“Becoming More Human” based on Psalm 50:1-6 and Mark…

February 14, 2021
by Sara Baron

Do you listen to podcasts? I
know some of you do, and I get regular recommendations for great
ones, which means I often feel guilty for never getting to them. I
download them sometimes, with expectations of listening. However
between being a person who values the space to think that silence
gives me, loving classical music when I am in the car, and preferring
to learn by reading, I just never get around to podcasts.

This is true with one exception.
After all, I have an exercise bike that I use regularly, and I
prefer to be slightly distracted from the challenges it provides me.

Rather to my own surprise,
ride after ride, I keep on going back to “The Enneagram Journey”
hosted by Suzanne Stabile. The Enneagram is one of those means of
modeling humanity by breaking people up into different types and
explaining how the types are different. As with any other model, I
think it is useful until it isn’t, and should be held lightly as
containing truth without being definitive. So perhaps it is odd I
keep going back to this, but the host is mesmerizing. She is a
wisdom teacher, who uses the Enneagram as her model, and I like
wisdom. Maybe more so though, she is unfailingly kind and curious.
While being entirely herself, the only well-known person I can think
of to compare her to is Mr. Rogers, but she does her work for adults.
I find listening to her soothing and inspiring.

While listening to her podcast
this week, she stopped me in my tracks. I had to get out my phone
and write down this quote, WHILE ON THE BIKE. In passing, she
mentioned a suggested spiritual practice and then said, “Spiritual
meaning it will make you more human.”

I believe that. I’ve never said
it quite that way, but I believe that. Spiritual means it will make
you human. The goal isn’t to be less human, or less embodied, or
less connected, but rather to be MORE so. More human, more embodied,
more connected.

At its core, this is what
today’s Gospel lesson is about. This may not be what you see at a
first glance though. When Jesus appears in dazzling white clothing
with prophets of old and a voice coming out of a cloud, this may seem
to be about the super natural, the beyond earthly, or perhaps the
“spiritual realm,” I don’t think it is.

I think this is MOSTLY a story
about coming back down the mountain to continue doing ministry, and
that the stuff that happened on the mountain was meant to be
motivation and support for the important stuff happening back where
the people were. The top of the mountain was an experience of the
Holiness of the Divine, as well as an ah-ha moment about the
connection Jesus had to God’s work. These experiences are such
wonderful gifts when we have them – connections with God, senses of
the Holy One, ah-has about the wonder of what is.

At its best, worship can be like
a mountaintop experience, rich in sensory experience and openings to
experience the Spirit. But like the journey of the disciples in the
Gospel, the mountaintop is a temporary destination, and the purpose
of worship is to go back OUT into the world, refreshed and renewed,
filled with God’s love and ready and able to share it. Worship helps
us be more human! I think in person gatherings are even better at
this – when we can sing together and breath together, when we can
check in on each other before and after, when our emotions
intermingle, when the children lead us and open our hearts, when we
feel the base notes rumble the pews, when we can smile at each other,
and notice how someone is walking differently. Put that way, I’m
reminded of how incredibly embodied worship is, and can see clearly
how well it helps us be more human. But even this online worship,
lacking those elements, is still aimed at our humanity. The
scriptures are ways that people have made sense of their humanity for
thousands of years. The music aims to connect us with our emotions.
The lyrics of the hymns along with the words of the prayers remind us
of the universality of our humanity, and the needs and desires we
share with each other. Sermons, at their best, speak to who we are
and who we want to be, our humanity. We give, out of a sense of
gratitude for our lives, and out of a desire to bring more full
living to others. The images that the church offers each other to
intersperse our liturgy itself are visual art, means of connecting
with our humanity and with the sacredness of our earthly life. Not
to mention, we start with a breath prayer, and the fact that
breathing is proven to be one of the best access points to
spirituality really just proves everything!

I could make the same points
about prayer and spiritual practice, but I suspect that will be
overkill, so you can either trust me on it, or look at it yourself.

Spirituality is about being more
human.

Isn’t it obvious? Isn’t it
wonderful? Isn’t it counter to some other narratives we’ve heard
along the way?

The point of the
transfiguration, no matter how wonderful it was, is the going back
DOWN the mountain. The point of prayer and contemplation is to meet
God in our humanity. The point of worship is to become more human.

I’ve been slowly reading “The
Body is Not an Apology: The Radical Power of Self Love” by Sonya
Renee Taylor. (Slowly because it is radical enough to take time to
absorb.) Taylor spends a whole lot of time talking about body love,
and pointing out that when we hate our bodies – or even just things
about our bodies – we end up doing harm to other bodies. She is
articulate about the imperative work of becoming more deeply embodied
and more profoundly human as a good in and of itself AND as the only
way we can truly love other people in their humanity and their
bodies.

That seems like the completion
of Stabile’s idea. Spiritual means it will make you more human. And
being more human means you are more able to be loving to other humans
– all of whom are God’s beloveds.

So, dear ones, may we become
more spiritual, more human, more loving. 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

February 14, 2021

Uncategorized

“For All the Saints” based on 1 Thessalonians 2:9-13…

October 31, 2020
by Sara Baron

This
year I’ve spent some time wondering what the saints who have gone on
before me would think of this year. In some cases I know the
answers. My “Nana,” my paternal grandmother, would have been
HORRIFIED by it all. She was always scared of getting sick, and she
was a major extrovert and isolation would have been her personal
hell. My maternal grandmother, who I called “Grandmom” would
have been soooo worried about essential workers and those who are
struggling without enough resources. I fear my grandfathers, both
veterans, would be horrified by the way the USA failed to lead during
this pandemic.

Especially
in the spring, when we knew even less, and isolation was new, the
echoes of my grandparents lives felt close at hand. Perhaps it was
the isolation itself that helped, they felt as close as anyone else
could get, and memories were extra important.

Paul,
in 1 Thessalonians says, “You remember our labor and toil, brothers
and sisters; we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any
of you while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God. You are
witnesses, and God also, how pure, upright, and blameless our conduct
was toward you believers.” The toil was literally labor for money
so he didn’t have to ask others for support. However, the standard
of “pure, upright, and blameless” still feels really high. I
loved my grandparents and I loved many of the saints we celebrate
today, but none were PERFECT.

I
sort of like the insults leveled in Matthew, “the scribes and the
Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat;
therefore, do whatever they teach
you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice
what they teach.” So their actions were bad, but their teachings
were good? While the intention was to undercut them, I feel like
that is a far more do-able standard!

However,
it really was pointing out the hypocrisy in “Jewish leadership”
in Jesus’ day, so I guess I don’t get to drop the bar.

Despite
how it sounds in Paul, I don’t think that we’re called to be perfect.
Even John Wesley, well known in Christian circles for believing that
people could reach perfection DURING THEIR LIFE-TIMES, defined
perfection as speaking and acting out of God’s love for everyone –
but acknowledged that one could ERR in how one expressed that love
and still be perfect.

Most
of us still don’t meet that standard.

Nor
do our saints. I knew many of them and loved them and was inspired
by them, but neither love nor inspiration required perfection.

I
do think that love and inspiration do best when they meet with
authenticity. I”m always struck by the in-congruence between the
human desire to “fit in” and the fact that when I meet with loved
ones to prepare a “celebration of life” that what the people love
and miss are the things that made the person UNIQUE. It is the ways
that we don’t fit into the norm that people love about us. (Although
humility can be nice too, as Paul AND Jesus point out.)

As
we come into this week of even higher anxiety and deeper unknowing, I
hope those saints who have been walking with us all year can help us
again. They have been through unknowing, and come out the other
side. They have walked with us in love throughout our lives and
their love stays with us today.

Whatever
comes next, God is with us. And those people who have been
expressions of God’s love in our lives remain sources of our
strength. It has been a very hard year, and it isn’t over yet, but
we DO NOT WALK ALONE. Amen

Sermons

“Giving Life” based on Acts 9:36-43 and John 10:22-30

May 13, 2019February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Let’s
talk about messianic expectations for a minute, as in, what were the
expectations of the messiah for the ancient Jewish people? Also,
where did the whole idea come from? (Believe it or not, I think this
is going to come around to something relevant.)

The
expectation that God was going to set things right by working
with/through a messiah was an idea that emerged during the Babylonian
exile, probably after the royal line was intentionally extinguished
by the Babylonians. Until that point, there was an expectation that
the monarchial line of David was always going to sit on the throne in
Jerusalem, and when the monarchial line was extinguished, things got
confusing. (To be fair, I think that David and his descendants were
a more significant part of propagating that story than God was, but
for the people it was discombobulating anyway.)

Things
were all up in the air. The Promised Land was intimately correlated
with God’s covenant with the people, and they’d lost it. The story
of God giving the people their freedom was their primary narrative,
and they’d lost that too. Losing the monarchy was just another loss
in the midst of blow after blow to the people’s lives and faith.

It
isn’t clear where the story started, but it did. The story came to
be that God was going to restore the fortunes of ancient Israel
through the messiah. The expectation itself, though, wasn’t
consistent. Sometimes there was going to be a new king, a just king,
a good king, and he was going to lead the country into a new freedom
and dominance. Sometimes there was going to be a new military
leader, a general, who lead the people to win all the battles, and
restore their land (and often other people’s too). Sometimes it was
a new high priest, one able to lead the people to connect again with
their God, and restore worship in a new temple. Sometimes the messiah
was going to be a new prophet, who spoke with the power and truth of
the prophets of old, a new Moses and a new Elijah rolled into one,
whose capacity to speak the truth would bring down the power
structures and allow God’s new power structure to emerge.

And
often, the messiah was a combination of several of those things. But
in each case, the messiah restored the nation of ancient Israel
through either political, economic, or military might, and the rest
came into being too. God was going to work through the messiah, and
God was going to restore the fortunes of Israel through the messiah,
and it would all be OK again.

Since
it make the most sense to connect the goodness of the future God was
going to create with the goodness of the past where God was known to
have worked, most people assumed that the messiah would be a
descendant of David, of which there were many even though the king
and his children had died. This expectation is why Matthew and Luke
go through such pains to tell us that Jesus, like David, was born in
Nazareth and review his lineage.

When
we remember what the expectations for the messiah were, we can see a
few things more clearly: first why potential messiah candidates were
cropping up under the oppression of the Roman Empire – when people
were looking for God to save them again, and secondly why some of the
Jews of the day did NOT think that Jesus fit the bill. After all,
the fortunes of Ancient Israel were NOT reversed by Jesus, not
politically, nor economically, nor in military might. Quite the
opposite even, by the time the Gospels were written the second temple
had been destroyed, Jerusalem had been ravaged, and the masses had
been killed AGAIN in 70CE.

All
of that is back story to pick up the meaning in the lesson today from
the Gospel of John, where Jesus is asked if he is the Messiah. In
the Gospel, the Jewish authorities really annoyed that he won’t tell
them, the literal translation of “how long are you going to make us
wait” is “how long are you going to take away our life?”¹
However, this is the Gospel of John we’re dealing with, and that
means we should be looking for metaphor rather than historical fact.
John is using this story to teach his readers that Jesus IS the
messiah, and that it is better to be one of his sheep than not to be.

I
think the Gospel of John leaves the door open for other shepherds who
take care of their sheep too, a many flocks each with their own
shepherd approach, and I like that. I also love the image of Jesus
as a shepherd who has taken care of his sheep long enough that we
know his voice and trust him to lead us well, to good food, safe
pastures, and still waters. And that Jesus takes care of his sheep,
even protecting us from those who would seek to do us harm.

But,
I wonder if we are like the members of the Jewish establishment in
this story, asking who the messiah is. I wonder if we are still in
the messianic mindset. That is, I wonder if we are waiting for God
to act, and for God to act through someone else, to make things
better. Or perhaps I should say, I wonder WHEN we are in that
mindset, since I know we aren’t always there.

It
is sort of funny, since we are the inheritors of the tradition that
claims the messiah has already come, that we seem to continue to seek
a messiah! As far as I can figure out the stories of Jesus and of
resurrection, the narrative is that God was working with and through
Jesus in his life and then after Jesus died, that capacity he had to
transform the world was gifted to his followers, so that now we can
work together to continue his work. We can now show the world what
love looks like. We can now empower God’s beloveds. We can now be
sources of healing. We can now teach of a God of
never-ending-all-inclusive grace! What was once the work of one is
now the shared work of many.

We
aren’t supposed to be waiting for God, because we believe that God is
working with US, and sometimes waiting on US. We aren’t supposed to
be waiting for someone else to fix things anymore, because we’ve
learned that WE are supposed to be working with God in fixing things
for everyone.

Yet,
sometimes we still expect other people to do it, or maybe God to do.
And sometimes that’s OK – not everything is ours to do and trusting
others to also do their part is not only OK, it is excellent. But
waiting on a messiah, waiting on God to work though ONE person to fix
things, THAT isn’t our job.

The
transformation from being a follower of Christ to doing Christ’s work
is evident in the disciples in the book of Acts. In our story today,
Peter raises a woman from the dead, just like Jesus raised a girl in
Mark. In the Mark version, Jesus is said to speak in Aramaic, saying
little girl, arise, which is recorded as “Talitha, cum.” In
Acts, the grown woman is named Tabitha, and Peter says, “Tabitha,
get up!” The parallelisms are clear enough, which means the
differences are what make things interesting.

In
Mark, Jesus is directive, and he has witnesses, and he simply takes
her hand, says the words, and it happens. In Acts, Peter is quieter,
he does not have witnesses, but he is said to pray and seek direction
before he speaks. In Mark the girl’s value is mostly established
from the love her powerful father has for her. In Acts, the woman is
a disciple, a person who has devoted her life to care of the poor, a
beloved member of the community, whose worth seems to come from the
ways she has lived her faith. I really love the little detail that
the widows all showed Peter the clothing she’d made for them. Widows
were among the poorest members of society, and she’d cared for them
so well that what she’d made was worth bragging about. Her life
mattered to theirs.

It
seems clear to me that Peter is being presented as LIKE Jesus, but
not AS a new Jesus. Peter now has the connection to God that allows
him to see what others cannot, but he has to nurture that connection,
which we see when he prays before he acts. Peter is PART of the
inheritance of Jesus’ power and work, but he isn’t the whole thing
(Tabitha is part of it too). Peter is, then, like all of us. Able
to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, and WITH the rest of the
community able to continue his work, but none of us are supposed to
replace Jesus. We’re not asked to do it on our own. Our tradition
says we’ve already had a messiah, and thus we don’t have to.

Jesus
says, “little girl arise” and Peter says “Tabitha, get up”,
and I find myself wondering about how often we hear God asking us to
do the same. “Get up.” “Get moving.” “Get to work!”
I’m not sure how much of what we hear is actually God and how much is
our own inner critic, combined with the unrelenting expectations of
the world. When I look at the Bible holistically, there is a balance
between the “get ups” and the “sit down and rest a whiles.”
God who freed the people from slavery in Egypt used that slavery to
explain the need for Sabbath, for a full day of rest EVERY WEEK, in
order to fully establish the humanity of all. God is as worried
about rest as God is worried about “get up and do!” We, however,
are often much more worried about “get up and do” so we tend to
listen better to that one.

Or
at least I do. Sorry for all the times I project myself onto all of
you.

God
is seeking for us BALANCE: the capacity to make a contribution to
the world, and the space to savor the goodness of life, the time for
intimate relationships, and the joy of getting things done. God
gives us the gift of LIFE, and then guides us to living it in the
fullest. We may hear a lot of “get ups” but only because we
aren’t as tuned into the “rest a whiles.”

So,
I ask of all of us: can we remember we aren’t called to be the
messiah, even if we’re lucky enough to get to be part of continuing
his work? And can we listen as well the urging of God to rest as we
do to act? Can we receive the gifts of life, and savor them, even as
we seek to make sure everyone gets the gifts? Can we receive the
gifts of rest and the gifts of calls to action, and listen to them
both? I suppose we can at least try. Amen

1Gail
O’Day, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX: John, Leander
E. Keck editorial board convener (Nashville: Abingdon Press,1995)
676.

–

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

Mary 12, 2019