jesus is rather alive with the holy.”⁵ If so, then we are to do the same. “Our ultimate destiny was never to be religious human beings, as once we thought; it was simply to be fully and totally human.”⁶

The question then, is: what helps us be fully and totally human? As far as I’ve experienced it, there are two intersecting aspects to the answer. One is relational. We love each other into being, and no one becomes human or whole by themselves. We are communal animals, formed by each other. The second is relational too, but in this case self-relational. We are simply people, right? By our cultural myths we are composed of body, mind, emotions, and spirit/soul, but the greatest of these is mind! Yet we are not just our minds. To become fully and totally human is to live in our bodies, to listen to and care about our emotions, to pay attention to the needs of our spirits and find the way to feed them – and to help others do the same. For me, that’s easiest to accomplish through the process of Nonviolent Communication – shameless plug: stick around for the 2^nd hour on September 13^th and for an Adult Education series this fall. Learning empathy for myself and others is helping me become more fully and totally human.

The intersections of Nonviolent Communication and faith intrigue me and they seem to fit into one of Spong’s new definitions, “The task of religion is not to turn us into proper believers; it is to deepen the personal within us, to embrace the power of life, to expand our consciousness, in order that we might see things that eyes to not normally see. It is to seek a humanity that is not governed by the need for security, but is expressed in the ability to give ourselves away.”⁷

This full, total humanity, this way of living and loving with abundance for ourselves and others, is eternal in that it is so deeply connected to the divine. He says, “True worship has little to do with saying words of praise, but is rather identical with having the courage to be all that I can be. True worship is a process that suggests and celebrates the fact that the more deeply and fully I can be who I am, the more I will make God, understood as being itself, visible.”⁸ Others have suggested this before him, and it is a beautiful idea. Eternal Life can simply life with the Eternal One, opening up the possibility that the lives we live now, which are lived in and with God are united with eternity. And maybe even are a way of being open to the transition from this life to whatever comes next. He says, “For God is ultimately one, and that means that each of us is a part of that oneness. ‘My me is indeed God.” … I am finite, but I share in infinity. I am mortal, but I share in immortality. I am being, but I share in being itself.”⁹

Most self-help books are trying to help people become fully human! In that way they are terribly good. However, I don’t know that many of them pay attention to the intersecting human needs of relationships with self AND others! They’re focused on “personal salvation” thought about in new ways. The Bible is hyper focused on “communal salvation,” because we are only whole when we are whole together. Any time the balance is out of wack – too far to the individual and missing the communal or too far to the communal and ignoring the needs of the individual, we are not fully human. Salvation is the healing of the whole universe. All of us together and each of us individually. We participate by becoming fully human, and by giving ourselves to each other. To go back to Jeremiah, God promises,

“They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion,
and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord,
over the grain, the wine, and the oil,
and over the young of the flock and the herd;
their life shall become like a watered garden,
and they shall never languish again.
Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance,

and the young men and the old shall be merry.
I will turn their mourning into joy,
I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.” (Jeremiah 31:12-13

God’s work is salvation – and it is beautiful!

Finally, I was told last week that if I didn’t answer the question about “Would John Wesley drive a Prius?” then I’d be guilty of false advertising. Apparently, “It was just a good title” got me no where. I spent most of this sermon series thinking that John Wesley would drive a 20 year old Corolla because he’d want to save money to give away and he’d like the reliability, but I’ve changed my mind. Would John Wesley drive a Prius? No. He’d take the bus. It is more eco-friendly, it is more economical, and it is more relational. And, after all, this is a man who was famous for reading books on horseback. I think we can easily imagine what he’d do while waiting at the bus-stop. He’d read John Shelby Spong ;). (Amen)

1John Shelby Song Eternal Life: A New Vision (HarperOne: USA, 2009), p. 155
2Spong, 155-6.
3Spong, 161.
4Spong, 161.
5Spong, 167.
6Spong, 207.
7Spong 185.
8Spong, 162.
9Spong, 209.

–

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 30. 2015