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November 5, 2023
by Sara Baron

“The Great Cloud of Witnesses” based on Isaiah 25:1, 4a, 6-10a and Matthew 27:50-56

Rev. Dr. Wilda Gafney who compiled the Lectionary we’ve used this year, says, “For the Feast of All Saints, this lectionary turns to declarations of God’s faithfulness to all peoples and nations.”1 Perhaps I’m silly, but that was a fabulous “ah ha” for me! When we celebrate All Saints, we are simultaneously thanking God for the lives of the saints AND for God’s presence in the life of the saints. That is, for God’s faithfulness. This awareness brings with it the reminder that even the saints who have gone on before us wouldn’t have themselves if not for God’s actions in their lives.

As a pastor, I sometimes get to hear the stories of God’s faithfulness that aren’t quite public knowledge. The stuff of God can be so vulnerable, and sometimes so WEIRD that it can be hard to share it widely. But I can assure you with the saints we are honoring today who I got to know as their pastor, that there were incredible moments of grace and awe in their lives, for which they were grateful, and in which they were formed.

One story I do have the right to share, and that’s good because it is the story I most want to share with you today. One of our saints who is very heavy on my heart today is Lois Atkinson, it is hard to enter this building without thinking of her because it was so very common to enter this building and either see her or see evidence of her work.

When Lois was actively parenting her three beloved children, her husband and their father came out as gay. It was at the time a rather large scandal in the church, in no small part because he came out from this pulpit and those impacted by it didn’t know it was coming. He left the marriage, and Lois suddenly was the primary provider for her three beloved children. So she got herself a fill time job teaching at SCCC and a part time job too. It was challenging for a while, but things went on, and everyone thrived, and that’s a lovely story.

But there are more pieces, ones that feel really important when we talk about God’s faithfulness and the faithfulness of the saints.

The first of these pieces is that Lois calmly, carefully, consistently, worked in advocacy for LGBTQIA+ people. She served on our Reconciling Team, and she worked hard on making it all that it could be. She marched in Pride Parades. Before we had a Reconciling Team, she worked for this church to become Reconciling – both by giving a lecture on the biology of human sexuality to the church as a whole AND by introducing those who didn’t know queer or trans people to queer and trans people so they could engage with their humanity. Lois kept on working for justice for all people, and she didn’t let anything stop her.

Now, Lois eventually met Richard and remarried and those two REALLY liked each other, which is a very good thing. But the thing that amazed Lois the most was this: when her ex-husband married his long time partner, he invited Lois and Richard to the wedding. She was pretty amazed by that on its own, she thought it indicated that they’d divorced well. Well, Lois and Richard went, and when they came back Lois did something that I only knew her to do that ONE time: she asked if she could meet with me.

Clearly I agreed, and she came in BURSTING with joy. This was the most exuberant I’d ever seen her. She came to talk about the wedding they’d been at, and how WELL she was treated – like an honored guest, and how it had exceeded anything she’d ever expected was possible when they’d divorced. She showed me pictures, and she gushed with wonder at the picture of her adult children with her and their “three dads” – their father and both stepfathers.

Lois didn’t complain about her lot in life, and she didn’t blame anyone for things being hard. In fact the closest thing to a complaint I heard from her was an acknowledgment that for a woman who didn’t like the spotlight, it was hard to be in it when the church was talking about her family, but it was worthwhile because she couldn’t have made it without the church.

Oh friends, I wish you could have seen the wonder in her eyes when she talked about the wedding. I also wish I could remember her words about it verbatim, she said something like “I finally understand resurrection.”

Shoot, maybe I should have held this story for Easter!!

Naw, this is a story of one of our saints, and it could get lost in the brass and lilies of Easter, and it is too important for that. It is real life resurrection, it is hope where even the seeds of hopefulness had never dared to enter. It is life coming full circle in a more abundant and wonderful way that anyone would have EVER imagined.

Also, it is the amazing outcome of decades of faithfulness ending up mattering, which …. let’s be honest, is a story we all could use sometimes.

Our Scriptures today focus on the end of death, that God’s faithfulness will eventually make death disappear. This was definitely a big part of the early Christian narrative. While plenty of other Greco-Roman heroes were said to be resurrected by their various gods or goddesses, the Christian narrative was that Jesus’ resurrection and then ascension opened the door for his followers to defy death as well. By which they meant access to afterlife, because until that point it was assumed only the very very very special who were favored by their gods lived after death. But the early Jesus movement came to believe that Jesus was the firstborn of the dead, and his followers got to follow him into afterlife.

For many Christians today, the promise of heaven is the biggest selling point of our faith. For many of us, and for many of the saints we honor today, that isn’t the central point. For us, the point is making life better on earth, and connecting with the Eternal One.

But, I think we are still people of resurrection. People who see wonder and hope and new life possibilities in life itself. We are people who remember when we lose a loved one that we are able to honor them by living out their best qualities. We are people who believe the kindom is possible, and what we do with our lives matters.

God’s faithfulness is seen in the life of the saints, and in God’s presence with the saints. Resurrection is too. Thanks be to God! Amen

1Wilda Gafney, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church (New York, NY: Church Publishing, 2021), p. 313.

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

Nov. 5, 2023

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October 29, 2023
by Sara Baron

“Time and God” based on Psalm 90:1-10, 12 and John 7:37-44

There is a story, maybe for kids maybe for adults, called “The Little Prince” which centers on the experience of a small human from another planet who accidentally comes to earth and notices things that regular inhabitants do not. Copyright law prohibits me from reading the section of the book to you that our scriptures reminded me of, and so, alas, you are stuck with my rather boring summary instead. There is a scene where the little prince meets and chats with a railway switch-man, and maybe it helps to know the book was published in France in 1943.

The railway switch-man describes his job as sorting out travelers, by the thousands, and sending them off either to the right or the left. The Little Prince wonders why they’re hurrying around so, and is told no one knows. When another train goes by, the Little Prince wonders why the people aren’t satisfied where they once were, and is told no one is satisfied where they are.

I often think of that rail-station perspective as I watch cars veer this way and that way, while pedestrians walk up and down the street, and we each go about our lives. Where are we all going? Why? Do we know why?

Our Psalm today reminds me of this little rail-side story, in that it puts life into a larger context. The Psalm feels like standing outside at night in a dark deserted place and seeing uncountable stars, and noticing the vastness of the universe and the smallness of each of our lives. Or, perhaps, the Psalm feels like standing at the end of a pier looking into the ocean, with waves upon waves upon waves coming in and and unending horizon of water. Compared the vastness, we are so very small.

Sometimes in the awe of those moments, in the immensity of what is, it is possible to rest more fully on the Divine, and remember that our problems are also quite a bit smaller than the vastness of the universe and the infinite Holy One. And that can be truly lovely.

But, we come back, away from the ocean, and Schenectady isn’t a great place for star viewing, so our problems usually return to their normal sizes in our lives. We forget that “a thousand years in” God’s “sight are like yesterday when it is past and like a watch in the night.”

A colleague at Schenectady Clergy Against Hate reflected this week that at this moment in history humans are doing truly horrible things to each other and it is hard to make sense of it. That colleague then mentioned that this isn’t any different than any other time in human history. Which, I fear, is pretty true. It is also good perspective.

How do we hold the struggles of our own lives, which are often very significant, and the struggles of the world, which are often very significant? How do we hold them in tension with hope? How do we hold them in tension with love, and joy, and laughter? How do we hold them in tension with beauty and wonder? OK, let’s be honest – how do we hold our struggles and the world’s struggles without letting them drown us? That’s the question I’m really after.

How does God hold these struggles, and does that teach us anything about how we are to hold them? Our Psalm reading today ends with the words, “So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to Wisdom.” Perhaps that contains answers.

The Psalm, and those nighttime skies I’m so fond of, make us pretty small, right? The Psalm says, mortals, the women born, become dust again.

You sweep them aside; they are an illusion;

in the morning flourishing and in the evening wilting and withering.

In the morning it is green and flourishes;

in the evening it is dried up and withered.

Or, to speak of a human life, “The span of our live is seventy years, perhaps in strength even eighty; yet the sum of them is but labor and sorrow, for they pass quickly and we are gone.” The Psalm calls us to remember our mortality, and to hold that reality that our lives will be finite.

Now, there is a lot of pressure to ignore our own mortality, right? But its truth remains. And sometimes the way to hold perspective in life is to remember that we have only this one short span of time to savor, and it is worth holding it sacred and using it with some intention. There is a value in the goodness of life, AND there is a value in creating more goodness in life. There is plenty of sorrow – the Psalm doesn’t hold back on that reality does it – but it isn’t the whole story.

I could answer some of the Little Prince’s questions, I think. Most of the people are going to work or from work, some to visit others, some to vacation, some to pick up things they need (or want), and maybe a few are trying to get away from it all. Most are probably missing the wonder that is life, the scenery passing by the windows, the human interactions happening on the train, the simple wonder of taking breathes in and letting them go. Some are bored, some are scared, some are angry, and some are happy, some are excited, some are hopeful.

Most of us, most days, are a little bit of all of the above.

Next week we will celebrate the Saints of God who have passed out of this life in the past year. It is a holy and sacred time, a reminder of the the great cloud of witnesses who surround us and wish goodness for us. They are also people we miss dearly. Ones who taught us lessons, ones we laughed with, ones we sought out for companionship. We miss them, we wish to have more time with them, often we wish for them a fuller live.

So how do we lead lives that are full? How do we make the best of the time we have on earth? How do we learn the lessons of the saints, and how do we hold tragedy and joy at the same time?

I certainly need regular reminders that God WANTS a full and abundant life for me, just like for everyone else. I need reminders that both rest and joy are forms of resistance that build the kindom AND enable the building of the kindom. I need the reminder that it is OK to savor the goodness and not just wallow in the brokenness. I’m quite thankful for prayer time which offers me those reminders – along with a good spiritual director.

More and more I’ve come to believe in the wisdom of bodies, I mean the physical bodies we inhabit (and sometimes too the groups of people we variously call bodies or the bodies of Christ). But let’s start with our physical bodies, that have sensations that we can learn to identify as emotions, and that our emotions are REALLY wonderful clues to our needs and our responses to what’s going on around us and when we take our bodies seriously we can take both our feelings and needs seriously and that this is actually CENTRAL to our spirituality which is CENTRAL to full and abundant lives.

About 4 weeks ago, after a week of feeling a little under the weather, I developed ear infections and then both of my ear drums burst. Let me assure you I haven’t appreciated that. It hurt, my hearing is slowly resolving, rather despite the best efforts of modern medicine. Nothing helped, until one of you suggested that if anti-biotics and allergy meds don’t work, maybe my body needs rest.

(It is said all preachers preach to themselves, you are welcome to laugh at me all you want.)

Maybe my body needs rest. Maybe I can’t just keep on pushing. Huh.

Dear ones, we can’t end suffering in our own lives or in the world. Violence is. Wars are. Cancer is.

When paying attention to the suffering is something we do because we have compassion to offer, or wonder, or love, or care, that’s wonderful! But I fear sometimes we pay attention because we think we “should” when that very attention does us harm. Because we now have access to information on suffering in nearly infinitely ways in nearly infinite places, and it can drown us.

So, when comes to our own lives and our loved ones, we can take the time to listen to our bodies, our emotions, our spirits (I think they’re all one), and hear what the Sacred is Calling Us To in order to have abundant lives. When it comes to the world around us, when we are centered and have heard ourselves, we are able to offer the love and joy the world is desperate for.

AND ALSO, the one who holds the world on their shoulders is the Divine, who also holds the world in their heart, who also holds the world’s aches and delights. God doesn’t actually call us to the full heartbreak of the whole world. Our beings hear bad news 4 times louder than good news. Which means that to have a balanced understanding of the world we need to seek out the good news A LOT, because the bad news SELLS and is ever present AND we have a bias towards it.

Beloveds of God, we are not called to give up our lives in grieving for every tragedy around the world. The only one who can do that is God. We are allowed to stop, to stop knowing, to stop listening, to stop taking in the hurts. It isn’t our job to grieve for everything.

I fear that there pressure on us to know and understand every injustice from every angle, to be informed, to be responsive, to be aware. But we can’t, and trying may break us. In our relatively short lives, God calls us to abundance, to joy, to goodness, to living and savoring life and making it possible to help others do the same. But we don’t have to solve all problems, or even know about them. We can let God be God. Phew. And we can let God, “So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to Wisdom.” May it 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

October 29, 2023

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October 22, 2023
by Sara Baron

“Seeking Peace” based on 1 Corinthians 6:1-6 and Luke 6:43-45

I tend to believe the the quote from Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” This makes me quite skeptical of both-sides-ism. To be fair, the primary justice issue I’ve worked on in my life is justice for LGBTQIA+ people, and the difference between teenagers committing suicide because they’re told they’re not loved and straight cis-people feeling uncomfortable is a great example of things NOT being equal.

However, today a part of my heart is in my throat, thinking about the conflict in the Middle East, and I can’t make sense out of it. There aren’t easy answers in Palestine and Israel. There is pain and suffering of generations, and worldwide context, and vulnerable people everywhere. And there are clear and abundant violations of human rights and human dignities. This is a case of both/and, I think.

I have been reminded this week to hold the history of Israel in context. Of course, I thought I was doing that, and I wasn’t. Modern Israel was created out of the need for a space for Jewish people to have self-determination after Christian neighbors and so-called Christian Countries proved themselves unwilling to hold Jewish life as sacred. This, of course, culminated in the Holocaust, which Elie Wiesel survived, but the Holocaust was an single extreme expression of the constant antisemitism of the world.

I wonder, from the perspective of 2023, if the choices made to create modern Israel were less supportive of Jewish life than they seemed at the time. A friend told me this week that if Israel’s neighbors laid down their weapons, there would be peace, but if Israel laid down their weapons, there would be no Israel. Because the powers of the world made decisions to create modern Israel, but did so without the cooperation and consent of the other nations in that region, and without an adequate plan for the people who had already been living in Israel. How did they think this would play out? Did they care?

There isn’t much space in our lives for context, and nuance, and careful conversations. There isn’t space for both/and. There isn’t a lot of space for acknowledging that Hamas was definitely, completely wrong in their attacks – it was barbaric terrorism AND that the blockades and attacks on Gaza are excessive and inhumane. We’re told we have to pick: be for one side or the other, either forget the centuries of antisemitism that our own faith tradition created and nurtured and stand for the downtrodden Palestinians OR forget the consistency of inhumane treatment of Muslims and Christians in Palestine, and stand for the Israelite state.

For those of us who believe they’re ALL God’s people, ALL God’s chosen, ALL God’s beloveds, Israel and Palestine looks like pain and horror right now. In trying to find the balance in this sermon, I sought wisdom from others whose eyes see what I fail. They reminded me that one way to stand for Israelis and for Palestinians is to stand against Hamas, who not only brutally attacked innocents, but also did so knowing the response would kill Palestinians in large numbers. Can we stand for our Jewish siblings here, around the world, and in Israel while standing for our Palestinian siblings? I believe we can, but it takes a willingness to look deeply, to be uncomfortable, and to shy away from fast talking points.

The Mennonite Church of Canada wrote a prayer lament and intercession for Palestine and Israel and I invite you to join me in the spirit of prayer1:

God of love and justice, our hearts are perplexed, paralyzed and broken at the recent carnage in Palestine and Israel. We lament the loss of life and the suffering of so many people. We are shocked at the inhumanity of violence, terrorism, and war.

Our prayers for peace seem to go unanswered. We wish you would intervene. We cling to your promise of a different world, but we see so few signs of its fulfillment. We do not understand.

Still, we continue to believe that you desire life and peace for all people.

Holy Spirit, strengthen our resolve to advocate for peace, justice, equality, and compassion for all. Don’t let us turn away.

Comfort all who are overwhelmed with loss—loss of life, loss of homes, loss of safety and security.

God of the vulnerable and the oppressed, renew the energy and creativity of those committed to nonviolent resistance and change.

We pray for the communities in the land where our shared faith was born and nurtured. May your love remain bright among your Jewish, Christian, Muslim and people. May they recognize your hand in their lives, even amidst the suffering. We pray for your peoples around the world, wishing hope, health, safety, and abundance for all.

God of all nations, guide our own government to respond in ways that support the legitimate rights of all, especially those who are most vulnerable, those who continue to suffer after generations of occupation, dispossession, and denial of basic human rights and those who fear for their safety.

May your kindom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Yours is the kingdom, the power, the glory, now and forever.

Amen

You may have heard in our Epistle lesson this morning, a call from Paul for good conflict resolution. And you may have heard in our Gospel lesson this morning a reminder that we are not know by our intentions, but by our fruits. Come to church, hear hard things 😉

All I can offer the Middle East right now is my heartfelt prayers, and my profound compassion. What I can offer in the here and now is a refusal to participate in violence, even in my language. I can affirm the humanity of our Jewish and Muslim siblings in faith, I can acknowledge how horrifying and terrifying this is for anyone with family or friends in Israel and Palestine. And I can hold multiple truths – that Christianity has created the conditions by which Jews are dehumanized and live in fear around the world AND – hey look at us – Christianity has done the same to Muslims and many Christians do the same to Palestinians. Here, in the US – and around the world – I want Jewish people to be SAFE, whole, and assured that we’ll have their back. And I want the same for Palestinians of all faiths and for Muslims everywhere. Right? I’ve been thinking about what God might feel about it all. My best answer is “heartbroken.”

When the Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA) Board did an intense study of anti-racism, we were given a list of values in anti-racism institutions. One of them was “both/and thinking” and “moving toward collective action.” To be more direct, the training claimed that either/or thinking was a tool of oppression and both/and thinking was needed to make space for all people to be collaborative.2

I think about that a lot. I’ve noticed in my life that when I’m stuck between a THIS and a THAT, and I notice it, and take time to consider it, and even pray about it, that there is always an undiscovered THIRD WAY I wouldn’t have found unless I considered the important parts of THIS and the important parts of THAT together, and realized why I couldn’t let either one go. That God is in the both/and, and it can take me a while to find it, but it is always worth finding.

I’ve heard stories of those who have worked for peace though, have you ever heard them? Those who God has called to be peace-makers who have entered spaces with both sides of this conflict and found ways to let each side be actually heard? To even grieve together? The stories are always of small intentional groups, of people willing to participate, usually not of people in leadership who are most profoundly fixed in their positions (although in this conflict few people are easily moved.) But miracles have happened. People have heard each other. People have cried for each other. People have APOLOGIZED.

This work is being done RIGHT NOW. I learned this week that “one of the crucial movements in the peace space in Israel/Palestine now is the historic partnership between Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun; the latter organization was founded in the summer of 2021, and is comprised of Palestinian women working for peace in the West Bank and Gaza. Women Wage Peace was founded after the Gaza war of 2014, is comprised of Jewish and Arab women who live inside the State of Israel, and has the two primary objectives of 1) Getting Israeli/Palestinian peace negotiations going (and to eventually achieve a “bilaterally acceptable political agreement”) and 2) guaranteeing that women are part of the negotiation process.”3 4

Let’s hear one story about peace, right now, huh? There is a group called the Parents’ Circle Families Forum—formerly the Bereaved Parents’ Circle. The organization is comprised of Israelis and Palestinians who have lost a family member in the ongoing violence. Their work is the slow work of trust building and creating connections.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg tells, and reflects on this story: On October 7th, Hersh Goldberg-Polin was kidnapped by Hamas and brought into Gaza. Shortly before the abduction, he lost his arm while protecting his friends from Hamas bullets and grenades; as far as anyone knows, he is badly wounded if he is still alive. He has not been heard from since being taken.

Last week, his mother, Rachel, wrote:

Time is slowly ticking into the future, with these hostages approaching a week in captivity. If he is still alive, how much longer can he survive? His wounds are grievous. I hope someone somewhere is being kind to him, caring for him, attending to him.

Hersh is my whole world, and this evil is the flood that is destroying it. I really don’t know if anything can save it. If anyone knows, please tell me. To save a life, our sages taught, is to save a world. Please help me save my son; it will save my world.

Every single person in Gaza has a mother, or had a mother at some point.

And I would say this, then, as mother to other mothers: If you see Hersh, please help him. I think about it a lot. I really think I would help your son, if he was in front of me, injured, near me.

And that’s the whole of it. “I would help your son.” Your daughter. Your child. Your beloved. Yours.

I understand that yours matters infinite worlds to you, because mine does, to me, and I hope that you see that, too.

I can see the infinity in yours, in fact, if I’m willing to look.1

What incredibly holy work is being done in seeing each other as beloveds. The article that shared that story, framed it in the lens of the holy work of mothering/parenting – and in seeing all the world’s children as “yours”. Dear ones, I think that’s where the pain comes from when we see brokenness in the world. Because we know all children – all people – to be God’s children, in need of good care, and worthy of good and abundant life.

So we seek peace. We seek peace through love by loving all people. This maybe doesn’t seem radical enough, or new enough. Maybe it isn’t new, but the world has proven to us time and time again, it is radical enough. Let’s work on it until we get it right. Then we can try to pull Christianity along 😉

Amen

1 https://www.mennonitechurch.ca/article/16090-prayer-of-lament-and-intercession-for-palestine-and-israel, accessed 10/19/2023 Edited.

2Work of Crossroads Antiracism Organizing and Training. I attended in 2017.

3 https://lifeisasacredtext.substack.com/p/a-peacemaking-lens?fbclid=IwAR1y50dbv2q-VxQQ_o1elI_-5UNYuOAEoMIMsEe9Tcg0gGNzHe44TvOKmMA

4The thoughts and concerns of Alice Gomstyn and Elliot Olshansky are peppered throughout this sermon, and I thank them for not letting me bumble along like an idiot, even when it is my job to be informed and not their job to inform me. I’ll also note that while they helped me, they can’t fix me 😉 so mistakes remain my own.

1 https://lifeisasacredtext.substack.com/p/a-peacemaking-lens?fbclid=IwAR1y50dbv2q-VxQQ_o1elI_-5UNYuOAEoMIMsEe9Tcg0gGNzHe44TvOKmMA

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

October 22, 2023

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October 1, 2023
by Sara Baron

“Blessed to be a Blessing” based on Psalm 67:1-5 and Genesis 12:1-4

“Take, eat; this is my body which is given to you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

“Do this as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

These words in our traditional communion liturgy connect the Last Supper of Jesus to our communion table here today, to every communion table around the world today, to every communion table in history, to every communion table in the future, AND to every table we sit at to eat.

They extend even further. The extend to the tables that are empty of food, and to the people who lack tables, and those who have neither. The words connect as well to our siblings in faith around the world who are displaced from their homes – migrants, assylum seekers, and those who have been evicted. It can boggle the mind, the ways the Table of God connects us!

The words of Jesus, at the Last Supper as recorded in the Synoptic Gospels tell us to remember every time we eat and every time we drink. The communion liturgy just reminds us of that. Every time, we are to remember that we are God’s. Every time, we are to remember that’s God’s love is steadfast. Every time we are to remember that we are blessed by God to be a blessing for the whole world. Every time we are to remember that Jesus remembered God’s mighty acts of salvation – at the Passover – and added to them the reminders that we are capable of continuing his ministry as the living Body of Christ.

Every time we eat. Every time we drink.

We remember.

We’re called back to our purpose: we’ve been sent out to share love.

We’ve been sent out to continue the work of Jesus, of calling people back to God, and God’s vision of abundance for everyone. To the work of community, of relationship, of listening, of learning, of love.

And today we remember those who have plenty and those who have nothing. Those who are at peace and those who can’t find any peace. Those who are afraid and those who are filled with joy. God’s table is for all.

In Genesis Abraham is blessed by God, or so our stories go. Today’s little passage makes sense of it. His blessing is that he gets to be a blessing for the world. It isn’t for him. Blessings aren’t meant for just one, they’re for sharing. Eventually it came to be known that the ancient Israelites, too, were blessed. They too were blessed to be a blessing for the whole world.

The World Communion Table is, at first, just the communion table set and celebrated in many churches on the same day. But it is so much more than that too. It breaks down the barriers in our faith, it connects us, and it reminds us that we, too, are blessed to be a blessing. Not to hold on to anything God gives us, but to share it widely.

And so, today, we unite our table with many others around the world, and then we extend our table from the one in this room to the ones in the Fellowship Hall. And hopefully at supper time we remember that the tables have stretched just a little bit further to our own homes. And tomorrow at breakfast we can think about some loved ones we’ve shared meals with and pray for them and their tables. We’ll try to understand the immensity of God’s love, and the multitude of ways God seeks to feed God’s people. So that when we sit to eat, we remember.

And we’re grateful.

To be blessed.

To be blessings.

To be connected.

And now we move towards God’s table, to start this journey again. Thanks be to God who uses food and drink to remind us of what we need to know most. 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

October 1, 2023

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September 24, 2023
by Sara Baron

“Grieving Jesus” based on 2 Samuel 1:17-27 and John 16:16-22

This week I found myself in multiple conversations about “the day the church died.” That was February 26, 2019, and the following day the Love Your Neighbor Coalition held a worship service that was a funeral for The United Methodist Church.

Now, let’s assume that if I found myself in multiple conversations about this, I may have been the one bringing it up – although I’m not actually sure that’s the only truth. But we can go with it. It has led me to wonder why: why, 4 ½ years later, this is coming up.

However, some of you may be lucky enough not to know what I’m talking about, and I don’t like leaving people in the dark. In 1968 The United Methodist Church was born when the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church merged. Both churches had powerful histories with social creeds, and at the birth of the church a study commission was created to write a new set of “Social Principals” to guide the newly formed church. The study commission brought its recommendations to the 1972 General Conference. They did a nice job. They included in their recommendation, in a piece about human sexuality, “Persons of homosexual orientation are persons of sacred worth.”

Now, that phrase isn’t exactly a bombshell, right? I mean, DUH, “Persons of homosexual orientation are persons of sacred worth.” But when I think about the Queer and Trans justice movements in the USA, the 1972 church study commission offering the words “Persons of homosexual orientation are persons of sacred worth” was a good start.

Today we’re talking about grief – because the scriptures handed us those topics on a platter – and when I think about the church’s failures to LGBTQIA+ people, my grief starts escalating at this point in our history. With those decent words “Persons of homosexual orientation are persons of sacred worth.” on the table in front them, along with A WHOLE LOT OF other words about a WHOLE LOT of other topics, some people decided that those words were too strong and required caveats. Terrible ones. So they changed it, and eventually the 1972 Book of Discipline would read “Persons of homosexual orientation are persons of sacred worth. We do not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider it incompatible with Christian teaching.” They also added, "We do not recommend marriage between two persons of the same sex,” although I think the greater gut punch was in the first addition.

People of good faith in The United Methodist Church have been trying to remove those words ever since. While there were setbacks along the way, for a while there also seemed to be movement towards inclusion of all of God’s people. The people committed to exclusion seemed to be losing the battle, until they weren’t. By 2016 it was clear that the movements for inclusion had reached a series of dead-ends: General Conference was not going to change the church’s stance, the Judicial Council was going to uphold it, the Bishops en mass were not going to stand against it, and the capacity to fight things on localized levels was extremely limited. Based work in the first week of General Conference, it was clear that The UMC was about to enact a series of changes that would decimate its LGBTQIA+ community, one that was already experiencing a spiritual and literal bloodbath.

Good students of nonviolent social action know that when all the other avenues are closed to you, you raise the temperature in the room, in hopes of motivating change. Good students of nonviolent social action were in that room, organizing. The United Methodist Church was about to face two horrible options: mass arrests of nonviolent protesters, or protesters shutting down the floor of General Conference preventing their work from being completed. (I’m so thankful for good organizers, aren’t you?)

The Church choose a third option. They created another study commission (I’m barely refraining from extensive commentary on study commissions and the church) “The Commission on a Way Forward” that was to bring to a SPECIAL SESSION of General Conference – 2019 – a way forward that would …. well, let’s be honest… they wanted a way forward that would keep Queer and Trans people and their allies form making the church look bad while appeasing the conservatives. But, at that point, ANYTHING looked better than where we were headed, and forcing some new thinking on the topic felt like a victory.

When 2019 came the “Way Forward Commission” put forward a very milquetoast proposal “The One Church Plan”, the Queer Clergy Caucus put forward a truly excellent proposal called “The Simple Plan,” and the conservatives put forward a scare tactic they called “The Traditional Plan.” Confession time: I didn’t think the Simple Plan (which was hands down the best plan) could win, so I put my energy on to passing The One Church Plan which was a horrible compromise that I justified as being a step forward we could pass. Turns out I was wrong all over the place, and we couldn’t pass it – AND the support for the Simple Plan was almost exactly as high as The One Church Plan. Turns out, the votes went to The Traditional Plan which was simply so horrendous it didn’t seem possible it could ever happen. It felt like a caricature of itself, like what a satire magazine would produce as a conservative think-piece.

When it passed, the denomination lost any remaining integrity, and any claim on Godliness. As a clergy person I have made commitments not only to God but also to THIS denomination. I’d experienced the Divine through the UMC, I loved it, I wanted to make it better, and I wanted to work in it to make the world the kindom of God. On that day, I no longer saw a connection between God and the church.

Now, it always needs to be said, I wasn’t the primary one harmed by The Traditional Plan. It set out to harm Queer and Trans people, and it did. Any damage to me, and others who know a God Who Celebrates Diversity, was mere icing on the cake. And yet, to be in a denomination that does harm like that ON PURPOSE, wrecked me. It was some of the strongest grief I’ve ever experienced.

And maybe this week proved, it still is. The unfortunate reality is that while many of us were grieving The United Methodist Church, things were also really hard around here in this local church, and things were pretty bad in the USA and sometimes the world, and the grief probably didn’t get the time or space it needed. And then there was COVID, and the time to grieve simply dissipated. That’s actually my working theory on why this is coming up again – the grip of COVID has finally lowered enough that there is space for the stuff we were working on before it started.

You’ve heard me reflect on a really non-traditional grief so far today. We most often think of grief as relating to the loss of a person, and I think we make the most space for that kind of grief. But we miss a lot when we limit it that way. The Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling says grief is “The complex interaction of affective, cognitive, physiological, and behavioral responses to the loss by any means of a person, place, thing, activity, status, bodily organ, etc., with whom (or which) a person has identified, who (or which) has become a significant part of an individual’s own self.”1 (emphasis mine)

So to keep going with this truly uplifting sermon 😉 I want to talk about some significant communal grief that I have seen in our community. It may be that some of us don’t feel some of these, but I think all of them are in us together. And, because I think there is some power in it, we’re going to try this as a liturgy, after I say each piece, I invite you to respond, “Holy One, help us hold our grief.”

For the ones we have known, and loved, and lost – Holy One, help us hold our grief.
For the ones we thought we had time to get to know and love – and lost – Holy One, help us hold our grief.
For the church that we thought would become open to people of all ages, nations, races, genders, and sexualities – Holy One, help us hold our grief.
For the community that we hoped would welcome vulnerable immigrants with open arms – – Holy One, help us hold our grief.
For the nation that we thought would prioritize the vulnerable – Holy One, help us hold our grief.
For the world that we thought would work more on climate change than on enriching the already rich – Holy One, help us hold our grief.
For this local church that we hoped could be free from the anxiety in each of us and around all of us – Holy One, help us hold our grief.
For the people and places we trusted, who ended up having different values that we do, and it felt like betrayal – Holy One, help us hold our grief.
For who we thought we’d be, but we aren’t – Holy One, help us hold our grief.

Amen

If we take that definition of grief seriously, then grief is the response to the loss of something a person identifies with. It is a loss of a part of ourselves. In some of what we said above, I think it is the loss of hope. That’s a really serious loss, one that may characterize our age.

The work of grief is the slow work of creating new identity in a new reality. Where one might have identified as a spouse, one now has to figure out what it means to be a widow or widower. Where one might have identified with a strength, now there is a need to identify with a weakness. Where one might have chosen hope, one now there is a need to identify with the experience of hopelessness.

It is clear why grief takes a while, and why the more strongly one identifies with someone or something, the longer it takes to form a new identity, and why one might not want to!

I’m really struck in the gospel by the idea that the disciples started grieving the eventual loss of Jesus while he was still with them. I’m annoyed by it. I want it to be untrue. But I think that probably was the case. The disciples probably could see where Jesus’s ministry was heading, and while they may have been in denial about it, it was still there pressing on them. Even during the life and ministry of Jesus there was grief pushing around the edges that they were going to lose him. I can’t think of much more of a human reality than that one.

The reading from 2 Samuel is almost too much to hold. The depth of David’s grief feels so vulnerable that my instinct is to look away because I don’t know him well enough to be privy to it. That said, it is written in Bible, and you might not have heard it, so let me summarize. David is grieving Saul who was his king and adversary (#complicated) and Saul’s son Jonathan who was at least his best friend and probably lover (#alsocomplicated).

Don’t go around sharing that the mighty have fallen –

I don’t want our enemies to rejoice at this heartbreak.

Let those who failed to support Saul struggle, as payback.

Saul and Jonathan weren’t weak, don’t say they were weak, they brought others down with them.

They were together in life, and they are together in death.

Women, weep – these were the ones who took care of you.

My love has been killed, and I grieve.

He was my delight, his love gave me life.

The mighty have fallen, and I grieve.

My word for you today is an odd one. Traditionally speaking, I should turn this sermon around and end on an up-note, but that feels trite. I can say that the things we grieve are most commonly things we loved, and the grief is a reflection of that love. That’s good. But really, my point today is this: grief is imperative and hard work. There is no way through it except through it. It doesn’t go away because we don’t like it, or we deny it, or we can’t handle it. Like many things based in our bodies or emotions, either we make space to grieve or grieve will make space in us to come out – usually in ways we’ll hate.

And yet, God is with us. God is with us, holding us when we grieve. We are not alone, even when we feel the most alone. We are not lost to God, even when we don’t know who we are anymore. For me, that’s good news. In fact, it is enough. Thanks be to God who holds us when we grieve. Amen

1Rodney J. Hunter, general editor, Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling (Abington Press: Nashville, 1990), page 472.

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 24, 2023

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September 17, 2023
by Sara Baron

“Our Prayer” based on Psalm 71:1-6, Matthew 6:9-13

In June, after we celebrated the life of Walter Grattidge, I was walking through the sanctuary with the intention of putting my microphone away. Three people were in the sanctuary, seemingly admiring the stained glass, which was a little unusual because Dottie Gallo’s cooking creations were available at that time in Fellowship Hall.

I believe I said something incredibly profound, like “I’m putting my mic away, but while I’m here, can I help you with anything?” The answer was unexpected.

The three people turned out to be a mother, a daughter, and the daughter’s husband. The mother was raised in this church, and was a teenager in the 1940s when Rev. Dr. Lee Adkins Sr. was pastor here. I’ve heard wonderful things about the ministry of Rev. Dr. Adkins Sr., but the story she told was the best one yet:

She was a curious and thoughtful young person, and she struggled with the stories she heard in Sunday School and how she was taught to interpret them. In her frustration, she went to Rev. Adkins to ask him some pointed questions. (Already, I’m loving this story – right? She’s feisty, she’s good at Biblical interpretation, and she has access to the Sr. Pastor as she should.)

She named her concerns, and in response he ask her to listen to a story. His story was this:

When he was a young man he was struggling to decide what to do with his life. One day, he was hiking, and when he got to the top of a mountain, and the sky opened up before him, he saw written in the clouds “Preach,” and he knew his life’s work.

He then told her to go home, think about his story, and come back in a week or two and explain it to him. She did. She thought long and hard about it. When she returned she said to him, “I do not believe that the clouds actually said ‘preach.’ I think you were moved by the beauty and sense of awe around you, and you found within yourself clarity on your life’s work, and the best way you can communicate that is to say that the clouds spelled out ‘preach.’”

Now -get this – this is my favorite part. He said, “OK, go home and think about it for another week or two and come back again.” Now, she said that she was really wanting to give the “right” answer and it was quite distressing to be sent away to try again. But she did, and when she came back said to him, “I stand by my answer.” And he smiled and said, “good.”

He affirmed her capacity to think, to interpret, to use her reason, and in doing so gave her ways to approach the Bible and the world.

She said that she was taking her family on a tour of her life, and they were in Schenectady so she could show them the church. (They live in Western Canada I think.) The following day we were having our combined Pride services, and they’d known about that and just walked by hoping to get in. Her family had left Schenectady soon after the story she told me, her father’s job changed. But for her that conversation with her pastor opened up the world. She is now a great-grandmother, and she talked about being formed by that permission to be curious and reasonable, and how in her family there are now 4 generations of people who are who they are because she was given permission to THINK about her faith by her pastor.

I’ve been holding this story (not perfectly, sometimes it slips out because it is so good), but holding it for preaching for this day. Because when we think about Homecoming and what it means to come home to this church, I think that story has some pretty central themes about who this church has been and who this church is.

This is a place where faith and reason are welcome together. This is a place where curiosity is welcome. This is a place where people know that the Bible’s truths are often shared in metaphor. This is a place that seeks to form people with permission giving, rather than limitations.

Which gets me to a second central piece of how I know you, First Schenectady United Methodist Church. Some years ago now when asking parents about what color blanket they wanted for their baby’s baptism, their response was “We’d like a rainbow blanket, because we want our child to know they will be loved as whoever they are.” I completely copied them when it was my turn 😉

One of the many joys of being the pastor here has been the chance to get to know people who were raised in this church as I have worked with them to prepare the Celebrations of Life for their parents. I know of any stories of the church’s children of the 20th century being wrapped in rainbow. However, as I’ve gotten to know those who were raised in the church, I’ve been astounded to find some deep similarities.

The men who were raised in this church are unusually kind, considerate, empathetic, gentle, and thoughtful. The women who were raised in this church are usually self-assured and able to be appropriately assertive. Let’s be honest, those things both break gendered stereotypes, but fit the fullness of the human experience. This church raised people with the space to be the best and most authentic version of who they were, and made space and capacity to reject the norms of society that put people into boxes.

I was able to put my finger on what was so extraordinary several years ago now, and it has been really fun to see my theory confirmed over and over again since.

Dear ones, the impact of this church in the world is HUGE – even if all we count is how the people raised in this church were given the love, space, and capacity to become fully themselves. This church has been a counter-cultural force for good for a VERY LONG TIME.

This church has been doing God’s work for a long time.

Thank God.

And thank you.

I have been reminded this week of how beautiful and delightful this world really is. And it is beautiful even while it is broken. The beautiful and the broken are simply both true.

As people of faith, we are given the great gift of being reflective about how we respond to the world. So much of what we do together is reflecting on what is good, what is God, and how we can respond. We have the chance to think about, and practice, centering down with God, centering down to relationships, centering down to simply enjoy the goodness of life – and then using the energy we have gathered in the centering down to seek justice for God’s people. Isn’t that a wonderful thing to get to do??

The Lord’s Prayer is full of layers of meaning, has been examined with rich study, and there are translations of it that make my heart stir. We can’t get into most of that in an even vaguely reasonable time frame, so I just want to focus today on the last line in our reading, “and do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from that which is evil.” The rescue is sometimes deliverance, and deliverance is interesting in the Bible because it is the original meaning of salvation. As Dr. Gafney says, “Salvation in the Hebrew Bible is physical and material deliverance or rescue of an individual or community from enemies.”1

The rescue that we need, the deliverance that we need, changes with time, changes with the communities we live in, changes with our own needs. But the reason this prayer still resonates all these years later in all kinds of different places is that a need for rescue is a pretty common human experience.

Yolanda Norton translates that line as “separate us from the temptation of empire and deliver us into community.”2

Thank God that God HAS delivered us, into community, into THIS community, beautiful and broken as this one is, it helps us be a part of rescuing the world. Thank God. Amen

1Wilda Gafney, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church (New York, NY: Church Publishing, 2021), 284.

2Gafney, 285

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 17, 2023

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September 10, 2023
by Sara Baron

“Shorts!?” based on James 2:8-13 and Mark 7:14-23

It was really hot, sort of like this past week, when I went to visit some parishioners in my first church. I was in my mid-20s, and very aware of my pastoral role, so I’d carefully purchased only knee length shorts. I wore them, because they were modest and it was hot out.

The couple I visited was in their 80s, kind and thoughtful, passionate gardeners with great stories to tell. Without malice or judgement one of them remarked on my shorts to the other, something along the lines of “I never thought I’d see the day that a pastor would wear shorts.”

It had not occurred to me until that exact moment that I was violating an expectation. It was HOT OUT, and they were LONG, and someone had told me not to be too frilly or people wouldn’t trust me and…. most of all, I just didn’t know that pastors were expected not to wear shorts.

As an FYI this also applied to sandals and sleeveless tops, where there were expectations of some that I didn’t know about. Oddly enough, I’m willing to violate your expectations if you think I shouldn’t show my toes or my upper arms, but I haven’t gone visiting in shorts since that day!

Our passages today land us smack dab in the middle of purity conversations, and my experience of wearing shorts on a hot day seem like a decent example of how purity expectations change with time. There was a 60 year difference in ages between the faithful members of the church and the new pastor in that story, and we didn’t have the same understanding of what “appropriate” attire was for a pastor in the summer. That’s not exactly shocking. I have not experienced a time when women wore hats, gloves, and dresses to church while men wore suits, ties, and had handkerchiefs but I’ve heard about those times. I’ve heard about the transitions to making space for women to wear pants. For that couple, those transitions had happened during their live-times, and I was unfathomably casual. For me, finding shorts that were long enough to be “appropriate” was seriously challenging work – I was going against the grain of what I wanted to wear and what my friends wore for the sake of adapting to expectations, and I was embarrassed to learn it wasn’t enough.

As I read the Gospel this week, and listened to a story about Jesus condemning kosher dietary laws, I thought to myself, “well, that’s not likely to go back to Jesus. The decision to forego Jewish purity laws happened much later in Christian history. Jesus was Jewish, and he wouldn’t have condemned a faithful expression of his own tradition.” So, I went to the Jesus Seminar so they could tell me how brilliant I am.

They didn’t.

Instead, they said, “The aphorism – it’s not what goes in but what comes out that defiles – is a categorical challenge to the laws governing pollution and purity. … As a simple aphorism, it may well go back to Jesus: it challenges the everyday, the inherited, the established, and erases social boundaries taken to be sacrosanct. If Jesus taught that there is nothing taken into the mouth that can defile, he was undermining a whole way of life. That, in the judgement of the Fellows, sounds like Jesus.”1 They did think the later explanation of all the sins was likely a creation of Mark, for what it is worth, which is pretty much nothing.

I am not exactly sure what to do with this now, because it has a problematic anti-Semitic feel to it, but also Jesus was Jewish and I think people within a group get to see its reform. I just think that we, as Christians, better be very careful about how we speak about such things.

So I’m going to move away from the kosher conversation, and further into the purity conversation. The Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels makes this really interesting. They say, “Purity practices are a form of group boundary markers. They define who is in and who is out. They draw lines between those who are loyal to a group and those who are not…. Redefinition of purity rules such as Mark describes here and in the preceding passage can thus be construed as a redefinition of group and its boundaries.”2

I hadn’t even thought of that. I’ve been too busy being upset about the way that purity movements in my life-time are anti-sex, anti-female, homophobic, transphobic, and small-minded. I missed that they had a purpose.

If purity laws about defining the boundaries of who is in and who is out, well, first of all, a lot of things suddenly make more sense. Because that indicates that by drawing a line somewhere and thus excluding someone you can feel good about yourself and your self-righteousness, and well, I’ve seen that trick.

But also, if purity laws are about who is in and who is out then a whole lot of the Bible makes more sense. Because it turns out the word “neighbor” is also about who is in and who is out. Back to the Commentary, “Persons interacting positively with each other in in-group ways, even when not actual kin, become “neighbors.” The term refers to a social role with rights and obligations that derive simply from living socially close to others and interacting with them – the same village or neighborhood or party or faction. Neighbors of this sort are an extension of one’s kin group.”3

OK, so the ancient world was obsessed with in group and out group thinking – not so different from how we are now. And the first level of in group was family, everything else balanced on family. So as the in-group expanded outward, it became about thinking about who counted as being “family like,” and neighbors were family-like, in no small part because their well-being was tied up with one’s own.

But this is weird I fall in love with the Jesus movement all over again. Because we’ve got this purity thing going on, this drawing lines in the sand and excluding people from it, right? But then it turns out we include our families. And we include our neighbors. And then we have this Jesus who teaches centering on the question “Who is my neighbor?” and the answer ends up being the expected enemy, and that means everyone is your neighbor and there isn’t an out group after all, just one big in-group and everyone’s well being is interconnected.

This concept is why I use the language “kin-dom of God” where many others have used “kingdom of God.” Part of my decision there is to reject the idea that God is like an overbearing earthly king, interested in power and obedience. That part of my decision is ironic because the whole idea of “kingdom of God” is meant to be a counter to the idea of earthly power, but it seems to me we’ve gotten confused along the way, and it hasn’t worked. The positive piece though, is that we are moving towards the kin-dom of God when all people are treated as kin, as family, as members of the in-group, as people whose well-being is interconnected.

Now, there is a challenge in this. One of the best ways to bind a group of people together in an identity is to define an us by defining a “them.” It is engaging to be “in” and we create an “in” by creating an out. It is harder to be without those purity boundaries. But it is worth it.

When I think about being a person of faith, the way I think about it is to be about moving with God towards the kindom, and hopefully inviting others with me along the way. Or, in similar language, I’m told one of my predecessors in this pulpit, J. Edward Carothers, talked about the purpose of church being “to establish and maintain connections of mutual support in an ever widening circle of concern.”

Ever widening circle of concern. Which might, even, be a circle of mercy. Our James reading ends with “mercy shouts victory over judgment.” I always have to remember that mercy is compassion shown to someone who it would be in one’s power to punish or harm. In this phrasing it seems like the opposite of judgment. Judgment would be using one’s power to punish or harm. But “Mercy shouts victory over judgment.” James is making a point common to the Bible – the ways we act and judge are the ways we will be treated and the ways we will be judged. Be merciful, he says, so you will receive mercy. Be merciful so mercy shouts victory over judgment.

May mercy be the way forward.

Compassion, when one holds the power over another.

Compassion.

Mercy.

Mercy shouts victory over judgment.

Ever widening circles of mercy.

Until the kindom comes.

Yes, God, yes, let’s do it! Amen

1Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? (USA: HarperOne, 1993) 69.

2Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) “Textual Notes: Luke 16:1-16” p. 176.

3Malina and Rohrbaugh, 373.

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 10, 2023

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September 3, 2023
by Sara Baron

“Math for the Win" based on Galatians 5:13-21 and Luke 19:1-10

The math of the Zacchaeus story has always bothered me. Because if he gives half of what he has away, and then he gives back what he took inappropriately TIMES 4, he has negative income really fast. Right? Which would mean he can’t fulfill his promise. But he is a tax collector so he can probably do math, so why did he say it?

For the first time in my life, this week, I let myself finish that thought. Because, despite the fact that math isn’t usually a great source of Biblical insight, the decades of annoyance about the math just couldn’t be silenced.

If the math is impossible, I started to wonder, does that mean that Zacchaeus is actually saying that he doesn’t defraud anyone? Because if that is the case, then it would follow that he isn’t actually a bad guy, despite being a tax collector! Which would mess up a whole lot of what I thought I new about this passage.

So, like you do, I did some digging in my favorite commentaries, and (shock of shock for those who listen to me regularly) the Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels had something to say about this that I found important. Namely that the Greek verbs that Zacchaeus speaks “I give” and “I pay back” are in the present tense, which indicates that even before meeting Jesus, “Zacchaeus is already practicing this kind of compensatory behavior. The trouble is that the crowd does not believe him. He therefore bristles a bit at the stereotyping behavior of the crowd and responds to Jesus with a description of his customary behavior.”1

As someone who heard this lesson in Sunday School and learned a very annoying little song about it that never quite leaves my head, this is kinda crazy to learn. Zacchaeus was a good guy all along! He didn’t have some conversion experience upon meeting Jesus, what he actually had was a chance to be SEEN and KNOWN for the faithful human he already was- and the actions of Jesus in going to his house and in giving him a platform to speak were actions of HEALING between Zacchaeus and the community, because afterwards they could see him as he was and accept him as part of their communal life.

And, for the record, NOW it makes sense why he climbed that tree – if he was already a man who lived his faith, of course he’d want to see the guy whose live shined with God’s light.

Thanks math.

All of a sudden, this story resonates with some universal truths. Because, who among us hasn’t been misinterpreted, misunderstood, perceived in the worst light and desperately wished to be heard well, understood, and appreciated for who we are? I fear the answer is that no one has been excluded from that horrible human experience. The one where the good things you do go unnoticed or sometimes even are intentionally brushed away, and the mistakes you made are used to define you, and no space is given for you to talk about what your actual intentions were nor that you are sorry for the harm you caused. Everything you do or don’t do gets interpreted as bad, usually without anyone even talking to you about it directly.

It is awful stuff, right?

And it is common.

And it feels terrible.

Oh how I wish this were one of those things that didn’t happen in the church. However, this is a thing that happens in the church. (If you didn’t know that yet, YAY!!!!!!!! And sorry to burst your bubble.) I guess, for me, it helps a little bit that Paul speak to this as well, because this being a universal human and church failing at least means it isn’t just my own personal failure of leadership that this happens here sometimes too. I take what I can get.

Galatians, being one of the authentic letters of Paul, is a source of great wisdom and insight that still manages to annoy me immensely. In this case, I really hate that he engages in “body soul dualism” and attributes all the evil stuff to bodies. I pretty emphatically disagree. In my opinion, my worldview, body soul INTEGRATION is where it is at. Our bodies are full of useful information about who we are, how we are, what feelings we have, and what we need. Our bodies guide us to the fullness of our humanity, and as we make space for the fullness of our humanity we move toward the Divine as well. Which I think is really important.

Now that I’ve argued with Paul, I can move on and say that I agree with his opening point that being free in God should not be taken as a reason to bite and devour each other. We are to love our neighbors as ourselves – the ones near and far, the ones in the church and out of it. If you are being distracted by his long list of “bodily desires” and those have been used against you in the past, let me offer the words of Dr. Wil Gafney on this, “In this case the author is focusing on excessive desires and self-gratifying desires rather than condemning the care and ending of one’s body and health. Mutual sexual gratification would seem to be beyond rebuke.”2

Now that we’ve de-escalated our responses to Paul, what we can do with his wisdom that people who seek to be loving to each other sometimes chew each other up and spit each other out – like people did to Zacchaeus? He recommends “walking in the Spirit.” I recommend staying in your body. Really. I recommend letting yourself be mad, or sad, or disappointing in another, and then checking to see if there are any other emotions around it, and then finding out what thing(s) you value are violated and then thinking about what might make those better – and then if you can thinking about what the other person may be feeling, needing, valuing – and then TALKING ABOUT IT WITH THE PERSON.

Yes.

WITH the other person.

Because the Bible is really clear that the best way to deal with each other is directly. Even though it is really hard. Can you imagine if someone had said to Zaccheaus, “Hey, you are in a really awful profession, but you claim to be a decent guy. That doesn’t add up to me, can you help me understand?” Or even, “I think you took too much money from me.” Or, “You claim to love God, but you seem to love money. Does that seem true to you?”

Those wouldn’t be easy conversations, but they might have changed everything. I have been so grateful in my ministry for the people who say, “I see you doing this thing, and I think you should be doing that thing,” and say it to me directly so we can chat! I’ve also been grateful for those who say, “I was really offended by this thing you did.” Because we can figure out together what matters to us together and how to find an answer for the future that works for us both. And no one else is stuck in the middle, or pulled into drama, and no one is being maligned. It is a hard, beautiful thing.

I think that’s the miracle of what Jesus did with Zaccheaus – he reconnected him to people so the people could talk to him again, ask him questions again, call him out even. He opened up the lines of communication. Because that’s what it means to be in community – it means to be in communication with people, including in difficult communication.

Thank God Jesus called Zaccheaus out of that tree, and thank God his math SO CLEARLY didn’t add up so he could become multi-dimensional to us, and THANK GOD other people have been misunderstood so we don’t feel alone, and most of all thank God for the times when people are brave enough for the hard conversations. Those are the most holy ones.

Amen

1Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) “Textual Notes: Luke 16:1-16” p. 303.

2 Wilda Gafney, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church (New York, NY: Church Publishing, 2021), p. 278.

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 3, 2023

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August 13, 2023
by Sara Baron

“Glimmers” based on Psalm 10:1-14 and John 10:11-16

You may already know this, but sheep are the vulnerable adults of the animal kingdom. They are epically poor at making good decisions. Left to their own devices they will eat themselves to death, because they just don’t know when to stop. Because of their woolly coats, which weigh them down when wet, they’re picky about where they drink. They’re vulnerable to predators, and can get lost easily.

It is because they are so vulnerable that the role of shepherd is so important. It is probably because they are so vulnerable and in need of help and support that they come to know and rely on their shepherd.

It is probably because we’re all sometimes vulnerable, and can make bad decisions, and have particular needs we can’t easily meet that the metaphor of God as a Shepherd makes sense. Well, that and the Bible was written when agricultural metaphors were the most easily available and understood ones 😉

This passage from John fits easily into the explanations we have of the 23rd Psalm, where God is a shepherd. Here, Jesus is the shepherd, right? And here it is explicit that the care the shepherd gives is being willing to run INTO danger to protect the sheep while others would choose to run away. And the shepherd is the one the sheep know and trust, and no one else is. Lovely.

Perhaps my favorite part of this passage is the end where Jesus claims there are other flocks who also listen to his voice, and it is his intention to bring them together. That sounds right- that there are others who also know love and also are loved and that Jesus is able to offer care for more individuals than we might have thought possible.

I adore, too, the intimacy of the passage, the reminder that a shepherd and their sheep KNOW EACH OTHER well, and know each other’s voices, and respond to each other. That fits, because humans and sheep are all mammals and mammals are all about connecting to each other.

It leads me to wondering about how it is we experience that kind of intimacy with the Divine. God, we say, is everywhere in everything and always around us and always available. Yet, not every moment of our lives feels saturated with the Divine, and quite often we’re too busy doing other things to connect. Or maybe God feels farther away and the connection is harder to come by.

This week I’ve been thinking about the reminders of God and God’s goodness that glimmer in the world and help us remember to connect. I’ve been thinking about it because I spent a week at camp and the whole week was just one big glimmer of wonderfulness and love, of being wrapped in creation and there being spaciousness to connect with wonderful people, and time to savor it all. But, it turns out, I came home from camp and reality as I usually experience it hit me … well, pretty fast and pretty hard and I was disoriented.

Because usually my life involves bearing witness to a lot of pain, and a lot of our society’s brokenness and when I came back to that with my guard down it HURT. (Which is also good, I think, but that’s for another day.)

And yet, my guard needs to come down sometimes. And sometimes I need to take a walk with dear ones and marvel over the many colors of mushrooms growing in the woods, or watch a beaver swim with a big branch, or just sit and watch a rainstorm come by from a dry porch, or talk about scripture with people who just love it. (Camp. WOW.)

So I’ve been thinking about joy, and where to access it. And I’ve been thinking about hope and where to access it. Because I don’t think that the injustices of the world or the pain that humans experience are about to stop, but I don’t want those to be the ONLY things that get my attention.

And that’s where “glimmers” come in. I shared this on the church’s Facebook page:

Did you know about glimmers?

Glimmer is the opposite of a trigger. Like a micro moment that makes you happier, a little moment of awe, something that makes you feel hope. Once you start looking for them and embracing them, your life feels so much sweeter.

I’m actually going to take that a bit further though. I think a glimmer is a glimpse of God, or God’s love, or God’s goodness, or God’s desire for us to live full and abundant lives. And they’re reminders that we can trust in God and God is with us – like John says.

So I’ve been watching for glimmers. Baptism is ALWAYS one. This baptism all the more so for me, after having had the chance to confirm Chris in the early years of my ministry here. I have been reminded that we have rainstorms AND porches here in Schenectady, as well as sunrises and sunsets and even sometimes stars and all of that glimmers. Good food glimmers. Shared excitement glimmers. Great ideas glimmer. Quiet moments of understanding glimmer. Debbie’s fingers on a keyboard glimmer. Maybe it is too obvious, but the stained glass in here glimmers – and it is awfully good to remember to look!!

Once I started looking again, the glimmers were everywhere. Oh, Andrew, I hope you grow up seeing glimmers everywhere every day. I hope your family does too and they teach you to appreciate it. I hope your churches – here and at home – do too and they teach you to appreciate it. And, by the way – all of the rest of you too.

I wish you the capacity to see the glimmers all around you, and the ability to remember they are signs of God’s love, and the development of trust in God that can come from it all – so that we all learn even better how to hear and trust God’s voice.

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

August 13, 2023

(Thanks to Joan E. Carey for photo.)

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August 6, 2023
by Sara Baron

“Destruction and Peace” 1 Samuel 15:1-3, 8, 10-17, 24-25 and Psalm 146

This church is blessed with a deep commitment to learning and growing. We all come with our own background and experiences. Some of which involve degrees in religion, theology, or divinity. Some of which involves running for dear life from church and everything like it for most of a life, and not being as well read. Which is to say, wherever you might be, that’s fine! Nerds are welcome here, and … non-nerds? Is that what they’re called?

So, anyway, this church that loves to learn has been lucky enough to have the Carl Lecture fund which allow the church bring in speakers to help us learn more. The most recent Carl Lecturer was Bishop Karen Oliveto in May, and that was a delight. In 2017 ago John Dominic Crossan lectured here, and like Bishop Karen I’m still fan-girl-ing over it.

A few things “Dom” said that weekend have reframed the Bible for me, and quite often when I read a text I’m struck again by the truth of it all. The biggest reframing was in thinking of the Bible as containing two streams of thought.

They are often intertwined, they are both holistic, and they are both prevalent throughout the Bible. One of them he called the covenant stream and characterized as being a punishment/reward system. In that stream the people were told what to do, rewarded if they did it, punished if they did not, and judged by their obedience.

The other he called the stream of distributive justice and it begins in the Bible with the distribution of rest called Sabbath and continues to be concerned with the fair distribution of the things people need so they can live full and abundant lives.

Both streams are found throughout the Hebrew Bible, both are found throughout the Christian Testament, and most people of faith focus on one of them and find the other to be of less value. John Dominic Crossan himself prefers the sabbath and distributive justice stream and finds within it the description of the God he knows. Turns out me too.

Today we got a text from each stream, and one of them is pretty distressing, at least to me. In 1 Samuel God tells the people to destroy one of their enemies in a “holy war” which means the complete and utter destruction of every living thing in their village. Our translator makes this horrifically clear by saying “do not spare them and put them to death from woman to man, and from infant to nursing baby, and from ox to sheep, from camel to donkey.”

This. Is. Horrific.

I want to puke.

Then, it turns out, they only killed MOST of the living things, but kept the leader alive and some of the livestock claiming they wanted to sacrifice the livestock to God. And this story, in our Bible, says that God was REALLY REALLY mad about this because when God says “kill them all” you are supposed to “kill them ALL” and not most, and this is used as a reason that Saul is replaced as the king of Israel.

ARGH. I’m going to give us just another moment to be horrified by this, and then I’m going to soften these blows a little bit. Ready?

There are a few things to bring into reading this text. The first, which may well help, is that it is probably not historically true. This is a story that would have been told for a long time and written down well after the fact and in other cases where we read about destruction like this and are able to verify it – the destruction never happened. The second piece is that 1 and 2 Samuel are super pro-David propaganda and this story seems created to establish David’s authority by diminishing Saul’s, which is another reason to inherently distrust it. The third, and final, softening on reading this text is the reminder that the Hebrew Bible as we know it was written down in the aftermath of the Exile when people had experienced unprecedented death, destruction, trauma, and horror. The primary question of the people as they were writing down these stories was “why did this happen to us?” And this story seems designed to answer “this happened to us because we were unfaithful and God punished us.”

A whole lot of people believe that bad things happen because God punishes them. I would say most of those people were raised in the “covenant stream” of reward and punishment – and may not even be aware there are other options. And, indeed, this story fits fully into that stream. God expects obedience, punishes disobedience, there is nothing anyone can do about it – not even the prophet Samuel.

So, if you haven’t noticed yet, I pretty much hate this text. But, if this text reflects about half of the Biblical tradition, I am probably better off acknowledging it exists and dealing with it than just wishing it away, right? I appreciated Dr. Gafney’s reflection on this text that it “illustrates the difficulty in teasing out the human and the divine in scriptures.” TRUE THAT. I also appreciated her reminder that the ways we see power and authority function in the world impact how we think about the power and authority of God. In places where there is a monarchy, it is particularly easy to think of God as a monarch, and to think of hierarchy as normal and appropriate. The Bible was written during a whole lot of monarchies and hierarchical systems, and it makes sense that that humanness would invade the perspective of the text.

We also have today a text from the other stream – the one about distributive justice. And it is a breath of fresh air. I also appreciate that within it I can hear regular and repeated themes of the Bible, because this too is Biblical and deeply rooted. Those who would claim that God is all about punishment and rewards may have a hard time making sense of texts like this one.

The Psalm starts out seeming a bit simple. Someone is praising God. If you’ve read the Psalms you might be tempted to say “what else is new?” It then moves on to establishing that God is worthy of trust in a way that people are not. And then it talks about WHY God is trust worthy and worthy of praise and the source of hope and joy. The reasons are pretty standard order too: because God created all that is, because God is a God of justice who brings justice to the oppressed, because God is the one who feeds the hungry, because God is compassionate and sets prisoners free, because God helps people see, and lifts up those who are bowed down, and loves when good things are being done, and cares for the stranger, and takes care of the vulnerable orphans and widows, and confuses and confounds those who would do harm.

Nothing new there, those are repeated themes in the Bible. But note that they are universal. God isn’t just caring about those in covenant relationship with God, God is caring about everyone. God is inverting the social order and taking care of those with the least capacity to take care of themselves. Which means that the normal social order isn’t as God would have it be, and THAT would mean that those doing well aren’t being rewarded and those doing poorly aren’t being punished. Instead both of those reflect a need for more JUST distribution and God is working on making that happen.

Now, as I mentioned, I have a STRONG preference for one of these streams of thoughts and ways of understanding God. I’d go so far as to say I think one is “right” and the other is “wrong” or as close as I’m willing to get to using words like that about God.

But, dear ones, I think the best news is the reminder that these two streams of thought, these two fundamentally different worldviews, are hanging out together in the Bible. Neither dominates the other. Sometimes, they intertwine so well we can’t tease them apart. They are in there together, coexisting for about 3000 years now.

(Here is the twist, it feels like it may come out of no where, but I’ve been building this whole time.)

And, beloveds of God, if these two different streams of thought have coexisted in the Bible for this long, and fed various people of faith, and been experienced as holy, and sometimes even supported each other – then I’m pretty sure we can survive the next US election.

I adore that the Bible feels free to contradict itself with different versions of the same story and even different basic conceptions of who God is and how God is. I love that there is space for the fullness of humanity and the fullness of the divine, and I actually love that teasing out which is which is so hard. Because it deserves to be hard. And we learn while we try. And our disagreements usually teach us a lot we need to know.

John Wesley famously said, if your heart is with my heart, give me your hand. May we be people whose hearts are with others’ hearts, even if we disagree. May we be people of peace.

Amen

August 6, 2023

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