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Sermons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someday, may it fully be so.  Amen

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/ 
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  1. Does afterlife exist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Possible answers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1

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

Sermons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 6, 2019

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

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

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

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

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

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

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


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

Today
we’re going to look at two belief systems that disagree with my
belief system at the core.  Right now we are comparing three
different belief systems: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, the
Christian Right, and “Jesus Following”1.
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism was identified by sociologists through a
large research project with US teens, and is the actual belief system
of most teens, despite any religious tradition they claim.
Furthermore, as teens are most heavily influenced by their parents
when it comes to faith, we have reason to believe that a rather large
segment of the population actually believes “Moralistic Therapeutic
Deism.”  So, we are looking at it, and finding where it does and
doesn’t match our actual faith tradition.

“Moralistic
Therapeutic Deism” has 5 salient points:

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermons

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

  • September 15, 2019February 11, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

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

We
are comparing three different believe systems: Moralistic Therapeutic
Deism, the Christian Right, and “Jesus Following”.  Moralistic
Therapeutic Deism was identified by sociologist through a large
research project with US teens, and is the actual belief system of
most teens, despite any religious tradition they claim.  Furthermore,
as teens are most heavily influenced by their parents when it comes
to faith, we have reason to believe that a rather large segment of
the population actually believes “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”
So, we are looking at it, and finding where it does and doesn’t match
our actual faith tradition.

“Moralistic
Therapeutic Deism” has 5 salient points.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s
look at them:  Blessed are the:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron 

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady 

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 

Pronouns: she/her/hers 

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

September 15, 2019

Sermons

“Find Joy” based on  Isaiah 66:10-14 and Psalm 66:-19

  • July 21, 2019February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Weeping
may linger for the night,
but
joy comes with the morning.

–
Psalm 30:5b

I have a fondness for
… um… expressive language ;), and that fondness was significantly
stronger when I was in college.  However, in April during every year
of college I cleaned up my language to  pristine levels.  I did it so
that when I got to camp, I would not accidentally speak a word that
would harm, or offend, or get repeated by any of our campers with
special needs.  We were also careful then, as we are now, not to
offer too many hugs or to permit any loosening of manners – not to
allow anything at camp that would cause potential harm in the real
world.  

I did this because I
loved our campers, and I wanted them to be safe, secure, and at ease
both at camp and in the world.

During my second year
of seminary I started an internship with an urban church, one that
was doing important ministry with people who were homeless.  People
who are homeless are more likely to be assaulted – both physically
and sexually.  People who are homeless are often hungry, unable to
get clean, struggling with physical health, and most people who are
homeless for a long time end up with an addiction even if they didn’t
start out with one.  Being homeless is one of the hardest and most
vulnerable positions in our society, if not THE hardest.

The history I’d
learned in college about the closing of state hospitals for people
with disabilities, and the resulting (continued) failure of the
system to care for the most vulnerable people in our society suddenly
became very clear in reality.  People who were in the same population
as Sky Lake’s beloved special needs campers were homeless on the
streets of Los Angeles.  The disconnect between the intentional care
I’d been offering to God’s beloved people with special needs at camp
and the reality that people with special needs were being assaulted
every day on the streets of LA, and that society was doing NOTHING to
change it broke open my heart.

I have not recovered
yet.

Instead, over the
past 15 years, I’ve discovered more and more ways that the world is
fundamentally broken and been disillusioned repeatedly.  Some wise
ones have pointed out that is it because of the color of my skin and
the stability of my childhood that I was able to be so naive to begin
with, and they’re right.  Yet, for me seeing the world as it is, and
seeing clearly what its priorities are and are not, is painful.
Similarly, seeing the church as it is, and seeing clearly what its
priorities are and are not has been painful.

I believe that part
of the purpose of church is to offer a God’s vision for the world to
the people, and as such to offer hope that we can build the kindom
together.  Further, I believe that the pastor’s role is to be a
speaker of the vision, and of hope.  People NEED hope, and our faith
tradition offers it.  It has been hard at times, though, to have
integrity and be truthful about the brokenness, and simultaneously
offer real hope.  The challenge, I think, has been in my own
discomfort with reality.  Once reality is accepted, then it can be
worked on, but I’ve been struggling for years to accept that things
really are as broken as abundant evidence points to.

The realities of the
world, however, are exactly WHY we need to speak hope – real hope –
and be inspired by God’s visions of justice.  We can’t just let
ourselves wallow, we have to face reality, but we can’t offer weak or
trivial hope.  The world, and its people, NEED to know that another
way of being is possible, and we can create it together.

Family Systems theory
teaches us that when we are anxious, we get more close minded.  When
systems (groups of people) are anxious, they get more close-minded
too.  They take less risks.  They make worse decisions.  They create
anxiety in their people, and then people with raised anxiety tend to
revert to old ways of functioning and coping mechanisms that often do
more harm than good: gossip, triangulation, demonizing others,
consuming, addictive behaviors, lashing out, etc.  Anxiety can easily
become it’s own self-perpetuating cycle.

Dear ones, the
anxiety in our systems right now are at unhealthy levels.  I remember
reading articles during the 2016 election cycle about the impact the
election was having on our shared mental health (it was bad).  It has
gotten worse.  The injustices around us take a toll every day, and I
hear from all of us how much we want to create change.  It doesn’t
help right now to be part of the United Methodist Church, because
being part of a CHURCH that is an oppressor is really darn
depressing, and adds our anxiety and dismay.  Further, in this
particular congregation, we’ve been working on something that is also
really hard: we’ve been in conversations about balancing our budget,
which we have not done since 2004.  (And even that was a bit of an
anomaly.)  We have been living beyond our means for a long time.
Balancing the budget requires making difficult decisions about who we
are and what we do and what is imperative to our shared life
together, and it requires that we have really difficult conversations
where we don’t all agree – and that is anxiety producing as well.

It is tempting, in
these days, to give up:  to stick our heads in the sand, or to lash
out in anger, or to become comatose on the couch.  It is REALLY easy
to let the anxiety win.

But.

Dear ones, beloveds
of God, we aren’t going to do that.  We
aren’t going to give in and we aren’t going to lash out.  We aren’t
going to let anxiety take over.  We are going to keep on
keeping on, working towards the kindom, loving each other, spreading
love and goodness in the world, and trusting that God works with us,
through us, and when necessary despite of us.  We are going to find
the ways to let go of the anxiety, and find some trust and some hope,
and be sources of transformation.

We are going to break
out of the cycles, because anxiety is terrible for us, it is terrible
for the world, and it enables all the things we don’t want to see!
Now, here is the weird twist.  Given all the brokenness of the world,
it can feel really disrespectful, or trite, or privileged, or even
mean to …. have fun, seek joy, laugh, and play.  (Or even just to
take breaks and deal with reality for a bit.)  That’s real!  I know
how hard it can be to enjoy life when we know the awful things that
are happening, but I want to share with you wisdom that I heard
second hand.  This wisdom came from a person who was impoverished and
disenfranchised in a country with dictatorial rule.  That person was
asked, “Why are you so joyful when things are so bad!?” And they
responded, “Why would we let them take our joy too?  It is all we
have left.”  

Joy, it turns
out, is resistance.  Joy is OURS to claim, and we shouldn’t give
it up, because giving it up won’t help anyone – in fact it will
hurt everyone.  The world needs more joy.

Joy, unlike anxiety,
creates space for creativity, for connection, for hope.  Out of the
box thinking can happen when joy replaces anxiety, and the problems
of the world today REALLY need new solutions.  Joy makes space for
people to regain their humanity.  And laughter really is the best
medicine (trust me, I laughter until I cried at camp – twice –
and I haven’t felt so whole since before General Conference).
Whatever you do, dear ones, don’t cut out joy from your life.

And, if you need help
getting to joy – which is totally fair – most wisdom teachers say
gratitude is the way to get there.  So, practice advice here: keep a
gratitude journal, and take 5 minutes at the end of each day to
notice what you are grateful for in that day.  Putting our attention
on what is good is a great way to create more good, and to make space
in our lives for joy.

Now for the REALLY
good news.  Our God is a God who knows all about oppression, and has
worked to overcome it throughout all of history.  In all these years
where I have become further and further disillusioned with society
and the world, I have found great comfort in the Bible.  The Bible is
VERY WELL AWARE of the brokenness of the world, of the reality of
domination systems, AND of the power of God to break them open.  

The Bible tells this
story innumerable times, but there are three really big versions of
thie story:  (1) The Bible says that God knows about the oppression
of slavery, and moves to free the people who are enslaved.  (2) The
Bible says God knows about the oppression of exile, and moves the
people to restoration.  (3) The Bible says God knows about the
oppression of being part of empire because of the force of the
military, and moves the people to empowerment, to resistance, and
ultimately to freedom.  That is, the stories of (1) Exodus, of (2)
Exile and Return, and (3) of the ministry of Jesus.

The passage from
Isaiah today is a response to Exile and Return, and it speaks in the
language of God as mother of the people, nursing them and caring for
them.  After a WHOLE LOT of condemnation of the injustices of ancient
Israel, in the end of Isaiah we hear, “ Rejoice with Jerusalem, and
be glad for her, all you who love her; rejoice with her in joy, all
you who mourn over her– that you may nurse and be satisfied from her
consoling breast; that you may drink deeply with delight from her
glorious bosom.”  Rejoice with Jerusalem, despite it’s history of
oppression, despite its history of exile and destruction, none of
those are the final words.  The final words are that God cares for
the people and finds a way to nurture them and it brings great joy.
The final words in the book of Isaiah are God’s comfort, and care,
and the people’s JOY.  

I’ve told you before,
but this bears repeating: Our faith says that Love wins in the end,
and if Love hasn’t won yet, then it isn’t the end yet.  (In this case
Love and God are interchangeable.)  The brokenness of day is not
the final answer, God is still at work.  We are still partnering
with God to make things better.  So, in the meantime, practice
gratitude, find joy, allow for rest, and in doing so let go of
anxiety.  God is working, and looking for for open-hearted, loving,
partners to work alongside.  May we find MANY ways to be those
people, and encourage each other towards joy.  Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. BaronFirst United Methodist Church of Schenectady603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305Pronouns: she/her/hershttp://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

“Finding Compassion” based on Luke 10:35-37

  • July 15, 2019February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

The
Parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the best known stories from
the Bible.  Some of you are likely sick of it, some of you are bored
by it, and some of you don’t know a thing about it.  Any of those
responses are acceptable around here, but I am going to review the
basic facts for those who haven’t heard them, I’ll let the rest of
you know when you may want to tune back in…

The
Samaritans were hated by the Jews.  They had a shared history, to a
point.  Both were part of the formation of Ancient Israel, both were
led by Kings Saul, David, and Solomon, but after Solomon the Northern
and Southern Kingdoms had a civil war and separated.  The North kept
the name Israel and had two parts: Samaria and Galilee, the South
became the nation Judah – from which we get the language “Jew”.
As you’d expect, the two nations that had fought a civil war to
separate from each other had some resentments towards each other.
Then, the Northern Kingdom fell in battle to Assyria in 922, its
leaders were taken into exile, and those who remained intermarried
with foreigners.  Thus, the 10 northern tribes of Israel were “lost.”
Except, they weren’t really.  They didn’t become a self-governing
nation again, but the love of YHWH and the Jewish tradition remained,
it was just different.

Of
course, the southern nation also fell, and also went into exile, but
it was nearly 350 years later, and they WERE able to rebuild their
nation.  Because of these differences (and similarities) the Jews
HATED the Samaritans, enough that those who were going from Judah to
their Jewish colonies in Galilee would tend to walk AROUND Samaria
even though it made the trip much longer.

Thus,
having the hero of this story be the Samaritan is a really big deal,
it shakes up all kinds of assumptions about who is good in the world.
In fact, the Jewish law scholar can’t even admit that it is the
Samaritan who does right, he instead answers “the one who showed
mercy.”  Indeed, the priest and the Levite (also a religious
leader) should have been the models of good behavior, and aren’t.
This story not only talks about what it means to be a neighbor, and
how showing mercy is what defines a good neighbor, it also upsets
assumptions about WHO can be good, and who IS good, and how we see
possibility in those we might identify as our enemies.

YOU
CAN COME BACK NOW


Now
that we’ve reviewed the characters in the parable, I want to zero in
on one line that jumped out at me this week.  It is verse 33, “But
a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he
was moved with pity.”  (NRSV)  Or, in the Message, “A Samaritan
traveling the road came on him. When he saw the man’s condition,
his heart went out to him.”  Or in the New American Translation,
“But a Samaritan traveler who came upon him was moved with
compassion at the sight.”

The
thing is, that every time I’ve read this story, I’ve read into it
something along the lines of, “The priest passed by on the other
side, even though he was supposed to be a person of God, the Levite
passed by on the other side, even though he was supposed to be a
person of God, but the Samaritan did what a person of God should have
done.”  I’ve missed the ATTRIBUTION of motivation.

For all these years, I thought
the Samaritan did what was right because it was right, and because
God wants us to take care of each other, so we’re supposed to.
However, the story doesn’t actually say that!!  The story says that
the Samaritan was “moved” and then acted on his response.  The
hero didn’t do the right thing simply because it was the right thing,
the hero was moved to do it.  His heart went out.  He felt
compassion.  He saw the man who had been robbed and something in his
humanity connected to something in the man’s humanity and he
responded to that.

Hearing it this way, it is
almost as if we aren’t responsible for fixing every single brokenness
in the world, and we don’t have to stop what we’re doing for every
hurting person we encounter, and … well, we don’t always have to be
THE Good Samaritan in every situation.  Now when I say that, you
hopefully think I’m crazy, because OF COURSE we don’t, because we
can’t.  Humans are finite and we simply can’t do everything for
everyone.  Further, we can do a lot more good if we focus and do what
we do well than if we try to respond to every little thing that we
see.

And yet, like most people I
know, I’m so overwhelmed by the brokenness of the world, and I feel
responsible to do my part, and often unclear about where the
boundaries lie on where my part is.  Which is to say, I often feel
guilty that I’m not doing more.

Two Sundays ago I was at camp,
and I invited the staff to do a little introductory ice breaker which
included the question “what kind of toothpaste do you use and why?”
I have previously found this to be an amusing question, which has
ended up giving shocking amounts of insight into people’s choices.
This time, however, the first two people to introduce themselves had
found ways to minimize their plastic use and carbon footprint in
their toothpaste choices (cool!), and were happy to share that their
WHY was out of love for creation.  That was awesome.  However, it
meant that for some other people who pick their toothpaste for other
reasons, and for those who hadn’t (yet) decided to make
eco-consciousness in toothpaste purchasing their priority, there was
a lot of guilt in answering the question.  

That
sort of guilt isn’t productive (if any guilt is productive, which I’m
not sure it is).  But it did serve as a good reminder to me of how
many things there are to pay attention to: how are we treating the
people we see in day to day life?  How are responding to those who
make requests of us?  How are we deciding what to buy, and who to buy
it from, and how much to pay for it, and what factors should impact
our purchases?  How do we decide what to give, and where to give, and
how much to give?  How do we decide when to work, when to play, when
to connect, when to rest?  How do we decide where to advocate, and
for what, and how?  How do we know if it has been effective?  How
much attention do we give to our physical bodies and their needs,
what about our emotional needs, what about our spiritual needs, what
about mental needs, and what about worrying about if we are being too
selfish thinking about all this?  How do we invest, if we can?  How
do we use our time, our energy, our resources, our responses, our
responsibilities, … our prayers, our presence, our gifts, our
service, and our witness 😉 … to do the most good, and the least
harm without burning out?

The only clue I have is the one
in this story.  The Samaritan didn’t act simply because it was the
right thing to do, because there are a lot of right things to do and
we just can’t do them all.  He acted on the need in front of him that
MOVED him.  He let his compassion guide him.

As far as I can tell, that’s
REALLY important.  For the Camp Staff who care about eco-choices in
toothpastes, thanks be to God!!  For the ones who don’t, whose hearts
go in other directions, thanks be to God!!  If we try to push
ourselves to care about everything, we will burn out and be able to
care about nothing.  If we try to become someone we aren’t, someone
who cares about things we don’t really care about, we’ll exhaust
ourselves and ignore our actual gifts.

Each of us in this room have a
wide range of things we’re good at, and enjoy, that support and
benefit others.  Each of us have ways that compassion naturally moves
in us, and if we follow the compassion, if we allow the movement of
our hearts to guide us, we will be doing GOOD work that benefits
ourselves AND others, and the kindom, and we might even be able to do
it in sustainable ways.

But
wait, you may be asking.  What if NOTHING moves me?  What if I have
no compassion? What if my heart is broken and it simply doesn’t go
out to anyone?  Am I damned to be the priest and Levite in this
story, the one who showed no mercy and are the examples of bad
neighborliness?

No, dear ones, you aren’t.  If
NOTHING is moving you at all, if your compassion doesn’t reach out
beyond yourself then there are two possible realities.  One is that
you haven’t found the place where your gifts lie yet, and it would be
useful to expand your exposure to the world until you find where it
does move.  More likely though, knowing all of you, if your heart
isn’t moving and compassion isn’t flowing it is because you’ve given
too much of yourself away, and you don’t have anything left to give.

If that’s true, and I’d lean
towards thinking that is true in this beautiful collection of Jesus
followers who try to be Good Samaritans in the world, then your job
is to sit with YOURSELF and offer your heart, and your compassion to
YOURSELF until you are filled back up.  You might even need to seek
out others who can offer you their hearts, and their compassion,
their listening ears or supportive shoulders.  

The world can be a very
difficult place, and if you are a person with empathy, it can be
incredibly draining.  If your heart isn’t moving, then it needs some
tender loving care, from God, from yourself, and from God’s other
beloveds.  If compassion doesn’t move you, then give yourself
compassion.

I know this is a
funny way to preach on the Good Samaritan, the normal method is to
tell you to be a good person and take care of your neighbor, but
instead I’m telling you to follow your hearts, and to trust that God
works in you through your compassion and energy – and not to push
further than your heart leads you.  Let mercy guild you, as the
parable says.  But if your heart doesn’t move, then stay put.  You’ll
be needed later, and being ready and rested will be good too.

Dear ones, follow
your compassion, and if you can’t find it, give it to yourself.  God
wants full, whole, loving beings, and that means we need to make
space to be them – even if it means walking on the other side of
the road!!!  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

July 14, 2019

Sermons

“Sheer Silence” based on 1 Kings 19:1-15a

  • June 23, 2019February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Elijah
had it rough.  In his time, the people were uncertain about their
loyalties.  Their shared story of being led out of bondage in Egypt
and to freedom in their own land by a God who cared about them and
how they treated each other… wasn’t primary anymore.  Their current
king was worshiping another gods.  Elijah was a prophet for YHWH,
called to speak out for justice, and for YHWH-God’s vision of people
treating each other well and creating a society where everyone could
survive AND thrive.

The
other gods weren’t into creating fair and equitable societies.  They
were into power, and control, hierarchy, and wealth – and most of
all they were into themselves.  They were easier to worship because
there felt like a direct correlation between sacrifices to those gods
and personal success.  (Aka, the prosperity gospel isn’t new.)

Worshiping
the God of our tradition isn’t always easy, and Elijah was proof of
that.  He was a prophet when neither the power structure nor the
people tended to want to hear him.  He was asked to bring bad news,
time and time again, and it was NOT appreciated.  For most of his
life he is presented as a very lonely creature.  He is said to have a
servant, but he seems to be on his own for the most part.  In the
preceding story he claimed a great victory for God over the other
gods  –  in a way I find utterly horrific – and gained the
attention of some of the people in doing so. He also upset the king
and queen, and was running away, certain of his impending death for
what he’d done, on the basis that the queen said she was going to
have him killed.

He
ran, by himself, into the desert.  It seems to me that he decided it
was better to control his own death than be tortured and shamed as he
died.  Running into the desert was claiming the right to at least die
alone.  The Bible, remember, thinks of the desert wilderness as a
place where there is not enough to survive without God’s help.

I
mention this, because I think there are a lot of deserts out there
–we have deserts of loneliness, we have deserts of grief, and
deserts of exhaustion, deserts of confusion, and deserts of
hopelessness, deserts of meaning, and deserts of beauty.  Research
says 45% of people in the US don’t have enough money for rent and
food1,
so there are a lot of people dealing with exactly the kind of deserts
that the Bible is talking about, no metaphor needed.  However, the
rest of the deserts also exist, both for people with enough money for
food and rent, and for those without.  For those of us who believe
that ALL people are beloved children of God, and who thus want to
work for a world where justice rolls down like waters, and mercy like
an every flowing stream, our country can feel like one big desert
of injustice and mercilessness.

Elijah
goes off into the desert by himself, too exhausted and scared and run
down to do anything but find a broom tree to lie under.  A broom tree
is a little desert shrub.  A devotional about broom trees says “Its
deep roots draw in the moisture of land that is otherwise barren.
…In the desert, water is invisible. It lies hidden beneath the
surface and is often too deep to reach on our own. But water
is there and the roots of a broom tree prove its existence. In the
same way, hope can be discovered even in the deepest moments of human
suffering.”2
Hagar also lay down under a broom tree to await oncoming death.
Hagar, too, was taken care of by God.  It seems that in the Bible
utter despair and hopelessness happen in the desert – and because
the desert is so HOT and the sun is so unyielding, the little shade
that the broom tree offers ends up being the place that people lie
down to give up their fight and let the despair win.

And,
in the Bible, that means that the broom tree, like the desert, is
where God steps in.  For Hagar, that meant helping her see the well
that was going to sustain her life.  For Elijah, it is a bit more
complicated.  He lies down under the broom tree to give up, and the
first thing that happens is … he falls asleep.  He stops fighting.
He lets the exhaustion win.

And
then, a messenger of God (I’d lean towards assuming a human one, but
that’s just me), delivers food and water – good food and water from
what I can tell – and wakes him up to eat it.  And then get gets to
go back to sleep.

I
like this part.  I may like this part best.

I
like that Elijah doesn’t have to do anything more.  He sleeps, he
eats and drinks, and he goes immediately back to sleep.  Sometimes,
friends, that’s all we have left when we’ve given our all to the work
of kindom building, and we have NOTHING left.  Sometimes finding food
and drink is too much, and someone has to help us, and even when they
do, all we can do afterwards is go back to sleep.  This is also
lovely encouragement for the people who tend to be messengers of God
who show up with food and drink.  The prophet may get a lot of glory,
but the prophet wouldn’t make it without those others who prop them
up.

Even
Elijah, even the one known for standing alone in his generation, even
he didn’t do it himself.  The food and water to sustain his life came
from outside his capacities.  They were gifts to support him.  The
work of building the kindom takes many people doing their part, never
just one standing alone.  In this church, we do some of those
“messenger under a broom tree” type ministries.  We support the
people of God by making the journey a touch easier, by seeing what is
needed and offering it.  Our breakfast is food and drink in some
people’s desert.  Sustain is too.  

This
passage is good to remember and see the valuable work of those who
are “messengers of God” with hidden, quiet support.    I think is
also honest about the times when life has drained EVERYTHING we have
from us, and that sometimes in life we sit under a broom tree without
any intention to ever get up again.  At those times, we don’t even
have a choice.  We can’t do any more.

And,
friends, I think that’s OK.  I think we’re allowed to be exhausted,
drained, horrified, and in despair.  Elijah is a pretty deal in the
Bible, and he gets just sleep under a broom tree!  I don’t want to
rush out from under this broom tree.  In the stories of the Bible,
sitting under them in despair is honest, and real.  It is a
reflection of what has happened, and what is happening, and that
there is no where else to turn.

AND
YET, God is the one who makes a way out of no-way.  God lets Elijah
sleep under the broom tree, BUT God also makes sure that Elijah gets
the sustenance he needs for the next part of the journey.  I guess
that means we get to sit under broom trees, we get to recover, we get
to be aimless, we get to rest and rebuild strength, but … it is
always a stop along the journey and never the journey’s end.
However, before anyone feels rushed out of their broom tree offering
shade in the desert, let’s note that he got to sleep, eat, drink, and
sleep again and eat again and drink again.  He got rebuilt before he
had to leave.  If you aren’t rebuilt yet, I’m not sure you have to
leave yet.

But,
leave the liminal space of the broom tree of hopelessness, we will.
God lets us be there, but not stay there.  Elijah gets awoken a
second time by a messenger, who has left food and drink again, and
then he gets kicked out from under the broom tree.  

It
seems to work for him.  On that rest, recovery, and sustenance, he is
able to complete his journey.  His journey is to Mount Sinai, where
Moses got the commandments from God.  Like Moses before him, Elijah
has the chance to know God more deeply there.  The story makes space
for Elijah to name his grievance and be heard, “I have been very
zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have
forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your
prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my
life, to take it away.” (verse 10).  And then and there, from a
cave on mountain far from home, Elijah experiences God.

The
story takes the time to clarify who God is and is not.  God is not in
the destruction, or the fear, or even the awe.  God is not in the
loud and extraordinary.  Instead, God is in the regular, the every
day, the silence.  There was probably silence under the broom tree,
but it seems Elijah needed the journey before he could hear its
significance.  So, Elijah emerges from the cave to stand in the midst
of sheer silence.  Teachers of Centering Prayer call silence “God’s
first language.”  In the midst of the presence of the Divine,
Elijah is again given the space to name his grievance and his grief.
God, who is in the silence, LISTENS to the one who has been
exhausted.

Now,
God’s response at first glance does not appear to be the very
empathetic.   Elijah repeats his claim that “I have been very
zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have
forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your
prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my
life, to take it away,”  and God replies, “Go to Damascus.”
Which, by the way, is like 500 miles away – through the desert.

See?
Isn’t it good there was some time under that broom tree before we
got to the cave?  I think it is because of the time to be, without
trying to do, that Elijah was able to hear God again.  And be ready
for the next steps of his journey.  By the way, Elijah was sent to
Damascus to anoint two new Kings (one for Aram and one for Israel)
AND to anoint his successor.  And, for a while, Elijah and Elisha got
to work together for justice, and Elijah didn’t have any more work he
did on his own.  After the broom tree, things got easier, and
there was more support.

Thank
God for broom trees, and prophets, and messengers (with food and
water), and rest, and restoration, and sustenance, and silence, and
companionship, and hope, and a God who cares for all people even when
we’re too exhausted to care for ourselves.  Amen

1https://money.cnn.com/2018/05/17/news/economy/us-middle-class-basics-study/index.html

2https://fivetalents.org/blog/2017/8/21/beneath-the-broom-tree-discovering-hope-in-the-deepest-moments-of-suffering

–

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

June 23, 2019

Sermons

“Wisdom, She Calls”based on Psalm 8 and Proverbs 8:1-4,…

  • June 23, 2019February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

I’ve recently gotten
feedback that many people around here like it when I preach from the
heart, from authenticity, from … myself, and not JUST from context.
This is a bit of a challenge because the authentic me is sort of a
mystic, and I’ve never been entirely clear how comfortable that is
for all of you.  However, I’m really grateful for feedback, so I’m
going to give it a try, and trust that you’ll continue giving
feedback if this is not what you were looking for at all.  

Today is Trinity Sunday.
Thus, our lectionary readings have given us space to consider the
Spirit, who in Proverbs is the Spirit of God’s Wisdom, the firstborn
of creation.  In its purest, most orthodox
forms, Trinity says that God IS Three Persons that are also One, and
the love between the 3 Persons is the foundational energy and
motivation of the universe, from which creation arose, and from which
God’s love for all humanity begins.  I’ve never been able to commit
to an orthodox understanding of Trinity, although I did give it a
good faith effort for a decade or so.  I adore this idea of love as
the foundation of the universe, but I’ve had to come to that
conclusion in other ways.  I don’t hold a traditional view of
Trinity, although I think those views can be strikingly beautiful.  

Instead, I’ve been most
formed by the thinking of Marjorie Suchocki, professor emerita of
theology at Claremont School of Theology, and the author of the book
“God, Christ, Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology.”  In
it, she talks about the idea of Trinity as a symbol for the
complexity and unity of God.  She says,  “God
as trinity becomes a symbol to indicate the sense in which the unity
of God embraces a complexity of a magnitude grater than which none
other can exist.”1
In more simple words, she says that God is one and God is infinite.
She doesn’t actually think the specific 3 of Trinity is the point,
but rather acknowledges that there is inherent value in thinking of
God as being  transcendent, immanent, and relational.  That is God is
beyond all that is, God is IN all that is, and God is in relationship
to all that is – and those are three things, so we think of God in
three ways.  

Suchocki’s
idea that Trinity means many and yet one has resonated for me.  God
is, of course, one.  We’re monotheists!!  And there is force of love
undergirding and infiltrating all parts of Creation, unifying us all.
At the same time, of course there are many facets to the Divine.
God is beyond our words, our metaphors, our understanding.  God is
complicated.  Any aspect of God we attempt to speak about or connect
to is both a part of God AND not the entirety of God.  God is love,
unconditional all encompassing love!!!  And, God is also one who
wants justice – so that good lives and good relationships can be
present for all people and not just for some.  And that doesn’t
ALWAYS feel only like love.  God is eternal, and yet God is also
present.  God is for us, and for each of us, and for all of us, all
at once.  In these ways, it makes sense to think of God as many, even
though God is also one.

In
some very similar ways, I think it makes sense to think of ourselves
as many and as one!    I mean each of us, each person, is both many
and one.  (Although, come to think of it, we are also one body of
Christ – one and many.)  We’re now at the mystical point of this
sermon 😉  If mystical isn’t going to fly for you, you may want to
think of all of this as development of compassion, although I’ll
admit to you that those are not well differentiated for me.

Years
ago, my spirituality professor told me about a prayer form called
with an acroynm FLAG.  In it you notice a strong emotion and
anthropomorphize that strong emotion as a young child.
Then you ask it:
Fear – what are you afraid of?
Longing –
what do you long for?
Ache – what is your ache/wound?
Gift –
what gift are you trying to offer that I’m not receiving?

This
prayer has been a great gift to me over the years, but in recent
years I’ve noticed that it relates to a whole bunch of other areas of
thought who are also looking at “self” in different ways.
Because this now comes from a lot of disciplines, to explain it I’m
going to glob them all together like we do when we work with all 4
gospel narratives at once.  We’re going to call it “parts theory.”
Because of how useful it has been in my own prayer life, as well as
in conversations with people,  it is one of the theories that I now
use to make sense of human beings- myself and others.  

Parts
theory says that we are a conglomeration of parts.  When this emerges
out of “non-violent communication” work, the parts are associated
with human needs.  In “Focusing”, the parts are associated with
physical sensations in various parts of our body.  In sensorimotor
psychology, parts relate to coping mechanisms necessary for survival,
particularly in childhood.  Going back to the prayer form I first met
this idea in, the young children we imagine are often expressions of
our self and our past. I think it may even be true that in the Center
for Courage and Renewal Teaching, where we talk about the maps of our
souls and the various terrain within, that we are actually
approaching parts from another angle.  Most places I’m looking for
understanding of how humans work seem to be moving to parts theory.

Now,
once we acknowledge that in our internal landscape there are various
parts doing their own things, then we think about how they relate to
each other and to our self as a whole.  Parts theory suggests that
dealing with ourselves is a lot like presiding over an unruly Church
Council meeting (who, us?) or perhaps an Annual Conference committed
to nonconformity (who, us?).  Parts tend to have their own points of
view, they remember the things that fit their narratives, they push
the things that fit their narratives, they ignore things that don’t
fit their narratives, and when they want things they ask.  And when
they ask, and we ignore them, they get louder (and sometimes meaner)
and this cycle can continue until we have a LOT OF INTERNAL
screaming.  Also, parts build connections with other parts, and parts
are antagonistic to other parts.  

If
you think of parts as trying to meet needs, this can become clearer.
So a part that is seeking out peace
is likely to be well partnered with the parts that seek rest
and beauty
and maybe even acceptance.
However, the part seeking out peace
is
likely in some conflict with the parts seeking out spontaneity,
stimulation, or
even growth.  And
when we’re talking about parts that have been harmed in the past,
this can be pretty strong.  For example, when a person lived through
abuse as a child, and the abuser was the caregiver, then the natural
human instinct to draw close to caregiver for safety and the natural
human instinct to run away from harm are in constant conflict…. and
those parts are trained to be on constant alert.

There
is also a Part in Charge.  I have tended towards calling this the
adult self.  While
the adult self is the moderator/chair of the council, the truth is
that sometimes the adult self loses control of the body.  In parts
language, that means that sometimes other parts hijack the adult
self, and the other parts are the ones running the show – by which
I mean the body, the facial expressions, the words, the tone, etc.
So if you think of a recent time when you said or did something that
you later regretted, and wondered “Why didn’t I have better
control?” the answer is likely that a part hijacked the adult
self
and “you” weren’t in control at that point.

Prayer
can be a time when we make space for our parts, listen to our parts,
create the capacity for empathy for our parts, and stop fighting them
in general.  The FLAG method works for this, as do many others.  It
can also be a time when we teach the parts meditative practice so we
can all have some much needed peace within.  Building the capacity to
listen to ourselves also builds our capacity to listen to each other.
That’s one of the goals – if we are going to be part of building a
more peaceful and just world, we’re going to have to learn how to
find peace within, and that will likely require learning how to
listen to (rather than silence) parts.  

Many
forms of contemplative prayer teach us how to be in the present, in
our bodies, and how to be connected to our breath.  These are
wonderful practices on their own.  They’re also the skills needed to
bring the adult self back from being hijacked.  In the neuroscience
part of these theories, the parts are mostly in the amygdala part of
the brain and the adult self is in the prefrontal cortex.  So
whatever we can do to THINK, and be PRESENT, helps move us back to
the prefrontal cortex.  

Parts
theory both feels TRUE, and feels exciting to me.  I appreciate how
inherently spiritual it is, to listen.  Now, many parts that we are
familiar with speak in … less than constructive ways.   Because of
that, we’re often a bit scared of them.  However, there is some good
news.  The horrid things that parts say are ALWAYS meant to be
helpful.  If you actually listen to the things they say, then you can
sometimes figure out how to flip it around to the positive thing the
part wants for you.  They’re shockingly transparent.  “You aren’t
enough” can mean, “You were really hurt one time when someone
said you weren’t enough, and I don’t want to you be hurt again, so
I’m going to keep your ego small so you don’t experience a drop in
self-confidence again.”  You know, stuff like that.

We’ve
talked about some of this before.  Some of our parts communicate
through criticism, and they manage to tell us we’re wrong A LOT.  My
parts have a lot they want to get done.  No matter what I’m doing,
they have about 50 other things I should be doing, and they tell me
I’d get them done if I were a “good person” / “good pastor.”
None of the parts is able to notice that I can’t do 51 things at
once, so my adult self is always having to work at setting
priorities, at listening, and at soothing, so all the parts aren’t
screaming at once that their thing isn’t getting done.  That said,
knowing about parts, thinking in terms of parts, and listening to
parts has quieted things within me significantly, and I experience a
lot less internal angst, and thus more peace.  (On good days.)

Did
you hear the end of the Proverbs passage?  In it, Wisdom talks about
delight – the delight in being with God, and the delight Wisdom and
God had in humanity.  Delight is part of what we’re going for, and
there are many paths to it.  Finding peace within is a form of making
space for delight.  When we can see what’s happening, and remain
present and loving, there is a LOT of delight available to us.  It
really is a bit like traditional Trinitarian doctrine: love spills
out.  Thanks be for that.  Amen

1Marjorie
Suchocki, 229.

–

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

June 16, 2019

Sermons

“Ascension??” based on Luke 24:44-53 and Acts 1:1-11

  • June 3, 2019February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Often,
we breeze past Ascension Day, because it never falls on a Sunday, we
don’t have a special service for it, and it is just as easy to use
the texts for the Seventh Sunday of Easter.   To be perfectly honest,
I was expecting to do this again this year, except for the truly
fantastic Children’s Time Story about the Ascension, and the
opportunity to tie worship together tightly.

Furthermore,
that final line in the Ascension story, “Men of Galilee, why
do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken
up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go
into heaven.” (Acts 1:11)
pretty much preaches itself!  There are few lines more perfect.
“Come on people!  Stop staring at what has been, and see what is!”
 Or, we could go with “Stop waiting for what God is going to do
next, God has already done enough!”  It fits something I often want
to say.

However,
I got thinking about the Ascension, and suddenly things got really
fuzzy for me.  What does it mean, for us today?  Does it mean
anything?  (I mean, normally, we skip over it.)  What has it meant to
others?  How does that impact what it means for us today?

To
add to my confusion over the meaning of Ascension came the normal
weekly task of hymn selection. There are websites with hymn
suggestions to fit scriptures, a useful thing,  and I discovered that
the hymns for ascension were themed on Jesus’ power and kingship.
Frankly, I had no idea why.  

Luckily,
our house is basically a theology library.   The 6 volume dictionary
of the Bible put out by InterVarsity Press includes a volume
“Dictionary of the Later new Testament and its Developments” and
an entry on ascension.  Before I quote their opening lines, it may be
useful to know that this comes from a significantly more traditional
Christian worldview than one I occupy.  In fact, I barely know about
this one, despite the best efforts of my seminary theology
professors.  (I was bored to tears by “traditional” German
theology, I didn’t even know why people were still writing it, as it
was just a rehashing.)  Clearly I barely know this stuff, I had to
look it up.  Anyway, they say,

“The
ascension is the second stage of Jesus Christ’s three-stage
exaltation, in which after his bodily resurrection (the first stage)
he visibly departed earth and entered the presence of God in heaven
to be crowned at his right hand with glory, honor, and authority.
The third stage, his enthronement, or session at God’s right hand,
commences his perpetual reign and intercession for his people.

… Acts
gives the most detail about the ascension.  It brings out its
decisive role for christology, the coming of salvation blessings, the
church’s mission, and eschatology.  The book of Hebrews teaches that
the ascension was essential to the completion of Christ’s
high-priestly work and to his continuing intercessory work.  1 Peter
and Revelation pursue the theme of ascension as victory over hostile
spiritual powers.  In the apostolic fathers the ascension undergirds
the Christian calendar and, since it culminates in Christ’s universal
reign, provides a rationale for virtue.”1

And
now I know why the hymn suggestions were about power and kingship,
which is helpful.  However, that description also served as a
reminder of just how many layers of scholarship and tradition have
built on each other, often in ways that are no longer useful (if ever
they were.)

As
a counter to that, Luke Timothy Johnson, professor of New Testament
at Candler School of Theology, explains what he gets of the ascension
narrative.  He says,

“Luke’s
two ascension accounts (Luke 24:51 and Acts 1:9-11) serve to remove
Jesus’ body from the sight of humans as a preparation for another
mode of his presence.  This is a deeper level of absence than the
empty tomb, for it means that even as the Living One, Jesus will no
longer be present in the sort of bodily shape that his disciples
knew.  That earlier mode of bodily presence was still limited.  If
Jesus ascends to the right hand of God and receives from [God] the
promise of the Holy Spirit, then then ‘life’ that is at work in him
can be poured out over all humans, so that his presence can be
mediated in all the ways in which those led by his Spirit body [go]
forth.”2

Seen
in this way, the ascension is almost a prelude to Pentecost.  Until
the experienced presence of Jesus has departed, the new experience of
being bathed in the power of the Holy Spirit cannot come.  This,
then, is one of the transition points of the Christian narrative, and
in that way I think it does make sense as an extension of the
Resurrection narratives.  In this case, I think Marcus Borg does the
best job explaining how:

“the
experiences that lie at the heart of Easter… carried with them the
conviction that God had vindicated Jesus.  Easter is not simply about
people experiencing a person who has died.  The Easter stories aren’t
‘ghost stories’ (see Luke 24:37-43).  Rather, they are stories of
vindication, of God’s ‘yes’ to Jesus.  God has exalted Jesus, raised
him to God’s right hand, made him Lord.  And lest we forget how Jesus
died, the Easter stories in both John and Luke remind us that the
risen Jesus still carried the wounds inflicted by the empire that
killed him.

There
is a continuity between the post-Easter conviction that God has
vindicated Jesus and the message of the pre-Easter Jesus.  ‘Jesus is
Lord’ is the post-Easter equivalent of Jesus’ proclamation of the
kingdom of God.  God is king, and the kings of this world are not,
Jesus is lord, and the lords of this world are not.  And just as
Jesus’s passion for the kingdom led him to oppose the imperial
domination system, so his followers’ passion for the lordship of
Christ led them to defy the lordship of Caesar.”3

Another
scholar mentioned that the ascension story is CLEARLY not meant to be
taken literally, since it happens in Luke on Easter and in Acts 40
days later, and the same author wrote both volumes.  That means that,
much like the creation narratives, we’re supposed to be looking the
deeper meaning instead of getting obsessed with the literal one.
(Phew.)  However, the thing that no scholar I read made mention of,
which didn’t particularly make sense to me, was how this compares to
the story of Elijah’s ascension.  I mean, there are plenty of books I
didn’t look at, but I did glance through 15 of them, and you’d think
they’d mention the ONE OTHER ascension narrative in the Bible,
wouldn’t you?  Let’s hear the crux of that narrative:

Then
Elijah took his mantle and rolled it up, and struck the water; the
water was parted to the one side and to the other, until the two of
them crossed on dry ground.

When
they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, ‘Tell me what I may do for
you, before I am taken from you.’ Elisha said, ‘Please let me
inherit a double share of your spirit.’ He responded, ‘You have
asked a hard thing; yet, if you see me as I am being taken from you,
it will be granted you; if not, it will not.’ As they continued
walking and talking, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated
the two of them, and Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven.
Elisha kept watching and crying out, ‘Father, father! The chariots
of Israel and its horsemen!’ But when he could no longer see him,
he grasped his own clothes and tore them in two pieces.

He
picked up the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him, and went
back and stood on the bank of the Jordan. He took the mantle of
Elijah that had fallen from him, and struck the water, saying, ‘Where
is the Lord, the God of Elijah?’ When he had struck the water, the
water was parted to the one side and to the other, and Elisha went
over.  When the company of prophets who were at Jericho saw him at a
distance, they declared, ‘The spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha.’
They came to meet him and bowed to the ground before him. (NRSV, 2
Kings 2:8-15)

Now,
Elisha was the disciple of Elijah, and this is a story of the Spirit
and Power of Elijah being given to Elisha as Elijah ascends into
heaven.  It is a bit more spectacular of a story, what with the
chariot and horse of fire and whirlwind, but the gist is really
similar.  Not only is someone who has been speaking God’s truths
“elevated” at the end of their life, and therefore affirmed as
God’s special messenger, the disciple(s) of the God-speaker, are
empowered by the same action.  In fact, as far as I know it, Moses
(whose body is said to be buried by God so no humans could find it),
Elijah, and Jesus are the only characters in the Bible whose lives
are so important that in their deaths they are cared for directly by
God.  

So
I think it is relevant!  I think that these stories, which come from
a time when the three tiered universe was presumed true (which is the
idea that heaven is above us and if it is exists hell is below us,
ideas that don’t work once we get to the concept of a spherical
earth), actually imply that by being taken into heaven, Elijah and
Jesus were  “entering the realm of the divine.”4
 That’s related to the radical claim that early Christians made
about Jesus.  You may know that LOTS of people were said to be
resurrected in ancient times.  Only two things about that claim for
Jesus were weird:  first that he was resurrected after being killed
by the Roman Empire, which was an embarrassing sort of thing to claim
for your religious leader in most cases, and secondly that he was the
“firstborn of the resurrection.”  Christian theology pretty
quickly developed the idea that because God raised Jesus from the
dead, that those who followed as “little Christs” along “the
way” would ALSO be raised (somehow, someday).  Jesus didn’t just
express God and  return to God, Jesus opened the way for others to
also express God and eventually return to God.

The
ascension also, inherently, has elements of overcoming hierarchy.  In
a three-tiered universe AND a top down patriarchal system, the amount
of power and glory a person had was expressed as how “high up”
they were.  (This still makes sense to us today, which should maybe
concern us.)  To have Jesus elevated beyond the boundaries of earth
itself then, is an INCREDIBLE metaphor for Jesus blowing up the whole
hierarchy, which is even better after the so called embarrassment of
his crucifixion.   And then, of course, it still all ends with the
messengers of God telling the disciples of Jesus to bring their minds
and energy back to earth and get back to work in building the kindom.
I still don’t know exactly what ascension means, but I’m thinking it
was worth this exploration and maybe some more down the road.  May
we’ll figure it out – eventually.  Amen

1“Dictionary
of the later New Testament and its developments” editors Ralph P.
Martin and Peter H Davids (Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity
Press, 1997, page 95-96.

2Luke
Timothy Johnson “Living Jesus: Learning the Heart of the Gospel”
(HarperSanFransciso, 1999) 21-22.

3Marcus
Borg, “Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of
a Religious Revolutionary” (USA:
HarperOne, 2006) page 289.

4Footnote
in The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised
Standard Version Bible Translation,
edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 199.

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

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