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Sermons

“The Work of the Kindom” based on Matthew 5:13-20…

  • February 9, 2020February 11, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

I
often hear it said, “Like a fish in water,” reflecting the idea
that a fish isn’t aware of water, which is meant to help us notice
our own contexts.  During a wonderful and life giving conversation
with a person from a FAR more conservative Christian upbringing, that
person said to me, “Your Christianity sounds exhausting.”  I was
unclear about the meaning of that and asked about it.  The person
replied, “All I have to do to be right with God is profess my
belief in the right things and then trust that all is as God wills it
to be.  But you think that you are responsible along with God, so you
think you have to fix all the things that are broken, and so you
never get a break as long as the world is still broken.”  I sat
with that for a minute and then admitted, “Yes, it is exhausting.”

I
hadn’t seen it until it was pointed out to me though, and I remain
very grateful for that conversation and that person’s willingness to
be in those conversations with me.  

As
much as I adore Isaiah, and as much as I adore Isaiah for passages
like this, the temptation towards exhaustion is certainly raised.
Walter Bruggemann1
does wonderful work with this passage, pointing out that it
criticizes “feel good worship” that doesn’t lead to action,
worship done to manipulate God, worship without humane economic
practices, and a lack of neighborliness.  Three things are asked of
God-worshippers: “(a) shared bread, (b) shared houses, and ©
shared clothing.”2
Food, shelter, and clothing being imperative for life, worshippers
of God are to see those who are struggling as beloved members of
their own families and provide for them.

Doris
Clark told me once about her childhood in rural Western NY.  Her
family, like all the other families around, lived on a small family
farm.  Their lives were sustainable, but not wealth producing.  One
of the nearby families was impoverished because they’d had many
children and the resources they had didn’t stretch far enough for all
the mouths they had to feed and bodies they had to clothe.  Doris
reflected on the fact that her family, like all the other families in
the area, shared their excess with that one family and were able to
keep them afloat.  She also reflected that what had seemed possible
with one family out of many, when all were interconnected felt VERY
different from responding to poverty and need in this place and era.

That
was another fish noticing the water conversation for me.  I knew I
was overwhelmed by the needs around us, but I hadn’t ever experienced
anything different in order to be able to make sense of it.  As of
the last census, more than half the kids in our city live under the
poverty rate, and recent administrative changes to social service
programs has made that far worse.3
The Schenectady City School Districts puts it this way, 79% of our
school children are “economically disadvantaged” which translates
to “eligible for free or reduced lunch.”4
On these statistics alone, it feels like a different world than the
one Doris grew up in.

And
the challenge is that these aren’t the only problems we are aware of.
Just to put it into perspective, we are aware of gross injustice at
our borders, including nearly 70,000 children in cages and
deportations of integral members of communities; we are are of gross
injustice in our so-called justice system, which has the impact of
decimating communities of color with imprisonment, probation, and
life-time bans on social service supports for crimes that are
committed equally by people of all races; we are aware of a gross
injustice to our the youngest members of our society when parents
don’t have paid leave and aren’t able to spend the time with their
infants that is needed; we are aware of a raging climate crisis that
has one of our continents burning and then flooding at unprecedented
levels, seas rising, extreme weather events becoming normal, and mass
migration pressing the capacities of nations; we are aware of
governmental instability around the world, of dictatorships and wars
and genocides…. and I just picked SOME of the big issues floating
around us today.  

And
so when I hear Isaiah speaking for God saying, “Is this not the
fast I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of
the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?  Is
it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless
poor into your house, when you see the naked, to cover them, and not
hide yourself from from your own kin?” I admit to some feelings of
utter exhaustion, and sometimes even hopelessness. I know God is big,
but humanity isn’t terribly faithful to God and our problems are
ENORMOUS.

So,
a person might say, pick one problem, one close to home and work on
that!  I’m game for that, let’s look a childhood poverty in
Schenectady?  Where does it come from?  This one I know the answer
to!  People who are the caregivers of children in Schenectady don’t
have enough money.  (Mathematical proof complete.)

So,
why don’t the caregivers of children in Schenectady have enough
money?  Well, that gets complicated.  Some of it is because there
aren’t enough jobs; some if it is because there aren’t enough jobs
that pay a living wage; some of it is because people don’t have the
knowledge, training, or skills to get the jobs that exist; and some
of it is because people aren’t able to participate in the workforce
get so very little money to live off of; some of it could even be
because people don’t have good skills in financial management.  But
that’s only the beginning.

When
we root down deeper in these questions we get to a lot of other
issues.  Schenectady definitely deals with impoverished people of
color being being imprisoned – with the greatest impact being in
the African American community, and a person in prison can’t make
money while in prison and is profoundly impeded from doing so
afterwards (not can they get the support they need.)  Schenectady
City Schools have been underfunded by the state for decades, making
it exceptionally difficult to provide the services our students need
to thrive, ESPECIALLY given the struggles students have when they
grow up in impoverished neighborhoods.  This also means that many of
our graduates aren’t prepared for the job market.  We clearly also
have struggles with drug and alcohol addiction, which is complicated
by drug companies that have decided to make profits off of people’s
lives.  We in this community are deeply impacted by the cost of
medical care, which has impoverished many and prevents even more from
getting the care they need.  We also struggle with old housing stock
and a high water table that results in some of the highest asthma
rates in the country.  

There
are also the complicating aspects of poverty – the part where
everything in poverty is more expensive: the cost to cash a check
without a bank account, bank fees if you don’t have a high enough
balance, buying things on credit and paying much more with interest,
INSANE interest and fees, trying to eat cheaper food and paying for
it with health, the pure cost of eviction and then the increased cost
of housing after eviction, the increased cost of buying food near
one’s house when that isn’t where the grocery store is but the store
is far away and costs too much to get to, the smaller earning power
of women – with larger impact when men are imprisoned, the impact
of stress on the body and the family, and the list goes on and on.

Right,
so everything is intersecting and it isn’t easy to change.  A few
years ago I went to TEDx Albany and heard some great speakers offer
wonderful inspirational stories.  Most of them that year were about
the speaker’s intentional work to change the lives of people living
in poverty, and that was great!  But I was a little horrified to
realize that all of them were working on poverty on an individual
level.  That is, “if I help this person (or these people) in this
one small way, it increases the likelihood that they’ll be able to
get out of poverty.”  Excellent, for sure, and a great use of
compassion and capacity.  What scared me was that no one seemed to be
looking at poverty on the larger scale.  Because in our society,
when one person or family fworks their way out of poverty, someone
else falls in.  

Our
capitalist system depends on there being a lower class and an
impoverished class… because all those ways that poverty is
expensive are ways that other people are able to make money of of
people’s suffering.  

This
isn’t new, it isn’t news, and it definitely isn’t just the USA.  One
of the things that is most helpful about the gospels for me are that
they are based in a very similar economic system, and so the analysis
of Jesus is particularly applicable for us today.  The context of
Isaiah is a little bit more complicated, and that’s good too.  This
passage is from Third Isaiah, reflecting the struggles of the
community newly back from exile.  So, they were still a vassal state
to an external empire, but they also had some freedom, and were
trying to rebuild their society.  Thus, the normal struggles of “what
does justice look like” were relevant for them.  During the exile,
the people left behind were defenseless and struggled mightily for
generations.  And, during the exile, the people taken into exile were
used as slaves and struggled mightily for generations.  That’s a hard
place to start rebuilding from!  And it might be an easy place to
become individualistic.  After all, everyone has had a hard time,
there aren’t a lot of resources, it might make sense to gather what
you can and share it sparingly.  

But
also, the people were FREE, and they were REBUILDING, and they were
grateful to God for this new era were particularly faithful to their
worship and religious rituals.  Which is where we find this passage.
The people are worshipping, yes, but aren’t living out God’s values.
God’s values are ALWAYS for the well-being of the whole, the care for
the vulnerable, and the acknowledgment of shared humanity with those
who are struggling.

And,
yes, sometimes this is really hard, and it is almost always
overwhelming.  And these problems are big, and complicated.  There
are three pieces of good news here though:  1.  God is on the side of
vulnerable, and God is a really really good ally, 2.  The Body of
Christ works so that if each of us do our part, big changes happen,
but we only have to do our small part, 3.  The Poor People’s Campaign
is working on all of this and they’re amazing.
(Copies of my sermon have the NY state fact sheet attached.)5

Actually,
there is a 4th
piece of really good news, and this is one I should talk about more.
One of the most valuable ways to change the world is to settle into
God’s love for us.  Because when we are TRYING to be lovable, we tend
to get really defensive about our errors and then that leads to us
judging others to protect ourselves, and things can go downhill
quickly.  But when we TRUST that God loves us, and also that God has
good work for us to do in the world, THEN we can participate in the
world as expressions of that love, and things just go far better.  As
we allow ourselves, and our humanity, and even our weaknesses and
failures to be acceptable to ourselves and visible to others, we tend
to get better at letting other people be human too.  And as we do
that, we increase our capacity to see other people as fully human and
fully beloved by God – and THEN we have the best possible
motivation to work towards bettering the lives of those around us.  

So,
dear ones of God, I invite you to do what you can do to settle into
God’s love for you, and also to follow God’s will in the world: to
create more justice, to break more yokes, and to bring freedom to the
oppressed.  May God help us all.  Amen  

1Yep,
it is paragraph three and I’ve now cited Isaiah and Brueggemann.
#ProgressivePastorCredentials.  Also, if you were wondering, my
computer knows how to spell Brueggemann.

2Walter
Bruggemann, Isaiah
40-66
(Louisville, KT: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 187-189

3https://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Census-Most-Schenectady-kids-live-in-poverty-3925563.php

4http://www.schenectady.k12.ny.us/about_us/district_dashboard/demographics

5https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/New-York-Fact-Sheet.pdf

Sermons

“Requirements” based on Micah 6:1-8 and Matthew 5:1-12

  • February 2, 2020February 11, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

By
my records, this is the 4th time I’ve preached on the
Beatitudes here, and the 7th time overall.  To be honest,
this makes things a little bit challenging.  To be a responsible
preacher, I think I have to go over the basics each time, but to be
an INTERESTING preacher I need to offer you something new.  The
Beatitudes, however, have been around for a while and they aren’t …
well…new.

In
fact, they’re so not new to those of us with lifetime exposures to
Christianity, that I’m not sure we can hear them anymore.  Bruce
Malina and Richard Rohrbough wrote the “Social-Science Commentary
on the Synoptic Gospels” which is one of the most useful books I’ve
ever met.  They put the Gospels into a social context, and use it to
explain how things would have made sense in the stories and to those
first hearing the stories.

Their
commentary on the Beatitudes is particularly helpful, as they
DISAGREE with the general consensus that “blessed” can be
translated as “fortunate” or “lucky” or “happy.”  Those
are all good translations of the Latin version of the text,
but they miss the social context of Jesus’s day.  Instead, they point
out:

The language used here, i.e. ‘blessed’ is
honorific language. … Contrary to the dominant social values, these
‘blessed are…’ statements ascribe honor to those unable to defend
their positions or those who refuse to take advantage of or trespass
on the position of another.  They are not those normally honored by
the culture.  Obviously, then, the honor granted comes from God, not
from the usual social sources.1

The
honor bit of this isn’t simply honor like we understand it today.
One of the primary points of the book is that honor and shame were
understood as a zero-sum reality in the Mediterranean region at that
time.  One was born into a certain amount of honor or shame and the
only way one gained honor was by gaining it FROM someone else and
that person then experienced an increase in shame.  Honor was the
FUNDMENTAL value in society, and it was a “limited good.”  In
fact, the “poor” and the “rich” in the New Testament are not
actually economic terms to begin with.  Rather, to be “poor” was
to be a person living with less honor than one was born to, and to be
“rich” was to have gained honor from others.  Malina and
Rorhrbough put it this way, “The ancient Mediterranean attitude was
that every rich person is either unjust or the hair of an unjust
person,” one who had stolen from others what they had.2
They conclude that,”The terms ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ therefore, are
better translated ‘greedy,’ and socially unfortunate.’”3
(This isn’t to say poverty wasn’t an issue, it was just such a
UNIVERSAL issue that it wasn’t actually the focus.)

This
understanding of honor, and the connection of honor to “blessed
are…”, is the key to understanding the Beatitudes in their
original context.  The challenge is that sometimes the text has been
used to mean the opposite of it’s intention.  When “Blessed are…”
is translated “lucky” it can SEEM like the beatitudes are saying:
“Lucky are the ones who struggle, don’t worry about them, they’re
better off than you think.”  Thus the social order of the day,
whatever day it may be, is upheld and people’s suffering is
justified.

That
sounds sort of like what a STANDARD set of honor and shame statements
would have been – the ones describing society as it was in Jesus’s
day:

Honorable
are those born into good families.

Honorable
are those who are spoken well of in the town square.

Honorable
are those who own large estates.

Honorable
are the elected officials who make the rules.

Honorable
are those who have many servants.

Honorable
are those who have the status to control others.

Honorable
are those who have the ear of power.

Honorable
are those who can enforce their will with violence.

Honorable
are those who speak, and others have to listen.

That
is, honor belongs to and is used by those are are already powerful,
important, and wealthy.  So, shame belongs to the powerless, the
unimportant, the poor, and those who lose status.  This clarifies
just how different the statements in Matthew’s gospel really are.
Because those that society shames, God does not.

Given
the information we have, the Beatitudes might be heard as:

Honorable to God are those who have lost the
honor of society, while they do not own the kingdoms of earth, they
are part of the kindom of heaven.

Honorable to God are those who are mourn, while
they have lost that which matters, loss is not the final word.

Honorable to God are those who refuse to harm
others, while they may lose out on power and wealth, they will end up
with everything that truly matters.

Honorable to God are those who hunger and thirst
for fairness, righteousness, and justice – it is coming.

Honorable to God are the merciful – those who
do not demand what they have a right to and shame others – they
will also receive mercy when they need it.

Honorable to God are those who are pure in
heart, the kind, for when they look in the world, they are able to
see the hand of God at work.

Honorable to God are the peace-able people, the
ones who reject violence and seek win-win situations, they are like
God.

Honorable to God are the ones who are shamed by
society for making the right choices, they also are a part of the
kindom of heaven.

Jesus
is describing an ENTIRELY ALTERNATE values system, one that ignores
the things that society cared about and instead focuses about caring
for each other, building each other up, not being willing to do harm,
and inverting the assumptions about how honor and shame work.

The
work of Jesus in this Matthew passage tracks well with the questions
posed in Micah.  In this passage God reminds the people what God has
done for them, and they respond with a wish to show appropriate…
well, honor and difference to God.  This leads to the question, “With
what shall I come before the LORD?” and the initial thoughts are
the sorts of gifts one might bring a king to indicate that one
understands oneself to be a vassal – that the approval of the king
is important to your own continued life.    But the answer is that
God does NOT work like that.  God isn’t looking for bribes, like the
kings of the world.  God is looking for something else entirely.

You
may well know this answer: to do justice, and to love kindness, and
to walk humbly with your God.  Sounds a bit like the Beatitudes,
doesn’t it?

I
asked a question last week about how we as Christians are supposed to
be in relationship with the world.  I think, perhaps, this is a large
part of the answer.  We are to exist within an alternative value
system, one that sees the world with different eyes.  We are to see
the values of justice, and of kindness, of humility, of peacefulness,
of humility, of mercy  – and let those values guide our lives.  How
we relate to the world at large is not in rejection or complicity –
it is with seeing it with different eyes.  

In
the video for the Living the Questions study last week Rev. Winnie
Varghese suggests that as Christians we should be dreaming dreams so
big that the world thinks we are CRAZY, and the dreams are
impossible. The reason, she says, is because God dreams of a truly
just society, and we’re supposed to be dreamers with God.  I think
that both Micah and the Beatitudes point us in the direction of God’s
dreams – of value systems that value compassion, collaboration, and
kindness.  May we dream right alongside of God, and act accordingly.
Amen

1Bruce
J. Malina and Richard L. Rorhrbough Social-Science Commentary on the
Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) “Textual
Notes: Matthew 5:1-12” p. 41.

2Malina,
400.

3Malina,
401.

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/

02-02-2020

Sermons

Untitled

  • January 19, 2020February 11, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Two
years ago, our niece got a new game for Christmas:  Harry Potter,
Hogwarts Battle.  We usually spend New Years together, and it is a
great 4 person game, so Kevin and I got to break into the game with
our niece and her mother.  It is now fair to say that this is our
favorite game, and the four us clocked A LOT of hours playing it.

Beyond
the really fun Harry Potter connections, and the truly excellent game
design, I think we all love it so much because it is a collaborative
game.  The players are all working together towards a goal, so in the
end either everyone wins or everyone loses.  Which also means that no
one of us ends up as the winner while the rest of us have lost.
Truthfully, I really like board games, and most of the ones I play
have winners and losers, and I’m generally OK with that, but there is
something really great about a collaborative game.  It is especially
engaging because each choice we make impacts each other player, so we
have to pay attention to what each person needs and what each
person’s strengths are, and how each person can make the best use of
their strengths.

The
game is hard, and we lose sometimes.  Really, we lose about half of
the games we play, and we sometimes give up a game before playing
just because the starting conditions are too difficult.  But the
collaboration makes it interesting enough that even losing isn’t THAT
bad.  (Most of the time.)

I
find it interesting that the collaborative game is so much fun.  When
I was growing up our church had a copy “The Ungame” which was
mean to be a fun game that was collaborative rather than competitive,
and while I fully support the creators and their intentions it was
the least fun game imaginable.  Yet,
there is so much already in our capitalistic society that is
inherently about winners and losers, and zero sum games, and
competing against each other – and I’m really, really glad that
there are now super fun games that don’t buy into that model.

Collaborative
games seem more like the model of working for the common good.  Maybe
it is just because I was born and raised in the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania, but the moment when I finally actually noticed the word
“commonwealth” and thought about what it meant was eye-opening
for me.  I think of the common good and commonwealths as other ways
of speaking about the kindom.  

Over
the past 3+ years we’ve talked about Intersectional Justice and
Intersectionality a lot, but just in case the ideas are still fuzzy
for you, here is MFSA’s definition of its “intersectional
organizing principal.”

All experiences of marginalization
and injustice are interconnected because the struggle for justice is
tied to concepts of power and privilege.  Intersectional organizing
recognizes that injustice works on multiple and simultaneous levels.
Because experiences of injustice do not happen in a vacuum, it is
imperative to: develop the most effective strategies to create space
for understanding privilege; organize in an intersectional framework
led by marginalized communities; and build effective systems of
resistance and cooperation to take action for justice. Practical
intersectional organizing always focuses on collaboration and
relationship building.

To
bring that a little bit more into reality, intersectionality means
acknowledging that working on ONE issue and making as small as
possible so you can make some gains really doesn’t help that much.
For example, it is said that 101 years ago women gained the right to
vote in NY state, that misses that it only applied to white women.
That came from a choice to empower white women at the expense of
women of color and was NOT intersectional organizing.  There have
been a LOT of times organizing has worked this way, most of the time
it has worked this way, and it has done a lot of harm.

During
an anti-white supremacy training, I was taught to think holistically
about power.  That is, we all know what traits are most associated
with power in our society: white, male, rich, straight, English
speaking, cisgender, citizen, with a full range of ableness,
educated, tall… etc, right?  In each case, there is an opposite to
the description that is disempowered.  I’m expecting you are
following thus far.  Well, because the people who have the traits
connected to power control the resources, they use most of them!  And
then, it turns out, the people who are DISCONNECTED from power end up
fighting to get access to the scraps of resources that the powerful
are willing to share.  There are two
REALLY bad parts of this – first of all, to get access to those
resources usually means playing by the rules of the ones who have
power, and secondly, those without power are usually set up to fight
AGAINST EACH OTHER for access to those scraps.  

That
is, when white women decided to try to get the vote for themselves,
and not seek voting rights for all women, they made a decision to
play by the rules of how power already worked, and to distance
themselves from people of color to try to get what they wanted and
needed.  And, this happens time and time again.

Intersectionality
is about seeing the wholeness of the power dynamics, and the
complicated realities of people – who all have power in some ways
and lack power in others – and holding the whole together while
working for good.  It is really, really hard.

It
is probably also why I teared up when reading Isaiah this week.  The
passage quotes God as saying, “It is too light a thing that you
should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore
the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.“  The way I
heard that was, don’t just work for the benefit of a few, even if
they are the ones you identify with – work for the well being of
ALL.  And all, in all places, including enemy nations!!

Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is best known for his transformational
work on racial justice, work that make our country noticeably better.
Yet, at the end of his life, he had broadened his work, and was
organizing around poverty.  As several of the past year’s
Intersectional Justice Book Club books have pointed out, the powers
that exist in the United States have VERY INTENTIONALLY used race to
divide people, in large part so that impoverished white people and
impoverished people of color wouldn’t start working together against
their common oppressor.  Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign was
designed to bring people together for their common good, and truly
for every’s good.   As King once said, “In your struggle for
justice, let your oppressor know that you are not attempting to
defeat or humiliate him, or even to pay him back for injustices that
he has heaped upon you. Let him know that you are merely seeking
justice for him as well as yourself.”  Because, truly, oppressing
anyone harms both the oppressed AND inherently, the oppressor.

Today,
other’s have picked up Dr. King’s mantle, and there is an active Poor
People’s Campaign underway.  While their “Fundamental Principals”
are expansive – there are 12 – they are a coherent whole and I
couldn’t edit them down.  I want you hear, and be filled with hope,
and maybe even be motivated to work with this campaign, so here they
are:

  1. We are rooted
    in a moral analysis based on our deepest religious and
    constitutional values that demand justice for all. Moral revival is
    necessary to save the heart and soul of our democracy.
  2. We
    are committed to lifting up and deepening the leadership of those
    most affected by systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, and
    ecological devastation and to building unity across lines of
    division.
  3. We
    believe in the dismantling of unjust criminalization systems that
    exploit poor communities and communities of color and the
    transformation of the “War Economy” into a “Peace Economy”
    that values all humanity.
  4. We
    believe that equal protection under the law is non-negotiable.
  5. We
    believe that people should not live in or die from poverty in the
    richest nation ever to exist. Blaming the poor and claiming that the
    United States does not have an abundance of resources to overcome
    poverty are false narratives used to perpetuate economic
    exploitation, exclusion, and deep inequality.
  6. We
    recognize the centrality of systemic racism in maintaining economic
    oppression must be named, detailed and exposed empirically, morally
    and spiritually. Poverty and economic inequality cannot be
    understood apart from a society built on white supremacy.
  7. We
    aim to shift the distorted moral narrative often promoted by
    religious extremists in the nation from issues like prayer in
    school, abortion, and gun rights to one that is concerned with how
    our society treats the poor, those on the margins, the least of
    these, women, LGBTQIA folks, workers, immigrants, the disabled and
    the sick; equality and representation under the law; and the desire
    for peace, love and harmony within and among nations.
  8. We
    will build up the power of people and state-based movements to serve
    as a vehicle for a powerful moral movement in the country and to
    transform the political, economic and moral structures of our
    society.
  9. We
    recognize the need to organize at the state and local level—many
    of the most regressive policies are being passed at the state level,
    and these policies will have long and lasting effect, past even
    executive orders. The movement is not from above but below.
  10. We
    will do our work in a non-partisan way—no elected officials or
    candidates get the stage or serve on the State Organizing Committee
    of the Campaign. This is not about left and right, Democrat or
    Republican but about right and wrong.
  11. We
    uphold the need to do a season of sustained moral direct action as a
    way to break through the tweets and shift the moral narrative. We
    are demonstrating the power of people coming together across issues
    and geography and putting our bodies on the line to the issues that
    are affecting us all.
  12. The Campaign
    and all its Participants and Endorsers embrace nonviolence. Violent
    tactics or actions will not be tolerated.

This
campaign is DEEPLY good news.  I encourage you to look them up, their
demands are even better (but ever longer) and well worth the read.
There are a lot of opportunities to volunteer with and support the
Poor People’s Campaign, and I’d be happy to connect to to those who
are organizing – as would your Intersectional Justice chairs.  

Working
towards justice for all is really, really hard work.  It can even be
overwhelming, but as Isaiah says, God is out for the well-being of
the whole world.  Before you get overwhelmed though, let me remind
you that God has a LOT of partners in this work and no ONE of us is
called to do all the work.  In fact, we’re called to trust each other
and each other’s work, and to carefully discern what our work is to
do. Love exists, its power can spread, justice is possible, and good
people are at work.  We are meant to be a light to ALL the nations,
and with God at our backs, we can and we will.  And it is possible
because of collaboration.  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

January 19, 2019

Sermons

“The Call of Baptism” based on Isaiah 42:1-9 and…

  • January 12, 2020February 11, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Last
weekend, Congregation Gates of Heaven hosted a service of unity for
the Capital Region after acts of anti-Semitism in New York made it
clear that a response was needed.  The event was jointly sponsored by
the Jewish Federation of Northeastern New York, the Capital Region
Board of Rabbis, and Schenectady Clergy Against Hate.  By best
estimates over 800 people showed up!

(Interfaith Chapel at the University of Rochester)

The
event was particularly moving, even as the need for it was
distressing.  Schenectady Clergy Against Hate are well practiced in
pulling together community witnesses after attacks on faith
communities.  In our country today, that’s a good skill to have.
That said, I deeply wish we didn’t have the first idea how to respond
to violent attacks in faith communities.  I wish we’d never had a
violent attack to respond to.

Yet,
we have.  

And
while the acts of violence have often been perpetuated by individuals
acting as lone wolves, there is a disturbing connection between them.
Within a society, violence and the threat of violence act as means
of control, particularly of disempowered groups.  

I
would love to believe that in this forward thinking year 2020 we have
reached new heights of open-mindedness and equity, but evidence
proves me wrong.  Violence against people of minority faith
traditions, against people of color, and against women and non-men
continues, and indeed in some areas are expanding.  I believe this
violence functions as a way to maintain control over each of those
groups.  That isn’t to say that is a coordinated effort, but rather
the way that power works in our society impacts who gets attacked and
what impact is felt.  As each “lone wolf” acts, they function to
perpetuate the system of control.

And,
I believe this is against the will of God.

I
hope is is painfully obvious to say this:

God’s love is for Christians,
Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sihks, Pagans, Druids, Agnostics,
Atheists, and members of other faith traditions.  God’s love is not
determined by a person’s faith tradition nor faithfulness, and to
claim otherwise makes God very small and mean indeed.

Similarly, God’s love knows no
national boundaries, language barriers, or income requirements, nor
is it impacted conviction histories.  That just isn’t how God works.

And, consistently, God’s love is
for females, males, people who are intersex, and people who are
non-binary all the same.  

None
of this is news.  We KNOW this.  And yet, perhaps we have not been as
vocal as we need to be about sharing this.  It is painfully obvious
that the world around us does NOT know this.  There are a multitude
of forces around us that define who has value and who doesn’t, and
therefore imply that some people matter more than others – and GOD
DOES NOT AGREE.  

The
Intersectional Justice Book Club discussion yesterday was on Michelle
Alexander’s The New Jim Crow,
in which Alexander names the ways that the War on Drugs has created a
racial underclass by imprisoning mostly men of color and then
enabling discrimination of those with convictions.  She points out
that drug use and drug sales occur across racial groups equally, with
a little bit more happening among white people, and yet 90% of
convictions are of people of color (with the vast majority of those
people being of African American descent.)

She
names, quite directly, that if we cared equally about people of
color, we would not permit such a system in our society.

And
yet we do.  

At
the service last weekend, the speakers gave us work to do.  Their
messages included that we have to:  

Advocate
for religious freedom for each other.

Speak
respectfully and affirmatively of other faith traditions AT ALL TIMES

(For me, this works mostly as:
call out the problems in my own tradition before looking for others,
and I haven’t finished on my own tradition yet. 😉  )

Call
out anyone who doesn’t speak respectfully of a faith tradition

Repent
of the times we have contributed to messages of hate

Remember
the contributions of people of other faith traditions

Seek
legislation that makes attacks on faith groups hate crimes

Have
hope

Become
more loving

Rabbi
Rafi Spitzer, of Congregation Agudat Achim in Niskayuna, specifically
reminded us to attend to the things of the Spirit, as a means of
becoming more loving and more peaceful.  That’s the particular
role of those of us who are part of faith traditions: to become more
loving and more peaceful as part of contributing to the world become
more loving and peaceful.  (May it be so.)

This
got me thinking about how well we are doing at developing the things
of the Spirit.  There are lots of ways that things are going well –
we have many ways for people to meaningfully contribute to building
the kindom, we have space for people to be loved as they are, there
is beauty that feeds us, there is space for questions and for being.

I
think there are also ways we could be making more space for the
things of the Spirit.  The most historic Wesleyan question of all is
“How is it with your soul?”  Let me tell you, this is NOT an easy
question to answer, and it is not a question you can ask others if
you are unprepared to hear the real answers.  That said, it is a
great question.  “How is it with your soul?” invites us to think
deeply about the answer, and share it with someone else.  It brings
our faith journeying into contact with each other.  A course I taught
once invited participants to answer the question with weather
metaphors, which turned out to be amazing (“it is cloudy, with a
distinct change of tornadoes”, “it is bright and beautiful, but
bitterly cold,” “the fog is very, very thick”) but I think that
there is even more value in having to answer the question directly.
So, one tiny little thing we could do: we could ask each other “how
is it with your soul?”  

Perhaps
you might even be willing to ask someone this during the time of
passing the peace?  And, dear ones, if you don’t want to answer,
perhaps a weather metaphor might share the gist without being too
vulnerable?

On
a similar note, I don’t think we check with each other enough about
our spiritual practices.  During Lent two years ago we did a study of
a Richard Rohr book, and thus had a regular shared practice of
centering prayer.  It was amazing.  For many of the participants it
was the most regular prayer practice they had, and it was a wonderful
addition to their lives.  (I believe centering prayer is easier in a
group.)  My suspicion is that many of us in this community do not
have regular prayer practices.  Some of this may be due to not ever
having found a prayer practice that works, some of this may be due to
not being the sorts of people who want REGULAR practices, some of
this may be due to allowing other things to take precedence.  I will
admit to you that while I had INCREDIBLE prayer times during my
renewal leave, I allowed them to become lax again this fall and have
been struggling to pick them up again.  I adore prayer, but it is
very (VERY) easy to allow myself to get distracted with … well,
anything and everything else.

Yet,
I know that my own development as a person, and a person of faith,
and into being more loving and more peaceful is directly correlated
to the time I spend in prayer.  My prayer practices tend to be the
quiet and reflective sort, and thus the kind that let me see myself
clearly and make decisions at the right pace for me.  Without them,
I’m pretty anchorless.

So
that’s the second thing I can think of – we could be more
intentional about checking in with each other about prayer and/or
meditative practices – including sharing what works for us,
admitting what isn’t working for us, and being willing to talk about
what impedes us from practicing.  My personal experience says that
when I’m avoiding prayer, I’m mostly afraid of that some judgement
I’m making on myself is shared by God.  Thus far, it never has been.

Of
course, prayer practices are a WIDE range of things that can include
walking, or dancing, or bike riding, as well as sitting quietly,
writing, or coloring, and for many they even include conversation.
We as a church talk about and develop our prayer and meditative
skills more – I think it would benefit us and the world.  

For
the first time this year, when I read Isaiah 42, I didn’t get worried
about the servant like I always have before.  Instead, I heard it as
being all about the nature of God.  The passage tells us about God
who has joy in people, who wants justice for all the nations, who
doesn’t move us towards justice with violence, who is patient and
consistent and trustworthy.  This God, the very one who made all of
creation, is with us and working towards good with us.  What has been
and has been hurt and broken is NOT all that can be, there is new
goodness that can and will come with God.  Healing and hope are
possible.  

These,
you see, are things of the Spirit.  They are things of seeing clearly
what is, and yet seeing what can be.  And those things of the Spirit
are what our baptisms are all about.  Baptism welcomes us into the
community of the Spirit, so that we can work together towards love
and peace for all.  And baptism teaches each one of us that we are
beloved by God,  which means we don’t need to prove ourselves worthy
of love, and means that we have love in abundance to share.  

Dear
ones, there is a lot broken in the world, but God isn’t done with us
yet.  And as we share with each other and seek out the Divine, we
make it possible to bring more goodness into the world.  May we do
it!  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

January 12, 2020

Sermons

“Connecting Joy and Gratitude” based on Deuteronomy 26:1-11 and…

  • November 25, 2019February 11, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Kevin
and I have three cats, which is one more than we think we should
have.  However, all three are very sweet, and unusually
human-centric.  It is difficult to walk in our house without a cat
underfoot, and unusual to sit without a cat making space for
themselves on one’s lap.  I cannot tell you how many sermons I’ve
written with a cat sitting on a wrist, although before you worry too
much, I’ve stopped allowing that out of fear of carpal tunnel.  

Because
we have three, sweet, human-centric cats, we experience a lot of
purring in our lives.  This is unconditionally a wonderful thing.  We
fall asleep to cat purrs.  We wake up to cat purrs.  Often, our cats
will walk up to us, look at us, and start purring – expecting that
as soon as we see them, they will get petted.  (Yes, they are spoiled
rotten, we know.)

It
is so easy, if you are noticing it, to hear a cat’s purr, or a
brook’s gurgle, or the wind whispering in the trees as songs of
praise and contentedness to the God of Creation.  When listening to
those sounds, it can feel like all is well in the world, and that as
creation itself sings a love song to God, my soul is moved to join
in.

I
love those moments when it feels like all is well in the world, and
the majesty and wonder of God is visible and celebrated in creation.
I love it just as much as when I see unexpected grace and kindness
between people – which also seems like the majesty and wonderful
God being visible and celebrated in creation.

Those
sorts of moments used to come to me a lot.  After all, I have been
blessed to spend a lot of time in the beauty of creation and with
wonderful people who show grace in shockingly beautiful ways.

One
of the great honors of being a pastor is being allowed into the
vulnerable parts of people’s lives.  In moments of transition and
identity shifting, to be welcomed in feels like a miracle.  I am
always grateful when people are willing to let me be with them when
things are at their hardest, and God feels particularly close when
people are in their deepest needs.  God’s care meets people’s
tenderness, and I get to see it happen.

Over
the course of years, cumulative patterns within people’s hardest
times have formed for me.  Some of the patterns are beautiful and
striking – from God’s grace, to people’s capacities for strength,
to the ways we can build up each other’s resilience.  However, some
of the patterns have also been heartbreaking.  I am able to see the
impact of poverty on people’s lives, the prevalence of family
violence, the profound lack of effective mental health care for the
most vulnerable, the enormous number of traumas in our society, the
depth of the impact of the -isms on individual and communal life, and
the myriad of ways the church itself has harmed God’s beloveds.

Some
of you wish that I was more comforting in the pulpit, that I could
ease the anxieties of life and lead you to a higher plane of praise.
Dear ones, I do too.  I would love to ease your lives,  as well as to
offer you comfort and hope for the future.  Those are reasonable
desires, particularly when the world feels so heavy.  

The
challenge is that the world feels heavy to me too.  Further, the
brokenness I see in the world and the impact it has on wonderful
people’s lives feels like a broken promise to me.  I know that many
people were raised to see the brokenness, in large part because they
didn’t have a choice not to, but I thought the world MOSTLY worked
and only OCCASSIONALLY didn’t, and when it didn’t all we had to do
was work together to fix it.  And I believed this for a very long
time.  And still, today, I notice in myself that I’m shocked every
time something I thought worked fine actually doesn’t.  While my
mental and spiritual analysis of the world is – I think – largely
clear-sighted and aware of power and privilege, I’m still emotionally
disquieted with every new piece of information about avoidable harm
that is done.

While
this may be appropriate human development in one’s 30s (or, I fear,
one’s 20s – I may be behind based on how lucky I’ve been), many of
you are well beyond it.  You’ve seen the brokenness, made peace with
it, and are ready to focus on the good stuff again.  And you have
every right to be impatient with me while I struggle to catch up with
you.  In the model Marcus Borg suggests, I’m still working out
critical thinking about how the world and God work, while many of you
are already fully in post-critical naivete (which is a WONDERFUL idea
and place to be), ready to make meaning out of life – however
beautiful and broken it may be.

I’m
pushing myself to try to catch up, but I’m not sure the pushing will
work.  I’m pretty sure my only option is to be where I am, and try to
hold in tension that other’s aren’t in the same place.  I do want you
to know that I hear you, and I’m trying.  I am also open to learning
from you, how you moved beyond being aghast at what is wrong and into
a fuller connection to life as it is.

There
is one trick I’ve found, and I think it might be useful to others, so
I’m going to share it.  I’ve been taught to see anger as a USEFUL
thing.  This was not immediately obvious to me.  My prior
relationship with anger had been one of strict avoidance (in myself
as well as with others).  The teachings of Nonviolent Communication
say that anger is a red flag – not the bad kind- that lets us know
that something we really value is being violated.  Thus, when we feel
anger, we can know that something we care about is being harmed, and
we can stop and find out what it is that we value so deeply.  That
gives us two incredibly important gifts:  first, knowing what we
value is always important to know (although it isn’t always obvious
to us), and secondly that now we have a potential productive path
forward.  Anger itself is rarely productive, other than as a way to
point out that something is deeply wrong.  However, once we know what
we value, we are a big step closer to finding out how we might
respond to that value and ask others to join us.

So,
for example, there is a lot of anger in this church right now.  The
work being done to attempt to balance the budget has arisen great
passion.  Almost everyone is upset, most are angry, and many of you
want to stay home and avoid the whole mess.  However, there have been
some amazing insights from the anger, already, even though no
resolution is in sight.  We are able to see clearly that MANY, MANY
people care deeply about this church and are willing to show up to
care for it.  Similarly, people are willing to sit through long and
uncomfortable meetings out of their love for this church.  I’m hoping
that some of that care and passion might be shared in stories (like
the HW you got two weeks ago to share your faith stories with another
member of this congregation, just in case you didn’t do it yet…).
One of the things I’ve heard most consistently, under the anger and
under fear, is that people want this church to survive and continue
to be a gift from God to its communities for the long run – and
thus there is strong motivation not to make decisions that might harm
the church’s long term well-being.  That’s a value on this community
and its positive impact in the world.  Thanks be to God that so many
people care so much about this church and its impact!!  

Similarly,
I hear a lot of anger about the possibility of changing the way that
we do some of our ministries, making it clear that the ministries we
do are of value in people’s lives and are worth taking very
seriously.  I’ve also heard a passionate desire to be just in our
decisions and to be good and fair employers, values that we advocate
for in the world and want to enact in our lives together.  So, yeah,
there is a lot of GOOD that anger is a clue for, and anger can be
mined for many valuable insights.  

That
is not to say that an obvious way forward has emerged from those
passions or values.  To some degree, they conflict, and other
constraints exist.  However, as long as everyone’s passion comes out
of a love for this community and a desire for it to be well, we have
a better starting place to hear the possible ways forward.

For
me, all of this is really about the gratitude we are encouraged
towards in the Epistle reading which tells us to “rejoice in the
Lord always, again I will say: Rejoice” and “whatever is true,
whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever
is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and
if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”  

It
is easy to tell people to be grateful, and it is easy to show
evidence that gratitude is a good spiritual gift that leads to
improved lives.  I suspect that we all agree on gratitude being good.
However, that doesn’t make it easy.  Sometimes to get to gratitude
we need to work through anger and notice what is actually wonderful
and valuable underneath.  Sometimes we have to slow down and smell
those proverbial roses.  Sometimes we just need a moment to savor a
cat’s purr.  

I
do think that there is a whole lot more worth celebrating in life and
in the world around us than we could name if we spent the rest of our
lives naming things.  And I think spending a significant amount of
our time working on noticing and appreciating those things is
worthwhile. Even better, it think anytime we are getting angry, we
have a clue about something we really care about – something we are
already grateful for.  So, however you get there, may you find the
ways to “rejoice in the Lord, always” because God IS good and
creation has innumerable wonders for which we can give thanks.  May
we do so.  Amen

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/

November 24, 2019

Sermons

“Those Who Walked the Walk” based on  Habakkuk 1:1-4;…

  • November 3, 2019February 11, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

(Thanks to Kevin Kempf for the great picture!)



Have you heard of “thin
places?””  I’ve heard it described as places where the veil
between this world and the next is thinner – or where God’s
presence can be especially felt.  Ideologically, thin places don’t
make any sense to me.  I believe that God is all-present, so God
isn’t any more or less present anywhere.  

And yet… I have experienced
thin places.  I don’t understand them, but I know them.  You may be
needing some examples.  Mountaintops are commonly thin places, which
I suspect has less to do with the altitude and more to do with the
effort to get to them and the views they offer.  Things just feel
different at the top of a mountain, and many people have experienced
them to be thin places.  Sanctuaries are another common choice –
ones in churches or ones at camps.  I have often wondered if places
where many people have prayed are changed in some way by the
pervasiveness of the prayers – and thus made more holy.  (Again,
this doesn’t fit my understanding, but it fits my experience.)
Sometimes, I think, thin places are not places even, they are
moments.  I once had a chance to ask a church about when they’d most
strongly experienced God and a whole lot of them mentioned the births
of their children.  It is also very common (but not universal) for a
death to be a thin place.  

I
also suspect thin places might have a lot more to do with us being
open to the presence of God that is always with us than a change in
the amount of presence, but however it is, I think they ARE.  And,
further, one of those moments that has often been a thin place for me
is All Saints Sunday.  Over the course of my ministry, more years
than not, this has been the holiest worship service I’ve led.

This year, like every year, the
names we are about to read lie heavy on my heart.  Oh friends, the
saints who have gone on ahead of us taught us so much!  We are who we
are because of them!  It is an honor to read their names and remember
their lives, but it is also heavy to live without them.  One of our
traditions, in this church, is to also name the saints whose loss is
still especially heavy on our hearts, even if their departure was
more than a year ago.  The list of those names is also dear – and
beautiful and sad and heavy.

Today conjures in my mind that
simple line “the great cloud of witnesses” from Hebrews 12, which
is an incredibly comforting image.  Life can feel overwhelming at
times, and sometimes I have no idea where to turn, but remembering
that those who taught me, and loved me, and guided me – guide me
still and show us the way – is very powerful.  It is even better to
notice how many of there are!

So, indeed, All Saints Sunday
is, for me, a thin place, and the names we are about to read and the
lives they represent are an honor to remember and name.

Now,
the gospel passage may not seem terribly well connected to all of
that, perhaps because of the terrible Sunday School song that too
many of us learned about Zacchaeus.  (If you don’t know it, I beg
you, stay ignorant.)  The story itself, however, is not as trite as
the song.  There are surprises all over this story, if you pay
attention to them.  One is that a wealthy and powerful man was
particularly interested in Jesus, who aimed his ministry particularly
at people who were living in poverty and disempowered.  The second is
that the wealthy and powerful man was willing to forgo his dignity to
try to see Jesus, which seems to want to remind us just how exciting
Jesus was in real life and how worthy of seeking out he was (is).
Then there is the amazing turn in the story when Jesus decides to
focus his attention on Zaccheaus, this wealthy and powerful man,
which I think absolutely no one expected.  Zaccheaus, however, was
happy and gracious.  Then there is the unsurprising grumbling of the
crowd, who are peeved that Jesus is hanging out with this guy (tax
collectors being about as popular then as border patrol agents are
today).  And then there is the turn around where Zaccheaus, having
had this experience with Jesus, commits to a moral and fair life.
(I’m going to disregard my assumptions that he probably couldn’t
afford to pay back 4 times as much as he’d over taken…. that’s not
the point.)  It seems that being with Jesus was a thin place for
Zaccheaus, where he could access love, hope, and wonder, and be
changed by it.

The beautiful thing about the
Zaccheaus story is that sometimes we are ALL Zaccheaus, and the story
seems to say that’s OK.  Sometimes we have power, and sometimes we
use it wrong, but we’re still TRYING our hardest to know what’s right
and do it, and when we figure what what we’ve done wrong, there is a
chance to change it.

Now,
that’s where this fits in with our Saints today. Because none of the
Saints we celebrate today were actually perfect in their lives.  Not
a single one.  Our memories may get fuzzy around that, but all the
people we are remembering were fallible.  All of them, as well,
sometimes had power and sometimes used it wrong.  That’s human life.
What’s WONDERFUL is when people realize what they’ve done and seek to
change it.  That’s why they are our saints – because of their
willingness to grow, learn, and change.

Friends, this is an interesting
reminder for those of us trying to follow in their footsteps.  And it
is a two-fold reminder:  (1)  we are not expected to be perfect.
Really.  We can’t be, and trying just makes it all worse.  (2) And,
when we discover how we’ve erred, if we are willing and able to
change, it makes all the difference.  This is, often, a cycle we have
to keep on living.  I see it clearly in myself in working towards
anti-racism, a goal I yearn for.  However, every time I learn
something new, I have to realize how much I’ve erred in the past, and
change it.  AND THEN, you know what, the next thing I learn shows
that I’ve still been erring and I still need to change, and I’m not
there yet.  It feels AWFUL, and yet it would feel way worse to keep
messing up once I know what I’m doing.

The
Habbakuk passage feels a little bit too on point for a while, doesn’t
it?  It is bemoaning the injustices of the world, and THEN it totally
changes!!  The prophet’s concerns are met by GOD’s response, and God
says, “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner
may read it.  For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it
speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for
it; it will surely come, it will not delay.  Look at the proud! Their
spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.”
Oh.  My.  So our work is to dream, and vision, and make the vision
for God’s goodness clear and visible to others.  A commentator
writes, “At at time when the wicked are in control, when the vision
describing God’s intention to reestablish justice has not yet become
a reality, Habakkuk is called in the interim to trust God’s
assurances and to remain faithful.”1
Not to lose hope, not to give up, not even to keep on bemoaning
reality, but to trust and share the vision.  

And the vision that has been
shared with all of us is why we are here.  We want to be part of
building God’s vision in the world into everyone’s reality.  And the
saints taught us it was possible and showed us the vision.  And their
lives have made this a thin place, where we are able to see, a little
more clearly, the beauty of the vision of God and the hope that is
the world for the present and the future. Thanks be to God.  Amen

Sermon Talkback Guiding
Questions:

  1. I talked about “thin”
    places in the beginning, does that idea make sense to you and if so,
    where have you found some?
  2. How are “Saints” related to
    learn, growing, changing – and admitting erring?
  3. What else do you see in the
    story of Zaccheaus that I didn’t bring out?
  4. Did the Habbakkuk reading
    switch too fast for you?  (Or not fast enough)
  5. How do you name God’s vision
    that we’re working on?
  6. Of the saints we celebrated
    today, or have celebrated previously, how did they teach you of
    God’s vision for the kindom?
  7. What helps you remember that
    you don’t have to be perfect?
  8. What helps you have the courage
    to change when you’ve erred?

1Theodore
Hiebert, “Habbakkuk” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume
VII, ed. Leander E. Keck (Nashville: Abindon Press, 1996), p.
638)

–

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 3, 2019

Sermons

“The New Covenant” based on  Jeremiah 31:27-34 and Luke…

  • October 21, 2019February 11, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Formally, a covenant is an agreement or legal contract,
although the word is used more often in the religious arena.  In
fact, in the religious arena, LOTS of agreements get called a
covenant.  The “marriage covenant” the “covenant of the
ordained” (which, btw, doesn’t actually exist but the powers that
be in the church like to hold us to one anyway), behavior covenants
at camp or on mission trips.  I was a little shocked when John
Dominic Crossan was here a few years ago to learn that covenants
aren’t as morally neutral as I’d thought.

Religious groups use covenant language because our Bible
does, but it turns out that our Bible uses it because that was the
normal means of making agreements in its day.  And covenants are
inherently power dominant.  The dominant party sets the standards and
tells the less powerful party what the consequences will be if the
less powerful party doesn’t meet the standards of the dominant party.
It isn’t some particularly holy thing – it’s a form of agreement
between unequals, that functions as a means of naming the punishment
if the less powerful party doesn’t hold up to their end of the deal.
(Which they may not have had much choice about getting into anyway.)

The Hebrew Bible is full of covenants, and almost all of
them have condition in them and punishments delineated as well.  They
tend to say, “If you do this, then I will be your God and you will
be my people and things are going to be OK.  If not, then it follows
that the inverse will happen.”  However, today we are talking about
the exceptions.  The first exception is in the covenant made with
Abraham, mostly.

The story of Abraham’s covenant appears 3 times in
Genesis, and in 2 of the 3 versions it is unconditional.  The the
3rd, it is conditional on circumcision.  The three
versions relate to the three different “voices” in Genesis, and
this story is important enough that all three versions are known and
told.  My favorite is the Priestly version in Genesis 15, whereby God
intentionally takes on the roles of both the powerful and the
powerless in covenant making and thereby takes all the responsibility
for the relationship continuing to work.

That covenant is the one most like what we hear in
Jeremiah 31, where we hear of the “new covenant.”  Jeremiah is
generally considered a downer prophet, as his role was to say that if
the nation of Israel didn’t change its ways, it was going to be
destroyed.

However, Jeremiah 31 is the middle of three hopeful
chapters whereby the prophet names that after the destruction that
would come, an even better relationship with God would be possible.
The hope is even more potent in the midst of the the rest of the
book, and its threats of dire destruction.  The particulars of the
new covenant are worth noting.  Let’s hear that part again:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will
make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a
covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord.
But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel
after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I
will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they
shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to
each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the
least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive
their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

The comparison for the “new covenant” are the
covenants in the Torah.  In those covenants God made promises to the
people that were CONTINGENT on the people upholding their promises to
God. In this new covenant God takes all the responsibility on God’s
self.  The people don’t have to learn, or memorize, or interpret the
Torah because God will “put it within them” and “write it on
their hearts.”  And in this way the people and God will be
inseparable.

The part that is particularly inspiring to me is, “ No
longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know
the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to
the greatest.”  God’s self is not entirely knowable within the
human realm, and it is easy to get lost in figuring out God even when
we’re trying our hardest.  The idea that everyone could know, and
intuit the goodness and love of God AND act out God’s kindom is
really powerful.

The final line is both really powerful in its original
context, and likely the reason that the Christian Tradition has so
strongly claimed this text.  The line is, “for I will forgive their
iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”  For those who heard
Jeremiah, and for those who complied his remembered speeches into a
book, the reason for the exile was that the people had been
unfaithful to the covenant with God.  They had not followed the Torah
laws, they had allowed the rich and powerful to abuse the poor and
powerless, and they had forgotten God’s will.  Whether or not that
was the reason for the exile, it is the reason that is assumed within
the book.  To forgive iniquity and sin, then, was a form of
restoration.  To continually forgive iniquity and forget sin is to
take away the threat of punishment and create the hope of security.

Now, as the Christian Tradition has strongly claimed
authority over God’s forgiveness of sins, it makes a lot of sense
that it has strongly claimed this “old” (by the standards of
Christianity) idea of the “new” covenant.  However, claiming
Jeremiah’s vision of the new covenant is a really radical claim for
Christianity to make!  Sure, Christianity also claims that we and God
have made an eternal covenant, God is our God and we are God’s
people.  That one is easy.  We also claim forgiveness, that fits.
But we aren’t yet in a time, as far as I know, where we are past
having to teach each other of God and God’s goodness.  Nor are we
living in a time when all people intuit and live out right action
that allows the kindom to come and continue.

The “new covenant” of Jeremiah in some ways reminds
me of the kindom itself – it is here and now!  But it is here and
now IN PART and we are working towards the day when it is here and
now in completion!  I love, though, that Christianity is claimed this
deep and profound dream as ours.  Of course, I hope we all remember
that the dream is one from our Hebrew Bible and we don’t have a
unilateral claim to it.

A while ago, one night at Bible Study we came across our
Gospel passage for today, and someone raised a question, “What is
this ‘new covenant’ thing?”  The answer referred us to the Jeremiah
passage. For a lot of people present that night, things CLICKED.  The
United Methodist communion liturgy refers to the new covenant twice.
The first time it shows up describing the life and ministry of Jesus
where it says:

Holy are you, and blessed is your Son Jesus
Christ.
…
By the baptism of his suffering, death, and
resurrection
you gave birth to your Church,
delivered us from
slavery to sin and death,
and made with us a new covenant
by
water and the Spirit.
When the Lord Jesus ascended,
he promised
to be with us always,
in the power of your Word and Holy Spirit.

The second time is when the communion cup is named and
raised, where it says:

When the supper was over, he took the cup,
gave
thanks to you, gave it to his disciples, and said:
“Drink
from this, all of you;
this is my blood of the new
covenant,
poured out for you and for many
for the
forgiveness of sins.
Do this, as often as you drink it,
in
remembrance of me.”

Those who had grown up hearing those words, over and
over, without context, were excited to know the context of it.  

In addition to showing up in our communion liturgy, the
concept of the New Covenant is also found in our language for our
Scriptures.  The so-called New Testament which is alternative
language for, yep you got it, “New Covenant.”  Our Bible itself
claims that the stories of Jesus and the early church ARE the stories
of the new covenant of Jeremiah being lived out on earth.  And, I
think this is claimed because it is believed.  And, I think the claim
that our faith tradition is an expression of Jeremiah’s “New
Covenant” is both excessive and hopeful.

Someday, may it fully be so.  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

Sermons

“Afterlife?” based on Job 14 and Mark 12:18-27

  • October 13, 2019February 11, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

I want to start today by asking
for your trust – particularly from those who are here particularly
for the baptism.  I do know that the first hymn and the scriptures
have been an odd match for a baptismal Sunday so far, and it is going
to get worse before it gets better, but it IS going to get better, I
promise.

The question of “what happens
after we die” is relevant to us for two separate reasons.  One
reason is entirely personal: we want to know if we are simply mortal
and if we cease to exist when we die.  The other may be just as
personal, in a different way:  we want to know if the connects we
have to those who have died before us are still alive or if they only
feel that way.

Both of these are good reasons
to want to know, but nevertheless, we don’t know what happens after
death.  And our believes about it end up being profoundly personal.
If we are looking at afterlife through the lens of the Christian
Tradition, there are three big questions people to disagree over:

  1. Does afterlife exist?
  2. If there is an afterlife, do
    both heaven and hell exist, or just heaven?
  3. If both heaven and hell exist,
    how are people sorted between them?

While many people have deep
conviction about their answers to these questions, and believe their
answers to be the “normal” ones, the truth is that Christians
have disagreed about this for about as long as there have been
Christians.

For
centuries, Christianity has taught about afterlife and the existence
of heaven and hell, all while arguing about the means of sorting
people into each.  Yet,  there is also a large group of Biblical
Scholars who think that we’ve gotten those assumptions wrong.  They
say that 1st
century Jews, Jesus, and the earliest Christians did not believe in
heaven and hell the way we do.  At best, heaven and hell were
temporary resting places while waiting for bodily resurrection that
would come along with the Kindom of God on earth.1
 More commonly, people believed that there was nothing until the
moment of universal bodily resurrection, which they expected to come
within the first generation after Jesus.  For some others the
perspective of Job 14 was accurate:  humans die but at least God
doesn’t.

For
the most part, I think afterlife is an aside to Christianity.  The
goal is to build the kindom on earth, not in heaven.  However, the
reality of deaths of those we love and the looming reality of our own
deaths don’t let us go.  We really want to know, and for many people,
what they believe about afterlife profoundly connects to how they
understand God.  

Now,
this is the fifth and final sermon in a sermon series
comparing the salient points of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, the
tradition of the Christian Right, and what I’ve been calling
“Jesus-followers”.  (That final group is us.)  Moralistic
Therapeutic Deism was discovered through sociological research on the
belief system on teenagers, and we have reason to believe it is the
default belief system of most Americans.  Unfortunately, as we’ve
found, its a rather problematic belief system, at least in my
opinion.  It consists of 5 intersecting assumptions:

  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.”

Today we are looking at the 5th
and final point, “Good people go to heaven when they die.”

Of course, if you asked most
people what Christians think, that would be a key part of the answer,
“good people go to heaven when they die,” but – of course – our
tradition is far more complicated than is generally known.

Historically,
I think the concepts of heaven and hell came into clarity in the 3rd
or 4th
century, as that’s when the fights over who went where really picked
up.  So let’s look at our three questions:

  1. Does afterlife exist?

Christians
of good faith disagree about this one.  Some, including some in this
community, say, “no.  This life is all there is, so let’s make the
best of it instead of pretending there is more.”  Others, including
some in this community, say, “I think so.  I’ve had some
experiences that lead me to that conclusion and/or it just feels
right.”  Still others simply aren’t sure.  Because the “word on
the street” about Christianity so profoundly conflates belief in
God with belief in afterlife, I feel the need to say this explicit:
all of these are faithful statements that are congruent with knowing
a loving God through Jesus.

So, the second question, which
presumes an answer of “yes” to the first one about afterlife
existing.  The second question is:

2.  If there is an afterlife,
do both heaven and hell exist, or just heaven?

I’ll admit that I nuanced this
one to lead to a particular answer.  While I’m not always confident
about afterlife (and yet sometimes I am, it is a confusing place
inside my head), I never think there is a hell.  It just doesn’t make
the tiniest bit of sense to me that over the long run anything but
God’s grace could win out.  I read one time a suggestion that people
continue to have free will after death, and so if heaven is unity
with God, people can take AS LONG AS THEY WANT to get there, but in
the end, they will because grace wins.  Put another way, I simply
don’t believe in a God of eternal punishment, it is incomprehensible
to me.  That said, I think most modern Christians believe in a heaven
and a hell, and most of them think it is heresy not to.  (oh.  Well.)

I
think that for most people who believe that “good people go to
heaven when they die” and the unspoken but obvious corollary “bad
people go to hell when they die” there is a desire to believe that
there is fundamental justice in the world and that bad things are
punished and good things are celebrated and even if we don’t see
evidence of that on earth, it will get balanced out later.  I can
understand a desire to believe that!  

Now, for me the third question
is null and void, but since Christianity has spent the past 1600-1700
years fighting over it, I guess we should take a moment to hear the
arguments. 😉

3.  If both heaven and hell
exist, how are people sorted between them?

Possible answers:

  • In order to get into heaven you
    have to BELIEVE the right things ( “Justification by FAITH.”)
    This is the primary perspective of the Christian Right, although it
    intersects some with the next idea.
  • In order to get into heaven
    you have do DO the right things.  For many of those Christians there
    is a list of good things and a list of bad things to guide behavior.
    ( “Justification by WORKS” or “Works Righteousness.”)  
  • In order to get into heaven one
    must be baptized.  This is often even subconscious now.  This is one
    of the strongest arguments for infant baptism.  It is also one of
    the strongest arguments against it.  Some in this mindset will claim
    that only baptism in their PARTICULAR part of Christianity will
    matter.  However, when Christianity was much younger, this often
    resulted in people refusing to be baptized until the very last
    moment.  (I think, in fact, this is the historical basis for the
    Catholic ritual of last rites.) They thought that once baptized all
    their sins were forgiven, and if it was done late enough they
    wouldn’t have time to sin.  I’m not kidding.  This was very common
    practice.
  • In
    order to get into heaven we need God’s grace, and God’s grace given
    to us results in our ability to have faith.  (“Justification by
    grace alone though faith.”) UMC option
    Thus it is not what we do or do not do; nor what we believe or do
    not believe that results in our welcome into heaven.  It is simply
    God’s nature.  This does raise a rather large question about those
    who do not believe in God though.

As
a reminder of how complicated all of this is,  I do not think that
our Gospel lesson supports or disproves any of the schools of
thought.  Rather, it urges humility.  The Sadducees were trying to
trick up Jesus, and they brought him a tricky question in order to do
it.  The question supported their belief about what happens when
we die, but Jesus’ answer did not let them trip him up.  He says,
““Is
not this the reason you are wrong, that you know neither the
scriptures nor the power of God? For
when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in
marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the dead being
raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the story about
the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of
Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is God not of the dead, but of the
living; you are quite wrong.”

This
passage keeps me humble.  I don’t know what it means, I don’t know
what heaven is like,or if it exists, and that’s OK.  Many of us are
not same worldview as moralistic therapeutic deism who say  “good
people go to heaven when they die” or the Christian-Right who say
that and have clarity over who counts as “good.”  Many of us
simply don’t know what happens after death.

I
think that at the core, the questions of if afterlife exists or not
and whether there is cosmic justice are really questions about
existential anxiety.  That is, as beings who are conscious and who
know we are mortal, we struggle with the reality that someday we
won’t be (at least in this form) anymore.  

I
think that our shared, all the way back to Jesus, Christian Tradition
offers Jesus-followers two ways we can respond to existential anxiety
and the claims of the other traditions.  If we are about continuing
the work of Jesus – about building the kindom and inviting others
to be partners with us in building the kindom – then our work does
not end with our deaths any more than Jesus’ did.  This is not same
as individual afterlife, but is really powerful in a different way.
Certainly the ways that each of us work towards the kindom is unique,
but the end goal is shared, and after we are gone others will be
following up on our work with theirs … until the kindom comes.

The
other piece of our response to existential anxiety is simply trusting
in God.  Whether or not we cease to exist at the end of our lives,
God and God’s memory will still hold our lives, our loves, our
actions, our thoughts, and our feelings.  And, whatever is on the
other side of the proverbial curtain – God IS and God is GOOD and
what will be is possible to trust in.

And
that brings us full circle to say, that while I know it is awful to
acknowledge death while celebrating a new life, I am happy to say
that the kindom building and the goodness of God will outlast even the life of the baby baptized today life and thanks be to God for that!  Amen

1

(http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/april/13.36.html?paging=off)

Sermons

“Communion with Migrants and Refugees” based on Exodus 17:1-7…

  • October 6, 2019February 11, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Our faith says, a wandering
Aramean was our ancestor – that is, Abraham and Sarah, displaced
people from Syria, are our shared ancestors.

Our faith says our people were
enslaved, oppressed, and hopeless until God acted to free them.

Our people were desert nomads
for generations, looking for a home but not finding one.

Our people, when they found a
home in the so-called “Promised Land” struggled with those who
already lived there, and centuries (ok, millennia) of unrest
followed.

Our faith says, that a poor,
foreign widow came to live in Israel, and became the great
grandmother of the King of Israel.

When our people had lived in the
land for centuries, had built a temple, had established a government,
and had found peace and stability  – a foreign empire defeated them
in battle, destroyed the temple, killed the king’s descendants, broke
open the defensive walls, and took the leaders away as exiles.

Our leaders in exile were told
to “work for the good of the city they were in” because it was
going to take a while.

Our faith says that generations
later, God worked to bring the exiles home, and guided the people to
rebuilt, and restore, and it was hard and there were disagreements.

Other nations fought for power
and control over the land of the Israelites, empires grew and empires
fell, tributes were paid and governments were seized.  The people
sought freedom, and sometimes they got it.  

Eventually the Romans came to
power, and 30 or so years later, Jesus was born.

Matthew says that Jesus’s family
fled to Egypt to protect him from death, and resettled in Nazareth
after they returned.  

Nazarenes knew destruction and
its power, but Rome didn’t yet know the power of the stories of the
Jews, who knew their God to be one who overcame oppression time and
time again.

Jesus’ ministry was most often
with people who were poor and had been displaced from their families’
lands.  His was a ministry in motion – homeless and dependent on
the hospitality of strangers.  He sent his disciples off with nothing
but the clothes on their back and trust in God.

Our faith says that our
ancestors have known displacement in all of its forms.  Our faith is
the faith of slaves, of immigrants, of refugees – people who have
had nothing but hope in God, who  has proven faithful time and time
again.  The fact that God is with and for displaced people is
particularly important as our world has more displaced people than
ever.1

Today in 2019 there are known to
be 70.8 million people2
who have forcibly displaced from their homes, and that number is
likely lower than reality.  Of those, this year the USA says it will
welcome at most 30,000 (and likely only half that).3
In this country we hear horror stories about people trying to enter
our country – but we often don’t hear about how small the numbers
are compared to the global crisis.

In the USA, the stories we hear
are of concentration camps at our Southern Border, children being
torn from their parents, and atrocious conditions for people who are
simply trying to survive after being displaced from their own homes
and countries.  These  situations are worthy of our strongest
condemnation and protest.  Tthe situation in our own southern border
is AN ATROCITY and, because the USA is welcoming so few of the
displaced people in the world we must also look beyond our country to
see the extend of the problems.

For me, step one in wrapping my
head around the experiences of people who are displaced is simply an
act of empathy.  What would it be like?  While I have spent most of
my life in the United States, there are two exceptions: 2 months in
Ecuador when I was a teenager and 3 months in England when I was a
college student.  My brain simply can’t wrap itself around what it
would be like to have to leave this country and never come back.  I
know from my time in Ecuador how HARD it is to be in a place where my
brain struggles with the language, and how disconcerting it is to
have intelligent thoughts in my head and no way to communicate them
so that other people know they exist.  I know how much I can yearn
for familiar things – food I know, using water directing from the
tap, the plants and terrain that feels familiar.  But I don’t know
what it is like to leave those things behind and NEVER be able to
come home again.  Nor can I wrap my head around the atrocities being
committed at our Southern Border to people who have already been
displaced, who have already had to show resilience, who have left
their homes and their communities, their people and their dreams in
order to (hopefully) live– only to be dehumanized again by our
government.

While things feels stable, to
me, here, the world is noticeably destabilized.  There are twice as
many displaced persons as there were FIVE years ago, and the trend is
only upward.  Half of displaced people are children.  Less than 3% of
those who have been forced to leave their countries are able to
return there.4
It is important to stretch our imaginations, our empathy, and our
LISTENING to those who are refugees, because from their stories we
can learn how to be allies to those who are struggling.  

The book of Exodus, in our
reading today, gives us a great example of the challenges of being
displaced.  The people, having been freed from slavery in Egypt, are
in the midst of their wanderings in the desert before they settle
into the Promised Land.  The people are displaced, all that is
familiar has been stripped from their lives, and even though the
familiar was awful, it was the familiar and the unfamiliar is
overwhelming.  The people were whining, and grumbling, and
threatening Moses.  God took mercy on them and their fear, and
provided for them when they needed affirmation that they would
survive.

It is a powerful reminder that
it is hard to leave home EVEN when home is AWFUL, and that even when
where you are going is GOOD, it is still new and different.  Worse,
for many displaced people, a new home isn’t on the horizon yet.

Our faith tradition, the one
that KNOWS the reality of displacement, also knows that we can forget
or ignore the pain of those around us.  In 1 Corinthians, Paul names
that at the early communion table some were eating and drinking too
much while others had nothing at all, and he says that the table is
to be SHARED.  Those who have plenty share with those who have
nothing.  This is the earliest teaching we have in Christianity about
communion.  

There are those in this
community who have plenty, and there are those who don’t have enough.
Together, though, we have this table.  It isn’t something we tend to
pay a lot of attention to, but a table, in a shared community of
faith, is something many of God’s displaced people no longer have
access to.  For us, today, this table is extended, and we seek to
share it with God’s people who are displaced around the world,
including at our own southern border.  We know God’s table is big
enough for all people, and we ask God to extend our hearts until they
are grow as large as God’s table.  May the blessings of God’s table
be with all who need them, and may we who receive of these gifts be
mindful of those who can’t access them today.  Amen

1https://www.unhcr.org/innovation/10-infographics-that-show-the-insane-scale-of-the-global-displacement-crisis/

2https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html

3https://immigrationforum.org/article/fact-sheet-u-s-refugee-resettlement/

4https://www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2018/

October 6, 2019

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

“God With Us” based on Psalm 139:1-18 and Matthew…

  • September 29, 2019February 11, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Children’s
Time:  Let’s play an
imagination game.  If you were going to play hide and seek in this
church, where would you hide?  OK, now what if I change the rules?
If you were going to try to hide from God where would you hide?  Is
that a ridiculous question?  Why?  (OH…. you can’t hide from God
because God is everywhere?  Well, then let’s thank God for that!)

Sermon:
“The One in whom we live and move and have our being,” is a
description of God used by Paul in the book of Acts.  It is one of my
favorite descriptions of God, because it fits so well with my
experiences of the Divine.  I FEEL surrounded by and supported by the
Holy One.  I love the idea that the boundaries between “me” and
“not me” are irrelevant to God, and God is as much in me as as in
you as in the air between us.  Thus, the phrase “the One in whom we
live and move and have our being” is often repeated inside my head,
a regular reminder that the God of Love is the foundation of all that
is, and can be accessed in all times and places.  I suppose it would
be fair to say it is one of my faith mantras, something I come back
to regularly, ponder often, and draw strength from.

In
Acts, when Paul uses this phrase to describe God, he is intentionally
appropriating a Greek poet speaking of the Greek god Zeus, and
applying the idea to YHWH instead.  This makes me giggle, but it
doesn’t make the attribution feel less true.  At the core of our
faith is a believe in God who is “omnipresent”,
a Latin-derived word meaning All-present, used to say that God’s
presence is everywhere all the time.   This is why you can’t hide
from God.  Further, this idea means that God is within us as well as
around us, so that not only our words and actions but even our
thoughts and feelings are known to God.  To believe that God is
omnipresent is to claim that nothing can separate from the presence
of God, just as nothing can separate us from the Love of God.


Our
Jesus-following faith also teaches that that God is “omnibenevolent”
another Latin word that means that God is “all good” or “all
goodness.”  It might make more sense to say that God is “all love
for all of creation.”  It isn’t JUST that God is with us, it is
also that God is FOR us, seeking good at all times.  I’ve said it
before, and I think it is worth saying again:  I don’t find it
particularly important whether or not people believe in God.  I do,
however, find it VERY important how they understand God.  Whether or
not a person believes in God as all-present and all-loving is
significant in who it is they think God is.  Very different belief
systems develop when you believe in a God who is all-present and
all-loving … or not.

Today
we’re going to look at two belief systems that disagree with my
belief system at the core.  Right now we are comparing three
different belief systems: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, the
Christian Right, and “Jesus Following”1.
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism was identified by sociologists 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:

  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 taking a closer look at the fourth one:  "God
does not need to be particularly involved
in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.“
In essence, I think this statement stands against the idea that God
is “all-present.”  Or, at least, makes God so irrelevant that
God’s presence doesn’t matter.  Now, the Christian-Right definitely
believes in God as all-present.  However, I am not convinced that
they believe in God as all-loving.  (Or, if they do, the words mean
something so different that it doesn’t count as the same idea.)


Let’s
look at Moralistic Therapeutic Deism first.  This perspective, which
reflects the generic belief system in the US, says,  "God
does not need to be particularly involved
in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.”
This makes God the last resort – and our LAST resort tends to be
something we don’t have much investment in.  It also seeks to control
God.  (Which those famous 10 commandments seem firmly against.)  A
person who only reaches out to God when that person wants God to DO
something for them …. that person is thinking of God like a big
gumball machine.  That is,  “Insert prayer, and God gives you what
you want.”  God becomes a means to an end, de-personalized,
unimportant for God’s own self, just there to please us.  

I
suppose the statement doesn’t actually SAY that God isn’t all
present, but it make’s God’s presence irrelevant – other than as a
TOOL one uses for one’s own needs.  I think it also denies God as
all-loving, because if you believe that God is all-loving, then you
believe that there is a SOURCE OF LOVE IN THE WORLD YOU CAN CONNECT
TO.  And if you believe that, then I guess I figure you’d do so.  Or
try to do so at least.  Because humans are hungry for love – so we
seek it out (in productive and unproductive ways) all the time!  So
this indifference to the Divine itself tells me that people aren’t
thinking of God as GOOD, or LOVING.  Rather, they’re thinking of God
as …. well, meh.

Now,
I suspect this meh-ness about God is actually reflecting some of the
influence of the Christian-Right.2
(The Atlantic seems to be agreeing with me on this, they’re writing
a lot these days about how the decline in US religiousity is linked
to people associating the Christian-Right with Christianity and
opting out of it.)  Now, I’m pretty sure that the entirety of the
Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam-  teach and
believe that God is all-present.  I don’t know of any part of any of
those traditions who argue against it.  There are some stronger
understandings of it, like pan-en-theism which says that everything
that is exists within God and yet God is more than all that is. (I’m
a panentheist.)  But the all-presentness of God isn’t in any way
controversial.

However,
the all-loving part of God IS.  In fact, I think this is the breaking
point between the Christian-Right and Jesus-followers.  While both
sides may make the claim, what we mean by it is profoundly different.
When I say God is all-loving I mean:

  1. God
    loves and wants good for ALL people, regardless of their
    acknowledgement of God, desire to “worship” God,  or the
    morality of their actions.
  2. God
    seeks the COMMON good, and works to create the kindom in the world –
    a time and place where ALL people can both survive and thrive.
  3. No
    one is more valuable than anyone else, and no one is less valuable
    than anyone else in the eyes of God.
  4. God
    encourages us, nudges us, and calls us into loving words and actions
    – all of us all the time – and we get to pick whether or not we
    respond.  
  5. God’s
    nature is to be loving, which is an awesome and delightful reality.
    If we want to respond to that love, then we are led by gratitude and
    by love itself.  God’s request of us when we attend to God’s love is
    that we RESPOND to it – by letting love grow in us and change us.
    The love that grows in us is for God, for others, and for ourselves.
    Another way to think of this is that deepening our relationship to
    God is growing in compassion.
  6. NOTHING,
    no NOTHING  – not death,
    nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to
    come, nor powers, or height, nor depth, nor anything else in all
    creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ
    Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)

When
the Christian-Right says God is all loving, it starts from a
different place.  The Christian-Right worldview starts with “the
fall” – the idea of original sin.  Within this perspective, there
is a separation between God and humanity that exists in two parts.
First, the fall itself is understood as fundamental to reality, it
create a separation between God and humanity as a whole.  Secondly,
as each individual person sins that sin separates them from God.
From here, the Christian-Right considers ways to move from this
brokenness into “right relationship with God.”   God as loving,
then, is God who gives humans the means to move from broken
relationship into right relationship.

Right
relationship with God consists of fulling a required set of actions
and beliefs.  In this view, because God loves everyone, God gives
everyone the opportunity to be in right relationship.  As God wants
to be in right relationship with everyone, God steers people towards
the correct actions and beliefs.  Thus judgement and even punishment
by God of people are seen as corrections that are part of love, like
a parent correcting their child for the child’s development.  (The
fact that punishment is a terrible motivator and, at the core,
doesn’t work, isn’t acknowledged from this perspective.)  

In
the Christian-right view, wrong belief and/or wrong action can
distance one from relationship with God.  And, at the point of death,
the opportunity to move into “right relationship” is cut off.
Thus, those in the Christian-Right try to encourage others to choose
right beliefs and right actions, so that they too can be in right
relationship with God and thus not spend eternity in hell, cut off
from God.  It is possible to see, from this viewpoint, how judgement
could be seen as an expression of love.

I
haven’t actually been directly exposed to much Christian-Right
theology, but I actually was exposed to the core of this viewpoint,
one time when I was a teenager at my Annual Conference session.  The
Bible Study leader showed us a video in which the human sin created a
chasm with us on one side and God on the other.  The video then
showed us how Jesus’s death on the cross changed the nature of
reality, and that if we accepted God’s forgiveness (right belief),
then the cross would become the bridge we could walk to connect with
God.  

I
think I was 13.  The next day I complained about the video to my
pastor, and that particularly youth bible study leader never
returned.  At that point I didn’t understand exactly how that
viewpoint was different from mine, but I could FEEL it.  Somewhere
along the line I realized that I think the idea that sin separates us
from God is blasphemous because it indicates that SIN is more
powerful than God and God’s love.  

Like
the passage from Matthew suggests, God does not call us into being
afraid of God. Rather, God is with us and we need not be afraid.  God
loves us, all of us, and nothing can separate us from the love of
God.  Thanks be to God.  Amen

(Sermon
feedback leads me to add a PS to the end of this sermon:  Therefore,
as people connected to the all-present and all-loving God, as people
freed from the fear that pervades the world around us, go and be
present and loving in the world!)

1The
use of the phrase “Jesus following” is not meant to suggest that
the Christian-Right are not Jesus followers.  Rather, I find that
because of the hateful action of many people who claim the word
Christian, many of us are uncomfortable claiming that language and
prefer to take on “Jesus-follower” as a way of recognizing the
core figure of our faith tradition without the baggage of the word
“Christian.”

2I
love it when people do research that supports my assumptions:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-christian-right-is-helping-drive-liberals-away-from-religion/.
(Don’t we all?)

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  • First United Methodist Church
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  • Schenectady, NY 12305
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