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Sermons

“Holes in the Story” based on Judges 4 and…

  • September 10, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

It should be noted that I’m a wimp.  I blame my parents.
(But in a good way.)  As a young child I was limited to an hour of
TV a day and it had to be PBS.  I’ve never quite normalized to our
culture in that I have a super low tolerance for media violence or
horror.  To be honest, I don’t like this story, I think it is too
violence, and if I was trying to hold the Bible to a standard of
“Church Appropriate” then this passage would not meet it.
However, I think dealing with this story is important and necessary,
so we’re going to do it despite my distaste.  That being said, there
are many reasons why you might not want to hear/read the rest of this
sermon:

****  Trigger Warning ****

This story contains excessive violence, in detail, and
sexual violence.  

****

I will not take it personally if you choose to take a
very long bathroom break at this point.

Now, despite its graphic nature, this text isn’t
particularly easy to follow.  I had to read it half a dozen times and
read several commentaries before I could even follow what is
happening.  Because this text is from the book of Judges, we can
start by knowing a few things.  The ancient Hebrew people have
“entered the promised land” (they did that in the prior book,
Joshua) and are currently functioning as a loose alliance of tribes
without a central government.  They have settled into  hilly, desert
land.  Later in their history the land would be in high demand
because of its functionality as a crossroads, but in this early
history  this land  is a bit outside of society.  It was hard to
scratch out a living there, which means outsiders usually didn’t
bother with it.  

However, sometimes neighboring countries (and we should
understand “countries” pretty loosely, maybe as akin to a small
city-state) would try to expand into some part of the “Promised
Land” and then there would be a need for a leader/general to guide
the people in fighting back.  That leader/general would then be
called a “judge” and would lead the people until their death.
Then things would be OK for a while until a different country tried
the same deal on a different boarder.

This is the second set of stories of such a judge in the
book of Judges, and there are a few adaptations to the standard story
line.  The first is that the “neighboring country” is actually an
internal one.  The Israelites had invaded the land of the Canaanites,
because the Canaanites were the ones living on their “promised
land.”  However, the Canaanites were neither entirely destroyed nor
entirely willing to adapt to Israelite customs.  So, the two both
occupied the land, with ever shifting borders between them.  

According to the story, at this point in history the
Canaanites were a FAR more technologically advanced society than the
ancient Hebrew people.  They’d entered the “iron age”, as
evidenced by the 900 iron chariots they brought to war.  (It is
reasonable to assume exaggeration.)  The ancient Hebrews not only had
no iron (they’re in the late bronze age), they’re said to have no
shields nor spears.  The armies are incredibly mismatched.

The second adaptation is that the role of Judge is a bit
fuzzy.  The story says that Deborah had been judge – but in that
case they mean that people brought their disputes to her and trusted
her to judge between them fairly.  Since she appears to have come by
that reputation on her own, that’s pretty cool.  Deborah is, in case
you were wondering, the only woman to be called a Judge of Israel.
However, she isn’t the military general, so that’s unusual for these
stories.  And neither she, nor the general, actually complete the act
of defeating their opponent.  That  role belongs to another woman,
and a foreigner at that.

Now, I have a lot of issues with this story in
particular and with the book of Judges in general. Judges assumes
that everything that happens is God’s will.  So, they think that when
outsiders attack them or oppress them it is because God is punishing
them.  They try to protect God’s reputation, so they claim that when
there is no judge in Israel, the people do what is evil in the sight
of the Lord, which they assume to justify God’s anger and punishment.
  It doesn’t work for me.  It is easy to see that the Israelites
were experiencing fairly normal conflict with neighbors – internal
and external to their country.  It is easy to see that the stories
are trying to be faithful when they attribute all of it to God.  But
they seem to miss that they make God into an egotistical abusive
parent when they do so.

And, in case this isn’t clear to you, I don’t think God
is egotistical, nor abusive (although it is fine with me if the
parental metaphors work for you).

Those are my GENERAL issues.  Specifically, I pretty
much hate that this is a story of war, death, and murder that is
claimed as a victory.  Similar to the point I just made, I understand
that those who told it and those who wrote it down thought that they
were telling a story of a God who freed them from oppression, and I
see why that’s good.  The problem is that I believe in a God who is
the God of the Israelites AND the Canaanites.  And, generally
speaking, I don’t think there are winners in war, even when there are
victors.

So, you ask, why am I preaching on it?  Well, two
reasons.  First of all because when I’ve spent most of a year
preaching about the subversive women of the Bible, I didn’t think I
could reasonably skip out on the first FEMALE to lead the country
(and only one said to do so rightfully).  Secondly, because war,
violence, and murder are real parts of life.  To refuse a text that
includes them because of them means pretending life is cleaner,
easier, and more acceptable than it really is.  This story reflects
the lives of many people who live today, both in literal and in
metaphorical terms.

Now you might ask, WHAT HAPPENS?!?!?  Well, that’s
complicated.  There are actually two versions of this story.  The
version in chapter 5 is much older.  Along with the (much, much
shorter) song of Miriam, it is thought to be the oldest text in the
Bible.  It may date to the 12th century BCE.1
(For reference, the next youngest parts were 400 years later and the
majority of the Torah was written down around 800 years later.)  The
two oldest parts are both women’s songs, and they reflect very
similar stories: natural events defeat an army and the Israelites
associate that with God’s work and give thanks to God for saving
them.  It has been guessed that women passed down their songs from
generation to generation, perhaps while the men passed down their
stories.  We read from Judges 4 because it is easier to make sense
of, but I want to focus on Judges 5, the poetry version passed down
as song.

In Judges 5, the people have been oppressed by the
Canaanites.  But when God raised up Deborah, the peasants rejoiced
because she took care of them.  She is called a mother in Israel.  
The song celebrates the courage of those who went to fight the
Canaanites without even having any weapons, and it acknowledges
Barack as the military leader.  The song emphatically claims that
God, as the Divine Warrior, marched with the people.  The third time
it mentions this, it puts it this way:

The
stars fought from heaven,
from
their courses they fought against Sisera. 
The
torrent Kishon swept them away,
the
onrushing torrent, the torrent Kishon.
March
on, my soul, with might!  (Judges 5: 20-21, NRSV)

That
is to say, with God on their side, even the stars were fighting for
the Israelites against the Canaanite general, Sisera.  The battle
happened in the Kishon riverbed valley.  But because it is a desert
climate, the river bed usually ran dry.  The river flowed with
strength enough to stop the army.

Then
the song changes, and celebrates Jael.  Jael is said to be the wife
of Heber the Kenite.  Moses’s father in law was a Kenite, so she
would have been seen as a distant but distinct relative.  Jael
welcomes the general into her tent with enthusiasm.  It says he asked
for water and she gave him milk curds.  Then she kills him.

Then
the song turns even more vicious.  It imagines Sisera’s mother
waiting for him at home, fantasizing about the “spoil” he’ll
bring home.  In this imagining, she assumes he isn’t home yet because
they are busy raping the women of Israel.  The Hebrew text says, “a
womb or two for every man” and then goes on to imagine the
embroidery she is hoping he’ll bring her.   Right after this
imagining, the song ends with the words, ‘So perish all your
enemies, O Lord!
But may your friends be like the sun as it
rises in its might.’” (Judges 5:31a, NRSV)  Likely there is
direct irony between the imagined two wombs and those of Jael and
Deborah.

The
prose text has a more linear plot that flows like a story, with
explanations and details.  It explains why Jael and her husband were
there, implying that Heber the Kenite was a smith who decided to
travel with the Canaanite army to fix their chariots!2
 However, it is almost certain that the prose version was created to
help people understand the song, so I don’t think we need to spend
more time with it.

We
do need to spend some more time in that tent with Sisera and Jael
though.  There is a rather large hole in both versions of this story:
why does she kill him?  Other stories in the Bible have taught us how
sacrosanct hospitality was there.  A person welcomed into one’s tent
was often treated with more dignity and respect than even family
members who lived in that tent.  And Jael is said to be enthusiastic
in her welcome.

What
happened?  Did she make a calculation that if Sisera, the general,
were running away without his army that he must have lost and it
would be better to have the gratitude of the Israelites?  Perhaps.
That would make sense.  But since this is a woman’s song, I think it
would be reasonable to read into the hidden narrative.  Women were
generally in subservient roles throughout the time this song was
passed on, so it seems particularly likely that the song would make
its points in subtext rather than in text that could be used against
them.

And
there is a lot of subtext.  I mentioned a moment ago that the song
explicitly mentions Sisera’s mother imagining him raping women.
Futhermore, the details used to describe Sisera’s death are
surprising.   Commentators have noted that Jael “penetrates” his
skull with the tent peg, and that this reads like a rape scene.  The
Hebrew actually reads, “he sank, he fell, he lay still … he sank,
he fell… he fell dead.”  When he dies he is said in Hebrew to
fall “between her feet” or “between her legs” which is “a
sexual euphemism found elsewhere in the Bible.”3
The ancient rabbis noticed all of the sexual overtones, it has long
been debated.

But
what do they mean?  I’m not sure, but I can think of three things.
The most obvious one, and I think the one we’re meant to be
distracted by, is that Sisera was “shamed” by being killed by a
woman and further “shamed” in the undertones by having it sound
like a woman raping him.  (Please note that I don’t believe that
these things are shameful, rather that the text thinks they are.)
However, two other options seem hidden under this.  One is the
possibility of women having their own fantasy of being able to get
retribution for being the “spoils of war.”  That even being able
to sing a song where a woman is NOT raped by the enemy but instead
has power over him kept them going through the hard times.  The final
option is less empowering.  I wonder if Sisera actually raped Jael,
and she choose to kill him afterward.  If so, the narrative of the
rape and the narrative of the murder got folded into one.

This
story has made it through 3200 years to get to us today.  It has some
themes we can affirm (God liberates!  God can work through shared
leadership!) and a whole bunch of others we can’t.  This story
captures an ancient way of thinking about God.  This conception, of
God as Warrior, of God as egotistical-abuser, is in our shared
general psyche.  It comes from our ancients, and as such it lives
with us today.  It feels important to be able to read it as an
ancient text and acknowledge that we
no longer live 3200 years ago in the very beginning of the iron age.

We
are allowed to have developed from this point of view, and to
understand things differently now.  We can affirm that God liberates
the oppressed, but we don’t have to take the rest of the story with
it.  We can let go of a warrior God, and make space for a God who
loves ALL people (on any sides of any divide).  We can let go of the
egotistical-abuser, and make space for a God of compassion, vision,
and guidance.  We can be grateful for the chance to hear the stories
of 3200 years ago, and still acknowledge the value of the wisdom we
have today.  We aren’t stuck in the past, nor in the values of the
past, and we don’t have to leave God there either.  Our God is not a
God of violence.  We can leave that idea to the past and remove it
from our collective psyche.  Thanks be!!  Amen

1 Dennis
T. Olsen “Judges” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. 2
(Nashville: Abingdon, 1998) p.
787.

2 Danna
Nolan Fewell, “Judges” in Women’s Bible Commenatry
edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville, Kentucky:
Westminster John Knox Press, 1992, 1998) p. 77

3 Olsen,
788.

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

“The Anti-Heroine Extraordinaire” based on 1 Kings 21:1-16

  • August 20, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

Jezebel is evil personified as a human. Or, at least, that’s what we’re supposed to think of her. She may well be the inspiration for Lady Macbeth, and I’m fairly confident that every female antagonist the Walt Disney corporation ever dreamed up is at least loosely based on her. She’s got it all: manipulative skills, greed, power, murderous intent, and the ear of the king.

Every bit of her story is carefully crafted to arouse distaste and horror. She is, right from the beginning, the enemy who has invaded the royal palace. Jezebel is introduced in 1 Kings 16. Right beforehand we hear that King Ahab of Israel (the Northern Kingdom) did more evil in the sight of the Lord than any of his predecessors, which is incredibly impressive. Then it says he married Jezebel, a princess from an external land who worshiped an pagan gods. It then suggests that because of her, Ahab also worshiped those gods and set up worship spaces for those pagan gods (and goddesses! Gasp!) in his capital city.

At the same time that 1 Kings turns its attention to the evils of Ahab and his wife Jezebel it introduces the prophet Elijah. For the Hebrew Bible, Elijah is the prophet of prophets, he sets the tone for the prophetic tradition. He even shows up in the New Testament in the Transfiguration story when Moses represents the Law and Elijah the prophets. Elijah’s introduction at this point is meant to set up the classic balance of power in the time of the kings: an evil King is held to account by a prophet well connected to God. There is, however, one LITTLE incongruity in this particular story.

Elijah is awful. His opening lines are declaring a drought that will bring a famine, and then he LEAVES, going up to Jezebel’s home country so HE can eat. THREE YEARS LATER Elijah declares an end to the drought. (You can decide for yourself if you think Elijah was speaking for God or not). Meanwhile, we’re told, Jezebel was on a killing spree, trying to kill off the rest of God’s prophets in Israel. That counts as a major strike against her. When the drought ends, Elijah intentionally gets himself into a fight with the prophets of her god, Baal, and shows them up. He then orders THEM all killed. This is the “small” problem with Elijah, he murders in the name of God and is still seen as acting on God’s behalf by the Bible.

So, the story goes on, Jezebel is really mad he killed 450 of her priests, and threatens his life, so he runs away for another long while.

The next story we have about her is today’s text about the sulking King. This text is really interesting in that it may reflect actual differences between ancient Israel and the nations that surrounded it. According to the Torah, from the beginning each tribe was allocated land, and then each family within the tribe was given land from what the tribe had. Thus, at least in theory, each family had land to live on and sustain themselves with. The land could not be sold, although it could be leased for a short term. The whole of the Torah vision was meant to create a stable society that didn’t allow for generational cycles of poverty, so no one could permanently lose their land. Furthermore, no one could force someone to lease their land! The land belonged to the people. The King, then, was meant to be as much of a servant to the people as anything else. The King functioned as the general during times of war and as a judge and administrator the rest of the time.

In other nations of the Ancient Near East (as well as many other times and other places), the King was understood to control ALL of the land. Those Kings, then allowed their advisors and Lords to control parts of the land, but only so long as the Kings found their loyalty acceptable. The advisors and Lords could sometimes also break the land up to their loyalists – but the the land was still understood to belong to the Kings.

You see the difference? In Ancient Israel, the land belonged to the people. In surrounding nations, including the land where Jezebel had been raised as a princess, the land belonged to the King. So when Ahab wants to buy land and isn’t able to, he is annoyed and frustrated. For him, it is the final answer. He may appear to be a toddler having a tantrum, but he accepts the system of power of his nation and that the system of power reflects God’s own vision.

Jezebel comes from a different nation, one that understood power and ownership differently. Her father owned all the land. No one could say no to him. She does not accept the premises of Israel’s system. In some ways, I think the Bible’s emphasis on her commitment to her gods and not their YHWH is meant to indicate exactly this. She didn’t buy into the Torah vision, she didn’t buy into the God who envisioned it.  Yet, she knew the laws. She knew that a man could only be stoned to death when TWO witnesses agreed, and she put it into action.

After the deed is done, the king stops sulking, almost as if he’d been hoping she’d deal with it for him, and just didn’t want to know how.

Elijah comes next and condemns them for this act of atrocity, this murder. (Not sure what moral foot he is standing on.) He promises both of them terrible deaths. The text is then silent on Jezebel until 2 Kings 9 when it relates her death.

By that point Ahab has died on the battlefield, and his son Ahaziah had taken over after his death. Ahaziah takes a nasty fall and dies from its complications, and his brother Jehoram had become king. He reigned for 12 years. At the end of those years, Jehu, who had been the commander of Ahab’s army, the commander of Ahaziah’s army, and the commander of Jehoram’s army, is anointed as the new king by Elijah’s protege. Then Jehu kills the current king and becomes the King. Jehu thus begins a 5 generation dynasty, the longest in Ancient Israel’s existence. (That history is super messy.) As Jehu arrived to kill his predecessor, Jehoram asked if he came in peace. Jehu replied, “What peace can there be, so long as the many whoredoms and sorceries of your mother Jezebel continue?”  Then, it is said, he killed him. Afterward he killed Jezebel. Then he killed all of Ahab’s decedents, said to number 112 men – to start with -and even more whose numbers aren’t known.

There is a little detail in the story of Jehu coming to Jezebel. It reads, “When Jehu came to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it; she painted her eyes, and adorned her head, and looked out of the window.” (He has her thrown out of that window). The text accuses her of PRIMPING before her death. Now, she knew she was going to die, and she choose to do it with some dignity. In fact, for some women, the best chance they have to hold power comes through their looks. We wouldn’t expect a man to face death without at least holding his shield, yet she is derided for trying to hold her own death with the dignity that remains to her.

So, you see, it is very easy to derive from the text that Jezebel was truly terrible. Everything about her story is meant to lead us to that conclusion. The murderous bits are the big parts, but all the other details also point in the same direction. Of course, she seems surrounded by EQUALLY terrible men: Ahab, Elijah, Jehu whose names are not still synonymous with evilness in their genders. Jezebel, in essence, does two things: (1) she defends her faith tradition with all the power she has and (2) she uses power the ways she’s been taught to use power.

So, let’s look at them. You’d almost think that Ancient Israel, what with it’s faith tradition, would understand someone else also being faithful to their faith tradition. Yet, that doesn’t happen at all. The story holds that YHWH is God and everyone else is an impostor, and those who follow the impostors are described as pure evil. I think this is the case of history being written by the victors as well as a case of later editors wanting to pretend that monotheism happened way earlier than it did.

Regarding the second issue with Jezebel, that she uses power how she’s been taught to, I think that actually makes Ancient Israel look really good! It suggests that the vision of the Torah DID hold some power, and the Ancient Israel society WAS doing things right, and that there ARE other ways for societies to understand themselves. However, the stories as they’re told undeniably speak of her using the power she had for evil.

So. Is Jezebel really the worst human ever to walk the face of the earth? Seems unlikely, she wasn’t even the worst character in her story line! Heck, I’m not even sure she was that much worse than the Bible’s most significant heroes. David and Moses are both also accused of murder as well as led military campaigns that killed man under the idea that the God they worshiped wanted those other people to die.

In Bible Study we started to wonder about all of this. We started to question the integrity of the stories themselves. Perhaps there was a Jezebel, and perhaps she’d been a princess in a foreign kingdom, and perhaps she didn’t convert to Ancient Judaism. That’s all pretty feasible. However, it is also feasible that all the rest of the details about her were propagated by Jehu and his dynasty to JUSTIFY his treason, his murder of his king, and taking over the kingdom. Because, I mean to be real, when you murder your king and take his throne, it is REALLY helpful to have some good stories of why he wasn’t worthy of that throne to begin with. And if you can blame it on a terrible, foreign woman who had influence over the last three kings (as wife and then mother), all the better!! Because, people are willing to believe stories about women being terrible, and about outsiders being terrible, so foreign women are a great narrative target!

It seems possible that Jezebel’s name is synonymous with evil because it was easy to believe terrible things about her, whether or not any of them actually happened. Since all of her descendants were killed and the stories were passed down in era’s of their murder’s dynasty, the stories told of her are HIGHLY questionable. She may be “evil personified” only as justification for someone else’s acts of violence.

All of this serves as a great reminder to bring our critical thinking skills to stories. It may be of use to change the human characteristics (gender, race, age, national origin, political party, person we love with person we don’t, etc) of the protagonists and antagonists in the stories we hear, and check to see if our opinions change. That little trick may make us less susceptible to propaganda and more open to seeing the people in stories as fully beloved people of God. We all have biases. Our biases can do significant harm, but with careful attention we can loosen the power of propaganda and make space for God’s mighty power of love! Thanks be to God! Amen  

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

August 20, 2017

Sermons

“In the Midst of the Mess” based on 1 Kings…

  • August 6, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

By the time we get to 1 Kings, many of us are lost in the storyline of the Hebrew Bible. It has been an intense soap opera for quite a while, and the intricacies are often convoluted and subtle. This leaves me with the task of setting the stage for the story we just read, a task I’m not entirely sure I’m up to. Nevertheless, I’ll give it a try 😉

You remember the story of Moses, right? Well Moses led the people the the border of the Promised Land before he died. Then Joshua led the people into the land. What followed was about 350 years of various leaders emerging as needed, which was when the tribes were under threat. That 350 year period is described in the book of Judges, and archaeologists tell us that is the period when the people occupying ancient Israel were most consistently living out the rules of the Torah. All the homes seem to be about the same size, meaning that wealth was neither being accumulated nor lost. That’s a significant part of the goal of the laws of the Torah.

Then, there came King Saul. The Bible says that the people wanted a King, but God didn’t want the people to have a King. The prophets kept telling the people that God is their Ruler, but the people wanted a human one anyway. You may be shocked, but I don’t quite believe that one. I think it is much more likely that Saul wanted to be King, and once he was King he made sure that the story being told was that he was King because everyone wanted him to be. I do, however, believe that the prophets thought this was a terrible plan!

Then, somehow, David becomes King. I say “somehow” because the Bible tells several versions of this and they don’t make much sense individually or together. Basically, David led a coup against Saul with military leadership from Judea supported by external mercenaries soldiers. The Bible claims Saul was crazy. It is very difficult to tell if that is propaganda from David. (Then again, historians aren’t sure either of them ever existed, which could potentially resolve this issue for us. However, we’re going with the story as its told, even with ALL of its complications.)

OK. So David is King, which happens to mean he has a whole bunch of wives. Some of the wives predate his kingship. Many of his wives he “inherited” from Saul with the kingship. #sentencesIwishIdidnthavetosay Once David is serving as King in Jerusalem, he acquires more wives. The most famous story of his acquiring a wife is the story of David and Bathsheba. David’s palace was now larger and higher than the homes around his, and thus when Bathsheba was bathing herself on her roof top one day, David saw her and lusted after her. He had her brought to him, raped her, impregnated her, tried to cover for it, and then and had her husband killed on the front lines when the cover didn’t work.

In response, the prophet Nathan brought accusations against him. David turns to God in repentant prayer. David and Bathsheba’s infant son dies, which the Bible tells as if it is God’s punishment (you can tell from my phrasing I don’t believe that either). Bathsheba stays in the palace as David’s wife. She appears to remain his favorite wife according to the stories. Also, she ends up giving birth to 4 more sons, the youngest of which is Solomon. Please note we don’t know if she had daughters because they’re generally not worth talking about as far as the Bible sees it.

There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? We are caught up to the start of 1 Kings. Oh shoot! We aren’t. I need to remind you of another messy bit of this story, in order to make sense of this one. King David’s oldest sons were born to his earliest wives, before he was King. The oldest was Amnon. He was the one who raped his half-sister Tamar, who was a full-sister to the third son, Absalom. Absalom killed Amnon in revenge, years later. Absalom then attempted to claim the kingship of Israel in a coup and was killed by one of David’s generals. The 2nd son is assumed to have died in infancy. The 4th son was Adonijah, who was thus the oldest surviving son as of this point in the story. The Bible says there were about 20 sons, Solomon wasn’t one of the oldest 10.

According to normal inheritance laws, Adonijah had a far stronger claim to the throne than Solomon did. The Bible often tells stories that ignore normal inheritance laws. According to the beginning of 1 Kings, the parts we skipped, David was very old and impotent. A new young, beautiful wife, was brought to “warm his bed” but that didn’t work. Her name was Abishag. With awareness of David’s condition, Adonijah holds a coup and claims the kingship. He raises support from his father’s old guard, the part of David’s leadership that was Judea-centric and NOT representative of the whole kingdom of Israel. He excludes ONLY his brother Solomon, which I think would imply that he saw only his brother Solomon as a threat to his claim. David’s newer advisors refuse to attend, and seem to decide to thrown in their lots with Solomon.

The story says that Nathan approaches Bathsheba with a plan. Bathsheba accepts it and goes to King David’s bedroom to make her plea. There may be a new, young, wife in town but Bathsheba still has the privilege of entering David’s bedroom at will and being greeted with an offer to give her whatever she wants.

She takes Nathans suggestions and runs with them. She tells David that he promised her Solomon could be king after him (Nathan said she should SUGGEST it in a question), she tells him Adonijah has claimed the kingship and makes sure it sounds particularly insulting to David himself, she tells him who among his servants have supported his son’s coup, she implies that the whole nation of Israel needs his leadership and that Adonijah will only care about the southern part of Judah, and she names for him the threat to her life and Solomon’s if David lets the coup stand.

There is just one little issue with what she says: there is no reason to believe that David had promised the kingship to Solomon. It is never previously mentioned. The possibility of Solomon as a contender only emerges when Adonijah doesn’t invite him to his coup. Most likely, it wasn’t true. David is likely experiencing memory loss by this point, and Bathsheba manipulates him into doing what she wants. She plays the role of king-maker, and she makes sure it is HER kid who on the throne. Her role has changed a bit since she was first introduced.

Then Nathan backs her up, sort of. He at least backs up the fact that Adonijah has held a coup. He lets her stand on her own in terms of the claim that Solomon would be king. Based on their words, Solomon is named and anointed King.

Then Solomon promises his brother Adonijah that he can live as long as he keeps supporting Solomon’s kingship. David dies, and then comes the next bit of our story. Now, if this part of the Bible is historical, and if all these characters existed, and if things more or less went down the way this story says they went down, I STILL don’t believe this part. Under those circumstances, I think that either Solomon or Bathsheba make it up.

The story SAYS that Adonijah, the eldest living son of David, comes to King Solomon’s mother and asks her to ask her son King Solomon if he can have his father’s youngest wife as his own. Since the King’s harem is seen as part of the King’s rightful possession, getting to marry one of David’s wives would have strengthened Adonijah’s claim to the throne. I don’t quite believe he would have been stupid enough to ask for that, especially when his continued life was already tenuous. However, the story says he asked, and says that Bathsheba goes right to the throne room. Her son bows to her has a THRONE brought out to her, indicative of his affection for his mother (or perhaps of her power in his kingship), and she publicly tells him about this request. In response, Solomon orders the death of Adonijah. It seems a bit too easy, especially in the first days after David dies, and if the story stands as written, I only wonder if Solomon was in on Bathsheba’s plan or not.

All in all, this leaves us with a whole bunch of questions. The most difficult question is one that was posed in Bible Study: is Bathsheba a subversive woman? In terms of saying, “Yes! Of course she is!” we have the following evidence: she made a king, she eliminated his rivals, and she got what she wanted out of the leadership of the country. On the other side, the side that says, “Nope, not a subversive women” we have the following arguments: manipulating people for power and influence is one of the most normal of all human activities, and even more normal when it comes to royal lineage. That argument says that no matter how you worked it, doing the work to get your son on the throne is playing with power, not subverting it.

For me, both of those perspectives hold a lot of water. I kept her story in this sermon series because I love that she has such a complicated life story and significant character development, particularly from being a passive object of lust into being the most powerful agent of her own life and one of the most powerful agents in the country. However, she still mostly exists within those terrible constraints of oppressive power. She just moves from being oppressed to being the oppressor, she doesn’t change the way the game itself is played.

The other big question is: how can the kingship be such a complete and utter mess????? This is the time of history that the rest of the Bible looked to as the golden age. There are only three kings of the United Kingdom (of Israel and Judea) and they are: Saul, David, and Solomon. And all three, and their families, are total messes. They make modern soap operas look boring. They make truly broken modern families look picture perfect. If that was the golden age, heaven help the rest of the ages!

Actually, while the drama factor is higher in the Jerusalem palace, all of the characters of the Hebrew Bible are ridiculous messes. Some are richer than others, some are smarter than others, but they’re all messes. They don’t even look impressive as compared to average humans. (And I think most humans are struggling rather mightily.) And yet, the Bible contends, God CHOOSES to work with and through those messy people. God doesn’t just give up on them because they are terrible parents, or greedy rulers, or manipulative queens, nor manipulated kings. God doesn’t even give up on the ones who are murders (David and Moses). Yeah, think about that for a bit. And who are the most famous murders in the Hebrew Bible? David and Moses. Who are the most celebrated leaders of the Hebrew Bible? David. And. Moses.

God doesn’t give up on us. Ever.

And the Hebrew Bible makes it plain to see that we can’t be so messy that God ever will give up on us. Even better, God keeps working with us to take our messes and make them into something beautiful. Solomon was known for his wisdom.  David was known for his Psalms of Praise. Bathsheba found a way to be an agent of her own life (and help a very wise man take the throne). God isn’t scared off by messes, God can work with whatever we are, and bring wonder and beauty out of it all. Thanks be to God for that. 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 6, 2017

Sermons

“As if Jesus Cared About THAT” based on Luke…

  • July 9, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

In my experience, there is very little in the world more frustrating to the hard workers in church congregations than a sermon dismissing Martha. About 4 months ago the Subversive Women of the Bible Sermon Series celebrated Mary’s subversive action of sitting at Jesus’ feet and claiming her place as one of his disciples. Today, at last, we get to celebrate Martha’s subversive action – and her acts of service!

I think I’ve been waiting my whole life to preach exclusively in support of Martha, and I’ve been told by several of you that you’ve been waiting to hear such a sermon. When the Young Adult Bible Study came back to this text to hear it on Martha’s behalf, it rather surprised us. You’d think that 5 verses we’d looked at only a few months earlier would have been sort of boring the second time around, but we’ve been learning through this study that perspective is EVERYTHING. The story sounded different taking Martha as the heroine, in the same ways that we’ve been hearing deep wisdom in other stories we thought we knew but had only heard from the male perspective previously.

This story carries a lot of baggage, particularly it carries a history of being read with the world’s misogyny. Most Biblical commentators from the earliest times to the present have indicated that Martha’s work was less important than Mary’s, and associated Martha with the “concerns of the world” while Mary is seen as caring about “the things of God.” There are a few issues with this: in the story Martha is in a traditionally feminine role while Mary is in a masculine one. Celebrating Mary thus became another way of dismissing the work of women. Similarly, associating women with earthiness, worldliness, practical matters, AND negativity perpetuates the view that women are of less value in the world. The contrast, Mary’s role which fits into masculine norms, which is presented as Godly, holy, good, and right continues the idea that women just aren’t of that much value.

Let’s be practical for a minute here. Jesus traveled with an entourage. We know about the 12 disciples who seemed always to be with him, and we reasonably assume that their families were with them. We also know that the crowds around Jesus grew with his ministry. This story takes place on the journey to Jerusalem, so near the end of his year of active ministry according to the Synoptic Gospels. There were likely a LOT of people traveling with Jesus and Martha was offering them ALL hospitality. I mean, I’m thinking 50-200 people??? I know very few humans who can offer hospitality to 50-200 people without being a LITTLE frenetic about it, and even fewer who would be happy to do so without any help.

Furthermore, it is all fine and good to acknowledge that learning about God in study is an excellent priority to have, but it is much easier to make those claims when one is well-fed and has one’s with thirst quenched. Any time a person or group of people are given the opportunity to focus on study and learning we can assume that happens because some other person or group of people are doing the practical work of preparing food, drink, and lodging, and errands to support them. The traditional work of women; the undervalued work of this world in caregiving, cleaning, and food preparation; simply have to be done, and it is only because someone else is doing them that anyone is free to devote their life to study (or anything else for that matter).

Sometimes those doing the work are spouses, sometimes they’re people being paid to offer services. I recently read a ridiculous article proclaiming how much easier it was to be a self-sufficient woman in a big city because of the availability of take out food and laundry services. The author seemed to miss that the work she wasn’t doing was still being done by human beings (and mostly by women of color), that she wasn’t actually making her life work on her own, she was merely ignoring in the work involved in supporting her life!

Now, as to the truly radical thing that Martha does, the thing that I will be grateful to Martha for the rest my life: Martha assumes that Jesus cares about “women’s work.” She thinks Jesus has a clue of how much work there is to be done to offer this hospitality, she thinks that Jesus will seek justice for her and create a better balance, she thinks the work she does matters enough to interrupt Jesus while he’s teaching!!!! Martha herself thinks “women’s work” matters, and she thinks Jesus does too. She seems to have a healthy does of self-esteem and a good relationship with Jesus to be willing to initiate this conversation.

Many times in history the work of offering hospitality has been invisible to those who receive it, and it might have been common for women offering hospitality to assume that the men who received it neither knew that it happened nor cared how much work was involved. They would only notice if something went wrong. But Martha, who knew Jesus well, trusted him with reality that it WAS a lot of work and that she needed help, and that he wouldn’t laugh at her or ignore her or her concerns. She is the only one of the sisters who speaks, and she speaks to Jesus about her concerns about women’s work. She acts as if Jesus cares about women’s work, about women’s LIVES, and thus about women!!

Now, Jesus may not have done exactly as Martha wanted, but he didn’t dismiss her either. He didn’t instruct Mary to get up and work with her sister as requested. Jesus doesn’t ever tend to do the that he is asked to do when he is triangulated, and this is no exception. But he also doesn’t yell at Martha for asking, or make fun of her before the others. Jesus’s response supports Mary’s right to learn from him, and to make her own choices, without dismissing Martha or her concerns.

I admit, he says Mary has made the better choice. Furthermore, his answer MAY imply that he thinks Martha is making things more complicated than they need to be. But he doesn’t tell her stop! He doesn’t instruct her to sit down and let the work go undone. He doesn’t actually imply that the work Martha is devoting herself to is unimportant. He backs up Mary and her choice, and refuses to ask her to leave. He supports the more radical option, the person acting out of the norms society puts people in. He gently chides Martha.

But his words leave a lot of space for interpretation. Or, to say it with more integrity, Luke’s words placed in Jesus’ mouth leave a lot of space for interpretation. As intriguing as I find this story, as much as it is the second time I’m preaching on it this year, I do need to tell you that the Jesus seminar puts Jesus’ words in black. That means they don’t think there is any chance that Jesus actually said them. These words indicate Luke’s perspective on Jesus and Luke’s understanding of how Jesus acted in the world. That means that they fit how an early Christian community understood Jesus, which makes them very important, but doesn’t mean that they actually fit something Jesus said. Nevertheless, the story has been used for all of Christian history to make sense of our world, and I think there are new lessons in it that can make it richer, so we are going to keep working with it.

The words attributed to Jesus leave a lot of space for interpretation. Some have said it means that Jesus thought Martha should cook only one dish. Some say it had more to do with her actions of serving than cooking. Most commonly people have said this has nothing to do with cooking or serving but is instead about the world vs. God. (Eye roll.) As if God and the world are entirely separate and don’t inform each other. (Sigh.) Some, though, suggest that the thing Martha is chided for is the kind of energy she brings to the work. Jesus is not upset at her choices to serve or to be hospitable (which makes a lot of sense since in other places those who welcome Jesus are praised), but rather for being worried and distracted. The Africa Bible Commentary offers a beautiful example of this perspective:

“the name Martha is an Aramaic one that means ‘sovereign lady’, ‘ruling lady’ or ‘lady’. The name helps to emphasize Martha’s autonomous, well-off and dominate position. She is the hospitable mother of the house who welcomes a preacher and performs the practical tasks that the visit demands. In fact, her work is repeatedly described as diakonia, which would later become a technical term referring to serving at the Lord’s table, proclaiming his message, and providing leadership in the church. Given that diakonia is presented positively everywhere else in the NT, it is difficult to see that here is should suddenly represent a mistaken choice. Rather what Jesus disapproves of is the way in which Martha goes about her work, with fuss and agitation. We do not need to separate the gentle, listening, self-surrendering Marys and the pragmatic, busy Marthas. In other words, the Mary in me ought not to repress the Martha, and the Martha in me ought not to repress the Mary.”1

Ah! The freedom of that idea! The recognition that each of us have within us the prayerful scholar AND the hard-worker! No single person is fully one or the other, and the balance between them exists within each of us. That’s much more realistic that separating them out into two groups of people, and even better, the commentator suggests that and that neither part within us need to judge or repress the other! Extended this idea out even further, to counter the common readings of the passage, it serves to remind us that the stereotypical attributes of both gender identities ALSO exist within each of us, and need not be repressed either.

In this perspective, I’m not entirely sure what Jesus most wanted for Martha. What was he hoping would happen next? What did she need? Was she to make a self assessment and simply stop working if she wasn’t enjoying it? Was she simply to check her attitude at the door? Was she to figure out what would make things more reasonable (without demanding action of her sister) and figure out how to offer the hospitality without running herself ragged? I’m not sure. But I think that some of those are within the answer.

I have said it before, but I’ve gotten feedback that it needs to be heard more often: doing work we resent does NOT build up the kindom of God. There are many jobs within the Body of Christ and there is much work to be done to build justice and peace into the fabric of societies, but we don’t get there doing work we hate and resenting it. That leaves us all with several options:

  1. We can stop doing work we can’t find joy or meaning in.
  2. We can check in with ourselves to find out why we do what we do, and assess if we think our reasons are worthwhile.
  3. We can rebalance what we offer to the world so that the way we offer it brings joy or meaning to us and thus into the world.

There is much work to be done, Martha has that right! But there are a lot of ways to do it (or not do it)! If you are doing things you hate out of obligation with resentment, stop!!! The kindom of God needs joy and meaning, gratitude and delight. Please, don’t give gifts you resent. It will do more harm than good!

Martha believed that Jesus cared about women’s work, and it seems she was right. Now all of have the responsibility that Martha has after Jesus speaks to her: to figure out what gifts we will offer and how we can do so with joy, meaning, gratitude or delight – OR to stop giving those gifts so we can find ourselves free of distraction and worry. May God help us find our way. Amen

1Paul John Isaak, “Luke” in the Africa Bible Commentary, Tokunboh Adeyemo, general editor (Nairobi, Kenya: WordAlive Publishers, 2006), page 1226.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

“Who Do We Feed First?” based on Acts 2:42-47…

  • May 8, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

There are times when I find it invigorating to engage in a robust debate. One of the joys of my childhood was being able to score points in verbal battles with my brother, and if I don’t pay attention, I can still engage in conversation as a competitive sport.

On the basis of enjoying the capacity to play and sometimes WIN, if the opportunity presented itself, I would choose not to debate Jesus. He doesn’t lose much. The gospels consistently describe him winning, scoring match points before his opponents have even started to play.

Today’s gospel is one of the exceptions. I cannot yet say it definitively, but I believe the only people who ever score points on Jesus in competitive debate are women. Consequently, very few who beat Jesus are women. This is one of the stories where the woman is said to have won. Jesus himself declares that she has bested him, and gives her a prize for having done so.

Even so, this is one of the most uncomfortable stories in the gospels. Jesus is … well… um… super mean to this woman. He calls her and her people dogs! That is, he disparages their very humanity, and says that it is of less value than the humanity of his people.

I could tell you that the Jesus seminar doesn’t think this story actually happened. Luckily that’s true, but unfortunately it still requires us to consider why the early Christian community included it. We could tell ourselves that Jesus expressed explicit prejudice simply to show us that it was bad, but that doesn’t truly fit the story. The story says he healed the woman’s child because she beat him in oral combat, NOT because he realized her people were of equal value.

So, how do we deal with this horribly insulting, even racist, Jesus? We still have a few options left to us. The story does say that Jesus left Galilee to be in the land of the Gentiles and entered a house in secret. It would be reasonable to conclude that he was getting away for a bit of a reprieve, perhaps because he was tired and needed to catch his breath. Tired, burned out people often don’t operate as their best selves. And being accosted in this home where he was trying to hide and regain his energy might have brought out the worst in him. I don’t think this entirely explains the story, but I do point it out anyway for two reasons: 1. Because when we’re tired we really do make mistakes and I urge you to get rest as an act of faithfulness to God’s call on your life to be your best self and 2. Because when we’re tired we really do make mistakes and some gentleness with ourselves is called for when those mistakes happen. Human beings in human bodies can’t push on indefinitely through exhaustion.

Another pieces of the puzzle comes from a scholar who doesn’t think it makes a lot of sense for the early Christian church to have remembered such a hostile response from Jesus UNLESS it reflects a larger reality. Gerd Theissen looked for a socio-economic explanation and discovered, “Upper Galilee exported produce through the coastal cities. The cities, in turn, depended on these regions for food. In periods of crisis or food shortage, the populace of the hinterlands may have resented producing goods for wealthy cities.”1 This idea continues, “Those who produced the food, Jewish peasant farmers, see their work consumed by others.”2 In this case, ethnic and religious differences are compounded by economic inequalities. Jesus might simply be suggesting that his people have a right to eat the food they produce.

It stands in interesting contrast to the food sharing on Acts 2, doesn’t it? Jesus talking about the inappropriateness of sharing the food with the dogs contrasts with the people sharing all things in common, breaking bread together, and eating with glad and generous hearts?

Or does it?

This beautiful passage of the joy and communal support in the early church does not extend to ALL people. It extends WITHIN the community, not beyond it. I’m not saying that’s wrong, I’m just saying that it is limited. Supporting the community of faith is not the same thing as supporting all of God’s people. Supporting the community of faith, with firm boundaries around who that means, can actually look a lot like Jesus’s response to the Syrophoenician woman in this story! Jesus, too, was advocating keeping resources within the family of faith.

The first summer I was on staff at Sky Lake the summer curriculum included Romans 12, which we tended to read from “The Message.” which I adored. I quoted it once in a secular setting and one of my high school friends asked if I was intentionally excluding her. It said:

9-10 Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle.

11-13 Don’t burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don’t quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy Christians; be inventive in hospitality.

Until she questioned me I hadn’t heard “help needy CHRISTIANS” at all, but once she pointed it out, I squirmed a little bit every time I read it. I wondered if I was allowed to change it so that the command said, “Help needy people” and wondered why it wasn’t written that way to begin with.

I think that human nature includes a tendency toward thinking in terms of groups, and defining “us” that excludes “them.” It happens too commonly not to be part of our nature, and I suspect that it happens for decent evolutionary reasons! In order to thrive, humans need each other, but we’re finite in time and space. So we can’t bond with everyone! I’m thinking our species developed this way: Close bonds form the basis of units, and units expand until they maximize the relationship with resources in an area, and then other groups are established further away, right? Then, because resources on earth aren’t allocated with equal distribution, there are still some things that each group ends up competing with other groups. That would have helped establish the boundaries between the groups!

So, it isn’t bad, and it is likely part of our nature, but it isn’t the end goal either! The Syrophoenician woman reminds us of this. She was, in multiple ways, an outsider to the groups Jesus belonged to, and yet she came to him with a need. Her needed extended past her group identity!

The Syrophoenician woman is presented as the paradigm of committed parent! She crosses boundaries, takes insults, and argues with all her power in order to gain the care her child needs. She shouldn’t have entered that house by laws of both communities. Her community would have preferred if she had refrained from “bowing down” at the feet of a Jewish teacher. She let him call her, her family, and her community DOGS and responded within his metaphor. She found a way to respond, without accepting his premise, without dismissing his premise, and while staying ON POINT. She kept asking for what her daughter needed, and requested that even if Jesus didn’t see her as a fellow human being, he could still extend his power to help her!!!

And Jesus complements her! Going back to the idea that the city of Tyre was part of a problem within an economic system that was extracting wealth from the Galilean farmers – it is as if she points out that the Galilean farmers DO deserve to eat, but that Tyre is hungry too. She doesn’t argue his premise, but she reminds him that hunger is universal.

While on our honeymoon, Kevin and I took some tours of the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It became clear quickly that many immigrant families survived ONLY because of the support of community – in that case communities based on their countries of origin. This is one of the ways that groups defining clear boundaries can be good – it lead to life not death. But then again, I’m sure it left some people unable to access any help.

In the days of overcrowding on the Lower East Side, the barriers that divided people were real. Resources were limited. In the days of food shortages in Galilee and Tyre, the barriers that divided people were real. Resources were limited. In the eras of needing access to limited water for our ancient ancestors, the barriers that divided people were real. Resources were limited.

There are good reasons to establish groups and boundaries. Those reasons apply today, and we see this sort of thinking ALL OVER the place today. However, in some ways, reality has changed! Technology has made it possible to grow enough food for everyone to be fed – well. At the moment we have enough clean water for all to drink (if we don’t waste it). It may always have been true that if groups worked together there would have been enough, I don’t know, but today it is FOR SURE. The world has produced enough for everyone.

And yet, maybe more than ever, people are trying to draw firm lines between those who get access to resources and those who don’t, those we are worthy, and those who aren’t, those who should become more wealthy and those who should become more impoverished, those who get to access health care and those who don’t, … and so on.

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.” I think that’s the essence of the meaning of the kindom, the primary teaching of Jesus. As it has been described to me, the kindom is the Reign of God that will occur when EVERYONE treats EVERYONE else as kin. That is, everyone is IN the group and there is only one group and we are all working together for each other’s good. That’s how (at their best) kin treat each other, and that’s an expression of the desire of God for the world.

So, who do we feed first? The children? The dogs? The Christians? The Jews?

Our church? Our city? Our country? Our race? Our class? Our political allies?

Or perhaps, whoever is most hungry?

Because if we all work together, there is enough for everyone! And once we remember that, we can distribute based on needs rather than fears. Holy God, may that day come SOON. Amen

1  R. Alan Culpepper, “Luke” in Leadner Keck, ed. , The New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press: 1995) 610.

2  Culpepper, 610

–

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

May 7, 2017

Sermons

“The Bible’s Only Self-Description of a Woman” based on…

  • February 27, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

I
find it truly exciting that the only time a woman describes herself
in the Bible she describes herself as “black and beautiful.”1
The joy comes from both a woman describing herself as beautiful –
which I find incredibly subversive on its own – and the fantastic
inversion of our messed up culture that she is dark-skinned AND
beautiful.  It is a lovely match for Black History Month.  And then,
on top of all that, Song of Songs is a book of erotic poetry in the
Bible!   Its very existence flies in the face of the ridiculous
Christian prudishness that has done such great harm for so many
centuries.

Thus,
I’ve been really excited to preach this sermon for weeks.  However, a
few problems have emerged. Song of Songs has humbled my prowess as a
scholar.   I’ve done some my most significant Biblical study on Song
of Songs.  Yet, when I came to the important questions related to
preaching this text I found that I had NO possible way to discover
their answers.  What I would really like to know is (1) how radical
it was for a woman to say “I am beautiful” in that time and place
and (2) how radical it was for a woman to express sexual desire in
that time and place.  There are a few impediments to knowing.  First
of all, the black and beautiful woman is the only woman in the whole
Bible describing herself AND the only woman in the Bible naming her
sexual desire, which means that there is no one to compare her to.  

Secondly,
there are the incredible complications of the text itself.  This book
is very, very difficult to make assertions about.  To begin with, you
may know it as Song of Songs or Song of Solomon because its OPENING
LINE is difficult to translate and no one is sure which one is more
accurate.  That’s only the beginning of the complications.  There is
also the issue of determining when it was written, and time ranges
are especially wide on this.  Scholars claim anything from 960 to 200
BCE.  That’s 760 years of difference.  It is possible that the ways
that women’s voices were heard, the expectations of beauty, the
sexual norms of the day, and how much humility a woman was expected
to express might well have varied wildly over 760 years.  For
instance, it might be worth considering that many of those things
have drastically changed since 1257, and even since 1957.

This level of unknowing makes it
hard to determine anything about how subversive this woman’s words
and actions really were.  I think that there have been cultures in
world history where it would not have been particularly radical for a
woman to claim her own beauty nor her own sexual desire.   As a
whole, Judaism has been more sex-positive than Christianity,
including in having an understanding that part of the role of the
Sabbath was for love-making.  That may suggest that ancient Judaism
may also have been more openminded than (say) medieval Christianity
and that, in particular, a woman’s expression of sexual desire would
not have been all that surprising.

On
the contrary, though, if this were so normal we might expect to hear
it in other parts of the Bible.  Also, we do know a lot about
patriarchal cultures and we know ancient Israel was one of those for
all of those 760 years.  In those cultures, women’s voices aren’t
often heard, nor free.  Finally, if a woman expressing her desire
were so normal, it would be reasonable to expect that interpreters
through the ages might have commonly interpreted the text literally
and not allegorically, and that’s FAR from true.  Most historical
interpretations of this book have been allegorical and or
metaphorical, taking the male character as God or Christ and the
female as the church, Israel, or Israelites.  

It
is only relatively recently that this erotic text has been
interpreted as being primarily about eroticism.  In the nineteenth
century, a German scholar named Johann
Gottfried Heder
analyzed the Song and
found it to be, “a collection of pleasingly erotic love-poetry.”2
 Further research in the early twentieth century connected the Song
to similar Egyptian and Canaanite poetry.  In 1990, Roland Murphy (an
American Catholic scholar who taught Biblical Studies at Duke) wrote,
“Any broad agreement among contemporary critical scholars that the
literal text of the Song marvelously portrays the passions and
yearnings of human lovers is a recent phenomenon.”3

Roland Murphy himself says it is notable that Song of Songs is not
only about sex, but it’s erotic and nonjudgmental about sex. (You
might be amazed to note that the text does not say that the lovers
are married, and in fact rather suggests that they aren’t!)

I
suspect that interpretations of the book Song
of Songs
are more reflective of the culture reading the text than they are of
the book itself!  Since we don’t know how it was understood in its
first few centuries, so we lack the capacity to know how radical it
was then!  It is POSSIBLE that the original meanings of the book were
lost along the way to allegory and metaphor.  Additionally, the book
Song of Songs is exceptionally difficult to interpret.  

“The
vocabulary of the Song of Songs is also unusual in the proportion of
words unique or rare elsewhere in Scripture… In the brief span of a
little more than a hundred verses there are almost fifty hapax rarely
found elsewhere in Scripture.”4
(A hapax is a word found only once in Scripture, making them harder
to translate.) Many commentators identify frequent double entendre
within the Hebrew as well, making it very difficult to render in
English.  Furthermore, the love poetry of other parts of the Near
East and the mythology of the Near East offer deepened understandings
of many parts of the text.  All of this serves to allow interpreters
and commentators a lot of leeway in their claims, and adds to the
variety of understandings of the text.

If
the text is a drama, the number of speakers in the Song of Songs is
debated. Claims range from man and woman; man, woman, and lecher;
even to man, women, and some eight other characters plus choruses.
Others claim it isn’t even a drama.  It is clear the Song of Songs is
written in poetic language as opposed to prose. It is also clear that
the poetry speaks about love.  However, claims have been made that it
is constituted by as many as 30 separate poems, yet editorial work
allows for the poems to form an ambiguously meaningful whole.  The
Song is not the only love poetry from the Ancient Near East, although
it does have unique elements. Murphy explains,

“As our earlier survey of
Egyptian and Sumerian sources indicated, there is no reason to doubt
that the biblical Song is indebted, at least indirectly, to older
traditions of Near Eastern love poetry.  Nor need one quarrel with
the likelihood that some of these antecedent traditions had
specifically sacral significance or that they otherwise witness to
the reciprocity of imagery depicting divine and human love.”5

Thus,
although the Song of Songs is very distinctive in the Bible, it does
fit somewhat into the genre of Ancient Love poetry.

You
may wonder why I’ve had to spend SO MUCH time explaining all of this
to you, especially given that I think you are very intelligent people
with a strong grasp on the Bible and history.  In the suggested
readings of the church, the three year cycle of “lectionary”
readings, only 6 verses of the book Song of Songs show up.  Then,
they’re most often skipped over by clergy who find it easier to
preach on the Gospel (or any other part of the Bible) than on the
Song, despite the fact that they’re among the mildest verses one
could pick from the text!  So, I don’t think most people, including
those who have been attending church regularly for their whole lives,
have had much exposure to this book and I’ve had to start with the
basics.

All
of this brings me back to the beginning: there is very little that
can be said for certain about the Song of Songs and that makes it
very hard to make firm claims about it.  I would really LIKE to say
that it was radical and subversive to have a heroine who speaks of
herself as beautiful, because it would be in our culture and I think
that’s a a great thing to strive for, but I’m not CERTAIN that it
really was radical then.  Perhaps in the time of the writing the
culture she lived in was so body-positive that most people thought
they were beautiful??  Isn’t that nice to ponder? Similarly I think
it is radical that she named her own desire, but I don’t KNOW.

The
projection onto this book of the Bible is non-trivial.  I’ve found
that most commentators speaking of the line “I am black and
beautiful” find it necessary to explain how such a line is
possible.  They seem to forget that Western Culture’s obsession with
light skin is relatively new and thus doesn’t appropriately fit into
Biblical history.  Many, many commentators believe that the black and
beautiful woman is apologetic about her skin tone. Renita Weems, a
womanist theologian and author of the Song of Songs section of the
New Interpreter’s Bible, responds to those assumptions with 3 pieces
of context:

“(1) The word ‘black’ appears
five times in the emphatic position suggesting that the woman’s tone
is confident and her posture assertive – not apologetic. (2)
Throughout the poem the woman’s physical beauty is both praised and
celebrated, not only by her lover but also by the maidens of the
city, which means that others regard her as indisputably attractive.
(3) Although the Song of Songs and Lamentations (and other portions
of Scripture) suggest that a ruddy complexion was prized in men, the
same does not automatically apply to women, since women were commonly
judged by a different standard of beauty.”6

If
you are like me, you might appreciate knowing that “ruddy” means
“having a healthy reddish color.”  Since the text does not say
who her parents or clan are, Weems points out “We are left to take
heart in her bold act of self-assertion and description: She speaks
up for herself; she is the object of her own gaze; she is, by her own
estimation, black and
beautiful.”7
For many cultures in many places and in many times, such a statement
is radical in its positivity and self-affirmation.  I wish there were
more space made for people to make such comments in our time, space,
and culture now.

Instead,
we live in a society in which women are barraged with messages about
how inadequate their bodies are in order for corporations and their
shareholders to profit off of those feelings of inadequacy.  In
everything from the immediately obvious clothes, shoes, make up, and
diet industries to the also insidious tanning salons, self-help
books, beauty magazines, and even the wedding industry; wealth is
extracted from women by making them  feel inadequate and not
beautiful enough.  In
such a society, it
seems truly subversive to LIKE yourself.  

Throughout
the Song of Songs, both lovers celebrate each other.  The woman’s
capacity to find herself beautiful and her capacity to celebrate her
lover’s beauty are correlated.  Instead of struggling under a pile of
self-hatred, she was able to live freely in love.  Her ability to
like and love herself enabled her to live and love another, and I
choose to believe also enabled each of them to expand their circles
of love into the world.  Consumer culture teaches us to find
ourselves INADEQUATE, but
this ancient, dark-skinned, beautiful woman teaches us to savor the
goodness of life.  In
the use of her voice, in the way she describes herself, and even in
her willingness to name her own desire, she offers us an alternative
way of life.  She offers us the freedom to ENJOY rather than wallow
in life.  May we follow in her lead, each of us as we are able, and
find the freedom of God in beauty itself (even our own!)  Amen

1 Renita J. Weems “The Song of Songs: Introduction, Commentary and Reflections” as found in the New Interpreter’s Bible Vol V (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), 383.

2
Roland
Murphy, The
Song of Songs: A Commentary on the Book of Canticles or The Song of
Songs
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990) 39  .

3
Murphy,
40.

4
Marvin A. Pope “Song of Songs” in The Anchor
Yale Bible Commentaries (Doubleday: New York, etc, 1995), 34.

5
Murphy,
97.

6 Weems, 382-383.

7 Weems,
383.

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 26, 2017

Sermons

“A Defiant Aunt” based on 2 Kings 11:1-3 or…

  • January 22, 2017February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

To explain this soap opera to all of you required a lot of remedial scholarship on my part. I think I have it now. The monarchy period lasted for just under 300 years in Israel and just over 400 in Judea, and I found a handy-dandy chart on Wikipedia that helps.

Let’s start with the so-called great King named David (you may have heard of him). His son Solomon became king after him. After the death of Solomon the kingdom divided into two parts: a Northern Part called Israel and a Southern Part called Judea. That is, there was a civil war and the North, which wanted to become a separate nation did so. The Southern succession was SUPER linear, passing directly from father to son with only two exceptions: the one we read about today and the very end of the dynasty. The Northern one is much less linear and way more confusing, and we’re going to ignore most of it today.

The story we read about today is SOUTHERN, it is about Judea, but to understand it we have to start in the North. There was a Northern/Israelite King named Omri, who had been a general of another King and ended up the victor after a coup. The Bible says he was the worst king yet. His son Ahab married Jezebel. You may have heard of her. She is in the running for being the worst woman in the Bible. Jezebel was a princess of the Phoenician Empire, from which you should take that she was not a follower of YHWH.

King Ahab was a selfish, petty, and mean man who tended to follow his wife’s lead. She went on an offensive against the prophets of YHWH and tried to kill them all off so the prophets of rival god Baal could be in power.

If you take nothing else from this introduction, take this: Ahab and Jezebel were rulers who cared only about themselves and power. The Bible calls them unfaithful to YHWH, but I want us to hear that with nuance. The Bible calls leaders unfaithful when they don’t follow the laws of the Torah, and the laws of the Torah were designed to protect the poor and the powerless from the unquenchable thirst for more power and more money of the rich and powerful. Thus, any ruler who cared more for their own power than for the well-being of the people was called unfaithful to YHWH, because being faithful to God MEANT following the rules that cared for the people. Ahab and Jezebel deviated further from God’s vision for a just society than any other rulers before them. Thus they are the standard bearers of evil rulers in Kings and Chronicles. It isn’t just about believing in YHWH or not, it is about being self-serving or caring for the people AS the standard of faith.

Ahab and Jezebel, the power couple of epic evilness, had at least a daughter and two sons. Those sons also became Kings of Israel after their father, and the second of them to take the Kingship was Jehoram (of Israel). Their daughter was named Athaliah. She was married to King Jeroham of Judea. Two men, same name; Athaliah had a brother King Jeroham AND a husband King Jeroham. Eventually Queen Athaliah also the mother of the successor King, Ahaziah.

Just before we get to this little story, King Ahaziah, like several Judean kings before him, was leading military campaigns alongside the Northern Israelite King. The two separate countries were pretty well tied in together at this time (including by marriages), and the Bible seems to think that the evil influence of Jezebel was spreading widely. While King Ahaziah of Judea and his uncle King Jehoram of Israel were off fighting to keep control over vassal states, King Jehoram of Israel was injured.

The great northern prophet Elisha stepped in and anointed the general Jehu as king, to take over for the injured king!! Meanwhile, King Jehoram (of Israel) has gone off to heal in another city and his nephew King Ahaziah (of Judea) comes to visit him. Then the newly minted King Jehu (of Israel) comes and kills them both, and proceeds to go on a killing rampage to ensure that none of Ahab’s 70 other male descendants can take over for him. He also has Jezebel killed, and all the Baal worshippers. I’m telling you, they don’t make soap operas as violent as Biblical history for a reason.

Now, the deceased Jezebel and Ahab have one remaining child in power, their daughter Athaliah who has been Queen Mother to her son Ahaziah. Their male decedents in the north and all of their allies have been murdered. In the grand tradition of seeking power at any cost, the Queen Mother Athaliah has all of the other male royal descendants killed off and claims the throne for herself. This action would have completely eliminated the rest of Ahab and Jezebel’s line as well as the Southern succession. It is unclear if this mass murder involved any of her other sons (there may not have been any), but it certainly includes HER OWN GRANDCHILDREN, the princes of the kingdom.

Now, originally my goal was to discuss the subversiveness of Jehosheba, a daughter of King Jehoham and sister of King Ahaziah, but at this point I’m having trouble with clarity over which woman is more subversive: is it the woman who claims the throne for herself for seven years and is the ONLY break in the Davidic dynasty in 438 years OR the woman who subversively hid her nephew away so he could restore the dynasty?? This leads me to wonder how much are we supposed to care about the dynasty, which I really think is propaganda more than it was God’s will? In their own ways, both of these women were exceptionally subversive, although one seems significantly more evil than the other. While I admit that subversiveness can come in good or evil forms, we are going to keep our attention on the defiant aunt.

Before I started the research for this sermon series, this little story was not one I’d noticed before. It does show up twice, 3 verses each in the standard history of Kings and nearly the same verses in the alternative history of Chronicles. They tell us that there was a ruling queen of Judea, and she was the only one to sit on the throne who was not a descendant of David! She was taken down by the subversive action of another woman, one who was either her daughter or her step-daughter. The historian Josephus claims that Jehosheba was a HALF sister to King Ahaziah which means she wasn’t Athaliah’s daughter, but the text seems to imply the opposite. Generally in these stories a woman is only called a sister that clearly if she is a full blooded sister. It doesn’t really matter, but it is curious.

The Bible struggles with Queen Athaliah’s rule MOSTLY because she was not a descendant of David, and it seems to call her reign illegitimate. The New Interpreter’s Bible puts it this way, “Although Athaliah rules for seven years, the typical regal summaries are omitted in the report, for the narrator does not consider her to have been a legitimate ruler.”1Apparently, questions of the legitimacy of rulers is not new in human history. Similarly, we can tell from this entire narrative that people in power using their power to do harm to the vulnerable is a long standing tradition and that the prophetic voice exists for the sake of calling power to accountability.

Anyway, to get back to the story, this sister Jehosheba of the newly dead King Ahaziah is ALSO married to the High Priest (which is sketchy in its own right, the power is clearly shared very tightly in that society). She hides her baby nephew and his wet-nurse away in a unused room in the palace to keep him from being murdered. Later she sneaks them both out of the palace and hides them in the Temple for SIX YEARS. For all of those years, his grandmother ruled the southern kingdom of Judea under the assumption that there was no one left with a more legitimate claim to power than the one she had.

Now, its hard to tell from story itself who the mastermind was: Jehosheba or her husband the high priest (we’re going to skip over his name so that no one gets more confused and just call him the high priest). They seem DEEPLY in cahoots. Jehosheba is the one who is said to have stolen away the prince and hidden him for years, but at the end of that time it is her husband who enacts a plan to overthrow Queen Athaliah’s rule by convincing the military that the rightful son of King Ahaziah still lived and should be king instead. Perhaps it was the high priest that asked his wife to protect the baby to begin with. Perhaps it was the Jehosheba who convinced her husband to overthrow the Queen for the sake of her nephew. Perhaps they had a really great relationship and shared in both the planning and the execution of the plan. The text doesn’t tell us. But within the royal family, a princess who was married to the high priest risked her own life and that of her husband and family as well for the sake of overthrowing the Queen.

The Biblical narrative claims that the baby nephew who became King, Joash, was a good king. It seems that his high priest uncle kept in line for as long as the high priest lived, and he even oversaw a restoration of the Temple. He had a 40 year reign of following the ways of YHWH, although in the end he decided to use the Temple’s treasury to pay off a foreign king who wanted to sack Jerusalem and his servants killed him off in response. You can’t make this stuff up. I do not find it clear to what degree Joash really was in charge and to what degree his uncle (and aunt?) pulled the strings after having saved his life, but the gist seems to be that Jehosheba did a good thing for the people of Judea and for the worship of YHWH by saving that baby. Of course, she maintained the royal lineage, but she also helped provide a ruler who cared for the people.

The real question, of course, is what we can draw from these ancient stories of long dead battles for seats of power that matters to us today? Of course there is the timely reminder that the Biblical standard for good leadership is the care given to the people, with particular attention to the poor, the powerless, and the marginalized. I think there is also in Jehosheba’s story the reality that standing up to power can require great personal risk.

The book “Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed” by Phillip Hallie tells the story of a little village in France, Le Chambon, full of Huguenots who truly believed in the Biblical call to take care of all of God’s children. Those French Protestants were responsible for saving the lives of thousand of Jewish children (and adults) during the German occupation of France. They did so while taking their own lives at risk, and indeed pastor’s son was killed for being part of the resistance.  The faith of the people propelled them to take care of all God’s people.

The acts of Jehosheba, like the acts of the people of Le Chambon, were extraordinarily courageous because the power structures above them were willing to kill people in order to maintain their power. To be in the resistance sometimes requires acts of great courage and personal risk. Loving God, if and when it becomes necessary for us to take risks to take care of your people, may we prove worthy like Jehosheba and the people of Le Chambon. Amen

1Choon-Leong Seow “The First and Second Book of Kings” in The New Interpreter’s Study Bible Volume III edited by Leander Kirk et al (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1999), 227

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

January 22, 2017

Sermons

“The Hard Work of Departing” based on Genesis 16:7-15 and…

  • November 6, 2016February 15, 2020
  • by Sara Baron

We are told that in order for life to exist three things are necessary: a source of energy, liquid water, and essential chemicals. To expand on the last of these, “Life as we know it contains specific combinations of elements including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen that combine to form proteins and nucleic acids which can replicate genetic code.”1 It could be that life could exist with a different combination of chemicals, but the theory remains: a source of energy, liquid water, and essential chemicals are necessary to life.

Those three things exist on this planet, and given that reality, life seems irrepressible. Tiny cracks in pavement or cement sidewalks sprout grass and weeds. Puddles that stand too long grow algae, wet wood grows mold and moss. I’ve been considering this unstoppable quality of life ever since I visited Bryce Cannon National Park and was motivated to take this picture. At one and the same time there is a huge evergreen growing at the base of “hoodoos” easily 5 times its size AND there are tiny little evergreens popping up at the top of hoodoos with remarkably little soil available to them. Yet, life won’t stop. The trees grow.

The Bible is a remarkably interesting document, and within its complexity and contradictions it sometimes feels like there are unquenchable truths gleaming through it. These truths are like the force of life on our planet – no matter what is done to try to stop them and no matter the strength of the circumstances that would prevent them – they prevail. Our two stories today tell profoundly of a God who cares about ALL people, while existing within a narrative about God choosing to focus on just one people.

The story going on here is supposed to be about God choosing Abraham. There is supposed to be a special bond with Abraham, and less so with Sarah, and yet the story keeps diverging to include and bless others. It is as if the universal love of God cannot be contained, even in the stories trying to tell the back-story of the people who long claimed God’s love was particularly for them.

Our two readings today are most likely two versions of the same story that were adapted differently with time. The one in Genesis 16, which we read first, is the version from the Southern Kingdom and much older. The one in Genesis 21 is the version from the Northern Kingdom. The Bible got edited A LOT. Most of the stories in the Torah (first 5 books) were passed on in oral tradition for centuries before they first got written down, and oral tradition naturally changes stories as it goes. Likely each version had changed over time in different ways to suit different time-relevant needs. Then, after being written down, the stories continued to get adapted, including by editors so that they would make a more coherent story. The people responsible for translating the Bible into English also made difficult decisions that functioned as further editing. The stories we have now are the complicated compilations of milenia, with many fingerprints on them.

That is, the two stories we read today are likely the same story with different fingerprints on them. Yet, they are edited into the current version of Genesis whereby they fill two different roles. They are, at one and the same time ONE story and TWO stories that happen sequentially. The editors aren’t perfect, in the second version Ishmael is a 17 year old that his mother carried away into the wilderness in her arms like a baby. (Oops.) But the work of the editors to make a coherent story makes both stories important, and not just the older one.

Throughout both stories, extraordinary things happen to Hagar. Explains of this are coming from the work of the amazing Biblical Scholar Phyllis Trible. In Genesis 16 Hagar has run away from Sarai/Sarah because of Sarai/Sarah’s harsh treatment of her. Hagar is a subversive woman choosing to run away, likely to die, and taking with her the heir that her slave-master husband wants most desperately. She reaches a point where she claims her life as her own, and she acts on it. In Genesis 16, Hagar is pregnant, and when she runs away she is near the border with Egypt, and finds a spring to sustain herself.

“The Hebrew word ‘spring’ (’ayn) also means ‘eye.’ The association resonates with Hagar’s having acquired a new vision of Sarai, and it anticipates the new vision of God that she will soon acquire. She, an Egyptian and a slave, is the first person in the Bible to whom such a messenger visits. Moreover, for the first time in the narrative a character speaks to Hagar (rather than about her) and uses her name. … The messenger promise Hagar innumerable descendants, thereby according her the special status of being the only woman in the Bible to receive such a promise. … The messenger affirms Hagar’s conceiving. She will bear a son and will name him Ishmael. Hagar becomes the first woman in the Bible to receive such an annunciation. … The messenger specifies the meaning of the name Ishamel (God hears): ‘For God heard your affliction.’”2

Now, unfortunately, in the form of this story that we have now, the messenger of God tells Hagar that God hears and knows her affliction, AND sends Hagar back to it anyway. The first act of subversiveness doesn’t get her free, although she is different afterward. Perhaps the only reason it doesn’t work is so that we can get to the second story though. After the words of the messenger, Hagar speaks for the second time, and from the way the story explains it, what happens is astounding. Trible puts it this way:

“Hagar’s next words bypass the messenger’s words. She does not comment on her continued affliction, the promise of descendants, the naming of her son, the meaning of his name, or his future. Nor does she comment on the God who hears. Instead she names the Lord who sees. The narrator introduces her words with a striking expression that accords her a power attributed to no one else in the Bible. Hagar ‘calls the name of the Lord who spoke to her’ (Gen 16:13*). She does not invoke the Lord; she names the Lord. She calls the name; she does not call up on the name. ‘You are El-roi [God of seeing],’ she says.”3

And then, after all of that astounding-ness, the text seems to revert to the mundane. “Hagar bore Abram a son.” (Genesis 15a). It isn’t as mundane as it seems. Trible says, “Hagar becomes the first woman in the ancestor stories to bear a child.”4 Mostly sons are attributed as coming to their fathers (as if that’s how it works.) But, that isn’t all. Hagar gets a lot of “firsts” in the Bible. Moving onto the Genesis 21 version, according to Trible “She is the first slave in Scripture to be freed. At the same time, she becomes the first divorced wife – banished by her husband at the command of his first wife and God.”5

In the Genesis 21 version of the story, Hagar prepares a deathbed for her son, and sits to wait for his death. The story is clearly about a very young child. Within this story, Hagar “becomes the first character in the Bible to weep.”6 According to Trible, “The God who she saw (r’h) long ago in Shur opens her eyes enabling her to see (r’h) a well of water at the site of the ‘well of seven’ (Beersheba).”7

Whether the stories are taken sequentially or as two versions of the same narrative, some themes emerge. First and foremost, God takes care of Hagar and cares about Hagar. She is given extraordinary access to the Divine, paralleling Abraham’s. Unlike any other person in the Bible, she gets to NAME God. Her survival, which is inherently threatened by being sent out alone into the barren wilderness of the desert, is assured by God who SHE renames “The God who sees.” It feels like she names God, “The God who sees ME” because that seems to more completely articulate the wonder spoken by Hagar. She knows she’s a woman, a foreigner, a slave, and in both stories she is profoundly alone and utterly powerless.

Yet, God sees her.

Isn’t it weird? Throughout the rest of the Bible, God is referred to as the “God of Abraham”, but “The God of Abraham” goes with Hagar to care for her. God refuses to be contained by the stories boundaries. God’s love and grace are too expansive to be held within the walls of the narrative. Hagar is meant to be placeholder for Sarah, simply the womb to the woman who matters – and THAT woman only matters enough to be the one to provide descendants. That’s how this is supposed to go, according to the story itself! Instead we get Hagar naming God in the desert.

God disrespects human separations, especially about who matters in the world, even within a story trying to articulate how the ancestors of Israel came to be in the world! Even in that story, the sparkle of God’s love for outsiders shines through. Hagar is one of the least empowered characters in the Bible, by any set of human standards, and she is one of the people given the most access to God in the Bible. Her experiences of God are more expressive and profound than Abraham’s.

That is, Hagar matters. Those like Hagar matter. The Native Americans whose tribal lands were taken by the United States matter, even when the USA disregards its treaties, even with energy companies want protests squelched, even when protesters get arrested. Those seeking to protect the land from the Dakotas Access Pipeline matter like Hagar matters. Women and girls who are used in sexual trafficking matter, even when they are being used to make profits for others, even when they are using drugs to try to escape, even when they are being raped for other people’s pleasures. Women and girls living in modern sexual slavery matter like Hagar matters. Refugees around the world fleeing violence and horrors matter, even when no country wants to welcome them in, even when they use all that they have to get onto ships that may sink, even when getting to a new country means they’ll be labeled ‘illegal.” Refugees and immigrants matter like Hagar matters.

If a refugee, a slave girl of an ancient nomadic herder was important enough to name God, then the world’s standards are COMPLETELY irrelevant. Everyone matters because Hagar matters. Thanks be to God. Amen

1“Life Needs” found at http://phillips.seti.org/kids/what-life-needs.html on 11/3/2016

2Phyllis Trible, “Ominous Beginnings for a Promise of Blessing” in Phyllis Trible and Letty M. Russell, editors, Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Muslim, and Christian PerspectivesTrible, (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, Kentucky, 2006) p. 40-41.

3Trible, 41.

4Trible, 41.

5Trible, 46.

6Trible, 49

7Trible, 49.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

November 6, 2016

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