“Compassion” based on Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24 and Matthew 25:31-46

November 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Hello
dear ones.

While
I desperately miss the chance to be present with you in worship and
embodied conversation, I am so grateful for this chance to speak and
for your willingness to listen. I hope that the Divine Spirit will
bless this message both in my speaking and in your hearing so that
space may be made for compassion and grace to grow in you and in me.

I
am speaking to you after a break! For this first time in 2020, I
took a FULL week of vacation! (Thanks to all whose work made that
possible) Despite my own admonitions about refreshing the news, it
wasn’t the MOST relaxing vacation I’ve ever had. Then, I spent 3
days on retreat. Well, virtual retreat, but retreat none-the-less
(thanks to all who made THAT possible too.) The retreat is a series
aimed at clergy, and focused on deep listening. By making space to
listen to each other space to be heard, we trust that the Spirit will
be able to be seen more clearly.

After
the retreat I am feeling refreshed, renewed, and grateful. And…
almost strong enough to tackle this Gospel lesson 😉

This
gospel lesson gets my heckles up, because I don’t like talk of hell,
I don’t like threats presented as God’s, and I don’t like binary
splits between people as if some are good and some are bad when we’re
all just complicated.

And
yet, I do like the means by which the judgement is made –
the care of the vulnerable. Which means my whole relationship with
this text is complicated. In the “Social Science Commentary on the
Synoptic Gospels” Bruce Malina and Richard Rorhbaugh say, “The
basis for the division here is a person’s compassionate action toward
the weak and the poor. Its condemnation of the refusal of those able
to help people who are in need is nearly complete.”¹

God
calls us to compassion for those who disempowered: the hungry, the
thirsty, the stranger (or foreigner), the naked, the sick, the
imprisoned. Those are according to Matthew. Ezekiel mentions the
lost, the injured, those who have strayed, and the weak. In Ezekiel,
God will care directly for the sheep so that the lean are able to
become healthy, and the strong and fat are no longer able to oppress.

This
all reminds me of mercy – that word that gets used for God so often
it isn’t even heard anymore. Mercy is “compassion
or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one’s power to
punish or harm.”²
Similarly, the compassion being asked for in these texts is not
generic compassion. Rather it is compassionate ACTION towards those
who need it most.

It
is good to be kind and compassionate towards one’s peers, or those
with more power and influence than one has, but the judgement named
here isn’t on that. It is about compassion to those who have LESS
power and influence, and more need. (Although, intersectional
justice reminds us that power, influence, privilege and need are
complicated and multifaceted.)

As
I think these admonitions to be compassionate towards those who have
been disempowered is CORE to the Bible as well as to God’s desires
for a just world, the question of how to build up our compassion
muscles becomes really key!

For
me, at least, compassion starts with God’s compassion. That is the
foundation for EVERYTHING. Rather than starting with judgement or at
attempt to be worthy, my faith starts with the grace, love, and
compassion of God that I can trust in. It changes how I see myself,
as well as how I see others. It helps me be more gentle with myself
as well as more humble. It challenges me to be better, but lets me
find peace with myself as I am.

To
keep on learning those lessons requires reconnecting with the Divine,
and the Divine’s compassionate gaze. Prayer, spiritual exercise, or
simply letting myself BE without trying to DO anything more than be
all let me soak in God’s compassion and let it transform me once
again.

The
second piece is related to the first. To become a more compassionate
person requires compassion WITH MYSELF. This is actually the hardest
of the three I think. This also starts with prayer, but also
requires self-examination, and feedback from others. This, I
suspect, is a lifelong journey.

The
third piece of building compassion is the one we usually jump right
to: compassion for others. However, I really think it develops
naturally and effortlessly once we work on connecting with our
Compassionate God and allowing self-compassion. It turns out that
most of the judgments we put on others and the world are really our
judgements on ourselves externalized.

The
world needs more compassionate people, because the world needs to
become more compassionate. The irony is that the way we get there is
so indirect! To transform the world first requires allowing God’s
compassion to continually transform us.

During
this time of pandemic, when everything is different from what we’ve
known, we still have the capacity to work on our compassion. And
based on everything I’ve seen, the world is in desperate need of it
AND God has it in abundance.

May
we become stronger in our compassion, through God’s. Amen

1Bruce
J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh Social-Science Commentary on the
Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) “Textual
Notes: Matthew 25”

2Apple
Dictionary.

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 15, 2020

Sermons

“Central Goal of Life” based on Rev. 21:1-6 and Matthew…

September 15, 2019February 11, 2020
by Sara Baron

The
original meaning of the word “believe” didn’t have anything to do
with what we think or what we mentally affirm. It had to do what
what we “belove” – how we act. We’re looking at beliefs right
now, for the purpose of considering what we belove, and to check and
see if our lives are lined up with what we belove.

We
are comparing three different believe systems: Moralistic Therapeutic
Deism, the Christian Right, and “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 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.

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

This
week we are going to take a closer look at the third of the them:
“The
central goal of life is to be happy and to feel
good about oneself.” For me, at least, this is a complicated
statement. I don’t disagree. However, before you get your hopes up
for a really short sermon, I don’t actually agree either. I have no
objection to happiness or feeling good about yourself – I’m all for
that – but I still think it falls short as the CENTRAL goal of life.
So, YES, we are meant to be happy and it is great when we can feel
good about ourselves BUT….

And
the BUT has three parts. We’re gonna take two of them together. So
first,… BUT we don’t really know how to seek our own happiness and
actually find it! And, secondly, … BUT we are not called to be so
individualistic. We are meant to increase joy in the world, yes, and
to increase the ways that people notice goodness and God-ness in
themselves, but not JUST for ourselves – for each other! More
interestingly, most studies suggest that the best way to make
yourself happy is to bring joy to others.

In
one of those studies, they gave people money with instructions.
Those told to spend it on themselves did, and those told to spend it
on others did. And who was happier the next day? Those who spent
the money on others. The boost in their joy was bigger and longer
lasting – having given someone ELSE a gift. They tried it with
various amounts of money, in a few countries, under different
scenarios, and it held. Further, they also found that if people were
given money and instructed to spend it on a team member, the success
rates of the whole team when up! (True of sports teams and business
teams.)

Studies
also say that the happiness of our friends friends friends impacts
our own! We are social animals, impacted deeply by one another, and
the best way to increase our own happiness is to increase the
happiness of others. On the converse, self-indugence doesn’t bring
happiness.

If
you want to increase your happiness, spend more time with people you
love – engaging with them – and bringing them joy. These two
objections really end up being similar. We are called as Christians
to seek goodness together, and that’s how it really works.
Other studies also point out that when we are doing the work we love
best we are profoundly happy. This suggests a way of understanding
our roles in the world as our calls by God. Amazingly though, that
happiness that we have when we lose ourselves in a task we love –
we all tend to describe it as a way of NOT being in ourselves. There
is something to giving ourselves away that is deeply related to
happiness.

I
chose two scriptures this week to offer the Christian perspective on
happiness, mostly because either of them individually seemed
incomplete. The Gospel is the Sermon on the Mount, the beatitudes,
the “blessed are they…” which are sometimes actually translated
“happy are they….” or could be translated “fortunate are
they…” but the blessing or the happiness are definitely NOT the
assumed ones.

The
beatitudes don’t say blessed are the rich because they can buy what
they want or blessed are the young because they don’t have aches and
pains or blessed are the aged because they have enough wisdom or….
or anything like that! They say, blessed are the peacemakers,
blessed are the humble, blessed are those who mourn! The beatitudes
turn upside the idea of who is lucky, and with whom God’s presence is
found, but they can be read, easily, as a means of social happiness.
This fits with the Gospel message itself.

Let’s
look at them: Blessed are the:

…the
poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (5:3) – those
who do not seek wealth for themselves, or well-being for themselves,
but for others.

…those
who mourn: for they will be comforted. (5:4) – those who have
loved.

…the
meek: for they shall inherit the earth. (5:5) – those who let
others get what they need.

…those
who hunger and thirst for righteousness: for they will be satisfied.
(5:6) – those who care for the needs of others

…the
merciful: for they will be shown mercy. (5:7) – those who are
merciful and kind to others

…the
pure in heart: for they shall see God. (5:8) – those who love with
purity.

…the
peacemakers: for they shall be called children of God. (5:9) –
those who bring wholeness to others

…those
who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness: for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven. (5:10) – those who believe enough to be willing
to take on pain for others

Who
are the happy? The blessed? The fortunate? The ones in deep and
wonderful relationships with others – the ones giving themselves
away to others. The ones whose lives intersect.

The
second scripture is a vision of the completion of the kingdom of God
on earth, the coming of God’s spirit to dwell with the people, in a
time without death or pain or sorrow. Its the ultimate “happiness”
and its for the people as a whole. Its the goal toward which we aim,
as Christians, the completion of the kindom of God.

Which
gets us to the third objection. YES,
we are meant to be happy and it is great when we can feel good about
ourselves BUT….it is not the central point. The central point is
building the kindom of God. Because I believe these two things are
the same thing expressed in different ways, I can also say, the
central point is sanctification – creating space for the process of
growing in love for God, self, and others. Our Jesus-following
tradition says that sanctification is a gift from God, but there are
known “means of grace” that are likely to open ourselves to the
process.

I
think joy is a means of grace, and hope that people take their joy as
a source of wisdom about their particular roles in the world. I
think God wants us to be joyful both because God loves us AND because
each instance of joy in the world is a blessing to others and
increases the wholeness of joy. But in the end I agree with the
often shared (and regularly misattributed) quote , “The meaning of
life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”
Yes, this bring joy and happiness, but it also blesses the world.
And, dear ones, we are blessed TO BE blessings. Not just so we’re
happy while others … aren’t!!

Thus
far I’ve left the Christian-Right out of this conversation. I’ve
argued only with the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism perspective, and
shared from the Jesus-follower one. In this case the Christian-Right
perspective is radically different from both. Within the
Christian-Right, suffering is seen as redemptive. This one has bled
into mainstream Christianity in ways I’ve often worried about. In
other churches I’ve served there has been an innate fear of too much
pleasure, as if it is unholy to enjoy the goodness of life. But in
the Christian-Right this goes deeper, suffering is assumed to be a
punishment from God, a “gift” in the form of a lesson to be
learned, a way of knowing that one needs to seek forgiveness from
God. I’m told, however, that this assumption is sometimes biased:
other people’s suffering is thought to be good for them, but in one’s
own life the goal is to be blessed through righteousness rather than
suffering. The idea that the righteous are blessed directly and the
unrighteous are blessed through correction is inherent in this
perspective.

The
part of this that REALLY concerns me is that if suffering seen as
redemptive, the desire to lift people out of oppression is hindered.
You see, if suffering is … necessary… then there isn’t a reason
to worry about people in poverty, or about people being mistreated by
employers, or about people being abused…. because their suffering
brings them closer to God’s desires for them so it is … sort of
anyway… good. And, since the Christian-right is focused on
afterlife, the idea is often presented that suffering in this life
will be rewarded in the next… another motivation to allow the
suffering of people or groups.

Now,
I’m not entirely sure that the Jesus-following movement has a
fantastic theology of suffering. We tend to do one of two things:
ignore it and hope it goes away, or fight against suffering as
oppression as hard as we can. While the latter is something I value
in our believe/belove system, there ARE some sufferings of life that
are simply unavoidable. Making space for people to be in pain, and
to be heard and valued when they are in pain definitely matters to
making space for all of God’s people – and we can’t solve
everything. We can’t solve cancer, we can’t solve trauma, we can’t
solve grief. What we can do is be with people where they are, and I
hope that some of our work on sanctification/ kindom building is work
in increasing our capacity to sit with people who suffer.

I
think God is with people in suffering, and sometimes suffering can be
very holy work. However, I don’t think God ever GIVES people
suffering as punishment NOR as a lesson to be learned. That’s where
the Christian-Right and the Jesus-follower movements disagree.

So,
in the Jesus-follower perspective, happiness and joy are GOOD, but
they’re not everything. Suffering and pain are real, but they’re not
“gifts from God.” The central goal of life is not our own
happiness. Instead, the central goal of life is
sanctification/building the kindom. That is, the central goal of life
is increasing communal well-being – and with it communal joy and
happiness. God is working with us to bring more joy into the world –
for all. Thanks be to God. 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 15, 2019

Sermons

“Jesus Looked and Loved” based on Leviticus 19:9-18 and…

October 15, 2018February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

This is a tough gospel lesson. It is tough to understand, and it is tough to follow. Commentators I’ve read this week have varied wildly in their interpretations of the text, and in their suggestions about how to preach it. Since the text claims it is difficult to get into the kindom of God, it could seem like an odd passage for a baptism Sunday, when we celebrate inclusion in the Body of Christ and the shared work of building the kindom of God. I think it is going to work out for us in the end though.

I want to review a few points about the text before looking at it more broadly. The Christian tradition has often referred to the questioner in this passage as the “rich, young ruler” which is a conflation of the three versions from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Mark doesn’t tell us the man was young, nor a ruler, and he doesn’t INTRODUCE him as rich. We do find out that he is along the way though. As Ched Myers points out in Binding the Strong Man, “A possession is used to describe a piece of landed property of any kind… a farm or a field, and in the plural lands or estates.”¹ This puts him in the top 3% of wealth in the ancient world, and likely actually the top 1%.

The big interpretative question of this text is: is it good or bad to be wealthy? Or, more specifically – did the people to whom Jesus was speaking think it was good or bad to be wealthy? As John Dominic Crossan pointed out when he was here last fall, there are two streams of thought in the Bible. One is the “covenant” stream, in which God and the people make a deal and IF the people follow what they’re supposed to do THEN God will bless them with peace and prosperity. If not, God will punish them. The second stream, and it may be good to know that John Dominic Crossan thinks these streams are about the same size, is the stream of Sabbath and distributive justice. In this stream, God does not engage in reward nor punishment, although there remain natural consequences for actions. In this stream, human beings are responsible for their actions – and for taking care of each other. God is, at all times, encouraging resource distribution that maximizes abundant life.

John Dominic Crossan says that the stream of thought you follow in the Hebrew Bible impacts how you hear the New Testament. This seems especially true of how this passage gets interpreted. One school of thought thinks that the people Jesus were speaking to would have thought that wealthy people were wealthy because they were blessed by God, thus the disciples would have worried, “if the rich man can’t get in, the rest of us have no hope!” In this perspective, the end of the passage makes sense. If someone is asked to leave wealth, they’ll be given more of it later to make up for it.

Sakari Häkkinen, Department of New Testament Studies, Faculty of Theology, University of Pretoria, South Africa, helps us with context, “In the ancient world, generosity was directed rather to community, not to the needy, who were rather despised more than pitied.”² and “Those who had no problems with sustenance were altogether at most 10%, whereas in continuous problems of sustenance were living some 90% of the population, more than two thirds of them in severe or extreme poverty.”³

The other school of thought assumes the opposite. It assumes that because wealth was concentrated in the hands of very few, the poor resented them for it. Those who explain this mindset point out that there were a lot of zero sum assumptions at that time. Ancient Palestine and Galilee were part of an honor society, in which it was assumed that honor belonged to families, and if it was lowered – then someone else gained; and if it was raised, then someone else lost it. Thus, they say that people thought that way about wealth too. Ched Myers says,

As we have seen in the discussion of the class structure of Mark’s Palestine, landowners represented the most politically powerful social stratum. With this revelation, the story of the man abruptly finishes, as if the point is obvious. As far as Mark is concerned, the man’s wealth has been gained by ‘defrauding’ the poor – he was not ‘blameless’ at all – for which he might make restitution. For Mark, the law is kept only through concrete acts of justice, not the facade of piety.⁴

Bruce Malina in the Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels says, “In a limited-good society, compliments indicate aggression; they implicitly accuse a person of rising about the rest of one’s fellows at their expense.”⁵ And, compliments came with expectation of reciprocity. That’s why, he says, Jesus got snarky about not being good, he didn’t want the compliment, nor did he want to return one. Malina says , “To follow the discussion here, one must realize that ‘rich’ people were automatically considered thieves or heirs of thieves since all good things in life are limited. The only way one could get ahead was to take advantage of others.”⁶ Yet, it is important to note that a loss of wealth would be a loss of social status, and that would be a loss of HONOR, which would be the ultimate loss in that society.

Those in this view have a good way to make sense of the commandment that Jesus ADDED to his list that otherwise only included ones from the 10 commandments. Did you notice it? He says, “You shall not defraud.” Malina explains, “In the Greek Bible, the verb is appropriated to the act of keeping back the wages of a hireling, whereas in Classical Greek it is used of refusing to return goods or money deposited with another for safekeeping.⁷

I have to admit, I’m not sure which school of thought makes more sense to me. Sure, wealth was unevenly distributed, and those paying attention would have been furious about it. Further, I think Jesus was paying attention, and I think he followed the distributive justice stream. But I don’t know how the peasants in Galilee thought about wealth. It seems plausible to me that they thought the wealthy were blessed by God. It also seems plausible to me that their faith in God helped them see otherwise – if they followed the distributive justice stream. In fact, if I’m really honest, I think the people who listened to Jesus fell into both camps! Likely, not everyone heard it the same way. Likely not everyone who wrote about Jesus’ teaching thought about it in the same way.

Yet, the passage draws us into some really good questions. Jesus says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” I believe that he is talking about God’s realm on earth, and not about afterlife. And, I think maybe he is right. While I think the whole point of Christianity is to build the kindom of God, I also think there are a lot of thing that make it hard to make a 100% commitment to it, to live it, to ENTER it. One of those things has always been wealth. The kindom is a cooperative realm- where there is a distribution of justice AND of resources. Thus, anyone who has wealth and hasn’t shared it isn’t entirely living the kindom.

But monetary wealth isn’t the only facet of kindom living. The kindom is a place, a time, of abundance, which means it also requires giving of our energies, our talents, our passions. Further, I believe the kindom is built on healing and wholeness, not to mention authenticity! So, the things that hold us back from fully sharing ourselves, and our passions, and our talents – those hold back the kindom too. And that gives us all challenges to work on. Ultimately, as Methodists following John Wesley, we claim sanctification. That is, we claim that God is working within us to perfect our capacity to love others as God does. What direction is God working with you on right now? How is sanctification happening within you? Sanctification is the building of the kindom. And without releasing the things that hold us back from loving God, ourselves, AND others as God loves us all – we’re holding things that are too big to allow us FULLY enter the kindom. May God help us let go. Amen

1Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998 and 2008, 274. He is quoting Taylor, 1963: 430.

2Sakari Häkkinen, “Poverty in the first-century Galilee” in SciElo South Africa On-line version ISSN 2072-8050http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0259-94222016000400046 Accessed 10/13/18

3Ibid.

4Myers, 274.

5Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) “Textual Notes: Luke 16:1-16” p. 191.

6Malina, 191.

7Myers quoting Taylor, page 272 of Myers, 428 of Taylor.

–

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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 14, 2018

Sermons

“Wesley v. Social Media: Sanctification”based on Romans 12

August 17, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

In
high school, a friend of mine remarked, “I think perhaps the
stories in the Bible show us the way that humans grow in
understanding God. We couldn’t do it all at once, so we have to go
through stages.” Or, at least she said something like that, it was
a while ago. We were in the midst of an intense year old Bible
Study, and we were trying to figured out why the stories in the Bible
often depicted God in ways that we couldn’t believe.

Her
thought has been with me while I’ve been bemoaning the inflexibility
of the church at large – both The United Methodist Church and The
Church Universal. Hopeful people have been approaching me over the
past month, delighted to be able to ask, “Hey, now that the Supreme
Court has made same-sex marriage legal in the whole United States,
the UMC will have to follow, right? Isn’t that great?”

It
would be great, if it were true. I’ve watched peoples’ faces fall as
I’ve replied that The United Methodist Church isn’t bound by US laws,
and that things aren’t going to get better in 2016, in fact they are
going to get worse. The nearly universal response has been, “Well,
then what WILL happen to the church?” My profoundly unhelpful
reply has been, “It will become less and less relevant.”

On
the hand, no one has ever come up to me hopeful about the fate of
Christianity, so I haven’t had to burst any bubbles there. That, in
and of itself, is sort of interesting, but interesting in a very sad
way. The Church has been The Keeper of a very specific set of
truths, a set that it decided and a set that it declared itself
protector of. Unfortunately, the set of truths that has been
protected hasn’t been allowed to grow, change, adapt, and become as
humanity has continued to develop. Truths that made sense before
germ theory don’t all work now. Truths that made sense before we knew
that our sun was just another star don’t all work now. Truths that
made sense before the creation of effective birth control don’t all
work now. Just as truth has been hardened and left to die in the
face of human knowledge, the closed cannon of the Bible struggles to
meet the needs of modern people. Now, most of you know, I have a
very strong love/hate relationship with the Bible, and I’m not ready
to throw it away yet! Yet, the Bible is full of stories of people
trying to make sense of life, of God, and of relationships. If we
want to continue to engage that process, it needs to continue to
reflect the struggles of humanity. Our Bible tells stories that are
said to range for about 1500 years, written down over the course of
700 years. But it stopped 1900 years ago. A tradition that stops
developing will die. A way of understanding the Divine that relies
only on ancient information can’t be relevant.¹

This
church, and now I’m speaking very specifically, First United
Methodist Church of Schenectady, is one of the very few churches who
don’t need to cling to ancient understandings of God and the
world. As I’ve experienced you, you are a people eager to find more
meaningful ways of knowing, in particular to find ways to integrate
the knowledge you have of the world with the ways you could
understand the Divine Energy that binds us all together. This sermon
is the start of a 5 week sermon series entitled “Would John Wesley
Drive a Prius?” trying to consider how Wesley’s concepts, ideas,
and even just his words fit into our lives today. It is an attempt,
at the very least, to keep the nearly 300 year Wesleyan tradition
alive by dragging it into the 21^st century.

The
word of the day is “sanctification.” Literally it means, “to
make holy.” As mentioned in my Spire Article this month, I would
give it a bit more flavor, saying “sanctification is the process of
becoming perfect in love.” John Cobb (famous Process Theologian
and United Methodist clergy person) goes a little bit less formal
when he says, “sanctification is spirituality.”²
But, surely, if we’re going to talk about John Wesley, we can let
him define his terms? John Wesley says that to be sanctified is “To
be restored in the image of God ‘in righteousness and true holiness’
(Ephesians 4:24).”³

Definitions
are nice and all, but we should probably start at the beginning.
John Wesley and others at his time shared a thee part understanding
of grace, which we can delve further into during the sermon on grace.
The key for now is that God’s grace (meaning God’s unconditional
love for us) is experienced in 3 different ways, depending on the
person’s relationship to God. “The grace that comes before”,
previenent grace, is God’s love for a person who does not know or
acknowledge God. Justifying grace is God’s love for a person as a
person comes to acknowledging God.⁴
Then, sanctifying grace is the way that God’s love works in and with
a person in from that point onward, and that process is called
sanctification. The end goal is perfection in love – to act out
the Love of God for each person in every word and action.

Sanctification
is the process of faith development that enables a person to become
ever more loving by connecting every further with love. Rev. Dr.
Carothers used to talk about the point of the church being “to
establish and maintain connections of mutual support in an ever
widening circle of concern” which I think is yet another definition
of sanctification, this time with an inherent communal bent. Now
that, I think, we have a clue what it is, the question is: does it
still matter??? Is this a term that reflects something relevant and
real in our lives today, or is a reflection of an argument from 300
years ago that has proven itself useless with time? At least for me,
the answer isn’t immediately obvious. Yes, growing in love is still
pretty much the point. Yet, it seems that the biggest questions are
around how that happens than if it should.

I
want to poke around in our text today for some clues from even longer
ago. Paul suggests that those seeking to live like Jesus needed an
open mindset in order to figure how how to act in ways that are good
and “perfect.” Hmmm. It requires humility, Paul says, and an
awareness that we’re interconnected and each of us are dependent on
the abilities of the whole. Paul then gives some specific
instructions. “Let love be genuine,” which is definitely lovely
although perhaps not particularly easy to apply. “Hold fast to
what is good; love one another with mutual affection, outdo one
another in showing honor.” The list goes on, but it is a very
tangible description of ways that people might act if they are
seeking to live in ever greater Love.

The
precedent for sanctification is in this text, as well as in others.
As we will continue to see, John Wesley’s ideas are solidly based in
scripture. Obviously, continuing to grow into greater love is a
great description of the goal! The goal of of faith development, or
human maturing, or progress, or church or whatever you want to call
it. We’re aiming to continually grow into a greater capacity to
love. The question is HOW we do so! Wesley had answers for that
too, called the means of grace. In updated language, his answer was
that we become more loving by a combination of 4 balanced factors:
personal spiritual development, communal spiritual development, by
living kindness in our individual lives, and by seeking justice in
our communal lives.⁵
The idea is that if any of the 4 were missing things would get out
of whack.

The
problem, of course, is that these categories still leave a lot to be
desired in terms of definition.
There are particular examples of each of them, i.e. for personal
spiritual development the traditional list includes, “reading,
meditating and studying the scriptures, prayer, fasting,
regularly attending worship, healthy living, and sharing our
faith with others “ while for communal spiritual development
it is, “regularly share in the sacraments, Christian
conferencing (accountability to one another), and Bible study”⁶

This
is the place where I think it is reasonable to break with tradition.
While nothing is necessarily WRONG with the lists as given, they also
aren’t particularly RIGHT. They don’t really reflect the ways that
things have changed over the past 300 years or so, and I don’t know
that they really make space for us to have a different understanding
of God than was normal then. If you were here in January, you might
be thinking, “but Sara, you preached on this in January and said
the lists were fine!” I did. I don’t anymore. Thinking about
growing in love today, with a particular Jesus flavor, those are not
the lists I would make. Um, a stagnant understanding of God and the
world is dying, so its OK if I change my mind?? 😉

I’m
approaching sanctification from a new angle now, one that I’ve never
looked at it from before. It comes from the continuing education
I’ve done this year and the books I’ve been reading and what has been
working in my attempts to become more loving. Right now, it seems
that the task of becoming more loving in the world requires finding
ways to love the parts of myself that hard hardest to love: making
peace with their existence, listening to their wisdom, growing into a
fuller sense of myself by being all that I am all together at once
instead of trying to hide away parts of myself. It sounds a little
bit like Paul’s body metaphor brought back to the body! Perhaps
that’s a big piece that’s been missing from traditional
understandings of growing in love – it isn’t about jettisoning
pieces of ourselves because they are “bad.” Rather, it is about
learning that love applies to all parts of ourselves and all parts of
others, and figuring out how to learn from all parts what love can
be! In finding ways to accept myself as I am, I make space to do the
same for others, and to let go of the fear that comes as I see pieces
of others that I haven’t accepted in myself. Please note though,
this is an idea that is still in development.

Another
thought on 21^st
century sanctification comes via John Cobb who points out that in
Wesley’s writing “entire sanctification is depicted not as a
continuing state but as a matter of moment by moment life.”⁷
That is, it breaks in a moment first. We don’t become entirely more
loving all at once. But there are moments when we manage to act in
love and then with time and practice they come more frequently. This
means we can practice growing in love in even the most mundane of
21^st
century activities. That is, when we tween or text, facebook post or
snapchat, instagram or linkin, or EVEN just if we talk to each other
for a moment face to face, we have the chance in that interaction
with other people to have a moment of sanctification. We just need
to have a moment when all we act out is love, and it is allowed to be
brief! It can be sort of instant gratification. John Wesley didn’t
think of that though 😉

There
isn’t a sermon talk back today, but I’d like to hear what really has
worked. If you are willing, however you want to get back to me,
would you let me know: what has helped you grow in love in your life?
And what has broken open barriers that were previously closed to
love in your life? We can learn from each other,, and that would
lead us all down the road to Wesley’s probably not outdated concept
of sanctification. May it be so! Amen

1 None
of this is a quote. But my thinking was clarified by reading John
Shelby Spong’s “A New Christianity For a New World” which is a
truly fantastic text that finally put into words many of the issues
I’ve been freed to struggle with since coming to this church. And
my clarified thinking via the book made it seem important to
footnote for two reasons: 1. Attribution is appropriate and 2. Read
the book!!! And if you’ve read it, talk to me about it!
2 John
B. Cobb Jr, Grace and Responsibility: A Wesleyan Theology for
Today (Abingdon Press:
Nashville, 1995), p. 100.
3 A
Perfect Love: Understanding John Wesley’s ’A Plain Account of
Christian Perfection’
Modern Language Version and notes by Steven W Manskar (Discipleship
Resources: Nashville, 2004), p. 33.
4 This
is a heck of a soft-pedal. We’ll get to it in a few weeks.
5 For
the geeks who want to know more, from
http://www.umc.org/how-we-serve/the-wesleyan-means-of-grace
Works
of Piety
Individual
Practices –
reading, meditating and studying the scriptures, prayer,
fasting, regularly attending worship, healthy living, and
sharing our faith with others
Communal
Practices –
regularly share in the sacraments, Christian conferencing
(accountability to one another), and Bible study
Works
of Mercy
Individual
Practices –
doing good works, visiting the sick, visiting those in prison,
feeding the hungry, and giving generously to the needs of
others
Communal
Practices –
seeking justice, ending oppression and discrimination (for instance
Wesley challenged Methodists to end slavery), and addressing
the needs of the poor
6 ibid
7 Cobb,
111.

______

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady