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Uncategorized

“Love in Community” based on Romans 13:8-14 and Matthew…

  • September 6, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

There is a truly great Facebook group for “Young Clergy Women
International,” and this summer one of the members said, “Hey,
I’m single and live alone, and I’m really lonely in this pandemic.  I
know the grass is always greener, would those of you who live with
people tell me what is really annoying about that right now?”  Let
me say, there were A LOT of responses, including people living alone
saying it helped them to know and people living with others saying it
helped them not feel so bad about being annoyed.

A few years ago now, I came across a rather radical idea:  churches
are places of spiritual growth not IN SPITE OF disagreements,
pettiness, and annoyances with each other, but because of them.  Now,
every church I’ve ever met would prefer to be seen as made up
entirely of agreeable people who are never petty nor annoyed with
each other.  It feels like better advertising.  After all, churches
want to be expressions of God’s love in the world, and it seems like
it would be best to AT LEAST like each other.

And yet, and forgive me if you didn’t know this yet, sometimes people
are annoying.  To be fair, often the things other people do that
annoy us say a lot more about us than about them, but the point
remains – being in community means being in relationship with
people who will annoy you, people you will disagree with, and quite
often the work that people find important, you won’t.  This applies
to the people we live within the pandemic, and the people we go to
church with.  There is no perfect church.  They are all comprised of
people.

This radical idea, though, was this is the POINT.  Because if
spirituality is just about “God and me” it is really easy to
think you are doing well, growing, becoming sanctified.  However, if
you are active in faith community, then it becomes imperative that
you get better at loving REAL PEOPLE in order to know you are growing
spiritually.  If you aren’t occassionally annoyed, and getting
practice being loving about it, you aren’t growing (says this
theory.)

I love this idea.  It is in our humanity, our brokenness, our
disagreements, even our pettiness, that we grow – and this is the
POINT of community, not one of its weaknesses.

In the past year, the most spiritually helpful idea I’ve come across
came from Brené Brown
suggesting that we assume that “other people are doing their best.”
That is, this is the idea that has most helped me to be more loving,
more patient, and more kind.  This does NOT MEAN that someone else’s
best is OK – sometimes it is not, and cases of abuse are clearly in
this category – but in terms of my response to others, it is
helpful.  I’d also like to note here that while churches are full of
annoyances and disagreements by necessity, there are REAL harms done
by faith communities that need to be taken seriously.  Many of those
involve rejecting God’s beloveds, and/or functioning as an arm of the
status quo when it comes to racism, sexism, heterosexuality,
transphobia, ableism, and other hierarchies.  The work of the church
includes CHANGING so that those harms don’t keep happening.   Yet, it
also involves knowing that we are going to have to keep working on
each of those things, and never become complicit.

Paul suggests that we owe one another nothing but love, and I suspect
this is a far more radical idea that it appears at first.  The
Ancient Roman economy, just like ours, was based on debt.  People
made money by having money and loaning it out for interest.  People
who were poor lost money by being without money.  And much of the
world was motivated by trying to pay off debt.  

To step out of that system, to owe no one anything, kept the rich
from getting richer.  However, I think it also required the support
of community.  Because most people wouldn’t have been able to take
care of themselves without acquiring debt, unless the community was
working together.  So, that suggests that being debt-free meant
participating in the sort of the community that exemplified the
kindom – with people mutually caring for each other.

Then, it makes sense that all that is owed is “love to one another”
because such a community has to have deep bonds of love.  And the
reminders of what good community behavior look like follow in Paul’s
instructions.

The gospel lesson from Matthew comes to similar points – we need to
have ways of caring for our community in order to be well,
relationships matter, God based community looks different,  and we
grow in faith hand in hand with others.

Another way to think about this can be found in a quote by Ann
Voskamp, “Shame
dies when stories are told in safe places.”  Churches
are meant to be those safe places, and for now our Bridging the
Distance Groups are intentionally trying to create those spaces.  The
world uses our shame to control us, to get us to buy things, to
convince us to be or live certain ways.  But God is interested in our
full and abundant lives, free to be and to LOVE.  So God is
interested in making spaces for us to share our stories, and let go
of our shame.

Interestingly, like foregoing debt, foregoing shame requires
community support and enables kindom building.  It also tends to help
us be less petty and deal better with annoyance 😉

So, wherever two or three Jesus followers are gathered, may we learn
to make safe space.  And, in the meantime, may we learn to do it in
alternative ways 😉

Amen

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

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

September 6, 2020

Uncategorized

“Journey and Stability”based on  Genesis 12:1-4a and Psalm 121

  • March 8, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

It
is commonly said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a
single step.  It seems, in this story of Abram, that this is true.
God says “go” and Abram takes the first step.  By the accounts of
the Bible, it will be about 2000 miles, this journey he goes on.
Which is about the same distance as walking to Atlanta, Georgia –
and back.  

Or,
its the same distance as walking the Appalachian Trail (AT) as it
wanders from Maine to Georgia.  Thru hikers on the AT are able to
make the hike in 5-7 months.  Abram and Sarai will take quite a bit
longer than that.

Thru
hikers on the AT, however, usually have lives to go back to.  They
take time off, hike the trail (with food mailed to them along the
way), and then return to their houses, jobs, families, friends, and
former lives.  Its said that 3 in 20 people who start out on the AT –
usually with the best hiking boots, water sanitizers, backpacks, and
tents – will complete the journey.

Abram
and Sarai will eventually complete their journey, albeit with
different names by the time they are done. They and Lot and their
servants and their animals traveled for 2000 miles and even when they
“arrived” where they were going, they would never settle.  The
story claims that Abram was 75 when he left on the journey, and 175
when he died. The land where he and Sarah were buried – purchased
at Sarah’s death – would be the only land they would call their own
again.  There were no more houses that they lived in.  The rest of
their lives would be lived in the tents of a nomad.  Once the journey
moved them from the city of their home, they wouldn’t hear their own
language ever again.  And, maybe it was important, and maybe it
wasn’t – but the religion of his birth – the gods that the people
worshipped in the Land of Ur – were left behind as well.  Abraham
left on this new journey called by a God who, as far as we know, had
not spoken to him until God said, “Get up and go.”  And he left.

Abram,
Sarai, and Lot model listening to God’s call and trusting that God
goes with us on our journeys.    That said, sometimes God calls us to
stay put too.  God’s calls can’t be predicted, we aren’t all Abrams
and Sarais.  And while God will call where and how God will call, we
all also have yearning for both journey and for stability.  (Which
sometimes matches God’s call and sometimes doesn’t.)

We
want stability (like
Psalm 121): to have a routine, to have deep connections to people
we see on a regular basis, to know and understand the systems and
institutions around us, to have some predictability to life, to sing
songs we KNOW, to eat familiar food, to have our view of the world
unperturbed.  I have been in Schenectady longer than anywhere else
since I graduated from high school, and I can assure you that there
is a magic and a wonder to knowing where you are going without
needing a map, to learning a grocery store well enough that you can
make a shopping list in the order of the store’s aisles, to having
your doctor actually know your medical history, to having colleagues
with whom you’ve built deep trust over time.  

We
also want change though: we want new experiences, we want to travel
and see new things and learn different ways of being, we want to meet
people who teach us about seeing the world differently, we want
better than what we’ve already known – systems that WORK for
everyone, we want to sing new songs that resonate with our beings, to
eat new delicious food, to have our worldview expanded.  We want to
grow, and change, and become.  We want things to be BETTER.

The
tension between stability and change, between journeying and staying
put is a major tension in life.  Immigrants and refugees live lives
of the journey, Abram and Sarai among them.  

Years
ago I heard this poem, and its been playing around in my head ever
since:

The
Call of Abraham by Kilian McDonnell1

(“Now
the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country.’” Gen 12:1)

Talk
about imperious.
Without a by-your-leave,
or, may I presume?
No
previous contact,
no letter of introduction,
no greeting,
just
out of the blue
this unknown God
issues edicts.

This
is not a conversation.
Am I a nobody
to receive decrees
from
one whose name
I do not know?
And at our first encounter!

I
have worshipped my own god.
To you I had addressed no
prayers,
offered no sacrifices.
asked no favors,
but
quick,
like sudden fire in the desert,
without the most
elemental ritual,
I hear “Go.”

At
seventy-five,
am I supposed to scuttle my life,
take that
ancient wasteland, Sarai,
place my thin arthritic bones
upon
the road
to some mumbled nowhere?

Let
me get this straight.
I will be brief.
I summarize.
In ten
generations since the Flood
you have spoken to no one.
Now,
like thunder on a clear day,
you give commands:
pull up my
tent,
desert my home,
the graves of my ancestors,
my friends
next door, leave Haran
for a country you do not name,
there to
be a stranger,
a sojourner.

God
of the wilderness,
from two desiccated lumps,
from two parched
prunes
you promise to make a great nation.
In me all peoples of
the earth
will be blessed.

You
come late, Lord, very late,
but my camels leave in the morning.

I
love the tension in the poem, the anger, the annoyance, the worry,
the fear, the humanity of it.  The ending is perfect, because despite
it all or because of it all, he goes.  Abraham is the father of
faith, the beginning of the monotheistic tradition.  Christians,
Jews, and Muslims look to him as father.

I
looked at Genesis chapter 11 this week, and noticed something
important. Abram’s father, Terah is the one who starts the Journey.
We say that Abram went from Ur to Shechem, BUT REALLY his father
seemed to make the decision to go from Ur to Haran, which is the
longer part of the journey.  Abram heard the call and left Haran for
Shechem.  That changes things.

See,
if Abram was called out of no where and nothing to do this, with no
prior relationship with God, and he did… and he is the father of
faith, then we might conclude that we’re called to do that too.  But
really it wasn’t like that.  Whether or not Terah knew it, he started
the journey.  Whether or not Terah knew God, he started the journey.
Abram had already experienced migration, and move, he had already let
go of some of the things you have to let go of to leave.  Further,
despite the poem, we don’t really know how long God and Abram had
been talking, it may have been a lot longer.  

The
scripture says, “Now the LORD said to Abram,
‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the
land that I will show you.  I will make of you a great nation, and I
will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a
blessing.  I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses
you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be
blessed.’”

But
it actually doesn’t say, “Suddenly, out of no where the LORD
said….”

If
Abram hadn’t done it, would we be here today?  I don’t think so.
BUT, if Terah hadn’t gone, we also wouldn’t be, and if Isaac hadn’t
been faithful we also wouldn’t be….

Abram
was ONE PART of a journey.  His part was spectacular and still
startles us today with its faithfulness.  But the journey started
before him, and it was 500 years or more before the promise he heard
was fulfilled.  

Its
not ALL on us, my friends.  We’re called to do our part, but God is
patient, and has long range plans. We aren’t going to solve world
hunger or bring world peace, or even just transform poverty in
Schenectady by ourselves.  We’re just a part – an imperative part,
but not the only part.  The calls to stay, and the calls to go,
they’re all a part of a larger picture – and when we are faithful,
we enable God’s work in the world to grow ever more complicated and
beautiful.  

So,
I couldn’t help but counter the Call of Abraham poem.  I just don’t
buy that it was sudden, as beautiful as the first poem is.  Nor do I
think Abram’s version is the whole story. So, having considered it
from another angle, here is the Call of Sarah.

The Call of Sarah by Sara Baron
(“Now, the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country.” Gen 12:1)

When you’ve been a failure, an outcast, a useless lump,
an ancient wasteland, like I have -which is to say:
a barren woman –
for your whole life, you learn the things others do not.

You learn how to hold your head up,
when there is no reason to be proud.
You learn how to find peace,
when there is no peace to be found.
And ever so slowly,
so slowly indeed that you don’t notice it coming,
you learn that your value is not
what everyone else believes it to be.
You learn that you are not just a failed child-bearer.
You learn that you are alive and good and loved and worthy as just a person, even without being a mother.

I heard it first.
I heard it many decades ago.
I heard it when we were still in Ur.
It took me a decade to admit it to myself.
And another to admit it to Abram,
sweet husband though he is.

After I told him, he looked at me strangely for a while.
Then, a few years later, he started to hear it too.
He looked at me even more strangely after that.

That was 20 years ago.
The call has become louder every day.
It has started to seems reasonable to us,
which just proves that we’re crazy.

We’re too old.

But then again the rituals of worship feel like lies now.
We’ve come to know this one who talks to us, this One-God.
The rest of them fade away as if to nothing in the light of the One-God.

I’m not sure when we decided,
it took so long, and we went back and forth and back and forth….
and then back and forth some more.
It was about when Terah died, that the back and forth line moved so we talked a bit more about going than about how crazy we were.
Then, later, we slowly eliminated our excuses.

After all, we’re old.
What do we have to lose?

I’m ready to leave the pitying eyes,
and move to the desert where I can be free,
To worship and to love the One-God,
To love and connect to my Abram,
To be a blessing, even without being blessed.

We come very late, One-God, very very late.
But our camels leave in the morning.  

Remember
dear ones, there is more to the story than meets the eye –
including the ones who started the journey and the ones who complete
it.  Our parts are imperative, but they’re just a part of what God is
up to.  Thanks be to God.  Amen

1http://www.saintjohnsabbey.org/mcdonnell/poetry.html#The%20Call%20of%20Abraham

Uncategorized

“The Garden of Eden in Context” based on Genesis…

  • March 1, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Six years ago I
shared with the worshiping community in this church my learnings
about the Garden of Eden story.  Some of you weren’t here yet, and
some of you don’t have perfect memories.  The challenge of serving
THIS church, though, is that some of you DO seem to have perfect
memories, and I don’t want to bore you.  So… if I do, I’m sorry.  I
promise I’m getting to new and different points, but we all need to
get there together, and that requires reviewing the information about
the story first.  

The Creation
story that starts in Genesis chapter 2 is the Yahwist version, which
means it is folk literature, aimed at explaining why things are they
way they are.  Folk literature and shared communal myths are pretty
deeply related.  While the entire rest of the Hebrew Bible never
comes back to mention the Garden, or Adam, or Eve again, the
Christian tradition has been quite obsessed with this story.  That’s
likely due to the work of Paul in Romans, and the way that Paul’s
understanding became a normal way of understanding the point of
Jesus!

However, the
story itself makes the most sense when we look at it in context, and
the context for the story is the Ancient Near East, and the creation
stories of the Ancient Near East.  For transparency’s sake, my
understanding about this text comes from the brilliant Roman Catholic
priest and scholar Addison Wright, who shared with “Ecumenical
Scripture Institute” in 2011.

The Canaanites,
neighbors and frenemies of the Ancient Israelites, have a creation
story centered around their tribal god, Baal.  Baal
was for them the storm god and fertility god. He fought Leviathan in
order to bring order out of chaos.  He dispensed well-being on the
earth.  He is called rider of the clouds, and much of this is
appropriated for YHWH.  Baal has a holy encampment on his holy
mountain after the intentional flood at the sea  – like YHWH with
Sinai and Noah.  Some text fragments of Baal’s creation story have
incantations against snake bites, with a story about a man in the
east near the Tigress called Adam who touched a tree he shouldn’t
have touched, and got bit by the snake, and by calling on the gods he
got the incantations to avoid death, and the enmity between humans
and snakes.  That tree was the tree of death.

OK,
so hopefully I’ve done my job in convincing you that the early
Genesis stories that the Yahwist tells fit into the Ancient Near
East.  Now, in the Ancient Near Eastern people believed that
you could EITHER be immortal OR reproductive.  You probably can see
the problem – if you let immortals reproduce, you get to infinite
people very quickly.  You can probably also see then, that for the
people who believed this, sexuality was inherently related to death
and mortality.  The capacity to procreate came WITH the reality of
dying.  And, lest we forget the rather long era of human history
before effective birth control, sexuality and children were tied
closely together.  So again, parenthood and death was one option and
immortal life without sexuality was the other.  One could not have
both, as they saw it.

Furthermore, in
Ancient Near East stories, paradise gardens are places that IMMORTALS
live.  Thus, children do not live there.  Given this assumption,
eating from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”
transformed Adam and Eve from being immortal, asexual beings into
mortal, sexual beings.  That knowledge seems like it may have had a
lot to do with sexual maturity.

Now, when I
first heard this, I liked it a lot.  Mostly I liked it because it
pulled us out of blaming women for everything, and out of a hyper
focus on sin.  I wasn’t really convinced by it though.

Then, Father
Wright pointed out that the punishments given in the story fit this
understanding.    After they eat, they see that they are naked, which
fits a burgeoning sexual awakening.  We stopped reading before the
rest of the punishments, but they are:  the couple is thrown out of
the Garden, the woman will have pain in childbirth, sexual desire
will complicate life, you will have to work to stay alive, and you
will now die.  Which it turns out, all fits.  Leaving the Garden is
what happens when you aren’t immortal.  Pain in childbirth is only
relevant when childbirth is going to happen.  Sexual desire IS
complicated, and wasn’t when they didn’t have any.  Having to work to
stay alive isn’t necessary when you can’t die.  Finally, being mortal
means death will come.   Perhaps most interestingly, at the end of
the list of punishments, the woman is named for the first time.  Adam
(whose own name means mud-creature) calls her “Eve, because she was
the mother of all who live.”  Eve means to breath, to live, or to
give life.

At that point,
I was convinced that Father Wright was not only onto a cool
interpretation, his interpretation was superior to any others I’ve
ever heard.  The only problem is that it doesn’t work with Paul’s
take in Romans, at least as it has been used through the millenia.
Paul argues that as death came into humanity through Adam, the sting
of death is removed from humanity by Jesus.  In fact, Paul is sort of
taking on the whole Ancient Near East, because he is claiming that
with God’s work in Jesus, one can have children AND be immortal, just
not an immortality on earth.  Paul is trying to make sense of Jesus,
and of the impact of his life, and this is how he does it.  I don’t
think Paul meant to create quite the firestorm of misogyny and
sin-guilt that he accidentally did.  

Which then
leaves us free to be rather grateful to Adam and Eve, since if they
hadn’t eaten of that tree, none of us would exist 😉  Moreso, it
gives us freedom to reconsider our understandings of both gender and
sin.  It feels like a good reminder that by “sin” the Bible means
“missing the mark” which always feels a lot lighter than what I
would otherwise assume.

One of my
curiosities is about why we’ve held onto this story so tightly.
Again, the ancient Jews did not, and while Paul makes this argument,
we could have rather ignored it as well.  Yet this story is still one
of the living folk narratives in our culture, for Christians and
non-Christians alike.

I’ve wondered
if it relates to a yearning for “paradise.”  It is all sort of
interesting, right?  Because once we bring Paul into it, paradise
comes back in the form of afterlife.  And I think people yearn for
paradise, quite possibly because the world we live in is so full of
suffering and we’d like to consider other options.  The Garden of
Eden itself though, according to the story, was quite small!  It was
small enough for one person to tend to it, and it contained only two
people.  That would be REALLY boring for ETERNITY.  Exiting
definitely seems like the right option.

And yet, the
world is not as it should be.  We know this in our bones.  And we
YEARN for it to be better.  Sometimes our yearning takes the form of
remembering the past in a way that cleans it up and makes it seem
closer to perfect than it was.  Sometimes our yearning encourages us
to close our eyes to the pain and suffering around us.  Sometimes our
yearning for better closes our eyes to the harm we are doing, and the
shame we live with.  Sometimes our yearning for better erupts in
anger for how things are.  Sometimes our yearning for better makes us
afraid of what is and what might come.

AND, sometimes
our yearning for better is how God works with us to make the world…
better.  Isn’t it complicated that the same yearning can do harm and
do good?  Oh, human life.  I think there are two best ways to respond
to our shared yearning for a better world.  One, as you might guess,
is to work with God and each other to make the world better.  The
other is to put our energy on noticing the things that are already
good.  There may be a natural desire for paradise, and we don’t live
in one, but we do live in a world filled with wonders, and when we
forget to attend to them, we can miss out on all the goodness that is
already with us.  The kindom, they say, is already here in part and
is coming in completion.  Let us pay attention to both parts – as
they are the work of co-creating that paradise with 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

March 1, 2020

Uncategorized

“High Standards?” based on Deuteronomy 30:15-20 (really) and Matthew…

  • February 16, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Choose
the things of life, not the things of death.  That’s the gist of our
Hebrew Bible lesson today.  Following the ways of God is choosing
life.  Turning away from God is choosing death.  In the passage,
these are seen as communal decisions.  The desire of God is that the
people choose life, but the passage admits it is their choice.

Deuteronomy
is written from the perspective of the Exile, where the big question
was “why did this happen to us?”  The answer Deuteronomy gives is
“because we weren’t faithful to God and to God’s vision for our
society.”  Thus, when they look back on their communal life, they
yearn to have made better choices, to have been more faithful, to
have chosen the way of life rather than the way of death.  

I
have no idea if more faithful choices on the part of Ancient Israel
would have prevented the Exile.  It seems a bit unlikely, but who
knows.  It is clear that Ancient Israel was not faithful to living
out God’s vision, but it is also clear that the emergence of
mega-empires and being a little country at an intersection of major
trade routes was a dangerous reality.

Nevertheless,
the questions of what way we choose to live still resonate.  It seems
useful to point out that although the words “choice” and “life”
have particular connotations in the debate over whether or not women
have the right to control their own bodies, the phrase “choosing
life” has nothing to do with that.   Rather, it is about the
patterns of decisions that either turn towards God or away from God.
To put it another way, it is about living in a way that enhances life
for everyone and everything, or …. not.

Choosing
death, in terms of Deuteronomy was oppressing the poor, the widows,
the orphans, and the foreigners.  It was wanting a king and creating
wealth differentiations.  It was allowing the justice system to
become unjust for the poor.  It was putting God second and personal
prosperity first.

While
all of that has resonance today, I think there are also personal
aspects to this metaphor.  They may make the most sense from the
perspective of a person who is nearing the end of their life.  What
are people yearning for more of at the end of their lives?  What do
they regret?  What are they grateful for?  

While
people and their answers are different, patterns certainly emerge.
An article on the topic from Business
Insider
offers 5 of the most common regrets of people at the end of their
lives:

1. I
wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life
others expected of me.

2. I
wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I
wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I
wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.1

These
give us some really good answers as to what are the things of life
(courage, authenticity, feelings, friends, joy) and what are the
things of death (expectations, overworking, fear, distance, and
disconnection.)

The
only thing I think is actively missing from the list is the choosing
death of distractions.  So much of modern life is just a wide-ranging
smorgasbord of things willing to distract us from our feelings, from
discomfort, from our authentic selves.  Many of these distractions
come in the form of screens, but not all do.  It is EASY to numb our
selves out, rather than face our feelings, and (oh my!) respond to
what the feelings tell us about how we need to change our lives.  

Some
of you have heard me say that during my renewal leave I disconnected
from social media and email.  It was GLORIOUS.  I still found myself
picking up my phone more than I expected,  and I eventually got
curious about why.  Quite often, I pick up my phone to play Sudoku
(the only game I permit on my phone).  And so then I got curious as
to why I was doing it. Two reasons:  either because I was feeling
anxious and wanted to be distracted from it or because I was feeling
overwhelmed deciding between things and wanted to procrastinate the
decision.  Those motivations have held true since then as well.  The
smorgasbord of distraction options that keep us from making hard
decisions, or from dealing with our emotions are things of death.   I
suspect they are also things we may regret on our deathbeds, when
time feels precious and like a thing not be wasted away.

In
an attempt to change that pattern, to be more at ease with myself and
less worried about making the “wrong” decision, since coming back
from leave, I’ve been slowly working my way through Brené
Brown’s book “The Gifts of Imperfection.”   This week I read the
section entitled “Cultivating Self-Compassion: Letting Go of
Perfectionism.”  Brown says “Where perfectionism exists, shame is
always lurking.”2
Now many of us are trained to think that perfection is a GOOD goal,
that it is about striving to be one’s best or self-improvement, but
Brown disagrees.  She says, “Perfectionism is the belief that if we
live perfect, look perfect, and act perfect, we can minimize or avoid
the pain of blame, judgement, and shame.  …. Perfectionism, at it’s
core, is about trying to earn approval and acceptance.”3
(OUCH.)

Now,
if I’m honest, I have had an unusually difficult year.  Almost a year
ago now, the Church (big C) to which I have committed my life
declared itself morally bankrupt, and that has been …. heavy.  

At
the same time, this church (little c) has been struggling through
incredibly difficult decision making that has resulted in much higher
anxiety in the system than usual.  And, as family systems predicts, a
lot of the anxiety got passed to
me
as the leader.  That’s to be expected.  That’s what happens when
there is anxiety in a system, it gets focused on the leader.

Now, I
know that pastoral ministry is an impossible task to do perfectly.  
There is a reason why there is no universally agreed upon definition
of perfect pastor.  Context matters a lot in ministry – so do
people and their expectations.  Each person in each church has
different expectations of what a pastor IS and should be doing, and
most of those aren’t even conscious.  So those expectations aren’t
clearly articulated, and yet there is a hope that they will be met –
all of them, from all of the people, all the time, all at the same
time.  My own expectations are that I should spend about half my time
on each of the following: visiting the hurting and keeping in touch
with all the people, sermon and worship work, administration and
meetings, keeping up to date with great research and scholarship and
teaching it, considering structural reorganization and systemic
change, making change within our communities, meeting people and
bringing them to church, maintaining a deep and profound prayer life.
At a minimum.

As the
anxiety has risen, my fears of my own failures have gotten sharper,
and the critiques coming at me have kept pace with my own fears.  Yet
my capacities haven’t changed – I still can’t meet my own standards
in any aspect of ministry, and I don’t know that I can meet anyone
else’s either.  

Now, my
suspicion is that I’m talking about something more universal than
pastoral ministry, or even leadership.  I think that most of our
lives have times when we feel like what we’re doing isn’t enough, and
even worse there are times when others agree with us about that!  It
feels awful, and it can be a really ugly downhill spiral.  This is
the stuff Brown is talking about as perfectionism, and boy oh boy
does it make sense to me that perfectionism is about avoiding the
awful feeling of being judged lacking.

Brown
shares about people who are less stuck in perfectionism, and she says
two attributes make them different, “First, they spoke about their
imperfections in a tender and honest way, and without shame and fear.
Second, they were slow to judge themselves and others.  They
appeared to operate from a place of ‘We’re all doing the best we
can.’  Their courage, compassion, and connection seemed rooted in the
ways they treated themselves.”4
She concludes that people were operating from self-compassion, and
that it is LEARNABLE.
It has 3 parts:

“Self-kindness:
Being warm and understanding towards ourselves when we suffer, fail,
or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating
ourselves with self-criticism.

Common
Humanity:  Common humanity recognizes that suffering and feelings of
personal inadequacy are part of the shared human experience –
something we all go through rather than something that happens to
‘me’ alone.

Mindfulness:
Taking a balanced approach to negative emotions so that feelings are
neither suppressed nor exaggerated.  We cannot ignore our pain and
feel compassion for it at the same time.  Mindfulness also requires
that we not ‘over-identify’ with thoughts and feelings, so that we
are caught up and swept away by negativity.”5

So,
difficult as it is, authenticity and choosing LIFE are about facing
shame and failure, being vulnerable, and letting go of perfection.
I’m really quite sure that our self-judgments don’t happen in vacuums
like we think – most
of us believe that it is OK to be harsher with ourselves than we’d be
with others, but the truth is that judgement itself slips out
unaware, and the only way to be truly kind to other people in their
vulnerability is to become more gentle with ourselves in ours.  

Perfectionism
is choosing death.  Compassion is choosing life.  May God help us all
as we strive to choose life.  Amen

1Susie
Steiner, “The 5 Things People Regret Most on Their Deathbeds”
https://www.businessinsider.com/5-things-people-regret-on-their-deathbed-2013-12,
Published December 5, 2013. Accessed February 13, 2020.

2Brené
Brown, “The Gifts of
Imperfection” (Center City, Minnesota: Hazelden, 2010), p. 55.

3Brown,
56.

4Brown,
59.

5Brown,
59-60.  Please note, the same researcher offers other great stuff at
www.self-compassion.org

February 16, 2020

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

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